Film Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Early in Hail, Caesar!, Joel and Ethan Coen's farce set at an MGM-esque movie studio in the early 1950s, the narrator (Michael Gambon) refers to the films overseen by producer/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) as pieces of gossamer. It's a poignant phrase to describe the kind of shimmering popular entertainment being cranked out by the fictional Capitol Pictures, but it also feels like the Coens are lampshading how light and frivolous Hail, Caesar! feels compared to some of their other films. Much as Woody Allen ended You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger by invoking Shakespeare's line about sound and fury, or the Coens ended their own Burn After Reading by having J.K. Simmons acknowledge that the story didn't amount to much, the "gossamer" line feels like a pre-emptive apology for the film which contains it.

Film Review: Unbroken (2014)

In theory, Unbroken should be a very good, if not great film. It has so much going for it. It has a fantastic real-life story, that of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic distance runner who joined the airforce in World War II, then spent several years in a series of Japanese prisoner of war camps. In bringing the story to life, the film has the benefit of a screenplay written in part by Joel and Ethan Coen, cinematography by perpetual Oscar bridesmaid Roger Deakins, and a lead performance by Jack O'Connell, the young British actor who gave one of the year's best, most incendiary performances in David Mackenzie's Starred Up. In execution, though, all that talent combines to make a film which only occasionally manages to be good, and for the most part is just bland and flavourless.

You've Got To Accentuate The Positive: What's Good About The 2014 Oscar Nominations?

I'm sure I sound like a broken record saying this (actually, is that metaphor even relevant in 2014? Should it be "sound like a corrupted mp3"?) but 2013 was a very, very good year for cinema. Probably one of the best in my lifetime, and certainly the best since I started writing about film in a serious way. While it might be a bit too much to expect the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to comprehensively reflect the sheer volume of quality released last year - a token nomination for Upstream Color, even in Sound Design or something, would have been nice - by and large the nominations this year get a lot of things right, representing some of the better films that exist within the Academy's seemingly very narrow and conservative taste palette.

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: True Grit (2010)

In Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit, Deputy Marshal Reuben "Rooster" J. Cogburn, played by John Wayne in an Oscar-winning performance, is introduced to the audience when he helps unload a group of prisoners from the back of wagon. When one stubborn prisoner refuses to move, Cogburn knocks him off, to the delight of the crowd that has gathered to watch. It's a fun scene that sets up Rooster as a prickly rogue, but one who gets the job done. In the new adaptation of Charles Portis' novel, Rooster (Jeff Bridges) is introduced when Mattie Ross (Haillee Steinfeld) finds him occupying an outhouse, having relocated there from a saloon, and he drunkenly informs Mattie that he will be in there some time.