“In
Ex Machina,
Oscar Isaac is given the responsibility of providing the film with much of its atmosphere. The base is already there, and is the work of writer/director Alex Garland. The film is about three characters: Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who was hired to determine how close to a perfect AI is the robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and was hired to do so by Ava’s creator, a billionaire genius named Nathan (Oscar Isaac). The setting is Nathan’s immense underground home and lab, in which he lives essentially by himself. Some of the rooms look like very high-end, tricked out, but habitable living rooms and kitchens, whereas the hallways and bedrooms (of which there seem to be at least dozens) look like they belong in an empty hotel.
“So, what Isaac has to do with his performance – and it’s not something you ever see him do, and it may well have been something he never thought about, which doesn’t the change that he achieved it – is turn vast antiseptic loneliness into a human being. Not by playing Nathan as a barely human mannequin who resembles his inventions, but rather going the other way entirely, and playing him as someone whose humanity is all too present, whose confidence is drowning in beer and vodka, a guy who walks through these endless halls of glass doors and red carpets and spits on the floor, because it’s his floor, all of it.
“Isaac plays Nathan as a man both dissolute and rigorously in shape. His eyes can be alternately warm and shining with contempt. Isaac can do the same with his voice, and he does all of this almost simultaneously throughout
Ex Machina. It’s an intensely charismatic and chilling performance: Nathan is a man whose interest in you can make you feel good about yourself, while you quietly suspect that he probably hates you. And thus is the atmosphere of
Ex Machina created – the seamless integration of soulless beauty and gross, misanthropic humanity, as presented by Nathan and his home, reflected back by the soulless beauty of Ava, who was born stripped of anything like grossness, and who is too inhuman to be misanthropic.” ~
Bill Ryan
“I don’t think much people could’ve predicted how great
Charlize Theron was going to be in
Mad Max: Fury Road. Personally, as I wasn’t subjected to trailers and just entered the theater expecting to be wowed (and I was), I literally had no idea just how important her role was going to be, especially as she’s practically the lead. It’s not that she hasn’t played these kind of characters before (remember
Aeon Flux? No? Ok, that’s better actually), but that she didn’t portray them as seriously as she does in this science fiction dystopia action film. Personally, I’d say it’s in the eyes.
“When Immortan Joe mentions Furiosa (what a great name, means ‘woman who is furious’ in Spanish), that’s the first time we see her: riding her rig, a metallic arm, her ragged shirt, but none of that matters, as the few seconds that the shot lasts we’re enraptured by the way that she looks up towards the leader that mentioned her name: her eyes bright, barely squinting, surrounded by the grease that she uses to blacken her forehead and around her eyes. She’s already defiant, as if we’re expecting what she’ll do, she’ll betray Immortan Joe, and only with one slight movement of her eyes, we know everything we should about her.
“Even when the darkness stops covering the upper side of her face, she still commands the movie through the movement of her eyes, scrutinizing the horizon, and going through the motions of editing through her perspective and the people that she talks to. Her beautiful clear eyes surrounded by an exterior of madness and violence bring the necessary touch of inner trauma that the character needs for it to be understandable in every action that she makes, even making all of the backstory unnecessary.
“Besides is the fact that her physical presence is daunting and particularly enticing to watch, as she moves her body through the motions of driving and fighting as if it were a second nature. She appears to control every muscle, both in the tense situations, when she needs to stay calm and not a muscle moves, nor when she feels defeated and we can see her body flow and fall to the sand, crying and screaming, closing the circle of all the emotions that her character needed to express in the film.
“A personal note: I don’t think that Furiosa, as played by Charlize Theron, should have a new movie of her own, as I feel that her travel through the picture is completed by the end. What I could buy is a movie about her past. Now, there’s an idea, movie producers.
Furiosa: The Early Years.” ~
Jaime Grijalba
“
Samuel L. Jackson makes a lot of movies, and is good in most of them. He brings an exponential depth to each of his characters. If it’s a one-dimensional part, he’ll add layers of complexity. But if the role is already complex, he imbues the full spectrum of humanity into it, allowing each viewer to leave with a different impression of the character. In
The Hateful Eight’s centerpiece sequence, Jackson plays a variation on
True Romance’s infamous Sicilian scene. Using charged rhetoric, his Major Marquis Warren exploits the racism of an old man to elicit a desired act of violence. Is Warren telling the truth? The whole truth? Anything but the truth? One can’t be certain. What is certain is that Jackson’s performance in the scene - in which Warren details the torture, rape and murder of an old Confederate soldier’s son - is so electric few notice that Mexican Bob stopped playing the piano midway through the story. Which means Tarantino so trusts Jackson’s ability to command audience attention, he bases Bob’s alibi for not poisoning the coffee on the assumption nobody could possibly be paying attention to anything but Warren’s story. And, with Mexican Bob in mind, Jackson so convincingly has Warren argue that Minnie hated Mexicans, it still comes across as truth after Tarantino shows Minnie treating Bob with kindness. Jackson is so good, many still believe the lie even after the contradicting truth has been revealed. Damn, he would have made a hell of a politician.” ~
Kevin Cecil
“The premise of
Phoenix could work in most genres: inspirational tale of survival, hard-hitting melodrama, ice-cold mystery, body horror, even unconventional love story. That's an ideal starting point for
Nina Hoss, with her uncanny ability to slip among film iconographies with a turn of the neck and the right plume of light. In her last collaboration with director Christian Petzold, 2012's
Barbara, Hoss was a Fassbinder diva, a Verhoevian femme fatale, a Hitchcock blonde, and a John Waters renegade all in one performance. So how exactly do you raise the bar? Can such a thing be done? And yet somehow, Hoss does. As a survivor emerging into the Berlin she once knew, bearing a new face representing the doctors' best efforts to reconstruct — no, as beloved friend Lene would correct, re-create — the Nelly of before, she begins fitting the jagged pieces of her life into some semblance of order, retracing steps amongst the wreckage. And we are with her through each of those difficult steps she must take through the life that she led and thought she understood all too well. Leading, of course, to that exquisite ending, where she wipes the floor with our emotions. It's a staggering performance.” ~
Jason Shawhan
“Brie Larson has been getting the lion’s share of the acclaim for Room, but it’s
Jacob Tremblay who is at the center of the film. The film is told from his point of view--sometimes literally. More, the filmmakers ask Tremblay to change over the course of the film as his world is expanded. The boy who rages at his mother because he thinks she’s making up stories about the outside world in the first act is very different from the boy who finds himself normalizing with friends and dogs near the end. There are plenty of adult actors who seem incapable of performing this kind of change over the course of a movie, but for an actor as young as Tremblay, it’s remarkable.” ~
Christianne Benedict
“There are two things that some people seem unwilling to forgive
Leonardo DiCaprio for. One, he came into our lives as a dreamboat Romeo
Titanic victim, and even as he evolved into One Of Our Great Actors his genetics had the audacity to keep reminding us of that. Try as he might, he could not hide the boyish looks even as a repeat Scorsese leading man, or while playing an aging Howard Hughes or J. Edgar Hoover (the latter an undervalued movie and performance in my view).
“Two, he prefers a show-offy approach to acting that some, in their greater taste and wisdom, can't have fun with. He loves accents, tics, gesticulation, facial hair. Even when playing an internal character he's likely to have great charm, make a bunch of speeches, do some emotional yelling, just not necessarily about what's going on inside.
“In recent years I think he's taken his talents even further. In both
Django Unchained and
The Wolf of Wall Street he applied his skills to characters who were unrepentant scumbags, and who required great comic timing. In
Wolf he gave his most physical performance to date. The most remembered scene in an all around great movie is the one where he spends several minutes just trying to get into his car.
“In
The Revenant he leaves the humor behind but doubles down on the physicality, spending most of the movie with more injuries than John McClane has at the end of a
Die Hard. He crawls, limps, groans and sputters through the snow, lips scabbed over, body made up to have open wounds, frozen snot globs in his mustache. He pushes himself to the limit to play the human embodiment of hammered shit, and then bad guy Tom Hardy gets all the dialogue and laughs. I've only ever heard the trivia that DiCaprio ate raw bison liver on camera in the context of critics making fun of him for it, but if that's what he needed to do to become this phantom of grimy, slimy vengeance then who am I to judge his dietary choices?” ~
Vern
“
Tangerine was one of those movies that I didn't take to immediately. On my initial viewing, the first act didn't hook me and the unfocused energy of it was as distracting as it was interesting. I almost bailed out on it after about fifteen minutes, ready to chalk this one up as another casualty of overhype and undeserved notoriety derived from ‘shot on an iPhone’ novelty. I'm glad I stuck with it, though. If I hadn't, I would have cheated myself out of learning about
Mya Taylor, one of my favorite cinematic discoveries of 2015.
“Often, with a film that I am wrestling with, I will look for that one character that is my foothold, my way in. Mya Taylor's Alexandra was that foothold for me with
Tangerine. She is the more subtle, reasonable complement to Kitana Kiki Rodriguez's volatile Sin-Dee and, to me, the heart and soul of the film. As the film moved along and seemed to find its footing, it was Taylor that kept giving me those reasons to keep watching. Every time the action threatened to get too frantic, Taylor gently guided Rodriguez back on track. She acts as a buffer for the other characters when they're on the street, she knows when to encourage and when to diplomatically discourage Sin-Dee's manic energy, she even gives up her wig. That's true friendship. For a screwball comedy team to really work, the zany half of the act needs a good foil and Taylor fulfills that role admirably. It's a great decision, then, when director Sean Baker shows us her performing at a pay-to-play nightclub. She's not just second fiddle to Sin-Dee and we get a glimpse of her dreams and aspirations, modest and compromised as they are. It elevates the character from sidekick to something much greater and it's Taylor's warmth, grace and humor that make all that hit home.
“One of the great things about cinema is that it is a window into innumerable worlds. Hollywood vehicles are still obviously, woefully circumspect with respect to that. I am thankful that groups that are marginalized by mainstream cinema – the trans community, sex workers, African-Americans, the list goes on and on – are out there, making movies, not giving a damn. There are so many stories that I might never otherwise have access to, so many stories that might not otherwise be heard at all. I'm glad I stuck with
Tangerine. Even more importantly, I am glad everyone involved in making it stuck with it. 2015 was a better year for it being a part of the cinematic landscape. With any luck, the years to come will be better for it as well.” ~
Cole Roulain
"Neorealism by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of the characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one” – Andre Bazin
“When filmmakers Josh & Ben Safdie discovered
Arielle Holmes in a Manhattan subway, the attraction was to her look, but what they fell in love with was her story. Holmes was a charismatic free spirit, who happened to be homeless, a heroin junkie, and a hopeless romantic, incredibly in love with a self-destructive Russian street kid named Ilya. The Safdies got her story in bits and pieces over coffees and lunches. They were grooming her for a role in her next film, but the reality that was her life, was far more compelling than anything they were working on. They eventually asked for her story on paper. Holmes would visit Apple stores and libraries to jot down her thoughts, which the Safdies paid her for by the page.
“The resulting film,
Heaven Knows What, would be Holmes’ own story. She plays an on-screen version of herself named Harley. The film tells her story about living on the street, coping with heroin addiction, and her unwavering devotion to Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). The Safdies would film in many of the actual locations from her life and utilize many of the actual people who would be cast as themselves. The resulting picture is one of the most raw and real films of the past decade. It comes to life through Holmes, whose performance is quite simply one of the most honest and brutal portraits of love and addiction to have ever graced the screen. It’s one of those rare bits of acting that never seems to really seek reality, but simply is reality, inseparably tied to the actress who brings it to life.” ~
Adam Lemke
“That distinct moment when you have to ask yourself if something that you're watching is – okay. It happens periodically (more often than that in the films of Bruno Dumont, to be sure), and it's a dangerous kind of uncertainty, because it can kill a film dead for the viewer. There's nothing as captivating as
Bernard Pruvost in
L'il Quinquin to be found in the vast reach of cinema this year, and it's not because he's a differently-abled actor. He is a captivating presence that demands the viewer's attention, and one who haunts the subconscious long after the film ends and life as we know it takes up the slack on the other side. And still, after three full viewings, knowing what little there is to know about this professional gardener, there's that voice in the back of the critical mind; only this time it's asking, ‘Is he fucking with us?’ “ ~
Jason Shawhan
“There’s a late scene in
Gett in which Vivian Amselem is alone and agonizing over the nightmare in which she finds herself. This is one of the few scenes where we see Vivian’s interior life writ on actress
Ronit Elkabetz’s face. Most of the scenes show her interacting with the court, with her husband, with her lawyer, and in these scenes, Ronit mostly plays rage and exasperation and they’re the kind of scenes that show actors to advantage, sure, but in
this scene by herself, the levee breaks and everything pours out. It’s a wordless scene, the camera just looking at her, and in this scene her face says...everything. Set next to the back and forth of the rest of the film, it’s startling enough, but, my god, does Elkabetz use the scene to deliver the killing stroke to the audience. She has a grievance with the world, and it hurts just to look at it.” ~
Christianne Benedict
“
Tom Noonan is the apotheosis of the creepy everyman in
Anomalisa. He voices every character in the film other than the two stars, David Thewlis and the transcendent Jennifer Jason Leigh. It’s a testament to the strength of his voice work here that it took me a second viewing of
Anomalisa to realize all the the Noonan-voiced characters had the same face. (Wait, seriously, you missed that? Yeah, shut up.) Noonan’s voice is preternaturally calm, its gentle mundanity slipping into the sinister.
“Noonan often deftly straddles a line between intelligent loner and disturbing cipher. (See also
What Happened Was… which he wrote, directed and starred in, and his
X-Files turn as serial child killer John Lee Roche.) His kind eyes and soft voice are
almost comforting, but cross so easily over to weirdness. Noonan has been a Charlie Kaufman alter ego before. Or, rather, the alter ego to Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kaufman’s alter ego in
Synecdoche, New York. In
Anomalisa, he’s the embodiment of Kaufman’s alter ego’s self-loathing. A complicated combination of the self and others that disgusts our protagonist. Everyone is Noonan. And Noonan is dull, vapid, prosaic, angry, dismissive, needy, desperate, clingy, demanding, controlling, terrifying, and inescapable. Everything Michael Stone hates and fears in himself, repeating itself over and over again with every encounter, until he finds Lisa, pure, new, exciting and thrillingly other. But Lisa predictably comes up short, her fragile and beautiful voice morphing into Noonan’s immovable sameness. No matter where you go... there you are.” ~
Marya Murphy
“
Sidse Babett Knudsen was a breakthrough performer for me in 2015 with her portrayal of Cynthia in Peter Strickland's
The Duke of Burgundy. That breakthrough status is entirely my fault, not hers. Unfortunately for me, this was my first exposure to her, even though she is fairly prolific in theatre, television and film in her native Denmark. On the plus side, what a rich introduction. Even though I always feel like I've been a little remiss when I finally discover someone with an extensive body of work that I feel I should have been aware of, that is always offset by the excitement of having a wealth of material to dig into.
The Duke of Burgundy is a pretty thrilling jumping off point.
“I was really taken with this film and particularly Knudsen's performance. It's such a lush, beautiful environment. It would have been easy to make something simply titillating with this subject matter, these actresses and this backdrop. It transcends that, though, and much of that is attributable to Knudsen. Don't misunderstand me, it is certainly erotic. That eroticism, though, all comes from its finely observed, and fluid, power dynamic. Much to marketers' and reviewers' chagrin, it refuses to be pigeonholed as a lesbian film, a BDSM film, or a knockoff imitation of sleaze relics from the '70s, and one of the main reasons for that is because Knudsen elevates the material with her focus on what is universal in the story. In her, we see the insecurities that the older partner often faces in a relationship – Can I keep up? Will they trade me in for a younger model? How much do I compromise what I want? Haven't I put in enough time on this earth to have earned some modicum of security and comfort? She communicates all of this, and then some, subtly and sensually. She makes it relatable, arousing and touching, regardless of gender or level of interest in kink. It's a knockout performance that bends but doesn't break and she deserves to have her cake and eat it too.” ~
Cole Roulain
“The lingering tragedy of
Straight Outta Compton is how ultimately limited it became by having Ice Cube and Dr. Dre join on as producers. This, of course, is the amount of star power nitro that helped to get the film made, so it was likely an unavoidable step in the film's development. But because of that, a lot of the edges on both the characters and the historical individuals of Dre and Cube got sanded off. Not so, Eric Wright. The Artist Forever Known as Eazy-E's tragic death from complications from AIDS may be the funneling point of the film's choppy, quilty second half, but it's Eazy's story that captivates from beginning to end. He's the audience's way in to the story, and it's him who remains complicated and viscerally alive.
Jason Mitchell is exceptional in the role, bringing boundless energy to each of his scenes, navigating the zigzags of tone that result from so many stories, so many writers, and so many producers. His Eazy is the most complex character in the film, in the way he bridges the business worlds of pushing weight and selling records, but also in the wrenching Greek tragedy that he's undertaking with Paul Giamatti's Jerry Heller. (It seems really obvious that someone, somewhere along the development of the
Straight Outta Compton film read Heller's book Ruthless, because much of the film's dialogue in scenes between only Eazy and Jerry seem to have come directly from it.) But Mitchell does something amazing in the film, finding the humanity and the universality in someone who could have just been a cipher.” ~
Jason Shawhan
