Shell (Scott Graham, 2012) - 4 stars

Shell is a powerful debut from both writer/director Scott Graham and star Chloe Pirrie, both of whom make a huge impact with this slow burning drama full of subtlety, nuance and imagery.

The film centres around the title character’s problematic relationship with her father Pete, the similarly excellent Joseph Mawle. Only seventeen years old, Shell is looking for a future but also in need of guidance from a parent figure. However, she is mature for her age, and often seems like the parent figure to Pete, who has been emotionally distant and dependent on Shell due to his seizures and ever since Shell’s mother left them. Together, Shell and Pete own and run a garage in the middle of nowhere in the Scottish highlands, offering petrol and maintenance for passing drivers. The few we meet over the period of time we spend with Shell seem as lonely as she does; the conversations between Shell and customers as she fills up their cars rarely consists of more than a few words.

The beauty of Shell and Pete's relationship, and indeed of the film, is the fact that both parties clearly need each other for survival, yet they also despise their existence here, both constantly looking for a way out. This formula results in a melting pot of suppressed feeling and unsaid words, ready to explode any minute. The film acts as a time bomb, waiting for one of them to reach their breaking point, which comes in the moving and harrowing finale.

Technically, the film mirrors the slow pace of the script beautifully, bringing the starkness of their lives to life in hauntingly lingering photography. While the opening shots of the title character float weightlessly around the interior and exterior of the petrol station, just as Shell floats day after day around the same setting, the long shots that constantly force us to watch vehicles, and therefore life, drive away down the long road leave us with nothing, emulating Shell’s everyday struggle. Similarly, the quiet, wind-heavy sound design reminds us that no one is around, bar the increasingly less common lorries, whose engine roars give us and Shell the briefest sense of hope, until they drive past without stopping.

A story of two distant people in the coldest of the Scottish highlands, with a business that barely allows them to live and bad luck following them like a shadow, the one positive that comes from this is the film itself. It is an assured debut, which will hopefully propel both star and director to more similarly minded stories. Although it may be a slow watch, it is not one to dismiss and throw on the pile. This is a rare film that has something to say, one whose every slow lingering image will stay with you.

The Wolf Of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) - 5 stars

In the past twelve months, Leonardo DiCaprio has given us some fine performances as rich, immoral men and his performance as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf Of Wall Street is no exception. Of course, he is not the richest; his Great Gatsby role takes that medal. Nor is he the most immoral; Django Unchained’s  Calvin Candie surely outweighs him there. However, this is his best performance of the lot. In fact, it is his best performance in a long time, and maybe the one that could finally win him that elusive Academy Award.

The film, based upon Jordan Belfort’s book of the same name, and directed by Martin Scorsese, charters Belfort’s rise and fall as a stockbroker in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. It opens with Belfort starting at a major Wall Street company and his introduction to this new world by his boss played by Matthew McConaughey. Despite only featuring for barely ten minutes, McConaughey shines in the role, a sort of mentor to Belfort, and the one responsible for seducing him to Wall Street and the addictions available to him there: sex, drugs and most of all, money. As he gets more and more addicted to the high of earning millions of dollars, the price he pays grows and grows until finally the FBI catch on to his illegal means. The bulk of the film features a very criminal Belfort spending and throwing away his millions before Agent Denham can put him away.

Aside from McConaughey and Marty’s now five-time collaborator DiCaprio, the film is full of stunning supporting performances from Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin, Joanna Lumley and especially Jonah Hill, once again proving he is not just a Judd Apatow puppet.

The genius of the film is that at once it feels so familiar as a Scorsese picture, but also completely fresh. A fan of the director’s can see his hands at work throughout the film; the use of soundtrack, the steadicam shots, the obsession with the underworld. There is even a voiceover that takes you back to Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. Certainly, you could imagine DiCaprio opening this film with the line “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a millionaire.” However, this doesn’t make it feel like tired work, or a rerun of his devices. On the contrary, everything about the film feels like untouched snow, pushing boundaries of acceptability to their limit. Every visual in the film shows another scene of decadence and debauchery with the stock broker office looking more and more like a fight club than a work place, while every word in Terence Winter’s script is laced with depravity, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the better work of authors Brett Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. The very fact that this is a true story makes it all the more exciting to watch, and you certainly cannot imagine anyone else helming this film other than Scorsese.

The Wolf Of Wall Street is a 3 hour cocaine high, complete with the downs and the withdrawals and while it may run ever so slightly longer than necessary, you leave the cinema addicted, needing another hit. Another bump. Another scene. Just one last time.

Kelly + Victor (Kieran Evans, 2012) - 4 stars

A character piece in the greatest sense of the term, Kelly + Victor is a work of art that depicts the title characters’ sexual relationship and its effects on their otherwise downward spiraling lives. This is writer/director Kieran Evans’ debut feature and has unsurprisingly been nominated for a BAFTA award.

Led by two stunning performances by Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris, the film starts with their meeting on a cocaine-fuelled night out in a Liverpool nightclub. We then see their interactions over the next few weeks, as they are brought together by sex, addiction and tragedy.

Both title characters are hugely flawed people, both in troubling circumstances, yet they find such physical attraction in each other, which temporarily dulls the noise of misfortune for each of them.  What is interesting about Kelly and Victor’s relationship, and what keeps the film away from being just another love story about troubled souls is that the film is realistic in not suggesting that their relationship will necessarily be enough to simply whisk them away from all their troubles and allow them to start again happily. There is not an answer at the end of the film to whether the experiences in the film will lead them to leave their current lifestyles or change their ways (Kelly is haunted by an ex-boyfriend recently released from prison and falls in with a friend who is a sex worker, while Victor struggles to keep his friendships intact as his friends decide to go from taking cocaine to selling it.) This is one of the reasons that Kelly + Victor is great. The decision to not allow the characters to easily slip into an answer and resolution is a stroke of genius. What emphasises this realism is the performances by the two leads. The sparse use of dialogue aids this transition from film drama to real moments captured on camera.

Addiction plays a huge part in this story, which could perhaps be part of their attraction to each other. One is a regular cocaine user, while the other enjoys asphyxiation, and both introduce and draw the other into their own addiction, thus creating a sort of addiction to each other. Both addictions are to do with seeking for a release from the norm, an experience of ecstasy, which comes with a fair amount of danger, echoing both characters’ needs for something new, to get out of their mundane day-by-day Liverpool existences.

The film is also technically brilliant. The cinematography is beautiful, both in its static wide frames that show off a certain side of Liverpool so well, and its use of hand held close ups for dramatic scenes, while the often surreal sound design and use of soundtrack and a haunting score create such a tight feel to the film.

Kelly + Victor is a great piece of cinema from a very exciting new director, which toys with attraction and addiction in a new and unrelentingly real light.

(Review disc courtesy of Verve Pictures.)

2013 In Review

So, 2013 has come to an end, and to be honest, I didn't get to see quite as many new releases as I'd wanted to. Hopefully that'll change in 2014. But here's a look a what I did manage to see and, more importantly, what I thought of them. Films are listed alphabetically. 

About Time (Richard Curtis) - 3½ stars
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney) - 4 stars
Breathe In (Drake Doremus) - 4 stars
Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass) - 5 stars
Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino) - 5 stars
Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) - 2½ stars
Filth (Jon S. Baird) - 2 stars
Gangster Squad (Ruben Fleischer) - 3 stars
Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron) - 4 stars
The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann) - 3 stars
Hitchcock (Sacha Gervasi) - 2½ stars
Lincoln (Steven Spielberg) - 3½ stars
Man Of Steel (Zack Snyder) - 2 stars
Philomena (Stephen Frears) - 4½ stars
The Place Beyond The Pines (Derek Cianfrance) - 4 stars
Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve) -  4 stars
Short Term 12 (Destin Cretton) - 5 stars
Star Trek Into Darkness (J J Abrams) - 4 stars
Stoker (Park Chan Wook) - 4 stars
Trance (Danny Boyle) - 2½ stars
We Are What We Are (Jim Mickle) - 2 stars
White House Down (Roland Emmerich) - 3 stars
World War Z (Marc Forster) - 4 stars
Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow) - 4 stars

Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013) - 5 stars

Deeply dark, but edged with comedy. Difficult to watch but so rewarding at the same time. Short Term 12 not only shows the events inside a group foster home, but really captures what it might feel like to be there. Watching Destin Daniel Cretton’s film brings out the same emotions, if only for a shorter period of time, as you would experience if you were in the position of the workers in the home. Focusing on Grace (Brie Larson) who is head of the line staff in the home, and her troubles both inside and outside of it, the film at once grabs you and does not let go until the end of this haunting but humorous journey of healing, learning and discovery.

The film, of course, is written with personal experience seeping through every scene. Cretton spent two years in the staff of such a home, and when his short film entailing his encounters there went down so well at Sundance, the logical step was to allow it to blossom into a feature length script.

Cretton is a very talented writer. At the instant it feels like an opportunity might have been overlooked, he brings out something even better, something not only logical but inevitable, keeping us on our toes the whole time. If it ever feels predictable, it doesn’t stay this way for long, with the direction of the scene being thrust from left to right, from comedy to catastrophe. At times is it a true example of textbook storytelling, but at no point does it tire or feel previously well trodden. On the contrary it is fresh and explorative in a way that I have not seen before. Opening on a new member of staff’s first day, we are immediately invited into the home and the story, and before we know it we care about all of the children and our co-workers.

Larson, in a role that has allowed her to show her full capabilities and that will no doubt make her a star, is excellent as Grace who, on the arrival of a new girl, Jayden, realises that maybe it is herself that is the most troubled child in the home after all. This simply allows for some beautiful scenes between Grace and her loved-up boyfriend and co-worker Mason (played by the equally brilliant John Gallagher Jr.) in a story that otherwise may have lost direction getting outside of the foster home had it been handled by somebody else. Also worth note are Kaitlin Dever (Jayden) and Keith Standfield as Marcus, the two teens we learn the most about.

The film is shot with a hand held style and mostly with close ups, which helps us engage and feel part of the anecdotes, tragedies and celebrations straight away, and with a delicate score that can lift the mood and bring it right back down in an instant, the elements of the film work well together and are confidently handled to create a well crafted drama, whose realness, openness and immediacy you will fall in love with at once. This is a film whose success will hopefully not end at South By South West where it won a number of prizes, but should see a lot more buzz around it as we enter the awards season.

World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013) - 4 stars

World War Z is Marc Forster’s loose adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel of the same name, one of the few remaining similarities between the source and the film. It stars Brad Pitt, who also produces, as Gerry Lane- a UN agent and a family man, given the task of answering the question ‘why?’ when a virus outbreak leads to a global zombie epidemic. Forster’s background in both human dramas and action thrillers has been utilized here to create a large-scale apocalypse movie with heart and people we care about.

There is nothing new in World War Z. The huge visions of disaster evoke any of Roland Emmerich’s blockbusters from the past 10 years, while the third act looks like it could have been lifted straight from the cutting room floor of 28 Days Later (including a laughably similar soundtrack for this segment). And although it asks a similar question to that of I Am legend, it manages to surpass all of these films. Why? It is free from the constraints of simply being a genre vehicle, whether that may be horror or disaster. Instead, this is an apocalypse with soul, a disaster with more than just CGI to offer. It delivers precisely where most zombie and apocalyptic movies attempt, and fail, to do – in its realism. Often small-scale is mistaken for realism, because it is gritty, at street level, and therefore the huge budget and visual effects team at Forster’s disposal, would tend to be overlooked as glossy and ungrounded. But it is quite the opposite- Forster’s vision is probably far closer to a real zombie apocalypse than any other film has reached before simply because of the scale and the breadth of what we see (we are privy to action and drama in the USA, Israel, South Korea and the UK).

Another reason the film works so well, is that it is given a 15 rating and while in most areas it acts like a film with a 12 certificate, the higher rating comes from the fact that the film opts for consequential violence. A lot of disaster films are enjoyed because destruction happens without consequence- the delight is in seeing a building crumble and not being faced with what this means for the residents or tourists. But this in turn leads to characters and plot we do not care about, disaster that does not matter. So when World War Z adds consequences, the outbreak and destruction means something for the characters and therefore for the audience.

It is disappointing, then, to see the ending of the film not deliver in the same way the rest of it has. I favoured the way it suggests the acts of the film have been more of a delay than a cure, but too many times are narratives wrapped up with media headlines instead of drama. Relying heavily on an emotional score and news report montages, the film displays a potential lack of conviction in the last five minutes.

World War Z takes multiple genres and almost delivers on all fronts. It may not be the Summer blockbuster you were expecting, but with the disappointments of The Great Gatsby and Man Of Steel, my advice would be to enjoy this one while you can.