All Is Lost – Chris Barsanti

Oscar Isaacs and Jessica Chastain plot in 'A Most Violent Year' (A24) — Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain plot in ‘A Most Violent Year’ (A24)

Sneaking into theaters after the great Christmas rush is J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year. A low-key drama about warring heating-oil firms set in 1981 New York, when murders and violent crime had the city on the verge of collapse, the film and its characters are as controlled and tightly-wound as its setting is chaotic.

A Most Violent Year is playing now in limited release, with some hopes for Oscar nominations to give it more play around the country. My review is at PopMatters:

J.C. Chandor’s return to land-based storytelling shares some of the predilections of last year’s Robert Redford vehicle All Is Lost. Both that film and A Most Violent Year are deliberately paced, refusing to rush their stories for the purposes of juicing the drama. This is not a bad tendency. It shows Chandor to be an unusually disciplined filmmaker in a landscape increasingly populated by the work of the eager-to-please. But not all subject matter supports the slow-and-steady approach, and that’s the case with A Most Violent Year…

You can see the trailer here:

Robert Redford and his lonely yacht in 'All is Lost' — Robert Redford and his yacht in ‘All is Lost’

Just a few weeks after Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity showed astronauts struggling to keep from floating off into the void, J.C. Chandor’s one-man-against-nature drama All is Lost shows up, starring Robert Redford and nobody else. It’s him against the elements, in a damaged 39-foot yacht deep in the Indian Ocean.

My review is at PopMatters; here’s part:

“I think you would all agree,” Robert Redford narrates over the start of All Is Lost, “that I tried.” But for a couple muttered curses and some dry-throated shouts, this sentence plus a few others spoken to unknown persons are the sum total of what Redford’s unnamed character says during J.C. Chandor’s movie. Like his Margin Call, the new film shows the filmmaker’s precision and calculation. Although the story of All Is Lost might be quickly summarized as a man sailing a yacht in the middle of the ocean runs into trouble, the film doesn’t play with form or pad out its running time. There is greatness in this simplicity. If only Redford had been up to the challenge…

The trailer is here:

Chris Barsanti

Tag: All Is Lost

New in Theaters: ‘A Most Violent Year’

New in Theaters: ‘All is Lost’