In his latest non-documentary feature, director Kevin Macdonald (How I Live Now, The Last King of Scotland) burdens a straightforward heist plot with excessive, overt messaging. Dennis Kelly’s screenplay is chiefly to blame; he embeds an oversimplified backstory for every character and situation to the detriment of the in-progress action.
The changes in the updated version, written by William Monahan (The Departed), don’t enhance the original story. The most drastic — a transcontinental move from New York to Los Angeles, a hostile yet slightly Oedipal relationship with a dilettante mother (Jessica Lange), and an excess slickness, manifested in the casting of Mark Wahlberg as the lead now transformed into gentile Jim Bennett — detract from the narrative. Read the review here.
On their own each of these episodes could provide ample dramatic material for a feature-length film. Together, they’re daunting, and the adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 bestseller Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption required several attempts to be wrangled into filmable shape, first by William Nicholson (Gladiator) and Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, Behind the Candelabra), and then finally by Academy Award-winning writers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Read the full review here.
The screenplay for Big Eyes, by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon), proceeds on the assumption that viewers are more interested in latter-day restitution than in Hitchcock’s type of maladjusted compulsion. To that end, the filmmakers focus on the artist Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), creator of the 1960s paintings featuring sad, big-eyed children, over her striving husband, Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), who for years compelled Margaret to produce in secret the lucrative paintings he claimed were his. Read the full review here.
Adapted by first-time feature writer Graham Moore from Andrew Hodges’ 1983 biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, the screenplay derives the bulk of its drama from Turing’s covert stint at Bletchley Park, the WWII code-breakers’ compound in Buckinghamshire. In reality, Turing’s electromechanical machine, the Bombe, was decoding Nazi U-boat fleet messages encoded by the German cipher machine Enigma within weeks of his arrival. But the film stretches out this time, adding episodes of initial resistance to Turing’s ideas and personality, and then turning it into a race against the clock to save British lives. Read the full review here.
In 1995, 26-year-old Minnesota native Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) felt compelled to solo hike the 1,100 miles from the Mojave Desert to the northern border of Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail. For the previous four years, Strayed had grieved her mother, Bobbi’s (Laura Dern), premature death from cancer through anonymous sex and heroin use, eventually divorcing her husband, Paul (Thomas Sadoski). After an abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, she hopes that the journey on foot will — as her friend Aimee (Gaby Hoffman) urges her — get her life together. Read the full review here.
The third and final installment of director Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy starts at the exact moment the second episode left off last year, presumptuously tasking those short on either memory or obsessive enthusiasm with hastily reorienting themselves. Considering the extraneous subplots and the legion of characters, it’s hardly worth the time it takes. Read the full review here.
Do not watch Top Five to see Chris Rock bare his soul or exhibit any facial expressions resembling authentic emotion. In the comedian’s third turn as director (Head of State, I Think I Love My Wife), Rock remains steadfastly juvenile, playing it safe with the crude jokes affiliated more with Adam Sandler — who makes a cameo appearance along with several of Rock’s other friends — than Woody Allen. Read the rest of the review here.
Hilary Swank’s frontierswoman Mary Bee Cuddy wants it all. Although she efficiently and prosperously runs her own farmstead in the Nebraska Territory in the 1850s, she still longs for a husband and children. “I live uncommonly alone,” she explains to two possible prospects in the course of the film — neither a match for her former schoolteacher manners and talents — who unanimously reject her as plain and bossy. Read the full review here.
Adapted for the screen by Anthony McCarten from the memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking née Wilde, the film aspires to depict the courtship and marriage of Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) to Wilde (Felicity Jones), his first wife. But despite the first-hand source material, Wilde’s point of view is conspicuously absent. Hawking is the main attraction here, and Wilde merely his helpmate. Read the full review here.
In the latest installment of the cinematic adaptations of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games novels, the games are finally over. Replacing the astonishing child-on-child violence of the first two movies is a war of agitprop, and who better to star in the rushes produced to unify the rebellion districts against the Capitol but Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen? Read the full review here.
Psychopaths, according to British journalist Jon Ronson in The Psychopath Test, aren’t all violent criminals. The hallmark traits — lack of impulse control, emotion and remorse — are just as advantageous for gaining market share and reaping profits as for killing sprees. In fact, compared to the population at large, CEOs are four times more likely to test positive for psychopathy.The brutal beating of a security guard at the outset of Nightcrawler lets us know which type of psychopath we’re dealing with in screenwriter Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut. But Jake Gyllenhaal’s unblinking portrayal of the film’s heavy, Leo Bloom, also includes robot-like recitations of business jargon and corporate buzzwords, creating a monster more chilling than violence alone could spawn. Read the full review here.
