The Cold War in Warm Rooms

The Cold War. Courtroom Drama. Spies. Individually, these elements have each produced some great works of cinema. We make think of Dr Strangelove or A Few Good Men or even Skyfall, but what happens when you take these three aspects, roll them all together, and put Spielberg behind the camera? This is Bridge of Spies.

When Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a Russian spy, is captured by the FBI, it is extremely important for the image of the United States of America that he gets fair representation at trial and therefore someone must be appointed the lawyer for the most hated man in America. The lawyer that gets appointed is James B. Donavan (Tom Hanks), an insurance lawyer, and he has to convince the country not to kill his client. His argument begins to hinge on the notion that, should it be required, Abel could be used to trade for any similarly captured Americans. When a U-2 spy plane and its pilot are shot down over Russia as well as an American student getting arrested after crossing the Berlin Wall, suddenly having Abel alive becomes an appealing idea.

Abel (Mark Rylance) and Donavan (Tom Hanks)
 in the court room

Over the years, Tom Hanks has developed from a loveable young, romantic comedy star, into a serious award winning actor, and then into some sort of friendly and yet exceptional everyman. He continues that trend here in Bridge of Spies. Donavan is a family man who works in insurance and he is suddenly thrust into an extraordinary  situation and Hank's performance reflects this. He is charming yet firm and powerful. He is warm and loving, yet determined and authoritative. It is a hard balance to strike, but not for someone as accomplished as Hanks. Rylance, already an established presence on the stage, is the standout performance here though, and the film rests on this. The success on how the audience engage with the film's narrative is dependant on how they relate to Abel. As the soft spoken Russian spy, Rylance is absolutely delightful and, despite being a traitor to the United States, we root for him and against the American government.

Tom Hanks as Donavan's world begins to change

Spielberg's influence over Hollywood is vast. Year after year he makes brilliant, award-winning films. With Bridge of Spies, he continues in excellent form, but the film is undoubtably improved and made whole by Joel and Ethan Coen's tinkering with Matt Charman screenplay. In a film that is centred around talking and negotiating, the Coens pump life into a dialogue-heavy second act. They bring warmth to the Cold War in the form of Hank's Donavan, though never letting the intensity of the situation slip away. Accompanied by small yet spectacular set pieces, brilliantly captured by Spielberg's camera, the film's visual construction sometimes says more than the Coen's words ever could. A gentle foot chase through the rain, a train carriage of staring faces, a snowy and still Glienicke Bridge scattered with shadowy figures.

Whilst there are dips in pace, Bridge of Spies seamlessly combines several genres and exhibits some of the finest performances of the year. It also proves that Spielberg may not be revolutionising the cinematic world with the likes of Jaws and E.T., but he has not lost any of his film making power. 

United States of Ireland

The Oscars are no strangers to romantic films, and the last few years have been no exception. Sometimes they are biographical (The Theory of Everything), sometimes they are about the struggles on the way to love (Silver Linings Playbook), and sometimes they are a bit kooky (Her). So what can we make of this year's tale of love? This is Brooklyn.

Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is a young Irish girl who leaves for America lead a better life. With arrangements made by Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), an Irish priest, Eilis moves to Brooklyn, New York, to join the Irish community there. She is accepted into the home of Mrs. Keogh (Julie Walters) who also hosts several other young Irish girls. She begins to work in a shop, she meets a nice Italian boy called Tony (Emory Cohen), and her new life in Brooklyn begins to settle down rather nicely. But a quick trip back to Ireland could prove to upset that.

Emory Cohen and Saoirse Ronan as Tony and Eilis

Brooklyn is a film built on small yet significant roles; in a story about community, fellowship, and relationships, the supporting cast are just as important, if not more so, than the lead actress. Not to take anything away from Ronan, who we will come to in a moment, from Walters' deliciously entertaining Mrs. Keogh to Cohen's charming Tony to Domhnall Gleeson's delightfully handsome Jim Farrell, the smaller characters are what give Brooklyn its life and its energy. But its heart and soul do still come from its leading lady. Ronan plays Eilis calmly with grace. From the moment the film starts rolling, her soft manner draws the viewer in, her friendly, warm nature invites them along for the journey across the sea. Eilis has a constantly determined will that's always held back by a society that wants to keep her grounded, but Ronan's versatile charm keeps the audience rooting for her; we share in her confusion, we feel her pain, we fall in love alongside her.

Emory Cohen and Saoirse Ronan as Tony and Eilis

There is a rare quality to Brooklyn that few films accomplish. It is hopelessly romantic but also comments on a far bigger picture. Between the lines of love it tells the story of immigration, of old lands and new, of starting afresh. Nick Hornby's screenplay is structured around the struggles faced by Eilis in love and finding her home but never fails to keep sight of both of those key elements, intertwining the two with precision and care, turning the narrative of love into a metaphor for the difficulties of finding which side of the ocean her heart lies. Director John Crowley takes this story and turns it into a gloriously moving tale assisted by beautiful production design by François Séguin.

Brooklyn is an unrepentantly romantic piece of cinema and a warm hearted accomplishment of the screen. Touching, funny, and full of heart. A true success.

Unbreakable Brie Larson

You know how uncomfortable it is to share a lift with another person? To be caught in such close proximity with another person, with no escape, for a short amount of time. Now imagine being in that lift for seven years. That is sort of what this film does. This is Room.

Ma (Brie Larson) and Jack (Jacob Tremblay) live in Room, a 10 by 10 foot room, where they are held captive by Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). Nick has had Ma locked away for seven years and regularly rapes her. After a couple of years, along came Jack. Born and raised in Room, Jack knows nothing of the outside world and quizzes Ma over the existence of dogs, why the leaves turn brown, and other bits of common knowledge. Ma dreams of better things for Jack and begins working on a plan to get him out of Room and away from Old Nick, but perhaps the outside world is not as warm and welcoming as she recalled.

Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson as Jack and Ma in Room

You may remember Brie Larson from such comedy outings as 21 Jump Street, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, and even Community on the small screen. In Room, she moves away from making us laugh and instead invites us into a world of turmoil and suffering. In a narrative that could easily tip into being melodramatic, Larson controls Ma's mood swings and emotional instability as she tries to hold her life together for Jack, keeping the character real and devastatingly effective. But Ma does not just support Jack, she is also supported by him. Their relationship is built on each other, and the expansion of their world to include other people throws off that delicate balance. Jacob Tremblay - at only 9 years of age - expertly portrays the introverted fear and yet childlike wonder that an isolated five year old would experience when entering the world and meeting other people for the first time. 

The pair getting into the swing of things

Room is a stunning portrayal of the darkness that exists in our world. Not that it is based on a true story, but it strikes a lot of similarities to a real case that influenced the plot. But it is not just the nature of Big Nick's crimes that are shocking; it is Ma and Jack's reaction to the outside world. Jack longs for the comfort and security of Room, something that is brilliantly visualised by a nifty bit of camera work that makes that 10 by 10 foot space seem huge and spacious. Ma, on the other hand, struggles to reaccustom to day to day life, and spirals into hard-to-watch arguments with her mother and worse. The supposedly brighter world outside Room is full of unaccepting fathers and invasive media. Room, however, is a compelling story wonderfully told by director Lenny Abrahamson and writer (both novel and screenplay) Emma Donoghue.

Room is unapologetically heavy. It is not a nice or easy story, but it is one of the most engaging films of the year. Both Larson and Tremblay are completely outstanding and deserve every accolade coming their way. The weight of the film can make it a little draining at times, but ultimately a very rewarding watch.

The Weirdos of Wall Street

Around a decade ago, banks across the world collapsed. Not many of us really understand the details of what happened, but we all agreed that bankers were to blame and they were bad, bad people. A few filmmakers have tried to explain the events that led us to this conclusion (Margin Call, Inside Job), and trying to join that club is Anchorman director Adam McKay. This is The Big Short.

The Big Short tells three vaguely interlinking stories of bankers who predicted the crash of the housing market and bet against the banks. Firstly, there is Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a millionaire who discovers that banks are using subprime loans to add more mortgages to their plans. Subsequently he goes to the biggest banks in America and bets against the housing market. Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) learns of these transactions and presents them to the second set of bankers, Mark Baum (Steve Carell) and his team of investors, who investigate the issue further. Finally, two young bankers, Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), find Burry's pitch regarding the housing market bubble and team up with retired trader Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to help them make the trades. But as the three sets of bankers reveal more about the housing bubble, the more the moral implications of their bets are brought into question and the corrupt system simply keeps getting worse.

Steve Carell as Mark Baum

McKay has gathered a stunning cast to tell this important story. Steve Carell is on the top of his game, reuniting with a director that made him eat coffee grinds in one of their last outings. Carell's Baum is the moral compass at the centre of the film; he hates bankers and yet is one himself. While the others betting against the house market, like Bale's genius Burry or Goslings sleazy Vennett, are only aiming to gain in either pride or money, Baum is constantly fighting an internal battle and Carell portrays this brilliantly. The ensemble work brilliantly together on screen, though rarely at the same time. Burry is never out of his offices, whilst Pitt, nigh on unrecognisable as Rickert, spends most of his time on the phone, physically separated from those he is performing with. But this does not hold them back, and this is a character based film. We have to care about the people on-screen because they are still part of the corrupt system that the film is criticising - they need to be the good-bad guys - and every single actor give performances that aid that goal.

Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert

Much like this year's Spotlight, The Big Short is a film that takes a incredible ensemble cast and explores the evil actions of humanity. Whilst the subject matter is not quite as dark as Spotlight, it is no easier to swallow. For many of us, what caused the 2008 financial crisis was incomprehensibly confusing, but what McKay does, helped in no small part by screenwriter Charles Randolph, is make it accessible. With entertaining cameos from Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez, Richard Thaler, and Anthony Bourdain as themselves, who help break down some of the more complicated elements of caused the collapsed (Subprime loans, CDOs, Synthetic CDOs) with handy, understandable metaphors (blackjack and fish stew, anyone?). The self-referential postmodernism does not stop there; the fourth wall is nothing to McKay, and characters often take themselves out of a scene to talk to the audience. With such a complex topic, the direct address often adds much needed clarity.

Though a bit clunky at times, cutting to archival footage that breaks up the films pace, and a little bit too long, The Big Short is an engaging, accessible, and important story of corruption, greed, and contemporary history.

Revenge is Best Served Cold

This years Oscars seem to be a year of survival films. Both Mad Max and The Martian had the theme of survival at their core but neither even come close to today's film. Today's film takes the survival theme and stretches it to its very limits. This is The Revenant.

Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) live on a settlement with a fur-trappers. When their hunting party is attacked by a local tribe of native Arikara Indians, they have to flee to try and make it to a safe outpost. Led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) and accompanied by John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), the group venture out towards safety but on route, Glass gets separated from the others and mauled by a bear. Despite the freezing winter, the others rescue him and carry him between them on a stretcher. However, after being slowed down by the burden, Glass is eventually left for dead and buried alive when Fitzgerald tricks Bridger into thinking they are about to come under attack, forcing them to leave Glass behind. But Glass fights to survive and he has one sole intent - to get revenge on Fitzgerald.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass

The Revenant is, very simply put, Leonardo DiCaprio's film. Not only is the film almost entirely focused on Glass' fight to survive, giving him a huge percentage of the screen time, but it is also a testament to DiCaprio's acting ability. Not that this was ever in doubt, but after several roles that involved a high amount of physicality and volume (see The Wolf of Wall Street), his performance as Glass pushes him to his limits. Glass, for a good majority of the film, can hardly move or speak, and yet DiCaprio brings such life to an almost lifeless character. Tied down to the stretcher, completely incapacitated, his constrained facial expressions and muffled grunts tell a more detailed and developed narrative than whole films managed in 2015 (see Pixels). Despite this, DiCaprio is surrounded by a stellar supporting cast, Tom Hardy in particular. There is something nasty about Hardy's Fitzgerald but, at the same time, terribly endearing. He is intelligent but brutal, dishonest but authoritative. He has superb survival instincts but is only out for himself. Hardy encapsulates this and creates one of the best antagonists of the year.

Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald

The Revenant is an epic adventure from start to finish. It opens with an absolutely astonishing set piece, the camera tracking through the carnage of battle, following one hunter until their death, then another then another. We adopt the camera's viewpoint and stumble through the fighting in confusion but also never looking away; we even plunge underwater with Will Poulter's Bridger as someone attempts to drown him. Alejandro González Iñárritu uses similar techniques to his Best Picture winning Birdman last year, albeit in shorter supply, to drag us into the gritty realm of survival. But is it any surprise with someone as talented as Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman, Gravity, Children of Men, The Tree of Life) behind the camera that The Revenant excels in its visual story telling. Bookended by two incredibly shot scenes of fighting, The Revenant does almost as much in how it portrays its narrative as what it is portraying. The long shots of the wilderness tell us its great expanse, the long takes tell us the relentlessness of the struggles faced.

Without a doubt the most gorgeous film of the year, but perhaps also the grittiest; the true story it is based on is not even as brutal as the film's depiction of the events, but Iñárritu and Lubezki really capitalise on their visual art form and make something truly memorable.

All The Pope's Men

Journalism. A profession which involves a lot of writing, a bit of research, and occasionally, some changing the face of a country. There was Watergate in 1972, the revelation of the extent of the NSA's surveillance in 2013, and there was even The Daily Telegraph's discovery of the MPs Expenses scandal in 2009. But the journalists of today's film did not just upset a nation. They upset a worldwide institution. This is Spotlight.

The 'Spotlight' department of The Boston Globe are a specialist group of investigative journalists headed up by Walter 'Robby' Robinson (Michael Keaton) and when the new boss, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), takes over the running of the Globe, he notices an old article on child molestation by a priest. Eager for the story to be followed up, Robby's department is nominated to look into it. The process is simple - Matt Carroll (Brian d'Arcy James) looks into the old clippings on the topic, Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) looks into the potential victims, and Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) runs around the city looking for any more leads - but what they discover is much more difficult to handle. Several dozen covered up cases of molestation by priests in the Boston area, and the revelations just keep coming.

The Spotlight team

It is rare for a film to completely embrace the notion of an acting ensemble; a cast that works as a unit, all cogs functioning in harmony to create a riveting piece of cinema. There is no lead in the traditional sense, there is four of them. Of the four, Ruffalo's Rezendes particularly stands out from the pack. He is the most energetic of the group, dashing into offices, charming information out of Stanley Tucci's Garabedian, and essentially pestering anyone who might know anything. But this is a cast all at the top of their game. Keaton continues his fine form after Birdman last year, and this is easily a career high for McAdams and d'Arcy James.

Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams as
Walter 'Robby' Robinson and Sacha Pfeiffer 

Spotlight is not comfortable viewing. Around every corner there is a further revelation that takes us deeper into the rabbit hole of the church's actions and their cover ups. What makes Spotlight so exciting, however, is the thrill of finding out how deep that rabbit hole goes and how the characters navigate through that darkness to gain their answers. Written with wit, intelligence, and sincerity, the film perfectly balances a disturbing subject matter with a light handling and effective editing. Take a scene where two victims are interviewed simultaneously and the camera cuts between the two, never allowing the audience to listen to a full dialogue, but exposing the full story through the similarities of the two testimonies. Its narrative is gritty, but it is honest; the Catholic Church have even praised the film for its representation of the facts.

There a few examples in film that so clearly demonstrate the snowball effect as the story grows larger and darker. The bitter taste left in your mouth as the credits roll remind you that his is real. That this happened. It is no All The President's Men - the film's closest relative - but the story is one that is just as worthy, if not more so, of being told. Spotlight does just that, and does it brilliantly.

Life on Mars

Space is a huge expanse of unexplored place but NASA has that which they can explore in their sights. The plans to put people on Mars in the 2030s is well underway but perhaps today's film will provide some ideas of what to expect when they get there. This is The Martian.

When a terrible storm on the surface of Mars threatens the first manned mission to the planet, the team of astronauts prepare to jet off home. As the storm hits, the team are outside and a piece of debris hits the team's botanist, Mark Watney (Matt Damon). Losing him in the low visibility and believing him to be dead, the remaining four team members take off to return to Earth. The next Sol (or day in Layman's terms), Watney wakes up to find himself alone in the red deserts of Mars, wounded but alive. His only option in order to survive? Well in his own words, he is going to 'have to science the shit out of this'.

It is no surprise, in a film about one man stranded alone away from humanity, that this is Matt Damon's movie. He is the source of all the comedy (bar one prat fall from Donald Glover) as well as the emotional heart. Whilst the supporting cast consists of a strong ensemble (Jessica Chastain, Sean Bean, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, and many others), they never detract from Damon's performance. This being said, often their roles are limited to staring at computer screens and responding emotionally, so as far as that is concerned, they are exceptional.

The Martian, which was dubiously dubbed as a comedy at the Golden Globes, is a smart and emotional film that is as funny as it is thoughtful. It raises questions of morality and ethics, whilst also making jokes about using human faeces as fertiliser. As well as a solid screenplay, The Martian also boasts some gorgeous camera work that turns the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan into a gloriously beautiful Martian landscape. However, at just under two and a half hours, the film runs for just a little bit too long. The middle section begins to drag as the only communication between Earth and Mars is through written text on a computer; the characters read aloud as they type and then again as they receive messages*. Similarly, the end of the film goes on for a long while with drawn out obstacles and plenty of unnecessary shots that add little to the overall narrative.

The film is grounded by the optimism of Damon's Watney; it keeps it real. Ridley Scott's film does not fall into the isolated paranoia of Moon nor into the fantasticism of similar sci-fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar but instead remains cheerful, funny, and full of hope. There is a human element at the core of this space drama which is all too often awkwardly handled or overlooked in science fiction (just look at that 'Love and Gravity' scene in Interstellar). In many ways, The Martian succeeds where others in the genre have failed, but it also lacks the grand, epic nature that keeps the audience engaged for two and a half hours.

A fun and enjoyable film, if not a little too long. The many obstacles that face Watney are slowly deminished by the predictibly accurate optimism of the characters, but this does not divert from the quality that The Martian displays. A rare feel good, easy to watch sci-fi which is a welcome addition to an all too often glum and complex genre.

Best Bit? In order to grow potatoes, Watney needs water. To make water, Watney needs to use all of his science knowledge in a brilliant little segment which demonstrates the dangers of fire in space.

*Every Frame a Painting, an excellent channel on youtube, discuss this issue in film in more detail here: