This was a film that polarized my favorite critics; some had it in their top five movies of the year, while some completely dismissed it. In other words, I had no idea what to expect, but I was really excited to find out.

Unfortunately, it ended up being a disappointment in my eyes. Spike Lee’s latest feels less like a movie and more like a variety show. It’s disjointed, but not in a way that pulls together disparate perspectives in service of one theme or message. It’s not funny enough to be farce, not insightful enough to be satire, and too unfocused (and plain silly) to leave any strong statements in the minds of viewers about gun violence in America. It certainly has a lot to say, which it often imparts in rhymed verse that should appeal to lovers of Shakespeare and hip hop equally. However, much of its dialogue is too didactic to feel remotely authentic. Additionally, some Chicagoans have objected to Lee’s entire premise and his ability to understand the particular situation of the South Side. I can’t comment on that personally, but whenever I tried to pull a metaphorical meaning from Lee’s idea of a sex strike, I couldn’t unearth it — and from an interview that I saw Lee give on Colbert several months ago, I wonder if he really doesn’t have any bigger-picture intentions on that matter.
However, I did appreciate the frequent references to the institutional discrimination that exacerbates all the other problems that the film discusses. It was an interesting choice to have one of the only white characters in the film (a clergyman played by John Cusack) be the mouthpiece for many of these truths. Some might call it problematic, but I prefer to see it as Lee urging white viewers to listen up, expand their worldviews, and join this movement for peace.
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Chi-Raq’s greatest good is that it reveals the megastar potential of its lead, Teyonah Parris. If Hollywood has any sense (and the jury’s still out on that one), it would offer her as many multi-dimensional and interesting roles as she could fit into her schedule.

You can watch Chi-Raq on Amazon Prime.

This film was a true challenge, and I don’t think I ever need to see it a second time (at some point, I’ll describe why rewatchability is crucial to my rankings, but this piece already does it so well that I probably don’t have to). However, I feel so strongly about some of Melancholia’s achievements — particularly, how it submerges viewers in a perspective informed by depression, then by anxiety — that I wonder if it should be higher on my list.

One of the features of this movie that might make it unpalatable for viewers is that it begins with an eight-minute overture of strange, apocalyptic images and thunderous classical music. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people backed out at some point during this experience, but I really do believe that it sets the stage for the rest of the film so well. The overture establishes a universe that is frightening and unsettling, fatalistic and epically awful. We quickly come to see that this is the perspective held by the film’s two main characters, two sisters named Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), because of their struggles with mental illness. The camera allows us to look through these women’s eyes and see what they project onto each scene.

Part 1 of the film, entitled “Justine,” seems to be an allegory of living with depression; each character at Justine’s wedding stands in for a different (unhelpful and unsuccessful) way that someone might handle a friend or family member with depression. Dunst submits the best performance of any movie on this list (except for an actor in my #1 movie of the month). She puts on a face of grace and jubilance as would be expected of any new wife, but gradually allows the pain and anhedonia that her character experiences to claw its way to the surface and take over. Besides the fidgety camerawork that distracted me at certain points, I found this section of the film to be riveting.

Part 2, called “Claire,” was a bit harder to mine for meaning and a bit less interesting since the overture had hinted all along at how the story would conclude. Still, I loved how it began to incorporate more and more elements of a sci-fi disaster movie. (Some of its sky-gazing shots are more beautiful than anything in recent movies like Interstellar or The Martian that were actually set in space.) Also, its dramatic rendering of the anxiety that Justine’s sister experiences is an effective vehicle for director Lars von Trier’s message: this is how it feels. To live with this sickness is to fight against imagining the worst possible scenario at all times. It’s as drastic as believing that planets might literally collide.

You can watch Melancholia on Netflix.

This movie has such vitality: an amazing soundtrack, jittery and creative editing, a collection of lively performances, and a propulsive plotline. My main issue with it was when it became less than believable, whether that was the plot becoming contrived or the characters becoming caricatures. Most of the time, though, these features were much more excited than frustrating. Dope employs a sort of fun-loving surreality, and viewers are completely along for the ride.
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The movie has plenty to say about issues of race and how they impact black identity and achievement, but these ideas never seem superfluous or grafted onto the main story. In general, Dope’s characters and settings feel true to life in 2016, but they’re usually confined to other forms of media (or not shown at all), so it’s exciting and refreshing to see them on center stage in a feature-length film. Shameik Moore is a natural in the leading role, and I’m really looking forward to see him in Netflix’s The Get Down later this year.

You can watch Dope on Netflix.

I can’t remember the last time that a movie made me so mad. I was basically seething in my seat for the last 20 minutes or so of No Country for Old Men. I don’t want to say why, because I don’t like to spoil plot points in these write-ups, but I will say that I felt as if the treatment of one of the main characters in this movie was totally unfair to viewers in terms of emotional payoff.

After a lot of thought, I’ve come around to the idea that the Coen brotherswanted to unsettle me like this. It reminds me of something that one of my favorite TV critics, Andy Greenwald, has said about the first season of one of my favorite shows, The Leftovers — basically that he hated it at the forefront of his consciousness because it was asking him to deal with pretty frustrating and upsetting ideas underneath the surface. It’s hard to deal with the notions that life might be nasty, brutish, and short, or that the arc of the moral universe might not bend towards justice. But this movie asks us to, and I respect it for that.
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Plus, I wouldn’t have been so mad about the last 20 minutes if the first 100 hadn’t been so engrossing. This movie exemplifies the best of Western/crime thrillers; it’s suspenseful, gritty, and shocking. Javier Bardem pulls off the nightmare-inducing psychopath quite well (even if I thought the whole coin thing was a bit gimmicky), and Josh Brolin perfectly displays a man who seems much more confident and capable than he actually is. The Academy wouldn’t normally choose a movie like this for Best Picture, but it did, and it’s great to see two of our best directors get recognition.

Although No Country For Old Men is many people’s favorite Coen brothers movie in general, it honestly wasn’t even my favorite of those that I saw in February. That honor goes to Burn After Reading. This isn’t a movie that has one thing in particular that vaults it into the realm of excellence; instead, it’s like a little machine in which every gear and pulley performs its own task, and the result is a deftly managed and darkly funny story. I don’t want to go into all the different ways that the plot weaves together a bunch of different characters and situations, but it ends up being pretty impressive. I also have to mention the manic energy that Frances McDormand brings to her role and the way that Brad Pitt is totally convincing and hilarious as a dumber-than-average personal trainer. It’s sometimes hard to remember — since he’s usually being referred to as Angelina Jolie’s husband or Sexiest Man Alive — but Pitt is a incredibly believable and likable actor. (I thought George Clooney was funny and convincing, too — more so than in O Brother, Where Art Thou? from last month.)

The Coens are masters at shifting back and forth between humor and horror, and their work in Burn After Reading is no exception. The movie leaves you with the troubling notion that something can so easily come out of nothing — that a simple set of misunderstandings can precipitate a total disaster. You’re also forced to wonder about our nation’s increasingly omnipresent security apparatus: how often does it defuse these disasters, and how often does it accidentally cause them?

You can watch Burn After Reading on HBO GO.

Maybe there’s some truth to “third time’s a charm.” I had already seen two movies directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love), but I couldn’t buy into his aesthetic in either one; as much as critics champion him as one of our best contemporary filmmakers, I just didn’t get it.

But The Master completely floored me. First of all, it’s beautiful. I don’t have much of a working knowledge of cinematography, but all I can say is that this film’s color palette is rich and evocative of its 1950s setting, and it (in addition to its otherworldly soundscapes) makes the movie a total joy to absorb. Secondly, Joaquin Phoenix, as a deeply troubled WWII veteran named Freddie Quell, gives a performance with more range, tension, and unexpectedness than anything I’ve seen in recent memory — certainly more than anything I’ve written about this month or in January. The role requires rage, violence, weirdness, instability, and vulnerability, but Phoenix gives freely and fully. He’s completely believable, and it’s impossible to look away. As for the plot, I’ve heard from others that they found it to be inscrutable or hard to follow. I will admit that events aren’t always laid out plainly, and we’re not always sure what certain lines of dialogue are meant to imply, but I would urge viewers to trust the filmmaker and let him take the lead.

After the end of the war, Quell undergoes a series of strange trials but eventually comes under the wing of a cult leader named Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and their relationship is the main focus of the movie. The Master deals with a collection of visceral concepts, but nearly all of them return to one question: who deserves our devotion? It’s a film that begs for deep psychoanalysis, having so many ideas swirling throughout that relate to power and attraction, repression and self-medication, love and idolization, and belonging and fatherhood that I’d have to write a full thesis to feel like I’d finally exhausted the text (and I’m sure there are film majors out there who have done just that).
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Because Phoenix’s performance captivated me so much, I think my interpretation of the movie was colored by Quell’s perspective, but you could focus on Dodd’s motivations or the motivations of Dodd’s wife, played by Amy Adams, and arrive in totally different places. I look forward to rewatching The Master a couple more times and pulling together these interpretations. I really do believe that the film deserves that type of close attention.

You can watch The Master on Netflix.

​Recently in NUFEC, at one of our weekly meetings, we watched The Tree of Life. During our discussion afterwards, I mentioned the same thing I always say when talking about Terrence Malick films: after you watch one, you either feel at one with the universe or annoyed that you just watched a random stream of images. I personally love The Tree of Life- I think it possesses just the right balance between traditional plot and characterization and experimental film techniques. Sadly, the same cannot be said about Knight of Cups- even for someone who loves Terrence Malick films, this movie felt like a random stream of images.

The lead actor in Knight of Cups is Christian Bale, who plays… someone in Hollywood named Rick. I honestly couldn’t tell if he was supposed to be an actor or writer or what. The film is divided into eight chapters (Wes Anderson style), each of which is named after a tarot card (as is the film itself) save for the final chapter and charts Rick’s relationship with a different person in his life. For example, the fourth chapter (Judgement) examines his strained relationship with his wife (played by Cate Blanchett) while the eighth chapter (Death) illustrates an affair he conducted (with a woman played by Natalie Portman).

And… that’s about it. The single, glaring problem with this film is the almost complete lack of either plot or characterization. Over the course of two hours, we learn virtually nothing about Rick or any of the people he interacts with, save for the barest of details- his ex-wife is a doctor, is brother seems to be mentally unstable, etc. Sometimes we don’t even learn the characters’ names. I mean, I know Malick’s films are typically light on plot and characterization, but they’re stretched to the point of non-existence in this film.

Of course, this film does possess Malick’s trademark airy and borderline spiritual style. There’s a lot of talk in the film of the meaning of human existence- par for the course for a Malick film. But while his prior films have very definite themes, the near complete lack of plot and proper character development means that whatever message he is trying to convey is lost. He seems to be commenting upon the shallowness that characterizes modern life in general and Hollywood in particular, but because of the lack of plot and character development all we see is a collection of equally shallow and meaningless characters who we can’t connect with. The Thin Red Line examines the psychological effects of war upon soldiers, and The Tree of Life plumbs the meaning of life and the experience of losing faith, but all we see in Knight of Cups is an incredibly attractive and seemingly successful man who can’t find happiness or love or establish any meaningful relationships despite sleeping with numerous exceedingly attractive women.

Maybe I just didn’t get it. Like his previous works, Knight of Cups has generated very mixed reception. Hell, maybe the shallowness of the movie was the whole point. And this is not to say that the film is a complete loss- like every Malick film, it contains absolutely gorgeous cinematography. But in the end, Knight of Cups just felt like a meaningless stream of random images and shallow characters who I learned nothing about and couldn’t identify with. It is certainly a disappointment. Let’s just hope that his next film, Weightless, is better.
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Grade: D

NUFEC writer Gabrielle Ulubay recently got the chance to interview Nick Orsi, one of the artists at Walt Disney Feature Animation responsible who worked on their new feature Zootopia!

GU: First, thank you so much for meeting with me!
NO: Thank you for having me!

GU: To start off, which characters did you play a part in designing?
NO: Let's see: Judy, Nick, Bogo, Gazelle, the Tiger Dancers, sheep, polar bears.... Those are the big ones. A lot of different people work on these characters though, so it wasn't just me.

GU: What was the most difficult animal to animate?
NO: The giraffe, definitely. You have to make the animals distinct, even from far away, so a giraffe couldn't be this long, blurry form. The mice are a good example of that too, actually.

GU: Yes, I figured that. I was impressed during the movie because during the mice scenes there were so many of them, but it wasn't just this indistinct cloud of shapes. You could tell it was just masses of mice.
NO: Exactly. There were a lot of those crowd characters in this movie.

GU: What was character design like for scenes of that scale?
NO: It was a challenge. Crowd characters like are tricky because they need to complement the main character and make him or her stand out, but they also need to be distinct. We use a lot of tricks like motion blurs, camera tricks to move them, clear silhouettes, clear shapes, shape identifiers, arching--tricks like that. It's fun, but challenging.

GU: I can imagine! And what was designing Gazelle like? How does one make a long, skinny animal like that look anything like Shakira?
NO: [laughs] When Shakira expressed interest in playing Gazelle, we had to give the character more hips and make her more like Shakira. Shiyoon [Shiyoon Kim, one of Disney's animators] had the task of making a sexy gazelle while still keeping it a gazelle, which is a tough line to tread. It's hard enough to make the gazelle stand upright because of how weird their joints are, and it's even more difficult to give it curves! Shiyoon has been there a long time and was definitely up for the task, though.

GU: Right, I would assume that sexy gazelles aren't exactly intuitive. In your artistic process, do you often watch people in real life and use their gaits, mannerisms, and so on to create characters?
NO: For me and what I do, it was more of the overall character. I don't focus much on movement. I focused most on how they look, how they're shaped, and what that says about them. They're animals, so I try to find the personality and design more of that person and what makes them special, what makes them a character. I try to pull that inner character out and sort of write it on their forehead.

GU: The animals' ages and genders were also pretty clear just from how they looked and behaved, which is interesting because they weren't always wearing clothes that clarified those things. How did you manage to accomplish that?
NO: There's all kinds of animation tricks that help with that, actually. Usually broader characters look more masculine. If you streamline drawings, give the animals more subtle curves, and soften their features, it makes them more feminine. On the other hand, there are specific chiseled features that make a character appear male.

GU: I saw Zootopia in 3D. It's not jump-out-at-you, 3D, though. Now, 3D seems more about realism--there's nothing flying out of the screen at me. How does animating for that sort of depth compare to animating for 2D features?
NO: Everything has a 3D option now, so we just take that into account regardless. It's definitely more about depth rather than being in-your-face. It's not about having something pop out at you. From a broad sense, lighting and modeling are effected the most in 3D animation. Lighting has to do with how everything is colored and textured, and modeling is more about the actual construction. In other words, the character has to look good from all angles. Most character design--which is what I do-- has to do with rigging, modeling, and animation.

GU: Finally, there's definitely a social message in this film.
NO: [smiles] Yes.

GU: During your presentation earlier, you mentioned that you began working on this movie four to five years ago, and that's before a lot of the civil rights issues that are garnering a lot of attention today. Was it frightening this year to release Zootopia in the midst of so much social unrest?
NO: It wasn't frightening because these issues were still a problem then.

GU: Right, they just have more visibility now.
NO: Yes. Disney has such a huge audience, so doing a film like this with such a strong message will reach both the average little kid and their grandma and grandpa. These families are then going to go have these conversations at dinner with the kids, and we think it's really important that these messages reach these varied audiences and that these conversations happen.

GU: Thank you so much for taking the time out to speak with me!
NO: Of course! Thank you!

You can read Gabrielle's full review of Zootopia here.