Every couple of years, directors as diverse as Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, John Sayles, John Carpenter, Robert Zemeckis and Christopher Nolan add to the pantheon of films addressing making contact with alien life. The notion of actually communicating with interstellar visitors, so memorably celebrated in five iconic music notes in the finale act of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, sets the stage for serious modern films tackling this task of translation, but Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral science fiction drama Arrival (A-) radically riffs on a familiar tune with a stunning viewpoint and sustained atmosphere that remixes a well-worn genre. The Canadian director follows successful crime thrillers Prisoners and Sicario with an all-out orchestra to the outsider, exploring what it means to be imbued with preternatural power to alter the course of human events or perhaps even bend time if only the universal ability to understand one another is possible. After twelve mysterious UFOs begin hovering over world cities, the U.S. military recruits a linguist masterfully played by Amy Adams to assist in making sense of alien communication. What follows is a deliberately paced, at times puzzling and consistently revealing opus on the phenomenon of language and science as bridge builders to deeper understanding and community. Adams thoroughly dominates the film and is engrossing and believable in showcasing her convictions and discoveries. Jeremy Renner is successful at playing her supporting scientist, the kind of role typically reserved for a love interest, but there’s scant time for romance when the world is at stake. The film’s effects – striking and unusual – buoy a thinking person’s meditation on big issues of international and cosmic collaboration. The kindest accolade of all is that the film inspires a desire for repeat viewing and discussion.
Benedict Cumberbatch casts one helluva spell as an intellectual, cerebral superhero with the ability to shape-shift his surroundings in Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange (B), a mostly engaging entry into the Marvel multiverse. The title character is an arrogant surgeon who gets his comeuppance in a crushing car accident and subsequently turns to mystical arts in an effort to heal. Cumberbatch is an unlikely protagonist, but he’s witty, literate and believable in a world in which the supernatural stakes mount mightily. Like Tony Stark/Ironman, his smarminess and smarts with science help his journey take flight. Derrickson cribs from Christopher Nolan a bit too much with secret societies of Asian warriors and Inception style city bending, but the overall vibe is cunning and imaginative. If anything the pace could have been picked up in Kundun style monastery sequences. The effects of hopping out of one’s body make for some giddy multitasking fight sequences, and the hero’s CGI cape should win best supporting costume. Tilda Swinton commands her every mesmerizing sequence as a trippy bald sorceress in a mustard-colored frock. Rachel McAdams and Chiwetel Ejiofor don’t get much to do as an ER doctor and fellow warrior, respectively; and Mads Mikkelsen is menacing as a baddie who looks like he just finished a bender at the discotheque. But it’s really the casting of the central role that’s the coup de grace of this time and space oddity.
An epic true tale of faith has met its match in a filmmaker for whom fire and brimstone are merely a prelude, and the power and singularity of his vision on screen cannot be denied. Director Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge (B) is a tough mudder of an action movie, hearkening to the actor-turned-director’s own roots in Peter Weir’s WWI classic Gallipoli and imprinted with a world-weary POV applied to WWII’s Battle of Okinawa. Funneled through Gibson’s prism of gore and glory, the film is far from subtle but nonetheless audaciously moving. At the center of the proceedings – and key to its believability – is Andrew Garfield’s knockout portrayal of real-life American hero Desmond Doss, whose Christian beliefs prompted him to become a conscientious objector to violence simultaneous to enlisting in the military as a medic without a gun. Opening sequences feel like a Whitman’s Sampler of giddy nostalgia that would give Forrest Gump a run for his money in treacly sweetness. But soon after dispensing with some basic training melodrama, the film quickly detours into a fog and slog of war and a series of difficult decisions and riffs on themes of sacrifice and redemption. The director is adroit at putting the viewer in the heart of the action, relating to the protagonist’s fear and faith of being disarmed in the face of encroaching force. Aside from casting Vince Vaughn against type as a droll drill sergeant, the filmmaker rounds out his ensemble with sterling British and Australian actors ranging from Sam Worthington to Hugo Weaving to a relative newcomer, the delightful Teresa Palmer. The images of war are among the most suspenseful and sensational committed to screen, with the titular ridge, flanked with a mountain-high netting leading infantry to setbacks and triumphs, among the splendid set pieces. The sheer duration of some of the sequences dull their impact, but the fight choreography is second to none. Many will love the film’s messages but be turned off by the graphic violence; others repelled by Gibson will miss out on a poignant story. The auteur has once again found the pulse of an incredible and inspiring brave heart.
Written and directed with poignancy and grace, Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (A) is urgent in telling a three-chapter coming of age story of a young African-American man named Chiron and how his experiences growing up in America (largely in a surreal pastel drenched Miami) shape his identity. Rather than tackle only the physical violence associated with most inner-city dramas, the perceptive Jenkins traverses the emotional landscapes of self-worth, racial identity and sexuality and how Chiron learns to find traces of comfort in his own skin. The writer/director has fashioned a very dynamic narrative around a shy and withdrawn protagonist; as embodied by three supremely talented actors – Alex Hibbert (child), Ashton Sanders (teen) and Trevante Rhodes (young man), viewers will ache for him to come to answers. Naomie Harris is devastating as Chiron’s emotionally abusive addict mother, and Mahershala Ali is magnificent as a drug dealer who takes on a role as a near-spiritual guide. The film explores the games people play with each other and with themselves in their quest for acceptance. The clues aren’t easy to discover as the film employs an overall tone of heartache punctuated with bursts of uplift, but the journey is consistently gripping. Based on a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the film is splendid and assured cinema with an austere and stunning score by Nicholas Britell and a dreamlike color palette created by cinematographer James Laxton and colorist Alex Bickel (first chapter emulates Fuji film stock to emphasize skin tones followed by Afga film stock adding cyan and the final chapter in Kodak form). This is a must-see for cinephiles and is moving indeed as it pinpoints exactly why this Black life matters, expanding consciousness and empathy, and how the people who come into our lives shape our evolving selves.
Somewhere on the cinematic patriarchs continuum between Captain von Trapp and the Great Santini, Viggo Mortensen gives a sensitive, soulful and indelible portrayal of a flawed but well-meaning dad in Matt Ross’ incredibly engaging Captain Fantastic (A-). Mortensen is the draw here, summoning a rugged loner charisma that at this point can just be called “Mortensenesque” as a man raising his six children off the grid in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest with unconventional techniques to teach them self-sufficiency, critical thinking, peak physical performance and a global worldview. His headstrong homeschooling, an ongoing ropes course and debate society in the woods, wins him no favor with his in-laws (well played by Frank Langella and Ann Dowd) but makes him a hero in the eyes of his neo-hippie children, all beautifully played. George MacKay is an earnest delight as the oldest of the offspring, incredibly moving as he experiences a date for the first time after being shrouded in the wilderness. Ross makes an assured directorial and writing debut, showcasing the central family’s confrontations with society in a way that keeps you guessing of whether or not it will all work out. There was a melancholy moment I thought would be a pensive ending, but I liked the extended epilogue – including an unforgettable family jam session – even more. The film is a cult sensation challenging American mores in the tradition of Easy Rider and Into the Wild and highly recommended.
Reclaiming the title of D.W. Griffith’s controversial classic is the most subversive element of Nate Parker’s otherwise straightforward historical 2016 retelling of Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia slave uprising, The Birth of a Nation (B-), but the timing of this true-life tale could not be more prescient given continuing struggles with race in today’s society. Because the protagonist is both slave and scholar and an active preacher, the film brings up big themes about the nature of vengeance. It doesn’t always fuse those themes into a consistent tone, though. For a first time writer/director also in the lead role, Parker is a bit over his head; and his passable acting is largely enhanced by the gravity of his character and because he is opposite a very wooden Armie Hammer as the plantation owner (with unwieldy beard and novelty teeth). Hammer has evolved very little since his leaden 
Soon after their latest collaboration 
For those yearning for a solid Hollywood film with something to say, “brace for impact!” Director Clint Eastwood’s solid biopic Sully (A-) turns convention on its head with an interior examination of an American hero who followed his instincts and famously saved 155 people with a famed plane landing on the icy Hudson River and then doubts himself in the wake of evidence and scrutiny. Against the backdrop of an obsessive culture in which we meticulously pour over footage of pivotal events including the “Zapruder Film” of the JFK shooting, Eastwood’s clinical study of an unlikely emergency water landing combined with a quiet, restrained and mighty performance by Tom Hanks in the title role, makes for an emotionally exciting adventure wrapped in a contemplative piece of cinema. Minor quibbles include a discordant score (Eastwood wrote his own theme music) and a moment or two when the flashback-laden structure does a disservice to forward momentum. But it’s ultimately a stand-up-and-cheer/think experience, made even better by Aaron Eckhart as a charming first officer. Those who think they know the whole story already will be enriched by what Eastwood does here. It’s also an essential big screen theatre experience with magnificent sound and visual effects. With a tip of the hat to the pilot, his crew, the passengers and the first responders, it’s the hero story we may not have known we needed at this exact moment in time.
Rufus Norris’ adaptation of the West End musical London Road (B) is a curious case of hybrid musical documentary. This syncopation of vérité verse attends the tale of the plainspoken citizens of Ipswich, England, changed forever in 2006 by a quintet of killings of prostitutes who had emerged as curbside phantoms on the scene of a benignly neglected, sleepy borough. Actresses Olivia Colman and Anita Dobson lead an ensemble of sturdy players who brilliantly sing-speak the actual lines of a forensic investigation and subsequent media coverage of the aftermath of the murders, bringing humanity to the random viciousness befalling domestic tranquility. Even Tom Hardy, the most internationally recognized star in the film, has a nice singing bit as a roguish taxi driver tossing out conspiracy theories. Through the vocals of the victimized women living on the margins of town, we learn a little about the irony of a neighborhood watch wary for certain infractions and blind to a city’s most aching needs. Despite the chilling subject matter, there’s an overriding spirit of nihilistic dark comic glee that the filmmakers are having such a good time reinventing how a musical can take shape. Although recorded live, the dulcet dialogue has a delightful dubsmash quality with “ums” and “you knows” treated like they’re the angelic utterances of Jackie Evancho. The asymmetrical, casual quality of the music recalls Dancer in the Dark or Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and makes this essential viewing for fanatics of the musical form in its perpetual evolution or of droll, defiant British storytelling. The narrative sometimes yearns to break forth a bit more from its mumblecore melodies and doesn’t really ever make that leap. It would have been interesting to see how an Alan Parker or Ken Russell would have dabbled with more forceful visual panache into this subject matter. As it stands, Norris has challenges honing in on the exact plum protagonists most worthy of our attention. And the procedural story isn’t quite shocking or special enough to warrant this passionate a cinematic treatment. Still, this unconventional yarn is a thrilling detour from traditional storytelling.
Although many viewers may be feeling “no más” to the prospect of another boxing movie, Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Hands of Stone (A-) turns out to be stunningly good and one of the most unexpected character dramas of the year. The film is a sports biopic about the career of Panamanian former professional boxer Roberto Durán, and he is fiercely portrayed by Édgar Ramírez in one of those performances that defies every expectation. His brute deconstruction of machismo, his hunger for victory and justice and his nationalistic zest for life seeps out of every frame. The character is often hard to like, and that makes it even more intriguing. Through superb period detail and art direction against a backdrop of a revolutionary time period in Panama paralleling a transformation in the boxing industry through television and sponsorships circa late 70’s and early ’80s, the filmmakers create a soaring narrative that turns the tables for American audiences expecting to root for their native son. Usher Raymond is a delight in a small part as U.S. boxing hero Sugar Ray Leonard, conveying magnanimous authority. Ana de Armas is remarkable as Felicidad Durán, imbuing the spouse role with grace and verve. Magnificent in other supporting parts are Ellen Barkin and Rubén Blades, the latter legend contributing mightily to the soundtrack as well. But it is Robert De Niro who reclaims his mantle as one of the cinema greats as champion trainer and narrator Ray Arcel. He is splendid in the supporting role; and like Ramírez, you can’t take your eyes off him. De Niro’s corner of the ring pep talks with the Panamanian boxer are part inspiration, part confessional and part master class in quiet dignity. Whether you love sports movies or actively resist them, you will find this story – and the style of telling it – captivating.
In the tradition of the talky and compelling Before Sunrise trilogy, a new movie takes a similar approach to the fateful first date of one of the most historic and captivating couples of modern times. Writer/director Richard Tanne’s Southside with You (A-) stars Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter as a young Barack and Michelle Robinson Obama, respectively, circa 1989 in Chicago. This slice of life – literally one day in the life – is buoyed by radiant performances by the two leads and a timeless tale of a young couple challenging each other to become their best selves. Sawyers brings charisma and persistence and Sumpter a fierce intelligence and drive to the love story. Both are indelible and delightful in the roles. The incidental nature of a first-date-in-the-making that involves a picnic, an art gallery, time in The Gardens, an organizing meeting, drinks, a screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and a trip to an ice cream parlor illuminates so much more about a future First Couple than a traditional montage-filled biopic ever could. It is a lovely story, gorgeously filmed and beautifully acted. It’s gimmick free and groundbreaking in its own way as a chronicle of history unfurling before our eyes.
David Mackenzie crafts his neo-Western Hell or High Water (A) with such methodical pace that he disguises how urgent a work it is for modern times. Yes, on the surface it’s a heist thriller about sworn “Comanches,” or enemies: a pair of bank robbers versus a duo of rangers facing off on stark Texas terrain. But a deeper viewing of the film finds a dramatic, elegiac tale about brothers surviving a cycle of poverty and abuse, about lawmen making a last stand to protect a land and a way of life and about a community coping in the shadow of institutional greed. There’s a sense everyone is playing their assigned role in a Western, down to the cowboys and Indians, but the pop psychology behind the characters is very much grounded in America after the devastation of recession, payday loans and foreclosures. Everyone is wounded in this unconventional oater that eschews constant shoot-em-up in lieu of rich character development. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are superb as the sibling protagonists, with Pine delivering the best work of his career to date as a man conflicted between duty to family and revenge against the bank that wrecked havoc on his homestead. Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham, playing a character of Native American and Hispanic descent, are also wonderful as the rangers. Bridges can add his colorful role to a series of late-career triumphs. It’s telling that the bank is ostensibly the real enemy in the film, but it is populated by low-level bureaucrats who seem unaware or indifferent to their effect on Main Street USA. Giles Nuttgens’ lived-in outdoor cinematography and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ plaintive score bring additional gravitas to the proceedings. There’s action too, but this movie is best in the quiet reflective moments that speak volumes about pockets of the country left behind in the march toward progress.