Michael Stuhlbarg

Arrival

Director: Denis Villeneuve (2016) BBFC cert: 12A

Prepare yourself for an epic close encounter in this cerebral sci-fi creature feature. It’s an astonishingly involving, wonderfully acted, technically dazzling and breathtakingly beautiful paean to the pain of existence.

Superb in every department, the intelligent design and gorgeous cinematography are graced by sympathetic editing which reflects the themes of the film. The storytelling of this masterful work constantly wrong foots our expectations to provide this years most profound emotional kick.

I staggered from the screening, aping exactly the stunned expressions of stars Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner after their first contact with alien lifeforms. I was not quite believing of the intensity or meaning of my experience, but I knew it was somehow glorious.

The arrival of an alien fleet on Earth causes global panic and the US government calls a state of emergency. Adams is tremendous as Dr. Louise Banks, a gifted linguist who is recruited by the US military and represents humanity’s best hope. Her mission is to communicate with the extra-terrestrial visitors and ascertain their purpose on our planet. She is aided by Renner’s theoretical physicist, Ian.

The lengthy first view of the monumental alien craft has a gobsmacking power. Humans are pitifully fragile before the enormous alien shell-like ship which gently hovers yards above the ground. This is merely a light jab to soften our senses before the hefty emotional punches Villeneuve lands on us later.

Inside the grey giant egg of a craft, the aliens appear through a shroud of mist,separated from their guests by an invisible wall. The giant squid-like beings have an elephantine hide, and their seven fingered form has echoes of some of the startling imagery in director Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013). They communicate through a sign language composed of inkblots, reminiscent of rorschach tests.

However time is running out as the Chinese and Russians rattle their sabres in the face of the perceived threat. Plus the anxious trigger fingers of the US military are ready with radiation suits, rifles, helicopters and high explosives.

The relatively few action moments are given power by a sharp script which touches upon our understanding of love, language, memory and time. There are elements of the Cold War stand-off and biblical allusions to the tower of Babel and Moses ascending Mount Sinai.

Along with her lead in Tom Ford’s masterful thriller Nocturnal Animals (2016), Adams has two of the plum lead roles of the year, a singular achievement for a forty-something actress in a notoriously youth-orientated Hollywood.

As her scientist sidekick, Renner demonstrates why he’s Hollywoods finest second fiddle. Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg offer strong, understated support as a US Colonel and an FBI Agent.

With communication and time key ideas, Arrival appropriately conducts its own dialogue with cinema. Combining the majesty of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with the humour and humanity of Spielberg’s Close Encounter Of The Third Kind (1977), Arrival is a far more successful blend of the two masters than Spielberg’s own mesmerisingly flawed A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). As well as his own films, Villeneuve includes a call back to the cult sci-fi Cold War thriller War Games (1983). This is the film Christopher Nolan can only dream of making.

The next film by Villeneuve is a sequel to Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner (1982), and it’s good to know it’s in the safest possible pair of hands.

But first you absolutely must see this one.

★★★★★

@ChrisHunneysett

 

 

Doctor Strange

Director: Scott Derrickson (2016) BBFC cert: 12A

Released on a Tuesday to capitalise on UK schools half term break, this is a movie which doesn’t need the leg up to take the number one spot in the box office chart. The eye popping visuals and star power of Benedict Cumberbatch means this sorcery-based superhero adventure will have you spellbound.

In an astute piece of casting every bit as inspired as having Robert Downey Jnr play Iron Man, the star of TV’s Sherlock star plays Dr Stephen Strange, a brain surgeon turned Sorcerer Supreme.

In the latest introduction of a minor character in the Marvel canon to the wider cinema audience, the impressively psychedelic stylings of this latest product off the assembly line are sufficient to distract us from the functional plot.

Plus its East meets West magic and martial arts action means it possesses it a far stronger sense of identity than some of its franchise fellows. Yes, I’m looking at you Ant-Man (2015).

Despite a distracting American accent, Cumberbatch is alarmingly dashing in goatee beard, glowing medallion and a red cape. Similarly to the magic carpet in Disney’s animated Aladdin (1994), the cape has a mind of its own and is a major character in its own right. It says a lot for the actor’s comic ability he can play straight man to his costume.

The strong supporting cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams and Benedict Wong. Stan Lee has one his better cameos. McAdams is focused, bright and underused in the role of Strange’s love interest. By coincidence she appeared in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) as Holmes’ love interest Irene Adler.

A rampant egotist, the Doctor’s glamorous lifestyle and career are ruined when a car accident crushes his hands. In Nepal he is trained in the art of sorcery by Tilda Swinton’s mysterious Ancient One. Her sink or swim teaching methods include abandoning her pupils on Mount Everest to find their own way to safety.

Having fun in a role which is absolutely not stretch of his talent, former Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen sports glam rock eye shadow and periodically teleports in to cause carnage. As renegade mystic Kaecilius, he’s attempting to destroy the world with the help of Dormammu, a powerful demon from the Dark Dimension.

The story skips between London, New York, Hong Kong and Nepal in a series of gravity defying, time twisting, space curling, mind bending action set pieces. For a lot of the time it’s like watching Christopher Nolan’s Inception on acid.

This is easily the most visually ambitious, funny and entertaining superhero movie of the year.

★★★★☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

Trumbo

Director: Jay Roach (2016)

Romping through the career of a Hollywood screenwriter, this entertaining biopic suffers from a self-gratifying script filled with too much lightweight sentiment.

Enjoying a privileged lifestyle as one of Hollywood’s elite in 1947, Dalton Trumbo was one of many writers and actors illegally blacklisted for refusing to testify against communists to the US government.

Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston stars as the irascible scribe who types in the bathtub with a cigarette holder and glass of whiskey in hand.

Trumbo’s a less than loveable eccentric who patronises the masses who watch his movies and fund his comfortable lifestyle.

A honey throated spinner of yarns who invokes the constitution to serve his own ends, Trumbo reminds us of another historic US public figure given a recent cinematic makeover.

There’s a clear parallel between Cranston’s performance and Daniel Day Lewis’ Oscar winning turn as the ill-fated US President in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2013).

The script even includes a similar moment wherein a colleague refuses to listen to any more of Trumbo’s stories, lest he be converted to his cause.

We fail to sympathise for the champagne communist when he suffers the indignity of downsizing from his country manor to a large house with a pool.

Being aggressively covered in fizzy pop isn’t nice and holidays are interrupted. But a brief and uneventful stint in prison aside, nothing too worrying happens to him.

As an illustration of the rarefied social circles Trumbo moves in, a friend can afford to sell the drawing room Van Gogh to pay for their lawyer’s fees.

Meanwhile Trumbo’s career goes from strength to Oscar-winning strength. Under various pseudonyms he works with Hollywood directors and stars of huge stature.

The timeline covers some forty years giving the handsome film a breathless feel despite it’s stately pace.

Part of the problem is a desire to cram in many era-famous faces. As the story lacks drama, this is possibly to compensate for a suspected deficiency of audience interest.

Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson is one of several examples of casting capable peformers as famous cinema actors. They’re not as charismatic or talented and physically aren’t great matches.

David James Elliot essays John Wayne as an unconvincingly magnanimous presence.

At least Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas is given a gift of a line which is guaranteed to bring the house down with laughter.

Helen Mirren is terrific as the waspish society columnist Hedda Hopper. But by making her the villain of the piece, the male dominated hierarchies of cinema and politics are let off the hook for their behaviour.

Hopper suffers a poorly articulated rationale for for the intensity of her attacks on communism and there’s no hint her anti-union publisher is any way pulling her editorial strings for their own ends.

Diane Lane plays Trumbo’s wife Cleo with nothing to do except add glamorous scolding and sympathy.

Elle Fanning as their daughter Nikola fairs little better, being ushered down a civil rights movement cul-de-sac.

John Goodman plays to his strengths as a down market producer offering a broad comic performance which recalls his turn in ben Affleck’s Argo (2012).

Never convicted of any criminal charge, Trumbo presents himself as a fearless defender of the first amendment and the script bequeaths him a suspiciously retro-fitted sermon on the importance of the constitution.

There are great lines in the film but one suspects they’re lifted from the scripts or diaries belonging to one of the many scriptwriters portrayed on screen.

★★★☆☆

Steve Jobs

Director: Danny Boyle (2015)

A terrifically talented cast are in perfect sync in this biopic of Steve Jobs, the charismatic and complex founder of the technology giant Apple Inc.

It’s as smooth, sleek and as tightly engineered as one of their computers or iPhones, but has problems with it’s memory and crashes at the worst possible time.

A binary figure who considered his employees to be with him or looking for a new errr, job, the Apple chief died in 2011.

Ashton Kutcher played him in the poorly recieved Jobs (2013) and he is rebooted here in a perfectly calibrated performance from Michael Fassbender.

Far from PC, he’s a bullying, vindictive and paranoid, a control freak with a messiah complex who inspires a noisy devotion in his disciples.

The university dropout was neither an engineer or a designer but was blessed with an intuitive understanding there are vast amounts of money to be earned through brand design and marketing.

Plus trapping his customers into an operating system incompatible with competing systems or products creates slaves of his customers.

This obsession with creating a closed operating system reflects Jobs emotional inner life. The prophet of the future surrounds himself with an  emotional firewall.

In contrast, sociable Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who wants to create a more flexible, adaptable open system, while urging Jobs to acknowledge the role others have played in the success of the company.

They produced a computer so intuitive to use a five year old could begin to use it without instruction, the five year old being his daughter Lisa, played by Makenzie Moss.

The script is intelligent, sharp and scorchingly funny in its early stages, there’s no romance, sex or violence, except for when Jobs downloads a torrent of abuse on his colleagues, friends and family.

It’s a typically well-researched work by scriptwriter of the Facebook movie The Social Network (2010) Aaron Sorkin. He’s smart enough to wittily flag up the limitations of the structure.

Framed as a three act play, each act focusses on the press launch of a new Apple product: the expensive first Macintosh computer in 1984, the disastrous NeXT in 1988 and the revolutionary classic iMac in 1998.

As Jobs is celebrated, sacked and rises again the drama stalls.

A lack of a martyr makes for a dull finale as the self-mythologising messiah is allowed his moment of destiny defining redemption.

Ridley Scott‘s astonishing Orwellian themed TV advert for Macintosh is seen and discussed.

But it’s never pointed out the Big Brother imagery invoked to attack his rivals products could easily be used to criticise Jobs and Apple itself.

He is creepily aware of the small details of his colleagues’ lives. They form a dysfunctional surrogate family.

Kate Winslet sports a Polish accent and some unfortunate fashions as Joanna, Jobs’ head of marketing and his ‘work wife’. It says something about a corporation when the marketing department represents its compassionate soul.

Jeff Daniels is father figure John Sculley, the ill-fated CEO of Apple against whom Jobs rebels. Seth Rogen plays his ‘bro’ Wozniak.

Few directors possess director Danny Boyle’s consummate command of music to accentuate the visual drama, or have his ability to cajole convincing performances out of young children.

Though Boyle’s attempts to add some visual dynamism through his restless camerawork, he can’t illuminate the dark confines of a dialogue heavy script.

An early girlfriend aside any reference to Jobs’ romantic life is absent. The huge job cuts he instigated on his triumphant return to the company are glossed over.

Coldly calculating in it’s refusal to condemn Jobs for his sins smacks of legal compromise. It’s not possible to libel the dead but one suspects Apple employ extraordinarily expensive lawyers to police it’s brand.

By the end we’re far from convinced of Jobs’ genius, as his only identifiable talent seems to be in rude manipulation, at which he is extraordinary.

★★★☆☆