Showing posts with label The 50 best films of 2015. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The 50 best films of 2015. Show all posts

Saturday, December 2, 2017

The 50 best films of 2015 / Sicario / No 45


The 50 best films 

of 2015 

in the US  

No 45 

Sicario


Sicario review – Emily Blunt at the sharp end in war on drugs

****
Denis Villeneuve’s gruesome and intelligent white-knuckle thriller features a terrific star turn from Blunt as a determined FBI agent

Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 8 October 2015 15.30 BST
W
hen I saw Denis Villeneuve’s stomach-turningly gruesome narco thriller Sicario at Cannes this year, it struck me he had pinched Michael Mann’s style – and pinched his crown, too, like it or not. Perhaps it’s impossible to see a convoy of black SUVs speeding across an urban landscape in a film without thinking of Mann, but Villeneuve certainly carries off the borrowing with style.
The resemblance struck me again this week watching this film a second time, along with the thought that Villeneuve was probably taking notes during Kathryn Bigelow’s Bin Laden thriller Zero Dark Thirty – particularly for those extended special-ops attack scenes filmed in night vision, as if on an alien planet. He maybe even did the same thing with the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, though that is maybe because of the presence of Josh Brolin, and the fact that it is also shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins.
The title is cartel slang for “assassin” or “hitman”, evidently derived from the first-century Sicarii zealots of Judea, though the word is never spoken out loud in the script; screenwriter Taylor Sheridan defers the revelation of how it really applies here to the end of drama, and this disclosure ties up its attendant issues of justice versus revenge, idealism versus cynicism and how American justice is to be applied beyond US borders without anything as quaint as a formal declaration of war.


Emily Blunt plays Kate, a young FBI agent specialising in the relatively uncontentious field of kidnap-victim recovery. She finds herself co-opted into the US Homeland Security war on drugs: a new war on terror whose strategies have been repurposed and relegitimised. After a truly horrendous experience uncovering a cartel-owned safe house full of corpses in Arizona, Kate is asked if she wants to go after the guys ultimately responsible. She agrees, and admits deeply disturbing new men into her life.
Her boss for this mission will be swaggeringly irresponsible and studiedly obnoxious special agent Matt Graver, played by Brolin. There is also a second man, who appears to be Matt’s boss, though he is a civilian consultant from Colombia: Alejandro, played by Benicio Del Toro, courteous and even fatherly towards Kate, solicitous for her well-being, quietly traumatised by some event in his own past. When Kate asks Alejandro what’s going on, he coolly replies: “You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.”
The plan seems to be to “dramatically overreact” to the safe house situation, in Matt’s words, by arresting a known cartel member with maximum publicity, in order to provoke the drug moguls into high-tailing it back to Mexico and thus revealing who the real players are and making valuable intel gains for arrests. Straight-arrow Kate is fine with all this, until she suspects that Matt and Alejandro are CIA, and what they are actually planning is a deniable multiple-murder attack raid over the border into Mexico itself, and also suspects that these acts of violence against the Mexican enemy are theatrical displays conducted partly to gain trust with the home team and see how operatives are going to bear up under fire. And there is a second level of duplicity and bad faith behind even this, relating to Alejandro’s background.



The tenor and texture of the movie are established with that truly horrible scene at the very beginning where the FBI storm the house. It has its own sheen of horror, aided by the groaning orchestral chords in the musical score from composer Jóhann Jóhannson. The scene lays down a marker for the film’s status as something like a forensic thriller and in its way a procedural thriller, in which the covert procedure itself is the crime.
When Blunt first comes on in all the tough-guy hard-body gear, it is a bit implausible. But she brazens out any possible absurdity with great acting focus and front. She delivers a real star turn, mixing confidence, bewilderment and vulnerability: all the more difficult being up against Brolin and Del Toro, who themselves give huge performances with bells and whistles hooting and clanging.
For me, Sicario is a step forward for Villeneuve: it is less discursive, less reflective than movies such as Prisoners (2013) and Incendies (2010), although I always thought the cerebral content of these pictures was a little supercilious. This is a real white-knuckle thriller, with screeching feedback notes of fear and paranoia, which plays out in a very satisfying atmosphere of pure nihilist ruthlessness.



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Saturday, July 15, 2017

The 50 best films of 2015 / Beasts of No Nation / No 20



The 50 best films 

of 2015 

in the US  

No 20


Beast of No Nation

Beasts of No Nation review – Idris Elba rules in Netflix's impressive move into movies

4/5stars

True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga directs British star in the first competition film to screen at this year’s Venice film festival – and the first awards contender from Netflix’s new cinema division

Peter Bradshaw in Venice
Wednesday 2 September 2015 23.56 BST
D
irector Cary Fukunaga has handled projects as diverse as the migrant drama Sin Nombre, a Jane Eyre adaptation with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, and episodes of TV’s True Detective. This film, premiering at the Venice film festival, is his best film yet.

Fukunaga brings flair, muscular storytelling, directness and a persuasively epic sweep to this brutal, heartrending movie about child soldiers and a civil war in an imaginary West African country, based on the 2005 novel by Nigerian-American author Uzodinma Iweala. 


It is a tale of fear, degradation and abusive dysfunction – a violent and disorientating nightmare with a shiver of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Idris Elba gives an outstanding performance as a charismatic and sinister warlord who finds that military power, however intoxicating, is subject to the fickle imperatives of politics, and the suit-wearing opportunists in the cities far from the country badlands he has come to rule.
Newcomer Abraham Attah plays Agu, a nine-year-old boy whose village stands in a UN-regulated buffer zone adjoining a warring neighbouring state: his father, a teacher, has given some family-owned land to help house the refugees, a gesture that has alienated some in the community. Soon the chaos spreads over the border; Agu’s own country is torn apart by civil war.
His family falls prey to swaggering, trigger-happy soldiers and Agu runs, terrified, for his life, where he is taken up by a factional rebel unit in the jungle, led by the imperious Commandant (Elba), who in his enigmatic and unpleasant way, has taken a shine to little Agu and, instead of having him killed, decrees that he will be trained as a child soldier in his battalion. 

These soldiers, dead-eyed and obedient to the Commandant, vary in age from kids to teens and early twenties, but they are all clearly feral and scary as children who have been given guns and trained to obey a father-figure at an impressionable stage. 
Elba’s Commandant, like some warped preacher, has trained his men not merely to bark “Yes sir!” to each of his orders, but to chant and moan ritualistic replies like church congregants. “How does the Commandant look?” calls out his second-in-command. “Looks good!” they reply. 
The Commandant is whimsical, eccentric, affecting a conventional military beret but in other ways preferring to look like a bandit: Idris Elba’s performance gives him that important aura of leadership that keeps his men in line, but he displays none of the occasional humour and charm shown by, say, Forest Whitaker in his portrayal of Idi Amin. 


Agu has to surrender both his childhood and his humanity and become a monster of violence. Initiation ceremonies include running a gauntlet and taking part in a voodooistic mock funeral and resurrection. It is all but unwatchable when the Commandant hands Agu a machete and orders him to murder a civilian engineering student in cold blood. 
To keep fighting, Agu and the others are given heroin, which they ingest in a grotesque masochistic warrior style of slashing wounds in the side of their head and rubbing it in. A delirium and horror soon sets in, and Fukunaga shows that Agu’s horrendous experiences do not propel him into a precocious adulthood but rather make him regress into a pre- or non-human state: a dazed survivor-killer, with neither the child’s innocence nor the adult’s intelligence or perspective.

As for the Commandant himself, he is not exactly a Kurtzian chieftain-god of the jungle: his weapons and provisions all come from the political faction he is fighting for and to whom he is beholden. 
His favourite, Agu, is almost taken into the Commandant’s confidence about all this. But it is clear Agu’s ordeal is to reach a new low in an ambiguous scene in which he is subject to yet further intimate abuse. As the weeks and months of fighting continue, the Commandant and his men realise the prospect of victory is receding, replaced by the possibility of being rendered up to a war crimes tribunal. 

The narrative voice of the film is Agu, sometimes given a potent and thoughtful voiceover. After he kills for the first time – a Satanically inverted coming-of-age moment – Agu reflects on what death smells like: “Sweet like sugar cane; rotten like palm wine.” Despite his dehumanisation, however, Agu achieves a kind of insight into himself when he is finally questioned by a kindly, well-meaning teacher, whose bland condescending smile betrays her lack of understanding about what he has gone through: “I am not a baby – I am an old man and she is a small girl.”
This is a very powerful and confidently made movie, a film that really puts its audience through the wringer, which finally refuses any palliative gestures, with towering performances from Elba and Attah. The awards season really has begun.
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Tuesday, July 11, 2017

The 50 best films of 2015 / Salt of the Earth / No 19


The 50 best films 

of 2015 

in the US  

No 19


The Salt of the Earth

The Salt of the Earth review – colourful portrait of visionary photographer Sebastião Salgado

4/5stars

This deeply considered documentary from Wim Wenders and the photographer’s son looks at the Brazilian artist behind monochrome images that transcend history itself

Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 16 July 2015 22.15 BST

T
he amazing monochrome images created by 71-year-old Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado are the subject of this deeply considered documentary study, co-directed by Wim Wenders and the photographer’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The cinema screen is a good platform for work so passionately idealistic and, perhaps, grandiose. The pictures are the result of Salgado’s remarkable 40-year career as a photojournalist – although that word does not do justice to a vocation closer to artist, ethnographer and self-described “witness to the human condition”.



Salgado took stunning pictures in South America, Africa and central Europe, paying tribute to peoples who are dispossessed. He speaks to the camera here about his life and work, like a great big Buddha-like head looming out of the pictures’ glass frames. Wenders says that compassion fuels Salgado’s vision, humanity being the “salt of the earth”. I suspect there is also that Greeneian splinter of ice in his artist’s heart that allows him to capture unbearable images of human agony.

 Sebastião Salgado gets his closeup … The Salt of the Earth co-director Wim Wenders, left, with his subject


Salgado has been accused of fetishising and beautifying suffering and pain: I don’t agree, although Salgado is not asked why he takes only black-and-white photographs, and this is a flaw in the film – as it goes to the heart of the artistry-over-authenticity debate. Cinematographers Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Hugo Barbier occasionally show their own black-and-white images bleeding into colour; I would have liked to hear from them directly about how their work was influenced by the subject. Finally, it seems as if Salgado has gone beyond humanity in depicting the natural world: landscapes without people. His best work seems to transcend history itself.



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