Movie News: Crime

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So Bad it’s Good: The Counselor (2013)

Many films demand a certain state of mind if they are to be experienced to the fullest. For the Counselor, that state of mind should be something between feeling very sleepy and being exceedingly agitated. In this golden zone of inactivity (sleep) and frantic activity fueled by anxiety and frustration (agitation), it produces a unique experience. Here, the film shines like a true diamond of total overconfidence, in spite of the fact that it was built on devastate foundations of a script that is not simply overly ambitious, but aims for the spot of a modern masterpiece. The result is a funny and pointless film, but not because of its plot holes and illogical series of events, but because it seems to believe that not many thrillers of modern time can be compared with it.

This is seen from the first moment when the basic relations are set. In it, Michael Fassbender plays a successful attorney and a man who desires to get into drug trafficking, but knows nothing of it. Javier Bardem plays Reiner, his guide on this perilous journey, who has more experience and a lot better fashion style. Together, they initiate a financial series of events that gradually summon a Mexican cartel to their lives when all begins to fall apart.

Aside from these two incredible actors, there are many other who know their craft, but nothing of this is relevant next to the script. Here, the writer, who is a brilliant man by the name of Cormac McCarthy, a man who created the masterpiece called The Blood Meridian, managed to cook up a mixture of speeches which are all twice as large as life. Everything in the film is followed by a witty narrative segment and every line is not only a punch line, but a wrecking ball when it comes to its desired impact. In every minute, some character says something worthy of Cesar or Napoleon during their most important battles, and the sheer amount of serious situations clutters everything.

The film’s director Ridley Scott, just like in the case of Prometheus, once again fails to successfully wrestle with inadequate scripts and instead tries to glide through them, resulting in complete calamity. When the talking stops, the film switched gears into a gritty action film with bursts of Uzi automatic fire and machine-induced beheadings, which makes even less sense then the overspent cerebral approach and mastery of introspection, which is a trait of every character that appears on screen for more than one minute.

In some variations, the McCarthy’s script would work, if the setting was rural Arizona where everyone was dirt poor, but still behaved like a Harvard philosophy professor without any explanation who this came to be. Rian Johnson and his movie Brick managed to pull this off a decade ago. But when McCarthy’s work was brought to life using Scott’s blockbuster approach and set in a super-glamorous setting, it lost all meaning and become infused with presumptuousness that is rarely seen in this magnitude. Unlike other badly devised but presumptuous films like Before I Go to Sleep, this one is not flawed when it comes to its story. This is definitely a plus, but at the end, as Linking Park says, it doesn’t really matter.

The Counselor is a hilarious concoction that can only be enjoyed as a disfigured reminder that some things don’t work well together, even if they are great separately. Also, it is a reminder that Ridley Scott really didn’t make a good film since the American Gangster.

Film Review: A Most Violent Year (2014)

Both interior and exterior of this film are about control. Inside of its plot, the main character Abel Morales, superbly played by Oscar Isaac, is a young New York businessman who desires to expand his heating oil enterprise. But, he chose to do this in 1981, one of the most violent, crime-stricken years in the history of New York. At the same time, his delivery trucks start to get hijacked, often involving violent attacks on the drivers while the same danger begins to gradually cross over into his private life.

In spite of this, Morales is determined to stay in control and do not stray from the path of doing business legally, even though his wife Anna, played by Jessica Chastain, continually pushes for other alternatives, some of which involve crime figures.

On the outside, J. C. Chandor directed this film by also providing it with a large level of precision and control. Like his miniature masterpiece All is Lost, Chandor has a talent for making compact cinematic pieces that are tightly wrapped, but still manage to feel very natural and organic.

In All is Lost, the sea and the weather made the film seem that way while, in this case, something similar is achieved by a masterful soundtrack. At some points, the film’s music number seem larger than life in their melancholy and without a doubt strike the same tone as soundtracks from films like Once Upon a Time in America.

Alex Ebert, who created the film’s soundtrack, utilized the groove of things like Miami Vice or Scarface, making it laden with the 80’s atmosphere. But, for me, the track work much more as a soundtrack of the city itself, which is an empire built on ambitions, desires, money and schemes, where the streets are dangerous and dreams bigger than the skyscrapers. American Hustle had some of that on its surface, but this film drills deeper and thus finds something more than costumes and haircuts.

While the music colored the atmosphere, the great acting cast provided the main construction of A Most Violent Year narrative. Primarily a crime drama that intentionally struggles to keep its crime element on the margins, where it constantly threatens to erupt into the main fold, the film produces a whole and stable story about the struggle between ambition and principle.

This all makes it a unique movie that shrouds itself in the real history of one of the most fascinating places on the planet, but still remains a clear and hard-boiled thriller. In other words, J. C. Chandor continues to impress me in ways I don’t see coming.

Film Review: Wild Card (2015)

Wild Card is one of the films that can be listed under the Neo-Statham movies. In these films, it seems like Jason Statham is trying to slightly get away from his previous batch of action films while he still remains grounded in the action and thriller genres. He tries to make this work by playing action guys who are not into being actions guys, but are into drinking and wasting their life. Redemption is a great example of this trend and it definitely continues with the Wild Card.

In this movie, Statham plays Nick Wild, a washed-out Last Vegas tough guy who works as something between a low-level bodyguard and a private investigator (which he claims he is not). The purpose of these jobs is to allow him to drink and gamble, both of which are going into the red for Nick (although not in a extent of the character Bruce Robertson from the movie Filth).

One day, Holly, one of his friends from the Las Vegas strip nightlife, tells him that she was assaulted and molested by a mobster and his goons and begs him to help her get back at them. Nick is dismissive at first, knowing the connection of the mobster in question, but then reluctantly agrees.

The director of Wild Card, Simon West knew where to take the film’s segments. But then as a whole piece, the film still works as a series of episodes, starring Statham, which are connected by an almost transparent thread. Because of this, the entire film could be called Nick Wild Doing Things in Vegas. But, thanks to West’s large experience with action films in general, he wings through this disjointed story with a lot of style, making it hard for anyone to truly focus on the lacking element of a bigger picture.

Statham’s rocky charm offer assistance in this endeavor by making his character someone who the audience slightly feels pity for, in spite of the fact that he can still single-handedly put down a room full of mob enforcers. The biggest aid to the film’s smooth dynamic is Dominik García-Lorido who plays Holly. In this role, the actress managed to pull off a very substantial character living on the border of the Las Vegas criminal underground. Holly is hurt, afraid and confused, but still willing to risk it all for a taste of revenge.

While this was no easy task, García-Lorido successfully made Holly a real human being on which the cold determination of Nick Wild to mind his business slowly erodes. I hope we will see more of this talented actress in the future because she obviously has plenty to offer. Wild Card movie is fun to watch and its problems never arise so much over this layer of entertainment to have the ability to spoil its thriller action vibe.

Film Review: Inherent Vice (2014)

When it comes to reclusive literary geniuses from the US with inkling for deconstruction of worlds where their characters reside, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy could be the ideal contenders (I’m not counting J. D. Salinger in here mainly because he doesn’t fit in my main idea, so I will ignore him). In recent years, McCarthy got two phenomenal adaptations that made a huge blessed dent in the hull of the modern cinematography, even its mainstream aspect.

First one is The Road, which is the less known sibling of the pair, while No Country for Old Men already became a modern masterpiece (and it totally deserved this, at least in my view). Hopefully, the Blood Meridian (one of the finest fiction books that came out in the second part of the 20th century from the US) will also become a movie, and this too has the capacity to make something extraordinary.

Pynchon, on the other hand, is not known for the same things. His novel from 2009 called Inherent Vice became a film thanks to the involvement of Paul Thomas Anderson. This film, like the novel, tells a tale of a doper private investigator by the nickname of Doc, who is hired by his ex-girlfriend to find out what, happened to her new lover, a wealthy land developer. Set in the 1970, it features Joaquin Phoenix as the Larry "Doc" Sportello and a lot of elements from the late 60’s and the West Coast, where the hippie wave just got broken on the jagged rocks, as Hunter Thompson would put it. This takes Doc on a very trippy adventure filled with paranoia and a lot of Owen Wilson.

Anderson is without a doubt a brilliant director. His visual approach is full of melancholy and simply feels as if it came from a bygone era, but his narrative is still very contemporary. Also, the man has the right kind of magic needed to produce the best results from his acting cast, and Inherent Vice movie is no different. While everyone sees Phoenix as a brilliant actor, Anderson once again showed the same is true for many other people. Here, I primarily mean Michael Kenneth Williams, Katherine Waterston and especially the completely incredible Josh Brolin. In one of his moments, Brolin performance is enough to make the whole film worthwhile.

But, is the rest of the film worthwhile in equal measure? It’s hard for me to gauge this idea. On one hand, I enjoyed it, but more as a series of weird snippets full of great actors. There is a general lack of focus in the film, which mixes in a strange way with the subversive notions provided by the unique workings of the Pynchon mind. It is also completely free of any self-serving seriousness about itself. Like the thriller Big Bad Wolves (although devoid of much of the violence this Israeli film has), it goes where it wants it to be and doesn't mind if others drop out from this journey.

Here, I’m sure that Anderson remained true to the original material, but at the same time, including the omnipresent narrator in the entire film shows that he was also a bit taken back by this juggernaut of hippie, paranoid plot. And there is nothing wrong with being at least a little intimidated by Thomas Pynchon, especially if we count the fact that Inherent Vice never becomes dull or loses pace.

While it might not have the tightest plot or the ideal composition, Inherent Vice 2014 is as an original film as they come at this level of budget and AAA production. Once again, Paul Thomas Anderson can be seen as an imaginative hero of his generation.

Film Review: The Drop (2014)

Certain parts of the US seem as if they were made for street violence, shady criminal dealings and colorful character that partake in this environment. Brooklyn, with its working class quagmire and a thick accent that can be recognized by people outside of the States, is definitely one of those places.

The Drop (2014) is a film heavily set in Brooklyn. Michaël R. Roskam created his movie so that it is fueled by mystery and suspense. The mystery part revolves around the notion of a bar that was formerly run by a small local gang, but which then got overtaken by a more ruthless and capable Chechen criminal organization. Now, the bar is sometimes used as the Drop, or a place where all the dirty money collected by the organization gets taken and kept for transport. The only thing is that the Drop moves constantly, but many people think about robbing it.

The suspense part of the film is handled by Tom Hardy, who plays Bob, the bar worker. His older superior, called Cousin Marv is the former owner of both the bar and the local gang. Now, Marv is angry and afraid, while Bob just wants to keep his head down. One night, he finds an abandoned pit bull pup, and decides not to walk away. This sparks a series of changes in Bob’s life, while at the same time danger looms over everyone.

Roskam directed his actors to present a slightly warped atmosphere in the film, which seems strangely unusual, even autistic at times. The mastery of this film isn’t its thriller element, which can be quickly determined by a careful watcher in the first 20 minutes, but the notion of its action being set in the world of the “formers”.

Apart from the police officers and merciless Chechens, everyone else in the Drop movie is something former – former local thugs, former loan sharks, former addicts, former psychopaths and former believers. This subtext gives the film a really engaging edge, which also provides actors, primarily Hardy, Noomi Rapace and the incredible James Gandolfini a very rewarding playground.

As the plot plows towards its conclusion, it envelops the characters so tightly that it’s not the current story that is relevant, but more the question of how will it change them (even if it ends up killing them). Similar to the film Blue Ruin, the Drop is OK with its characters till the very end, no matter what they did, or how did they do it, mostly because they tried to do something.

Film Review: The Equalizer (2014)

It’s very enticing to examine the newest Antoine Fuqua’s film as a pseudo-religious tale. In it, a character called Robert McCall is a deity right from the Old Testament. He is never uncertain about what is wrong and what is right, and is prepared to commit acts of unabated violence to help those who are in need. Watching The Equalizer, I saw only two modes of Robert’s existence – quiet nothingness in which he is practically an invisible older worker in a Home Depot kind of place, and the quiet rage setting, in which Robert becomes a demon of death who kills to solve problems.

In this setting, Denzel Washington, who plays Robert, reaches once more for a character he constructed a decade ago. This person is an ordinary guy who is in fact a real world superhero with unshakable faith in his ideals.

Even when Fuqua presents Robert in a state that might be near to something like doubt, just a moment or two later, we see him suffocating cops or destroying pipelines while he calmly walks away from the nuclear-like explosion. Because, you know, tough guys don’t look at explosions, especially if they are a murdering psychopath. Although Washington’s acting is strong, his physical demeanor and loosening facial skin tell more about a tired man who only wants to complete another gig where he uses interiors of cars to torture people.

While he developed this middle-age man’s revenge fantasy and theological dissertation, Fuqua quickly established that Robert is a righteous angel living among the minority of oppressors and a large majority of sheepish and oppressed. He is infallible, and all-powerful, meaning he can kill professional criminals that are used to violence using only his bare hands. If needs be, he will go to the ends of the Earth and kill people there. He is a messiah who returned to his strayed flock only to push shot glasses in their eyes and shoot them with nail guns.

This is presented in stunning cinematography, which uses cameras that shoot in super slow-motion. Fuqua really focused on frame setup and photography, especially in the Russian owned nightclubs and bars which combine black and gold, and are filled with gangland tattoo bearing thugs. The Equalizer looks really nice, but also somehow managed to present a very disturbing story.

Apart from the actress Chloe Grace Moretz playing a Russian call girl in distress whose story manages to activate the murderous Robert, The Equalizer shares another thing with the horror remake Carrie from 2013, and that’s the notion of revenge. But, unlike Carrie, Robert isn’t providing personal vengeance, but is acting like a proxy, a man who kills for others. In this Equalizer review I have to conclude that I don’t have the problem with the delivery of a character like that, but the conception that this man is something good or positive, and a person who somehow represents righteous values.

Equalizer Denzel Washington as Robert is something similar to the character of the insidious spirit in his older movie Fallen. Like that spirit, he is ever-present, powerful and never completely explained. He is Louis from Nightcrawler, but holding a gun instead of a camera, believing he is helping people. This film finds him in a position where he desires to help those who are oppressed, but what is stopping him from turning to the other side and becoming a cereal eating serial killer?

Film Review: Nightcrawler (2014)

Civilization, since the dawn of humanity, was about many things, but it was also very much about blood and entertainment. Ancient Rome first comes to mind when we think about stuff like this, but honestly, cultures that were completely clean of any kind of gruesome entertainment ritual, event or practice are few and far between.

The instinct behind this drive is very understandable. Thanatos, as the opposite of Eros, the instinct of life, is the instinct of death, the thing that looks for entropy as the final and complete resting place and a sanctuary from the often overbearing existence.

In his film, Dan Gilroy, who wrote and directed Nightcrawler, takes a long, hard look at this need of ours in the 21st century. Our probes might be landing on comets, but inside of us, the urge to witness death didn’t diminish with the onset of the modern age. In fact, it got some brand sparking new allies.

In his two-decade career, Gilroy mostly wrote screenplays, and produced several known movies, some of which, like Freejack, aren’t exactly superb. But, for a first time director, Gilroy chose a scalding subject and presented it with a merciless narration and an awesome cinematography of LA covered by the darkness of the night.

In it, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, a young multi-layered predator, scavenger and self-educated psychopath. The film begins with him on a personal quest to find a job in LA, any kind of job. One night, he sees a random car crash, and sees a TV crew arriving there and filming the scene. In that moment, he learns about nightcrawling – a job that includes freelance “journalists” cruising around the wider LA area, filming whatever violent event they find and then selling it to the local TV stations. In a blink of an eye, Louis finds the job he was looking for.

The thing about Nightcrawler movie, which impressed me the most is Gilroy’s readiness to make the main character completely foreign and unexplainable. He doesn’t try to show how he became what he is, or doesn’t go looking for his redeeming characteristic. Louis is simply the Eye of Sauron, a menacing force that is willing to do plenty of damage to anyone, but does this not to enjoy the suffering of others, but for a clear personal gain. Devoid of empathy, Gyllenhaal, who already produced a masterpiece in 2013 with a great movie Enemy, once again shines as the dark space in a human suit. In the film, he always says the right thing, but does it in a manner that is emotionally completely alien.

Like his camera, Louis has his eyes open all the time and is unapologetic about a single thing he does. As the film slowly escalates in terms of the plot, his presence remains steady and stable – the plot might be progressing to a bloody climax, but Louis is certain that he will be there filming it all. But, the brilliance of the film is in the fact that watching Nightcrawler isn’t about Louis. It’s about us, and the thing in us which keeps all the people like Louis in business.

Film Review: A Walk Among the Tombstones

As a film where violence resonates through every level, A Walk among the Tombstones left a lasting impression on me.

On the surface, the movie is a version of the story seen in 8MM, and also one which shares some similar elements with it – these include a search for sadistic assailants, snuff films (although less prominently) and a deeply distraught but content man who isn’t overly keen on keeping himself in the realm of the living.

Based on a novel, the main narrative of the film starts with Mathew Scudder, an ex NYPD cop who is now (or better said then, because the film is set in 1999) an unlicensed private investigator, being offered a job to finding men who kidnapped the wife of a non-connected drug trafficker, and then killed her in spite of the fact that ransom money was delivered. Scudder is first hesitant, but accepts after learning more details about the gruesome nature of the killing.

Scott Frank, who directed this film, only took on this role once before in his rich cinematic career, directing a solid thriller The Lookout. However, his experience in creating screenplays obviously helped him a lot for this project, because he managed to create a strongly uncensored but impacting work.

With the help of Liam Neeson in the main role, who continues to shine in this setting, although he created several similar characters in the recent years (Taken, Non-Stop) Frank made a very atmospheric film about unseen danger and predators, where most characters are guilty of something. He didn’t opt for a flashy cinematography, but chose to show bloodshot eyes and lonely figures standing still after killing several men on the streets of New York.

All the while, the darkness presented by the antagonists, who are for the better part of the film known only by a single voice over a payphone line, continues to grow as a menace that represents pure psychopathic evil, bent of sheer sadistic violence. The moment their violence meets another one; one represented by Neeson, who also presents the same phenomenon, but one that is carried without malice or a hidden agenda, something very satisfying happens to the viewer.

It’s not justice, and it’s not revenge, but something more primal, like a tidal wave crushing the flow of lava from a newly formed volcano. One negates the other, and there is no deeper meaning to it. A Walk among the Tombstones presents this moment, and nothing more.

My Roommate: The Heavy Sleeper - A short thriller

A few months ago, I wrote and featured a short film called Alone. It was made by Dillon Schohr, a young US filmmaker, and set in a desert, post-apocalyptic landscape. Now, Schohr created a new film, this time setting it in a regular suburban environment, when a young man takes his new friend home, assuring her that his roommate is a heavy sleeper.

Once again, Schohr created a compact piece which this time plays on suspense, but the thing that really binds it all together is the fact that the main character is called Patrick and works in mergers and acquisitions. This alone should be enough of a hint, but there are others in this short thriller that you can watch below.

If you want me to feature your short film, contact me right here.

Film Review: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Frank Miller makes really good comics, and Sin City is no exception. First film, directed by Robert Rodriguez caught the world by surprise, but the second part seemed as if it might never get to the theaters at all (seem that way to me at least). Now, it’s here and it looks as if it spent last 9 years reading prison novels, drinking moonshine and working out using cans filled with concrete. The story of the new installment follows several narratives and it does this with the ease and confidence of a true champ.

Unlike the first film Sin City 2 seem more focused on the subtle (in Sin City terms) emotions, mainly loyalty and these ties (friendship, family or sexual love) that simply refuse to dwindle and die. It tells stories, including one about a woman who holds power over men, about a son who deems to reclaim respect and about frat boys who wanted to set homeless people on fire in the neighborhood where Marv drinks.

From the first moment, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For aim big and aim bloody. The interesting technique of black and white that are colored only for added emotional impact still works so well that I didn’t even noticed it until those colors remind me that I’m looking at a different kind of film. Rodriguez does wonders with gory violence and unbound, but still somewhat vintage sexuality, produced exclusively be Eva Green and her several erotically overcharged alter-egos.

While her posters featuring boobs managed to grab some attention, her body language and hypnotic delivery should grab the rest. There is no doubt that Green is a superb actress, but this film underlines that she is ready to push it even further into the murky waters of emotionally complicated (even undesired) sex.

At moments, the main storyline of the film feels almost sexists in nature (a woman that uses her sexual appeal to control others, but not in any magical sort of way), and there are other things that might be interpreted as misogynistic. On the other hand, the exact same things might be interpreted as raw empowerment coming from the same character, which deems that the society of men is something that can be disposed of (girls of Old Town also plays into this ideal). For me, both views become intertwined, and that is the thing that makes watching Sin City: Dame to Kill For interesting on a cognitive level.

Great Mickey Rourke revisiting the role as Marv makes the film very interesting on a purely death&destruction level. Both work and this combo make this move a very impacting experience.

Film Review: The Rover

When David Michôd created Animal Kingdom, I was truly impressed. This unspectacularly-looking crime thriller set in the contemporary Melbourne had a really disturbing feel about it, and I couldn’t put a finger on it. Its tense atmosphere, inhabited by cryptic yet totally understandable characters stayed in my mind for a long time, so naturally I was excited about seeing The Rover.

Partly, I expected something in line with Mystery Road, in the sense that the film would utilize the very familiar feel of the Australian outback, where tough people live in a hard land. The setting of the film, which takes place 10 years after an unexplained economic collapse, seems to further underline my expectations. Michôd is obviously not a big fan of anything that might look like oversimplification, we regularly see in other movies, especially when it comes to the thing that people feel.

Because of this, The Rover isn’t a film about tough people. It’s a film about people who stopped being human in today’s standards a long time ago, but who still continue to live and breathe. Now, they are surrounded by violent deaths and total senselessness in any moral or philosophical way (on a second thought, maybe we are always surrounded by this). Eric is the main protagonist of the film, a loner who gets his car stolen by a small gang of men.

He sets off to get his vehicle back without any regards to his own safety, only to encounter a wounded young man called Rey, who turns out to be the brother of the gang’s leader. Rey was left for dead, and Eric picks him up so he could manage to find the gang and take what is his, although there is no apparent reason for him to risk his life for an easily replaceable vehicle.

Robert Pattinson really tried hard to stay in line with Guy Pearce who plays Eric. He pulled this off, and that is why Pattinson’s Rey, who seems inadequately mentally developed, is as convincing as Perce’s uncompromising and very violent Eric. On several occasions, Pattinson took his role a bit too far, but not so much that he ruined the character. Pearce, on the other hand, was rock solid, and managed to transmit many feelings by simple looks and facial unease that his character feels in this desolate, cruel and senseless world.

As the two main characters go about their bloody and often totally random business, Michôd goes off to explore the setting that is comprised of desperation and meaningless survival. He wisely chose to make this world very reliable – there are no zombies or roaming tribes of leather-clad psychopaths driving motorbikes with metal spikes. Instead, everything looks normal and dirt poor Instead, psychopaths wear old and stained but regular clothes, just like everyone else.

The railroad is working, there is an army driving around and acting as an improvised police force and regular people seem to be intent on mostly selling thins, from cans of food to soft-skinned boys. Money is just paper which is gradually becoming even less than that, but people still struggle to get it, looking exclusively for US dollars, not the Australian ones.

There is no grandeur in this film, even the destructive kind we are used to seeing in these types of setting. In it, Michôd shows a decline as a natural progression of something (buildings, people, ideas, moral concepts and many other things) towards a universal nothing. The possibility of redemption is simply lost, as are notions of good and bad. All that the characters can do is to bury the dead and carry on killing until they themselves are killed or stopped from living further in some other way.

It’s a vision of post-apocalyptic hell, but with a very distinctive taste of the genuine possibility of becoming reality someday. The Road, another great film that explores a similar topic, created its story on the wings of an almost Biblical cataclysm, finding solace in the idea that love towards the ones who are closest to us like our children can save us. The Rover, on the other hand, created its own world of death and decay on a very different scenario: the money went bad, and so did we.

Hannibal - Season 2 Review

I usually write about movies, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t watch TV shows. Currently, there are several that I enjoy and follow regularly, and one of them is Hannibal.

NBC TV show Hannibal had a giant task. It was supposed to bring the character of Hannibal Lector to the small screens and a regular TV show format, which seemed almost impossible. Sir Antony Hopkins, who is most famous for playing Lector, a brilliant psychiatrist and a serial killer, made the role iconic. But, Bryan Fuller and other people from NBC decided to give it a try.

The resulting TV show is a stunning masterpiece of television drama. Now the series is in its second season. The storyline follows a Special Agent Will Graham, an FBI crime scene specialist, who has a very complex and troubling relationship with Hannibal Lector, in that time a free man and an FBI consultant.

Lector, who is brilliantly played by Mads Mikkelsen, is presented as a dangerous predator, but also an elusive target for the law enforcement. Laurence Fishburne, Eddie Izzard and Gillian Anderson are just some of the other fantastic actors present in the show. In the beginning I wasn’t very impressed with how Hugh Dancy presented Graham, but now he completely immersed himself into the role, and especially his character’s transformation.

During the second season, Graham becomes certain that Lector is in fact the Chesapeake Ripper, the main serial killer wanted by the FBI. I was worried that the plot will begin to fall apart offer the end of the first season, but it actually got much better and didn’t lose any suspense. Apart from a great script, the show includes a very refreshing focus on the visual aspect and presents a quality worthy of feature-length films. In many scenes, colors and unusual forms are joined to present the different emotional states and are a strong inducer of the eerie atmosphere found throughout the show. There isn't any beauty in real life violence, but in Hannibal, gruesome acts are often presented as pieces of twisted art.

With its peculiar storytelling and a terrific cast, Hannibal Season 2 should be watched by anyone who likes procedural police dramas, but also loves great cinema.

Film Review: Homefront

This movie is at its weakest when the most important things in it happen, at the beginning and at the end. The middle part, ironically conceived as the buildup section of the story, is a lot more interesting and engaging.

Jason Statham plays a former undercover DEA agent, Phil Broker who moves to the American south with his litter daughter after his cover is blown and he is forced to retire. In the swampy outback, Broker tries to live a normal life, but a small altercation between his daughter and a local boy begins a process that will result in all out violence, or the thing that usually happens in movies where Statham plays the leading role.

In this film, his enemy is Gator, local meth producer and head jerk, played by James Franco. Franco can pull off many roles, so he didn’t have any problem with presenting Gator as a mildly sadistic, impulsive criminal, but who is ultimately a scavenger in the underworld, and not the main predator. The most dynamic parts involve Broker trying to defuse situations where he is, totally unjustly, targeted by one or several local thugs sent by Gator. These scenes are extremely realistic, brutal and fun to watch. Here the director Gary Fleder gave his best, so all unarmed fight scenes are very entertaining.

Interestingly, the screenplay was written by Sylvester Stallone, who inadvertently gave the film a slightly nostalgic aroma, in the sense that the story resembles older action stories of this type (a normal family guy just want to be left alone, but the bad guys who plan on pushing him around don’t realize he is in fact a killer commando machine) . The same was seen in Bullet to the Head, but here it is thankfully more subtle.

Fleder, who didn’t do many feature-length films in recent years, did succeed in making a solid action film; maybe even a notch or two about the usual Statham cinematic norm. There are no idiotic parts and the plot doesn’t stall anywhere, even if the end is slightly unconvincing, so it could be said that I was pretty satisfied with the Homefront experience.

Film Review: Filth

I wonder is there a moment of saturation when you consume the stories written by Irvine Welsh? I was blown away like everybody else when I watched Trainspotting, and a few years later I loved the The Acid House, possibly even more because I found it equally deplorable and at the same time, somehow more insightful.

Now, almost two decades have passed by, and I’m left unimpressed by the latest Welsh adaptation, Filth. The story about Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh police detective and his manic, narcotic driven days is close to the heart of the Scottish writer. The novel came out in 1998, but now all that profanity, sex, drugs and politically incorrect insults thrown around don’t seem to have that bitter sting they used to.

I can’t pinpoint the exact reason, but some ideas do creep in – now, everything mentioned is almost regular in many films, no matter what genre they are. Madness that Welsh employs, represented here by the fact that Bruce sometimes sees people as animals they represent (sheep, pig and so forth) and other grotesque psychological details, does pack the biggest punch in the plot, but it still doesn’t ring true like it used to in his earlier adaptations.

The problem probably lies in the fact that the director Jon S. Baird gave the movie too much of an MTV look. Bruce’s hallucinations are clean and shiny and the pandemonium he causes on the streets or anywhere else is always very visually clear to the audience. For a film named Filth, there isn’t any of it in the actual scenes. James McAvoy as Detective Bruce Robertson once again gives his best, just like he did in Trance. In spite of that, he still reminds me of a British version of Bradley Cooper – somehow, I always feel that both misplace or lack that crucial little spark that is genuine in an artist and from where it all comes naturally.

I would be impressed if anybody actually got offended or emotionally involved in this film in any way, positive or negative. For me, Filth is like an industrial version of a famous painting. Welsh made this interesting Frankenstein out of really bad bits and pieces of humanity and gave it a desire to be good and honest, but Baird and his crew dumped him in molten plastic and reanimated him in a form of a Japanese robot – it's working fine, but the original texture is hidden by a bland shell.

Film Review: Big Bad Wolves

Here we have a thriller that was most definitely created outside of Hollywood. More importantly, it’s created outside of regular sphere of Western artistic thought. This Israeli film set in the same country and dealing with child serial killings is something that is quite different.

Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado who directed Big Bad Wolves first set their movie apart by using black humor and restricting information to the audience. The first point presents itself as a really offbeat, quirky tone that the film carries in its roots. The humor Keshales and Papushado use is almost vaudevillian: some scenes are followed by weirdly calming music, like the tunes in the old cartoons. In other, bleak deeds are stopped and interrupted by funny, childish ringtones that are followed by odd conversations on cell phones that involve worried mothers and soups.

Similarly, the flow of information that comes from the characters is also unorthodox. From the beginning, the audience is presented with the facts, as they are seen by the police detective Micki, who is working on a case of a missing girl. Micki is certain that Dror, a reclusive teacher, is responsible for her disappearance. After a failed attempt to beat a confession out of him, Dror is released, while Micki’s brutality is caught on video and released on YouTube. Also soon after, the same girl is found decapitated. At that moment, her father Gidi, a former military police officer, enters the case. Both Gidi and Miki intend to get to Dror. They differ, however on what exactly to do with him, but are on the same page how to do it: by extreme violence. No mention of their prior knowledge is shown or explained.

Big Bad Wolves is a thriller that easily gets your attention, but its motivations remained unclear to me. Because of the way it treats information, Dror remains a shadowy figure. We don’t get to see what made the detective or Gidi certain that he is their guy, so we can’t play the “who had done it” game, or judge for ourselves does Dror seem guilty or innocent. Gidi, who is the biggest cog in the machine of the story also isn’t emotionally clear. He gives explanations that prove his commitment, but these stay on the cognitive level, while his feelings stay distant and detached.

This is also underlined by the choice of the actor who plays Gidi, Tzahi Grad, who is in his fifties, and who presents a man who should be younger. This is even more clear when Gidi’s father appears, who seems only a decade older than Grad. This odd choice may be intentional, but I failed to see its meaning or purpose.

Unlike the hard to digest story, the cinematography of the film flows perfectly. Camera movements are effortless and punctuate the strong-willed, but murky characters. The colors and the space in the frames blends in a way that makes Big Bad Wolves clear as a mountain stream, and every object, from different guns, mobile phones, poisoned cakes and torture tools, blends with the grander picture. Even when the action becomes more intense, this visual harmony is never dispersed.

As a story of the human condition in its darkest corners, I feel that Big Bad Wolves left me uninterested. From the beginning to the end, I failed to see how the actions of the characters affected them or changed their moral judgment. As a minimalistic thriller, the film is burdened by passing social commentary and goofball humor. But, in spite of that, I enjoyed it on a much more basic level, more as a fantastic series of short, high-intensity situations than a complete work of art that brought any emotional or intellectual closure after it ended.

Film Review: Cold Comes the Night

I can’t make up my mind is this film riding on the wave that Bryan Cranston left with the TV show Breaking Bad, or is it just my imagination. In his new role, he plays a professional criminal named Topo, a man who is almost blind. He and his helper one night pull into a small motel and decide to take a break from their current transporting job. The shady motel is operated by Chloe, a single mother who is having problems in almost every aspect of her life. As Topo prepares for sleep, his helper gets into an altercation with a local prostitute, and they resolve their differences with a gun and a knife. Stranded, Topo decides to get some help from Chloe, willingly or otherwise.

The film functions as a micro neo-noir story. The main protagonist Chloe is down on her luck and the incident just adds more misery to her life. Topo wants simple things like the stuff he and his unfortunate helper were transporting. Because of his blindness, Chloe has to act as his agent, first because her and her daughters lives are threatened, and later because she starts to scheme on her own.

Alice Eve plays her steadily and without too much impulse, presenting her as a person whose survival instinct kick into multiple gears. That's why she thinks about staying alive, and tries to find a way out of her old financial predicament. This calculated approach only highlights her plight in the most desperate moments, when her tactics break down and emotions explode. Cranston is good as Topo, but not mind-blowing, as I gradually came to expect from him. The role of the old gangster isn’t that challenging, and the foreign (Polish) accent is completely unnecessary. Topo isn’t Heisenberg, but I couldn’t resist making this comparison throughout the film.

A lot of supporting roles are filled with great actors. Robin Taylor is exquisitely creepy as the jittery Topo’s helper, but I was impressed the most by Logan Marshall-Green as Billy, the dirty cop and Chloe’s lover whom she despises. He plays his character in a unique way, and very skillfully lays out Billy’s opportunistic life. He also shows that both Topo and Chloe look shallow and weakly written, and in the majority of the plot seem like they’re going through the motion without much energy. Other bland parts of the film, like the scene where Topo meets his employers, add to the idea that not much thought was put into the writing of the script.

Cold Comes the Night has all the suspense a dark thriller needs, combined with a looming possibility of violence. It does what it’s supported to do as neo-noir, and its cast also do the right stuff, but its underdeveloped and not too ambitious story leaves it as one of those movies that didn’t realize its potential.

Film Review: The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese made The Wolf of Wall Street in a way I can only describe as entirely organic. As I watched the story of Jordan Belfort, a New York stockbroker who enters the financial scene in the 80’s and soon becomes one of the biggest (and weirdest) success stories around, I didn’t feel like its director had to make any compromises. The film’s rhythm is frantic, and things happen in every minute; as Belfort starts to expand his empire, his appetites also grow, and women, drugs and financial criminal shortcuts start to play a big part of his life. He enters the realm of penny stocks and in a matter of months gains a fortune. Naturally, others get drawn to him like moths to the light of a burning stack of money. Things pile up as his life progresses, and in no time the FBI gets involved.

Things start to get really serious for him, but Scorsese still felt totally okay with taking a 20 minute slapstick break in the middle of the film, when he presents how a Belfort, overdosed on sleeping pills, tries to get to his home and stop his partner from making a potentially huge mistake. In other films, this kind of switch would look stupid and probably forced, because the rest of the film feels very intellectual (in spite of the crude language and nudity), but Scorsese didn’t mind doing it, and it paid off. The Wolf of Wall Street in truly hilarious, and the range of humor (from people falling down and drooling on each other to the ridicules way the characters dodge questions asked by financial regulators) it presents most likely consolidated its impact.

The creative ease Scorsese brought to the film can be seen in another aspect. For example, Belfort often speaks to the audience, but not continuously. We can hear his inner monologue, as well as monologue from other characters, but there is no pattern and this doesn’t only apply to supporting roles. A lot of time the monologue is only a passing sentence or a single phrase. It’s obvious that Scorsese didn’t force anything into a preset frame, but did it when it when it felt natural.

The cast did something similar. In the film, Jordan Belfort has several long motivational speeches, and the best of them reminded me of the character Frank T.J. Mackey from the movie Magnolia. DiCaprio, who plays the foul-mouthed Belfort, made them powerful and raw. Here, the DiCaprio/Scorsese synergy really kicks in, and we as an audience cannot deny the magnetism of the character and his relentless enticement that beckons everybody to join him on the road of never-ending greed and money.

Other actors were equally good. Jonah Hill plays Donnie, Belfort’s right hand man and an even bigger dope fiend than his boss. He already showed in Moneyball that he can step out of the comedy genre while staying funny and it’s no surprise he shines here too. Rob Reiner also impressed me, especially in the way he works with people who are decades younger than him.

Scorsese made a film about Wall Street, but his skill and freedom he has been granted allowed it to break the every negative expectation I had before I saw it. It’s not like Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or any other contemporary film about the greed and excess of the most famous site in the financial universe. It doesn’t mind looking silly and goofy, and that’s exactly why it’s so great both as a comedy and a grim presentation of the people who have the power to financially ruin millions across the globe.

Film Review: American Hustle

Bradley Cooper does try. He tries very hard in every scene in this film, from the first moment we’re introduced to his character, a driven and hugely ambitious FBI agent named Richie DiMaso. He is the person that puts a stop to a con artist operation run by Irving Rosenfeld and his accomplice/girlfriend Sydney. Christian Bale and Amy Adams play the grifters, who get forced by DiMaso to become part of his team.

He devises a story about a UAE sheik that is willing to invest a lot of money in the newly legal gambling enterprises in the East coast region, and plans to entrap politicians, mobsters and anyone else who he sees as corrupt and thus a potential target. But his unhealthy need to prove himself and become a top dog in law enforcement soon starts to degrade the plan, while Rosenfeld’s estranged and emotionally unstable wife (played by Jennifer Lawrence) only complicates things.

Compared to Bale, Adams and Lawrence, Cooper doesn’t have the chops to compete on this acting level. Bale is very skillful at his art, and shows Rosenfeld as rich character, brilliant but also unsure about the effectiveness of the strategies that are intended to keep him and Sydney alive and out of jail. His gestures and sounds that he makes are subtle and almost unnoticeable, but still work. Rosenfeld is a real guy, while DiMaso isn’t. In fact, every other character in this film is more believable than he is.

Louis C.K. plays DiMaso’s timid FBI boss, and even he does it with more tact than Cooper. Even worse, Cooper’s commitment to the role made him push DiMaso to a level of exuberance and self-centeredness that simply isn’t authentic in any way. Surrounded by phenomenal actors, Bradley Cooper is painfully average.

But he doesn’t spoil the film. David O. Russell directed it as a period piece, focusing visually on the clothes and general style of the 70’s. The soundtrack does pretty much the same, and the tunes range from Middle Eastern covers of disco hits to sing-a-longs to Tom Jones songs. This kind of expressive, extroverted style helped in shaping the film more as a comedy than an Ocean's Eleven type of thriller, in spite that the ending brought some boring elements from similar heist films.

American Hustle is based on real events, but that to me seems completely irrelevant. As a drama, the film delves into the personal lives of people who live on the line separating legal from illegal, but it doesn’t really explore the culture or the history of the period. This aspect of the film never reaches further than funny haircuts and ugly golden man-chains worn by all male characters.

I loved this movie, even through its unnecessary long runtime; it’s light and charming and successfully bonds the audience to Rosenfeld and the two women in his complicated and dangerous life. Its strongest suit is that it features some of the best actors in Hollywood, and its weakest is Bradley Cooper.

Film Review: Out of the Furnace

Woody Harrelson, Casey Affleck, Willem Dafoe, Zoe Saldana and Christian Bale are all part of this movie’s cast. It’s a story about two brothers. Russell, the older one, works in a steel mill and tries to do his best with not that much in life. His younger brother, Rodney is in the military, and has a bad temper combined with a fast fist. Their lives are a constant challenge, but one unpaid debt will cause Rodney to disappear and set Russell on an inquiry that will leave bodies, if not answers.

Apart from before mentioned actors, Sam Shepard and Forest Whitaker also star in this film. The director Scott Cooper had more fantastic artist in his cast than most A-list movies, and I can’t praise any one of them in particular, because everyone did a superb job. Even those with the least amount of on screen time simply shine in their roles, like Whitaker as the local cop who also married Russell’s former girlfriend whom he still adores.

Slow-moving and very broad in its development of the main story, Out of the Furnace is primarily a drama about family relations and the burden it comes with them. It’s not a neo-noir film, and it’s barely a thriller. But this isn’t a bad thing for me, but instead the nature of storytelling that Cooper chose for this film. With a cast he had at his disposal, this was the right call in my book. The film is full of tension and suspense, but not the kind that involves shootings and character ducking behind cover when the action breaks out.

In the reference frame of the film, this is the way people live their lives. The tension is a part of the bleak everyday reality where money is always needed and guns perceived as regular objects. The film brilliantly uses Perl Jam/Eddie Vedder tunes to further pain this gray picture. Eddie Vedder’s voice is hauntingly painful and at the same time melancholic and at peace, much like the broader atmosphere of the film.

In a few brief moments, the film reminded me on Killing Them Softly (a film that also wasn’t violent in the way people expected it to be), with its presentation of a deserted industrial town, where business and people are slowly dying together. I remembered this film mostly because of a single Barak Obama speech that can be seen on a screen in the background of a bar, but the parallels are abundant once you start to think about it. Both films, in my opinion, try to capture the feeling of change in a place where nothing really can change for the better, and that’s no one’s fault. The steel mill is going to close, one character says to Russell. Yeah, he replies, we get all of our steel from China.

He isn’t angry or disheartened. Steel simply comes from China, and there is nothing he can do about it. But, he can find his brother, no matter what the cost.