La La Land is opening this week, and it’s just about the best thing in theaters right now. My review is at PopMatters:
It starts on a car-choked overpass and ends in a kind of heartbreak. But in between those moments, Damien Chazelle’s giddy La La Land conjures up much the same exuberant yet melancholic fizz evoked by the Golden Era musicals it harkens back to. Fortunately, it doesn’t feel constricted by the rules of those old studio vehicles…
Here’s the trailer.
Questions:
Right now, there is only a definite answer to the last question, and that of course is yes.
Eyes Wide Open 2015:
The Best (and Worst) Movies of the Year
Available now in paperback and ebook
Since there just isn’t enough opinionating about film out there, yours truly reviews them on occasion for the odd website and magazine. Come each January for the past several years, with awards buzz percolating and everybody catching up on seeing the films they missed last fall, I have been publishing the Eyes Wide Open guide.
It’s most one of those thumbs-up (the 25 best) and thumbs-down (the 5 most mediocre) collections, with the odd DVD review and other miscellany tossed in for good measure, as well a look at why every other film out there seems to be a sequel.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the book is a handy thing to keep around when you’re looking at what’s playing in the local theater or browsing the new selections on Netflix, iTunes, or VOD.
What made the cut? Films you’ve all heard of, like The Revenant, Spotlight, and The Big Short, plus a few not everyone has, like Experimenter and Mustang.
What didn’t make the cut? Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Bridge of Spies, to name a couple.
You can get Eyes Wide Open in ebook (Kindle, Nook, or other) or paperback.
Also, if you’re feeling Powerball lucky, you can enter here for the chance to win a free copy of the book.
For my annual film guide series Eyes Wide Open — and yes, the 2015 edition is now on sale, thanks for asking — I try to narrow down the list of best films of the year to 25. Some years are easier than others. But pretty much every time there are movies that don’t quite make the cut but still seem worth calling out as worthy of people’s attention.
You can read “Brooklyn to Chi-Raq: The Nearly-Great Movies of 2015” at Medium.
A bleak, Up in the Air-like story about a depressed businessman’s wanderings through an anonymous American heartland, the stop-motion animated film Anomalisa is the newest boundary-blurrer from Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It’ll be the one that anti-Pixar Grinches in the Academy will be voting for in the animation category against the Inside Out majority.
Anomalisa opens in limited release this week and wider in January. My review is at PopMatters:
In today’s America, you must have money for your disaffection to be interesting. At least this is the case in Charlie Kaufman’s downbeat stop-motion animation film, Anomalisa. Like some slim and semi-acclaimed allegorical novel recently translated into English, it’s a story about a man alone in a strange city having dreamlike encounters while wrestling with his inner demons. Along the way, he meets a variety of people lower down the socioeconomic ladder than him, and treats them terribly…
Here’s the trailer:
The Revenant, the new film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Gravity, Birdman), is a revenge epic based on Michael Punke’s 2002 novel and starring Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio.
It’s opening on Christmas Day in limited release and will expand wider in January. My review is at PopMatters:
A spiritual view of the natural world clashes with the animalistic drives of a fallen humanity in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s operatic wilderness survival tale,The Revenant. This freewheeling adaptation of Michael Punke’s novel about fur trappers, Indians, and soldiers tangling in primal ways on the Western American frontier in the 1820s stretches the limits of endurance in more ways than one. Inarritu’s film pushes against known boundaries of art, suffering, and revenge tale…
Here’s the trailer:
Joy opens, appropriately enough, on Christmas. My review is at Film Journal International:
David O. Russell’s newest ode to the multifaceted pluck of Jennifer Lawrence,Joy announces right off that it is “inspired by true stories of daring women.” Between that message and a bait-and-switch trailer, hyped up with a glowering Robert De Niro and shots of Lawrence blasting away with a shotgun, audiences may settle in thinking they’re about to be swept away by another American Hustle-like story of nervy outsiders working the system. But really, the film is about a mop…
Here’s the trailer:
Herewith the full list of awards:
When the housing market bubble started to implode back in 2007 and 2008, precipitating the latest financial crisis, it came as a surprise to much of the world. Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short tells the story of the analysts who saw the implosion coming and discovered that nobody wanted to hear about it. Adam McKay’s film adaptation is an awesomely angry screwball satire of the apocalyptic and short-sighted stupidity that lead to the crisis.
The Big Short opens in limited release today, then everywhere Christmas week. My review is at PopMatters:
So who blew up the economy back in 2007? One answer that’s often shouted on talk radio and social media is a moralistic tale about how poor (minority) folks took out mortgages they couldn’t afford, which caused the financial collapse, after which sober-minded middle-class (white) taxpayers had to pay for all those bad mortgages by bailing out the banks. It’s the Ant and the Grasshopper fable re-engineered with Tea Party fury.
Adam McKay’s blistering, righteously funny The Big Short offers another answer…
Here’s the trailer:
In 1820, the Nantucket whaling ship Essex met a disastrous fate in the Pacific; only a few men survived. Later, the story that the ship had run afoul of a massive whale became the kernel of Moby-Dick and was more recently dissected in Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.
Ron Howard’s 3D adaptation of Philbrick’s book is opening this week, and hoping very much for some Oscar attention. My review is at Film Journal International:
…It starts in 1850 with a spry young Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) trying to claw a story out of Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), a drunk old salt who has refused for 30 years to talk about his connection with the Essex whaling-boat disaster. Melville’s money and Nickerson’s exasperated wife finally crack open that whiskey-sodden shell. But only after Nickerson fixes Melville with a probing look. “Have you read Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mr. Melville?” He asks. “Great writer”…
The trailer is here:
New York Film Critics Online, which generously includes yours truly among its membership, voted today on our best films of 2015. Unlike some years, when the opinion coalesces around two or three different films, this time only one film garnered multiple awards. That would be Tom McCarthy’s incredible eye-opener Spotlight, about the Boston Globe reporters who uncovered the Catholic Church’s decades-long coverup of widespread abuse by Boston priests. It won in four categories, including best picture.
Herewith the full list:
And here is our list of the year’s 10 best films, in alphabetical order (yes, that’s right, one of them is Mad Max, as it should be):
In Mustang, France’s official entry for this year’s Academy Awards, five sisters living in a remote Turkish village strain against the prison-like limits put on them by a local male culture terrified of allowing them even the slightest hint of freedom.
Wild, exuberant, and altogether masterful, Mustang is playing now in limited release; make sure to seek it out. My review is at PopMatters:
The view from the family home of five sisters living in a remote Turkish village on the Black Sea is the kind of vista for which wealthy travelers pay dearly. Nearby mountains are covered in lush forests and the ocean slaps musically into sandy beaches below.
This panorama is also a taunt, because the sisters will never be allowed anywhere near it unless a male guardian accompanies them. Even then, they won’t be allowed to play and run and laugh, but instead will be expected to follow like docile sheep in shapeless dresses…
Here’s the trailer:
In 1952, Patricia Highsmith — riding high after the success of Strangers on a Train but before she started her Ripley series — published her semi-autobiographical novel about a love affair between two women, The Price of Salt, under a pseudonym. It went on to sell over a million copies.
Now, Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) has adapted it for the big screen as a lush period romance, with Rooney Mara as the inexperienced shopgirl and Cate Blanchett as the older married woman who falls for her.
Carol is playing now in limited release. My review is at PopMatters:
Todd Haynes’ Carol offers two views of the holiday season. In 1952’s New York City, we first see family gatherings, snowy sidewalks, and shopping trips. Just below that surface, two women engage in illicit romance, at every turn reminded of everything they are not allowed to have. Their world doesn’t allow for same-sex attraction, much less the idea that two women could share a life together. As everyone else around them is making merry, their secret turns sharp enough to cut glass…
Here’s the trailer:
Based on the Oscar-winning 2009 Argentinian film of the same name, Billy Ray’s Secret in Their Eyes follows what happens when a police woman’s daughter is murdered and neither she nor her fellow cops can quite let go of it.
Secret in Their Eyes opens this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
After making Shattered Glass, one of the modern era’s greatest journalism films, one would have hoped that writer-director Billy Ray would have absorbed the cardinal rule: Don’t bury the lead. Yet that is exactly what he keeps doing all throughout Secret in Their Eyes, his strained and surprisingly star-heavy remake of Juan JoséCampanella’s morally complicated potboiler that was also the 2010 Foreign-Language Oscar winner. Initially a procedural about a retired FBI agent who can’t let go of a cold case, Ray’s version sidles into a buried romance and a commentary on post-9/11 security-state excesses without ever quite getting a bead on any of the many elements it’s juggling…
Here’s the trailer:
A brutal and (literally) bloody musician’s tale that’s about many, many other things besides music (surprise), Whiplash was the little awards film that could. While never quite making a splash along the lines of a Boyhood or The Imitation Game, it plugged along for months on little more than sheer word of mouth. Just like movies used to do.
Whiplash, which was ultimately nominated for five Oscars, will be available next week on DVD and Blu-ray. My review is at Film Racket:
In Damien Chazelle’s steam-heated pressure cooker, socially maladroit student Andrew (Miles Teller) is determined to be a brilliant jazz drummer. Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the demon-teacher at a New York music conservatory who Andrew thinks guards the entrance to greatness, sees potential in this student but won’t let him past without a serious flaying. From the second Andrew steps into Fletcher’s studio band, the insults and cutting remarks fly from Fletcher’s lips. The only question seems to be how long Andrew can tough it out. But since he and Fletcher have a surprising amount in common, the story then becomes more about who will outlast the other…
You can see the trailer here:
Chris Barsanti 
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