​When you watch Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End, their most entertaining moments always come when the genre clichés they’re lampooning (respectively: zombie, cop and alien movies) mix with Wright’s innocently over-the-top humor, like a kid watching those kinds of movies got to jump into one and arrange it how he liked. None of those moments, however, and none of the ones in his extravagantly styled adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, would have worked without the kind of engaging and unique characters that launched Wright to British comedy stardom with his sitcom Spaced. With his new film Baby Driver, he’s succeeded in curving his comedic timing and styling into the fast-paced action genre while enhancing it with the film’s wide-reaching score, but his characters either feel undercooked (in the case of the main character and the waitress he falls for) or stuck inside the action stereotypes he dug into in Hot Fuzz, and with such a small-scale cast, the film’s best moments can’t escape their shallowness.
 
Baby (Ansel Elgort), the boy wonder driver who has been jacking cars since he could see over the dashboard, gets mixed up with a bad gang when he accidentally grabs a load of "merchandise" along with a car. To get square with Kevin Spacey's mob boss Doc, he's forced to be the getaway driver for every heist Doc sets up until his debt's paid off. Balancing the criminal side of his life with taking care of his elderly guardian and making time for his newfound love down at the diner (Lily James, whose look echoes Shelly from Twin Peaks right down to the hairstyle) is the guiding force of the film, weaved together by a pretty serious and uninteresting backstory for Baby (a car crash early in his life took his parents and most of his hearing) whose best result is allowing for the neat musical moments Wright sprinkles throughout the chases and more light-hearted scenes. If you go back to his initial version of the film’s idea in a music video he made with the Spaced cast and imagine the music extending into the ensuing escape, you should get a good idea of the film at its most enjoyable, when the tires are screeching and the gears are shifting in step with the score. Even these high points, though, still feel undercut by the superficial natures of the people in the car.
 
The key to the film’s appeal is it’s simplicity, and the scene of Baby sampling a conversation between two brutal criminals for an electronic track is a glimpse of how Wright might have extended the setup’s innocent charm to the rest of the story, but his decision to lead the characters down a more serious and complicated path leaves the premise and it’s execution at odds with each other. The idea definitely works for the music video format: we don’t have time to know who any of the robbers are or what their plan is, so we just get to see the getaway driver bop along to some music. For the film version, Wright took the opposite approach to April’s Free Fire, where the idea of a gun deal gone wrong would have been enjoyable in a 10 minute YouTube video but was stretched over an hour and a half, by scattering short, great scenes across a story that merely ties them together.
 
Grade: B-

Ben Wheatley’s disinterest in moving his newest film, Free Fire, past it’s setup of a gun deal gone bad gives it the momentum to grip us moment to moment as a feature length shootout with a tight script, but leaves it’s events feeling shallow and, as soon as the credits roll, insubstantial. Simplicity is often a key part of an action movie’s success (throw in too much drama and we start wondering when we’ll get back to the good stuff), but slipping only the barest of story details into scenes of goons popping up from cover to either insult or shoot at each other means there’s no impact when a bullet finally finds it’s mark.
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With his aversion to telling a classic story, Wheatley makes sure to get as much mileage out of his characters as possible, as they’re tasked with balancing the mocking and gunfights that constitute the film’s atmosphere solely through their dynamic relationships. As 10 dealers and henchmen get involved in the exchange, the relationships a few of them shared before the deal quickly become overshadowed by a complex web of cheap rivalries and alliances that drive the shootout. With their back to back introductions and Wheatley’s clever use of the acoustics of the warehouse to constantly bleed their conversations into each other’s scenes, they’re able to carry the violence from its explosive start through its conclusion as one unit. Each of them are fairly one note by themselves, like Cillian Murphy’s “just here to make a deal, no funny business” Chris or Armie Hammer as the overly-chill moderator Ord, and only become interesting when paired alongside a group to banter with, but the explosive trickster Sharlto Copley creates in Vernon easily shines the brightest simply by being an exaggerated version of the classic dastardly cartoon villain whose eyes turn to huge dollar bill signs whenever a deal passes through their ears.

The greatest asset to Wheatley’s love of wit and gunfire, and the reason each shot and jeer fired in the battle is instantly gratifying, is the excellent sound design. The first time Chris tests out the merchandise is the moment the film sparks to life, as the butt of the rifle ramming against his shoulder sends vibrations through your seat while concrete explodes all around the theater. The kinetic energy of the shootouts all come from the ability of the audio to place you inside the chaos of the warehouse. This effect draws as much from the weapons locking, reloading and firing as from the characters’ voices, which are constantly building the warehouse around you. Two characters start a conversation at one end of the warehouse, and when we suddenly cut to another pair, we can hear the last pieces of their exchange bouncing off the walls in the distance. Then, there’s another voice shouting in the distance, and a moment later the camera’s right next to the yelling man. From the groups whispering their various plans behind each other’s backs at the start to Vernon yelling at every corner of the shootout, the film gleefully takes advantage of the opportunity for humor this layer of immersion adds. However, the film’s adherence to its immediate, wafer-thin pleasures means the precisely placed audio is only enhancing the “if you’re not shooting, you better be throwing a zinger” philosophy, rather than adding another element to a fully enjoyable package. Every aspect of the film is done in service of this idea, and while it makes for a laser focused blend of Wheatley’s favorites and a momentarily satisfying experience, it’s disappointing the best components weren’t given just a little more depth to work in.

Grade: C+

In his new feature La La Land, Damien Chazelle manages a dual affair between the music from his last film, Whiplash, and classic musical films like The Young Girls of Rochefort, putting them into the roaring improvisations that Sebastian the jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) can’t contain when told to play from a holiday set list and the studio lots lost in time that Mia the actress (Emma Stone) gazes at from her work across the street (streetlamps roll past painted backdrops of French sunsets while she taps out coffee orders on a giant iPad). Of course, Mia’s dream when she came to Los Angeles wasn’t to be a barista and Sebastian’s wasn’t to play the Christmas classics, so we’re taken through their persistent attempts at making it big to see whether or not Chazelle will end up giving them all they ever wanted.
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His script was originally about a younger pair of aspiring stars settling into LA for the first time, with planning set on casting Miles Teller and Emma Watson. After both dropped out for scheduling and money conflicts, Stone and Gosling were brought in and the characters were aged up significantly to fit the new leads. While a seemingly simple change, this older pairing allows the focus of the story to move from two starry-eyed newcomers’ dreams to examining the type of resilient people who are able to work for years while being denied at every turn, helped along solely by their all-consuming passion. The way these aspects of Mia and Sebastian come out is similar to how Michael Mann handles Jamie Foxx’s Max in Collateral, seemingly on the verge of a breakthrough with saving up money as a cab driver to start his own luxury limo company until Tom Cruise asks him how long he’s been at it. The way his simple reply of “twelve years” can fill our imagination with an endless cycle of night shifts in pursuit of a fading dream is akin to when Mia talks about her six years looking for a role to no avail or when Sebastian’s sister berates him for hanging onto his collections of instruments and records in his run-down apartment in hopes of them eventually filling his jazz club. Naturally, those shared years of failure eventually draw them together, and from here, Chazelle’s liberal reimagining of his inspirations’ love stories combined with the abilities of Stone and Gosling to blend Mia and Sebastian’s lives together without losing their individual personalities define much of the movie’s charm. This marks the pair’s third film acting together as a couple, and by now they have it down to a science, skirting just far enough from the edge of cheesiness to make their kisses and conflicts seem believable without sacrificing the loveable Hollywood schmaltz from those bygone pictures the movie constantly draws from.

As a side effect of how well executed and naturally engaging the duo’s relationship is, the musical aspect of the film occasionally feels like it belongs in another, more theatrical story. There are only six songs with singing spaced throughout the film’s two hours, and the first two come within the opening ten minutes. These are also the weakest of the bunch, placed nearly back to back with little room for the story to give them context as well as visually being overblown set pieces that are easy to feel lost in when compared to the simplicity of the later numbers. Those songs, aside from an exuberant concert Sebastian performs with his musician classmate Keith’s (John Legend) pop-jazz band, act as extensions of Mia and Sebastian’s lives together and are much more intimate, with the duo tap dancing beside a skyline view or singing side by side on a piano bench, but the feeling that each act more as momentary diversions from the main story than scenes with any impact remains until the final two numbers. 

I wouldn’t want to spoil the second-to-last song beyond saying it’s the first that’s both a great musical and story scene, while the finale, playing out in a much more visually expansive style than Whiplash’s intense drummer-conductor faceoff, creates the movie’s most personal moment by using every previous piece of the story in a style that justifies all of their inclusions. While the unevenness of some of those pieces drags the focus out past Mia and Sebastian and so away from the chief strength of the film, the overarching lightness of the story means the movie never becomes unpleasant. Going in knowing as little as possible about the exact events can definitely help you appreciate their conclusion more (I haven’t revealed anything too important here, and if you avoid the trailers like I managed to, you should be alright), and getting to experience the classic-film chemistry of the two leads along with the finely crafted music and choreography allows La La Land to be enjoyed as a journey about managing dreams and emotions as easily as for its sensory pleasures.

Grade: A-

Usually, the “needlessly complicated” in needlessly complicated action movies comes from them feeling like the result of the writer throwing a bunch of characters and scenarios into a running blender. Stringing a story together with childhood flashbacks and sudden revelations, their pacing becomes so muddled that there’s nothing definite for us to hold onto as we’re whisked from foreign vacation spots to high-tech mansions to cities whose names pop up in the corner of the screen. While those same pieces make up the strange beast that is The Accountant, instead of coming out as pure sludge, the slow dribble of action and thinly spread layers of characterization over its first half combined with an onslaught of bodies and twists going into the climax create a deliberately portioned but only occasionally interesting smoothie. 

Nothing hampers the movie and contributes to its lethargic start more than Ben Affleck’s Chris Wolff, a mathematically brilliant accountant whose autism pushes him away from everyone else in his world as well as from any interesting developments. Having to play an underdeveloped character shouldn’t count against Affleck, but his forgettable presence is especially noticeable alongside the solid performances of the remaining cast, especially Jon Bernthal, who acts as the rowdy antithesis to Chris’ withdrawn assassin, and JK Simmons as the seasoned cop leading the investigation after him. Working at the robotic prosthetics company where Chris has been hired to find any faults in their records, Anna Kendrick’s upbeat Dana provides a good potential foil for him to show us more about his past and a much needed shot in the arm for the so-far tedious pace, but their conversations quickly end up being the most lackluster part of the film and exacerbate the main issue that Gavin O’Connor keeps running into: focusing on a character who doesn’t like to talk to anyone means everything we need to know about him is forced to come from a flashback, slowing the story down even further.

Most of these problems don’t surface in the second half of the film, but neither do many of the characters, including Dana, and after the initial relief of watching some brutally intimate fistfights (carried over from O’Connor’s exhilarating cage matches in Warrior), the story begins to feel like the finale of a premium TV crime series we’re being shown as the pilot. What could have been a fulfilling redemption and reunion with some context outside of hurried flashbacks ends up being another detriment to the rest of the film, spreading the characters out further across another direction the plot should have stuck with as the main one. 

The unconventional protagonist of Chris makes for an interesting concept, especially for a $44 million Hollywood thriller, and could have really carried a more compressed film that shaved away a storyline here and there, so while The Accountant goes down relatively easy as it is, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it could have been really refreshing had it only been mixed a bit better.

Grade: C-

I was able to ask a few questions to the director of The Witch, Robert Eggers, as well as the film’s lead actress, Anya Taylor-Joy, during a roundtable discussion at the Eliot Hotel last Thursday, and while the other two reporters alongside me had much more to say, I got the answers I was interested in, which you can find below. ​

Directed by: Terrence Malick
Written by: Terrence Malick
IMBD Page
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I believe that every other film on this list, even if they don’t appeal to what you personally like, can be appreciated for their attempts at telling great stories. The skill and craftsmanship that produced each one deserve to be praised and I’m sure many people will thoroughly enjoy them just as I did, so despite knowing that the qualities of my personal favorite, the swirling narrative and meditative nature of a man searching for human connection, that I found enrapturing are sure to be bewilderments to anyone looking for a more traditionally designed film, I really encourage you to give this movie a try. In looking at a Los Angeles filled with opulence but lacking virtue, Terrence Malick creates so many stories that another director may have been content to bring into focus as the main subject but that he flows through each other, sliding moments together into expressions of a life dissuaded by breathtaking excess in its search for fulfillment. His exploration of whether, within this world consumed by such extravagance that everything becomes defined by its riches, pursuing love has become passé and futile is a poetic approach to an issue of the heart versus reality, much like his last two films, and becomes an evocative lesson in remembering where our values should lie.