Film Review: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

From its first scene, in which its title character suffers a beating at the hands of a shadowy, unknown man, Inside Llewyn Davis is a disorientating, darkly funny and quietly menacing experience. Set in and around the Greenwich Village folk scene in 1961, it covers a week or so in the life of Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a folk singer who is perpetually broke, and spends pretty much the entirety of the film shuffling through the brutal New York winter, trying to bum a cigarette or grab a night's sleep on a couch from anyone he can, all the while hustling to get a few dollars together. As he pinballs from crisis to crisis, most, if not all of which are problems of his own making, he contemplates his sputtering career, failed relationships and dying friendships. Oh, and there's a cat who figures in there somehow.

Film Review: The Great Gatsby (2013)

The best thing that could be said about Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby is that it's the sort of film that F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters would find terribly profound and moving, even though it's possible that no one else would. Using the same hyper-real and kinetic style that he employed to dizzying/disorientating effect in Moulin Rouge!, Luhrmann re-creates the Long Island playground of West Egg, home to the rich, beautiful and carefree denizens of an America drunk on success and illicit booze. It's a world of empty pleasures and idle existences, populated by people whose greatest concern is where their next good time is going to come from.

Film Review: Shame (2011)

Shame, the second film by artist-turned-director Steve McQueen, is a technically dazzling examination of Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a sex addict whose carefully cultivated routine of Internet pornography and meaningless one-night stands is thrown into disarray when his younger sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to stay with him. It's important to mention Shame's technical prowess up front since its meticulously planned tracking shots, languid pacing and evocation of New York at night, great though they are, only serve to mask the fact that the film they are in service of is shallow, banal and dull.

Film Review: Drive (2011)

Drive, Nicholas Winding Refn’s minimalist action movie about a stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver, feels like a film out of time. Its methodical pacing, neon-soaked vision of L.A. and electronic soundtrack give it the feel of a lost Michael Mann film and it’s easy to see why the film received such a mixed response from audiences on its theatrical release. Anyone expecting Fast Five would be sorely disappointed by its lack of traditional spectacle in favour of a slow, chaste love affair between Driver and his neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), broken up by scenes of startlingly brutal violence.

Film Review: Never Let Me Go (2010)

Never Let Me Go, an adaptation of a critically beloved novel by Kazuo Ishigiro (which I have not read) is a film that is easy to admire but hard to like. Set in an alternate present (or recent past, but let's not split hairs) it tells the story of three young people - played in adulthood by Kiera Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield - who form a love triangle as they try to come to terms with their existence as part of a radical medical program that will save lives but dooms their friendships and loves to a predetermined end.