***1/2 (Excellent)

Brian De Palma is perhaps best known for his extravagant visual sensibilities—his split-diopters, his long takes, his split screens—so much so that his remarkable acuity for the emotions vital to his films is usually neglected. So it is perhaps wise that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow chose to go with a straight-forward, unadorned style for their documentary on the legendary director, De Palma in order to put the spotlight on the subject rather than the director.

Formed from many interviews over a period of several years, De Palma reveals its first two tricks from the beginning. First, Baumbach’s and Paltrow’s voices are never heard, and for most of the documentary De Palma seems not responding to any specific question, simply recounting his experience on every single film over his almost fifty year career. Whether this increases a sense of connection with De Palma is hard to gauge, especially since the three directors are all friends, but it provides a greater sense of directness, in line with De Palma’s often confrontational oeuvre. The second trick is in the actual filming of the interviews. De Palma’s appearance doesn’t seem to change at all, continually wearing the same blue outfit and sitting in the exact framing used for the rest of the shots; the viewer could reasonably conclude that it was all shot in one afternoon and edited later. Through this, the filmmakers seem to be putting the emphasis on the films of De Palma and how he progressed through them rather than on the man himself, reinforced by the one break with this style at the end, where De Palma walks on the streets of New York, almost passing the torch as he nears the end of his career (however long it may continue after this documentary).

The choice of archival footage and photographs that for the most part takes precedence over the new footage is surprisingly eclectic. Beginning with the opening of Vertigo, one of De Palma’s earliest and most lasting influences, the documentary largely uses a mix of footage from the director’s films and various behind-the-scenes photographs, though some more intriguing footage, such as the Hitchcock or the original ending of Snake Eyes, is included. The most memorable images are shown (“Say hello to my little friend”, the prom, the climax of Blow Out) but they’re never shown in isolation, as De Palma frequently talks about the difficulties surrounding them rather than letting them sit as totems.

This, perhaps, is the most important function of De Palma. It is not necessarily a work of demythologizing, but it is a tribute and a view from the other side, a chance for De Palma to speak his thoughts freely on the controversial legacy, in terms of both the ardent defenders and vociferous detractors, that his work has created. He is candid about his failures and pleased with his successes, and the viewer never gets the sense that he is being insincere or trying to hide any dissatisfaction. De Palma is the view of a legendary director, but more importantly, it is a view of his work, all twenty-nine films to date in a neat chronological order, through perhaps the most important lens of all.

**** (Great)

Heroism is at once one of the easiest and the most difficult character trait to portray on the silver screen. It is practically the fundamental basis for the concept of the protagonist, but to convey it in a way that resists valorizing and empty praise is something else entirely. In Sully, the retelling of one of the most uniformly positive events in recent memory, the successful water landing of an Airbus A320 with no fatalities, Clint Eastwood achieves this and more, creating a profoundly mixed experience. It deals not only with the hero, but the world around him, never villifying but always probing to reveal the human nature of almost every figure, including the character of New York City. Through this series of portraits, Sully’s heroism becomes all the more satisfying and true to life—as in all legends, only through many trials can one become truly great, and in this manner the film mirrors its subject.

As the film opens, it unexpectedly displays without explanation what could have been, as Eastwood smash cuts between the opening credits and Sully’s nightmare of a disastrous attempt of an alternate attempt to land US Airways Flight 1549. It is only the first of many events that display what eventually becomes the driving conflict of the film: Sully’s relationship with his sudden fame, especially in light of the stressful circumstances. The first half of the film or so is a constant barrage of outside pressure, running the gamut from lighthearted media appearances to paparazzi to the source of conflict, an official investigation into whether the water landing and inevitable destruction of the aircraft was unnecessarily dangerous (stranding him in New York, across the country from his home in San Francisco). He is forced both by trauma and by habit—a handful of flashbacks back to Sully’s youth show both his consistent interest in flight and his continually quiet and serious temperament—to adopt a certain interiority, where his emotions are continually kept in check, and even the mostly reassuring presences of his wife Lorraine (Laura Linney, who manages to wrangle a full-fledged character despite never appearing without a phone) and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles (a solid and at times hilarious Aaron Eckhart) do little to bring him out of his shell.

But under the uniquely determined and noble gaze of Tom Hanks, Sully never appears anything less than achingly human. One of the most successful gambits by Eastwood is his willingness to show Sully’s weaknesses and doubts, and Hanks responds in kind. The most remarkable aspect of his performance is his eyes, which convey a disconcerting mix of care, worry, fear, and even a hint of paranoia. Sully has good reason to be paranoid, of course, illustrated most starkly when he goes on a run in New York and stops in a bar where not only his face is plastered on the TV screen, but the owner has made a drink named after him (hilariously concocted from Grey Goose and water). But there is a great deal of nobility to him, a resolute manner that shines through and defines him, that unifies the film even more than the inciting incident that forms the centerpieces.

The other gambit that Eastwood undertakes is to play the already iconic moment three times, each roughly focusing on a different set of important people with Sully and Skiles forming the center in the cockpit. Though there is undoubtedly a cumulative power that builds on each, I found the first version the most viscerally impactful. All three are nevertheless hair-raising in their immediacy, primarily using tight close-ups mixed with expansive CGI shots of the airplane, and relies heavily on an expansive cast of air control operators, first responders, flight attendants, and passengers (some of whom are fleshed out in a beautifully simple manner just before the flight) to convey the urgency of the situation. Much of the second half—the first version occurs at around the midpoint, after the viewer has been submerged in Sully’s tenuous mindset—is taken up by these replays (to use Bordwell’s term), but none of them feel extraneous, developing the idea that Sully voices in the final scene, that he wouldn’t have been able to land the plane without every single person involved.

And the most important aspect of this statement is that Sully believes in this idea, and that the fundamental humanity that proves Sully’s correct judgment in front of the official investigation radiates out to every person. It is a profoundly honest film, willing to show for instance how some people panicked and nearly lost their lives trying to swim away from the airplane, or how the specter of 9/11 still hangs over the public consciousness. Eastwood’s use of footage of a reunion of the Captain and the lives he saved is an extension of this idea, showing that, as the landing showed, there is a fundamental heroism in humanity, whether it be in one figure or in all.

Nicolás Pereda adopts two seemingly opposing approaches and elegantly meshes them together to form Minotaur, a strange film that only grows as it progresses. One approach is a studiously formal, almost clinically realistic style of shooting, using almost exclusively static medium shots (there are only two pans, both close to the end) and what appears to be natural light throughout. The other is what may be loosely described as surreal, as the film centers on three nebulously defined people, though it is unclear how long they have known each other—the woman says she hasn’t seen the main man before—and their languid existence over what might be a few days. Various people come and go, but the bulk of the interactions is taken up by the three characters’ slow, almost arbitrary movements throughout the apartment, and they seem to communicate almost entirely by reading books aloud, broken up by long fits of narcolepsy. The final third perhaps delves too deeply in this, as they seem to be confined to one bed as even more people come and go, but Minotaur is nevertheless invigorating, making the two styles blend (most notably by frequently placing the characters in shadow, obscuring their expressions) in an immensely satisfying manner.

Throughout the course of The Sky Trembles…, Ben Rivers seems far more interested in constructing the film as a series of discrete events than in making them work as a cohesive whole. The overall structure does work, following the descent of a filmmaker (Oliver Laxe, playing himself) in two neat halves, but from scene to scene it becomes monotonous, as Rivers never quite repeats himself but doesn’t establish a clear sense of progression. Even as the film gets truly bizarre in the second half, where Oliver is forced to dance while wearing a suit covered in cans and lids, only the subtly off-kilter shots and the occasional entry of the droning electronic score offer a strong stimulus to the viewer. The rest of The Sky Trembles… is stuck in observational mode, distancing the viewer from the subjects, especially the native people, though of course this is not necessarily a bad thing, and Rivers uses it to a strong degree.

***1/2 (Excellent)

One of the more nebulous aspects of a film definitively set in a real city, state, and/or country is how it captures its spirit. It doesn’t necessarily have to be representative of the actual location, but for whatever reason the movie tends to feel more authentic, more grounded in a mood than if it focuses too much on other aspects. Hell or High Water is a prime example of this importance, drawing on it as definition for practically every relationship and interaction. The narrative, following two brothers that rob small banks to pay off the debt on their family ranch and the one-month-from-retirement sheriff that aims to stop them, is simple enough, but what attracts the viewer is the attention paid to the times in between the heists, as the nature of the Wild West is explored and reinforced in modern times.

This is not to say, of course, that the film loses interest when it comes to the heists. As directed by David Mackenzie, there is a great deal of tension brought forth by Giles Nuttgens’ slow camera moves, zeroing in on a hapless clerk as she is about to fall into the robbers’ trap. But until the unexpectedly violent final heist, there is hardly any violence, and the tension is occasionally defused by the brothers’ amateurish efforts and Tanner’s (Ben Foster, magnetic in his volatility) occasional temper, in ways that are both hilarious and worrying.

The brothers, Tanner and Toby (Chris Pine, enormously sensitive and stolid), and their relationship form the heart of the film, both in a narrative and an emotional sense. Despite their noticeable differences, from their emotional state to their backgrounds (Tanner is an ex-convict while Toby is robbing solely for the farm and his sons), there is a true tenderness, as the importance of family is emphasized from scene to scene. This is mirrored, most notably in a cross-cutting where the two pairs both stay in (vastly different) hotels for the night, by the playfully antagonistic behavior between the two Texas Rangers on their heels, Hamilton (an appropriately gruff Jeff Bridges) and Parker (Gil Birmingham, admirably understated). Hamilton is repeatedly mentioned as being on his last legs, but there is a burning drive that he shows in pursuing the robbers, while Parker offers support and receives frequent stereotypical jokes. Though this doubling certainly isn’t meant to be taken literally, it does ensure that the main through line, that of Texan thinking, is sustained.

And that, ultimately, is what sets Hell or High Water apart. It is not necessarily a deconstruction so much as an examination of the ideal of the cowboy. The three main characters (with all due respect to Parker, who is set apart in some ways by his race despite being a Ranger) all exhibit traits of this mythic figure to some degree, especially Bridges, and much is made of the masculinity that it invokes. But it is the one that least embodies the cowboy, Toby, who makes it out the richest—he has the roots to something outside of the lawlessness of the Wild West, whereas the other two do not. None of this is made transparent, but Taylor Sheridan’s magnificent screenplay teases these ideas out slowly, and marries them to a sharp, witty portrait of modern Texas, adding flavor with various small female parts, especially two truculent waitresses, that almost overshadow the central male figures at times. Hell or High Water may be too intently focused on the genre elements at times to stand out especially, but it embodies its location so successfully. It is tender, profane, and resolute, and in the words of one of the minor characters, “if that isn’t Texan, I don’t know what is.”

Robinson is clever in his approach, never allowing either strand that forms his remarkable short to take precedence over the other. One is the evangelical, surreal dreams of an impassioned “prophet”, who waxes rhapsodic on gold triangles and wide landscapes, and the other is formed of distorted, abstracted visions of ’80s pop stage performances. The former is set to footage of rapidly moving clouds, and the latter uses electronic versions of what may be the original music. Robinson sequences these in ebbs and flows, refusing to let his short succumb to pure euphoria, and while this might make for a slightly less pleasurable experience than expected, there is a genuine sense of wonder, especially as the two through-lines begin to dovetail. “Mad Ladders” is a wondrous, near-transcendent short that takes as its topic the quest for light, and supplies it in spades.

There is definitely a subtle rigor to Everson’s short, which acts as an elliptical, boundary-pushing documentary that nevertheless gets to and anchors in the heart of the subjects. His intent is not to deeply familiarize the viewer with his subjects, two black men in the Cleveland East Side who make money by stealing scrap metal from their neighborhoods, but to sketch their surroundings. He does so in less than seven minutes by adopting a two-pronged approach. The first is relatively objective, filming them as they quickly pull off their little heists. But the second is altogether more exciting, using quick montages of them in more relaxed and yet more heightened settings set to overdubbed conversations which clearly aren’t from the same scene and yet feel applicable to what is being shown. The narration/conversation does form a clearer picture of the men’s approach to their job and how they got there, but it also elides the specifics. “Fe26” is a work of documenting, but it is also a work of experimentation that provokes in exactly the right way.

Drljaca’s sole concern in the conception of Krivinia seems to be for a distancing effect. His atmosphere is bizarre, straddling the line between mystery and realism in a way that never truly settles into a satisfying balance. The narrative, about a man searching for his friend who has supposedly committed war crimes, is almost of no importance at all: the film frequently circles around to a car conversation which at the end is heavily implied to not even be a conversation, it focuses on a bus crash in a small village in Serbia, and much of the middle of the movie is taken up by the main character’s life in Toronto. The friend is never found, the suggestion of ghosts is made, and there are numerous echoes to previous scenes that don’t seem to hold any intrinsic meaning.

Therefore, the only truly interesting aspect is the filmmaking itself, which does compensate a great deal for the relatively inert nature of the other aspects. It isn’t necessarily experimental (only the inexplicable insertion of some color bars into a landscape shot is startling) but it is undeniably effective. Kirivinia avoids close-ups, preferring either the handheld tracking shot from behind that follows the main character through the landscape or medium-to-long shots that definitively emphasize the environment and the figure rather than the character. There is almost no interiority to his personality, and he is played largely as a blank slate, but it works to a certain extent, matching his fruitless and frequently digressive journey. Aside from an inexplicably ominous score, Kirivinia remains solid on a technical level, and engrossing enough as a whole, though it offers little in the way of narrative engagement.

***1/2 (Excellent)

The title of Don’t Breathe works twofold: the first is a tidy encapsulation of the premise, that of a few young burglars evading a blind, psychopathic army veteran in his own home; the second is a summation of the strategy of the filmmakers, which is to throttle the viewer to within an inch of their life. It is unsparing in its relentless assault on the viewer, only releasing the tension in the very last two minutes or so, relying almost solely on ratcheting the suspense up to almost impossible levels in order to create an atmosphere of constant dread. With a tight premise, a particularly nasty frame with nothing on its mind but violence, and strong filmmaking in his arsenal, Fede Alvarez crafts what can be described simply as a thrill ride.

Don’t Breathe sums itself up in the opening shot, which oddly enough follows none of the aesthetic decisions that it follows for the rest of the film. It is a slow, meticulous zoom, moving from an aerial shot to a close-up of Rocky’s face as she is dragged through the streets by the Blind Man. The context only becomes clear late in the film, but the emphasis of the scene is on the visceral impact, the threat inherent in the abandoned neighborhood where the action of the film takes place. Afterwards, the introduction to the protagonists is simple but clean, unfussy in its portrayal of the trio of burglars and their motivations, especially for taking on such a dangerous job.

Once Don’t Breathe enters the claustrophobic house that defines almost all of its runtime, Alvarez efficiently introduces the two remaining components. First, the geography of the house itself; Alvarez uses a continuously roving Steadicam that does indeed make the ground and second floor as clearly mapped as possible, moving slowly up between floors and zooming down hallways. And second, the Blind Man in his natural habitat. Much of this is due to Lang’s fearsome performance, using his scarred face, his growling voice, and his hulking physicality to the maximum potential—his presence alone intimidates the intruders, and his brutal actions only heighten the danger. But what makes him so interesting is the signs of humanity (and thus weaknesses) that swirl beneath the gnarled surface: he falls asleep to home videos of his deceased daughter, his lack of sight isn’t fully compensated for by his other heightened senses, and he is prone to fits of rage that only give Rocky and her friends time to escape.

Lang’s characterization may loom largest in memory, but it does not obscure the stellar work that adds up to the melting pot of tension that is Don’t Breathe. Jane Levy, as Rocky, is a match for the Blind Man, with an astonishingly tenacious outlook that balances with her sheer terror. Alvarez uses mostly tight close-ups on the terrified expressions of the burglars as the film goes on, and the sharply detailed sound design remains one of the greatest keys to the tension, but he breaks with the tight mapping of the first two floors when the movie descends into the depraved basement of the Blind Man. There are various deliberately queasy developments that take place down there, but more significant is the confusing layout, even before the lights are turned out. The film’s most heart-stopping scene takes place in a grey, night-vision-like haze, as the Blind Man’s knowledge of his house comes to the fore. Even after the daylight rises, Alvarez keeps the tension up until the last moment possible, a cathartic release that truly feels earned. Don’t Breathe aims squarely for the viewer’s primal fears, throwing them into the head space of the terrified subjects and sustaining tension so well that it required me to unknot myself after the film was over.

***1/2 (Excellent)

Kubo and the Two Strings is, in an almost paradoxical move, a self-consciously magical film. Much attention—almost too much attention—is directed on the part of the filmmakers towards the powers of stories, placing a storyteller at its center and ultimately using it to propel and shape the adventures to come. In less sincere hands, or ones more focused on making a film specifically about the wonders of cinema, this concept would seem forced or unjustified, but in the hands of Laika, it is only one part of the joy that forms this labor of love, a thrilling, heartbreaking, and warm journey that feels utterly transporting.

The plot of Kubo and the Two Strings is purposefully mythic, framed (at least at the beginning) by the words that Kubo (a noble, perfectly young Art Parkinson), a young one-eyed boy living in feudal Japan with a magical skill of magically folding origami and a preternatural talent for his stringed shamisen, uses to begin his own stories. These stories, almost always following the same format of a great warrior named Hanzo and his quest, are revealed (in the first of many clever narrative choices) are revealed after the first telling to be handed down to him by his mother, who seems to only come to life when she tells said stories. It speaks to one of the most important ideas, that of inheritance and family, that permeates the film, and many echoes of Kubo’s parents (one of whom is Hanzo) show up in Kubo, sometimes commented on, sometimes not.

Eventually, as is inevitable, Kubo embarks on his quest, with only his origami, shamisen, and a wooden charm reincarnated by magic into Monkey (Charlize Theron, almost overflowing with warmth and sharp wit). In a particularly effective stroke, the filmmakers makes the goal of the quest the three pieces of magic armor already introduced in Kubo’s origami story while mixing in a very real abundance of unknowns; the glamours and heroics of adventure are swamped by the dangers and the threats. Here is where the most beautiful parts of Kubo and the Two Strings arise: the simple interactions of Monkey and Kubo and, a short time later, Beetle, a samurai trapped in a giant beetle-like shell (played by a beautifully dim-witted but stalwart Matthew McConaughey) are a joy to watch as their bond only strengthens. There are, thankfully, no conflicts between the trio—despite their temperamental differences, they all recognize the goal and work together with a great deal of composure; at least, as much as can be expected from such a motley group.

Kubo and the Two Strings is, of course, absolutely dazzling, utilizing a blend of 3-D stop-motion and CGI to craft an immersive world filled with caverns, endless oceans, and monsters of all types—each has their own allure, and all are immaculately detailed, just removed enough from a life-like look to be fantastical. Such a smooth look is understandably cause for mild concern, and perhaps adds fuel to the criticism that the plot is akin to that of a adventure video game, but the emphasis is placed equally on the action and the characters, as evidenced by a thrilling second-act battle between Monkey and one of the villainous Sisters (both voiced by a chilling, mocking Rooney Mara) that is upstaged by a stunning, absolutely heartbreaking tale told by Monkey, animated by Kubo’s origami. Kubo and the Two Strings might go slightly too far in resolving every last one of the mysteries inherent to the plot, and the ending might be too tidy and literal, but Laika never lets the magic get lost, and they remain resolute in crafting a gorgeous, moving, and genuine film that maintains its belief, without a scrap of doubt, in the power of stories.