Although only just going wide-release now, it seems that another review of Whiplash is a bit late to the party already thrown in its favour; the streamers have been swept up, the champagne glasses washed and drying and the poster so laden with glowing recommendations that there’s physically no room left on the one-sheet for any more to be said. A cursory glance of the promotional material and a perusal of the more gushing reviews will have you thinking that this is the feel-good movie of the year: Rocky with drumsticks set in the halls of Fame school. Therein maybe lies the film’s most laudable accomplishment, the ability to be a mirror for whatever sentiment you choose to see within its coming-of-age tale, because to me the conclusion of Whiplash serves up a downbeat tale of art destroyed by ambition and human warmth replaced by the clinical application of technique.

Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) is the awkward drumming prodigy at a prestigious NYC music school, where the ultimate accolade is to be invited into the school’s elite competitive jazz ensemble, overseen with sadistic authority by Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). The iron fist which wields the baton has a fearsome reputation but nothing can prepare Andrew for just how extreme Fletcher’s methods are in pursuit of excellence from his pupils or what the personal cost to both men will ultimately be.

Never in dispute will be the performances of the two leads. Teller is building on his slighter turns in The Spectacular Now and the Divergent series with a character here which is positively schizophrenic: a soft-spoken introvert who becomes a sinew-straining, sweat-streaming demon on the drum stool, literally bloodying his sticks and cymbals from open-weeping calluses. His drive to excel – “I want to be one of the greats,” he tells his girlfriend as he dumps her in a speech lifted straight from The Social Network asshole playbook – has no cost so high that’s he not willing to pay. Andrew truly is an asshole in the Zuckerberg mould, and no doubt was sculpted that way by the filmmakers.

In Terence Fletcher however, he finds the perfect foil to both drive and derail his smugness. It’s a career-defining turn by Simmons – Juno’s dad flipped one-eighty into Full Metal Jacket drill sergeant territory. All the more disturbing is that Fletcher seems to have a genuine soul buried under his bristling, abrasive outer hide, albeit one he reveals only in instances which are shown to be calculated: in one scene he listens sympathetically as a student shares some intimate family details, in the next he’s using the same details to flay the boy in front of the entire class for mistiming the tempo. “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job’,” he reasons by way of excusing his abusive, homophobic, racist, frankly criminal (hitting your students is a crime even in Movieville, no?) teaching methods. He is truly a monster to behold, ever commanding your attention even as his behavior grows more repellant and inexcusable.

Which brings us to the final showdown and that subjective mirror I mentioned earlier: I’ve
heard the climax of Whiplash called ‘life-affirming’, ‘goes out on a high’ and so on. I just don’t get that. In the end, Fletcher remains a vindictive spiteful control freak, Andrew a driven blinkered asshole. They get what they both deserve, and perversely what they appear to want and need from each other. It’s a Pyrrhic win-win for the two adversaries, achieved in a way that seems to run contrary to the whole ethos of jazz music as I understand it. It’ll make an interesting double-feature with Dead Poets Society and when you watch, I’ll leave it to you to decide who you’d rather inspire your kids in the classroom and be their pals outside of it.

But those performances? “Out standing!” — Mike Reilly

Zombies are so last year. Time travel is Hollywood’s newest favoritist thing and 2014 sure saw a glut of them ride the zeitgeist: Time Lapse, Edge Of Tomorrow, even Interstellar. At the close of the year arrives Predestination, covering both bases by being an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies”. Spoiler! There are no actual zombies in Predestination, unless you count the barely-twitching plot but we’ll get to that in good time.

Ethan Hawke is the preeminent operative of the Temporal Bureau – timecops, gottit? The TB is actively hunting the Fizzle Bomber, a time-hopping terrorist who has killed thousands in a series of attacks spanning decades. Thus we find Hawke working undercover as a bartender in 1970 New York City. But this is five years before the bomber’s most devastating attack which Hawke has been charged with thwarting. Evidently, some long game is at play here. A stranger pulls up a stool at his counter and they begin to chat.

When J.J. Abrams finally brings Stephen King’s Kennedy assassination/time-travel mashup novel 11/22/63 to the small screen in the near future, some viewers may find the front-half a bit of a slog. A wrinkle in the time-shifting device there means that 11/22/63‘s protagonist must endure a similar five year preamble before he can enact his history-altering plan. King’s obvious affection for the late ’50s setting and the charming minutiae of its depiction is what makes the wait an engaging read. Predestination tries to pull off a similar trick – a time-travel thriller which has neither thrills nor time-travel for the entire first-half of its run time.

It actually is fifty minutes of Hawke and his customer shooting the shit in the bar, punctuated by flashbacks to the fifties and sixties to accompany a fantastical tale the customer shares with Hawke. That’s Predestination‘s second major misstep: to lay out the entire back-story of a main character in one helping would be ill-conceived in most movie genres; to do so by such a completely mundane linear method is particularly egregious in a time-travel movie.

The first major misstep occurs in the preceding action opener, wherein Predestination inexplicably chooses to foreshadow its ultimate big twist with one revelatory shot. Thereafter, the next fifty-minute character info-dump has no mystery to tease; Predestination has already made itself predictable. Not content with gently tapping its self-destruct button, it pounds mercilessly on it twice more; during the bar scene, two exchanges clumsily sign-post where it’s going with its causality/paradox conceit. If you don’t twig the entire thing by the hour mark, have yourself strapped to a gurney and forced to loop-endure Somewhere in Time for the next twenty-three years. Watch-Die-Repeat.

Once the second-half kicked it, I hoped at least for some redeeming action and maybe just one crummy plot rug-pull to knock the smugness out of me; it is the hunt for a mad-bomber after all. Give me a ticking timer cliché, JCVD to come round-housing in at the 11th hour, anything! It was not to be. The plot strands simply mesh to confirm what I had already preempted an hour earlier. If you find it jaw-dropping and unexpected, I suggest you check out Shattered (1991); you’ll eat that shit up, and you’re welcome. By definition, a plot twist requires a prelaid plot to twist. In the end, Predestination simply pulls the sheet fully off the secret it thought it was expertly teasing throughout, reveals that it’s all twist and no trousers, yells “Tah-dah!” and shamelessly passes the hat round for you to show your ‘preciation.

Writer-director duo The Spierig Brothers thrilled in 2010 with the wonderfully inventive and endlessly stylish Daybreakers, a welcome inversion of the usual vampire conventions. On that success and on viewing the trailer, I prejudged that this follow-up would be a smart, stylish and original addition to the time-bending field. Ethan Hawke is in the midst of his own McConaissance – a ‘Hawke-second-wind?’ but here he’s a barely-registering bundle of broodiness. It’s left to his Australian newbie co-star to carry the day and their (don’t IMDB Predestination if you want to go in fresh!) committed performance alone carries what emotion the movie offers.

I’m giving this one-and-a-half stars. If you think I’m being harsh, feel free to tell me to go fuck myself. You always have a choice. UPDATE: After much reflection, I spun the dials and came back from the future and docked it another star for squandering winning best adapted screenplay at the 2015 Oscars. Oh boy! — Mike Reilly

“Australia. Ten years after The Collapse.”

So begins David Michod’s follow-up to Animal Kingdom. As a man – credited as Eric though Guy Pearce’s character never gives his name throughout proceedings – sits in a remote ramshackle bar at some forlorn corner of the Outback, a pickup truck comes to a crashing stop on the highway outside. Moments later, its occupants – Henry (Scoot McNairy) and his gang of outlaws – have stolen Eric’s car and resumed their flight from an unseen botched robbery father up the road. When he comes upon Henry’s brother Rey (Robert Pattinson), wounded and abandoned by the gang, Eric takes Rey hostage and gives chase in Henry’s truck. It’s a nice truck too, probably better suited to the crumbling infrastructre of this new world disorder than Eric’s sensible family saloon. But Eric really really wants his own car back, because…

That’s about all the plot you’ll get – or need – in this stripped-down version of the world going to Hell in a handcart. The Rover is certainly unique in its setting of ‘not-quite-Armageddeon’. Weapons are not obligatory to survive but certainly recommended. Some places still enjoy electricity. If you have U.S. Dollars you can buy gas, guns, bric-a-brac or sexual relief at any number of dingy hole-in-the-wall establishments. A disjointed military presence occasionally makes a go of keeping some semblance of law and order, ostensibly because the remnants of central government in Sydney keep them paid, fed and equipped in return.

The nature of The Collapse is never revealed. The decaying communities which Eric and Rey move through call to mind the odd-mix setting of the original Mad Max: normal folk living normal lives around which a growing lawlessness fights the last forces of order for supremacy. One can easily imagine Max, Goose or the Toe-Cutter cruising under the same skies as Eric and Rey, the total anarchy of The Road Warrior only a few miles and years farther down the highway.

Seeing The Rover as just that – a more coherent and committed take on Max #1 and a bridge to #2 – one wishes Michod had put greater effort into realizing a richer, more original view of our-world-but-not. There are plenty of familiar dystopian flourishes but nothing not already seen from the genre which George Miller’s seminal series helped define. Remote, remorseless desert environs are the go-to setting for these works and the Outback is still gorgeously grim in that regard.

Visually and aurally, The Rover oozes desolation in every frame, be that the wide shots of barren vistas or the close-ups of weathered faces drained of all hope and vitality, but its stripped-down production design and setting don’t allow for anything unique and memorable to set it apart from its predecessors. We’re left only with the characters to inform us of how the world sits and this is where The Rover truly rings false.

Remember the scene in Road Warrior? Max desperately tries to collect the gas spilling from wrecks on the highway. He’s using hubcaps and cans for a few precious drops, moping up stray pools off the tarmac and squeezing them from a dirty rag. In that one scene, the price to survive is made abundantly clear. When survival should be foremost in their minds, characters in The Rover make the dumbest decisions at every opportunity and more than a few end up paying for them. And it’s not merely the peripheral players; on several occasions Eric spurns easy chances to score better weapons, hardier vehicles, even simply gas and we are then treated to following scenes of him haggling for just those things. If the cost of survival is just as high in The Rover, it strains credulity to accept how any of these people made it through the last 10 years in the first place.

Guy Pearce does solid work in conveying Eric’s stoic nihilism and unyielding commitment to his cause. Pattinson is the marquee casting and it’s admirable his recent project choices designed to put distance between him and his Twilight period. His accent here wobbles between Mississippi and Melbourne and his simpleton-affected mumbling is frequently incomprehensible. Edward Cullen it ain’t, so mission accomplished I suppose.

The Rover‘s final shot may well be the clincher that pushes viewers who’ve been on the fence all the way through finally over the edge. It reveals the motive behind Eric’s dogged pursuit of his car and in my fairly-full theatre, the audience, which had been strangely subdued for the entire movie, reacted with more than a few groans and hoots of derision. I myself found it to be oddly fitting—the one true emotional beat in an otherwise detached and dry endeavour. — Mike Reilly

Night Moves (2013) is not to be mistaken for a remake of the 1975 Gene Hackman thriller, though both do star Lex Luthors in-waiting. It’s Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to her 2010 anti-western Meek’s Cutoff, and it’s being lauded as her most accessible film to date.

Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) and Dena (Dakota Fanning) are friends who live and work on the margins of modern society in the Pacific northwest; he on an organic farm, she at a wellness center and spa. Dena’s a trust fund brat who’s slumming it with the tree-hugger set and using her wealth to bankroll direct action against industrial interests they perceive as enemies of the environment. For their next target, they enlist Josh’s friend Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), a wilderness recluse, former marine, to help devise and execute a strike that will cross the line from activism into eco-terrorism: the bombing of a local dam.

The trailer for Night Moves put forth the promise of a relatively straight-line thriller, with its mood of creeping dread and escalating threat throughout. The first hour of the actual film delivers as much, focusing as it does on the preparation and placement of the bomb. As the night-time mission to destroy to dam gets underway, Reichardt ratchets up the tension and we find ourselves torn between our law-abiding better angels who ought to abhor any form of violence and our inner Dennis Hoppers who believe that all bombs should ‘become’. We’ve watched this seemingly sincere, generally amiable trio for the first hour, and we’re understandably rooting for them to at least come out of the ordeal in one piece. The on-location setting of the dam is beautifully lit and forebodingly framed, and Reichardt works the scene for every ounce of drama going.

It’s the aftermath of the dam attempt that pulls the movie down. The entire second hour is concerned almost exclusively with Josh’s rising paranoia about either capture by the authorities or betrayal by his co-conspirators. Harmon is absent throughout save for a couple of short phone exchanges with Josh. Dena shows up briefly. With little else to play off, the second act is mostly extended shots of Jesse Eisenberg spooking at every approaching car, every suspicious eye-contact, and skulking around the organic farm.

It’s Reichardt doing what she does and loves best: long quiet scenes where mood and setting take precedence over character and plot. As such, Night Moves becomes a movie of two truly distinct halves, split precisely down the middle. I think existing Reichardt fans will generally approve. If, like me, you’re new to the director, you may think it overall an opportunity to commit entirely to one type of film or the other wasted. Even as is, there’s scope for tightening the pace in both acts of the almost 2-hour runtime and a much stronger 85-minute film might have emerged.

Things come to a violent head in an odd scene that’s tonally jarring with the measured mood beforehand; it’s something more suited to the climax of an ’80s TV cop show and even Reichardt fans might question its appropriateness.

Critics are praising Eisenberg’s against-type man-of-few-words portrayal but I found the more interesting aspect to be how Josh’s fellow eco-activists react to his actions. We get a glimpse of the diverse opinion within this often-caricatured community and I found the scenes where he’s forced to acknowledge the consequences within his own world a welcome contrast to the draggy paranoia-scenes when he’s by himself.

Equally, Dakota Fanning is being hailed as some kind of revelation, as though she’s back from… wherever folk thought she went, I guess. Check her IMDB page and you’ll find at least 15 features since War of the Worlds, including three appearances in something called The Twilight Saga, whatever that may be. Unsurprisingly, all the performances in Night Moves are good, to be sure, but we need to accept that indie movies must always been seen as existing on a higher plane of achievement than their coarse mainstream counterparts because plucky brave pennywise indie.

To that end, I really hope Eisenberg gets to blow up some serious shit in Batman v Superman next year. He’ll obviously be an Indie Rolex among that blockbuster’s cheap gold watches. Who needs a house out in Hackensack anyway?

Night Moves is on theatrical release in UK/Ireland from Aug. 29th and on home video in US/Canada on Sept. 2nd. — Mike Reilly

“Certainly a startling opening line,” is about all that Father James (Brendan Gleeson) can manage in response to the mystery parishioner who enters his confession box and states the cause of his grievance. You can discover this opening line for yourself when you watch Calvary, suffice to say that its shocking content and shockingly nonchalant delivery set the tone for this satire on modern Irish morality: edgy, irreverent and just a wee bit too broad for its philosophical ponderings to win out.

The unseen confessor informs Fr. James that he has seven days to put his affairs in order because he’s going to kill him – a good and innocent priest – as symbolic retribution for abuse suffered as a boy at the hands of another. Will Fr. James acquiesce and present himself as the sacrificial lamb on the appointed hour at the appointed place? Will he report the threat – he suspects he knows his tormentor’s identity – or will he look to resolve the situation himself?

If the title card quote by Saint Augustine doesn’t clue you in to how Calvary decides to play this dilemma then back to Sunday school with you! If you still need a guide to recognizing your saints then you’ll probably take the movie at face value and find it ludicrous and ham-fisted. Over the course of the seven days, we meet the inhabitants of the rural coastal parish Fr. James ministers to. The who’ll-do-it mystery is irrelevant – every suspect is equally venal and amoral – as the story is more concerned with hitting every red-button issue to plague Irish society in the last 10 years: African immigrants, the economic crisis, loosening sexual mores, suicide and the failings of the Catholic church are just the tip of the iceberg.

The supporting cast is sprinkled with well-known (this side of the pond at least) Irish comedians and character actors but most are crudely-drawn caricatures, either mouthpieces to air our collective national grievances or strawmen to appease them. As Aidan Gillen’s coke-snorting, widow-screwing physician observes of himself, “The atheistic doctor? A clichéd part to play. There aren’t that many good lines.” Meta ever, Calvary?

Against this backdrop of over-kooked (yup, with a K!) humanity, only Kelly Reilly (Flight) as Fr. James’ daughter – he answered his vocation after his wife’s untimely death – visiting from London provides any kind of support worthy of Gleeson’s own understated performance. Critics have called his “career-defining” and “towering” but I think that’s judging it against the flimsy other characterizations around him. He’s a formidable talent when given more than just shady CIA hacks to portray and his twin collaborations with John Boorman, The General and The Tiger’s Tale, are in much better service of his range. Still, it’s a credit to him that he manages to pull a flesh and bone character from the paucity of the role as written, even as the script decides to play that old cinematic staple – the recovering-alcoholic-falls-off-wagon card – and throws a loaded pistol into the mix for good measure.

Director John Michael McDonagh’s previous movie was The Guard, a likeable slice of Irish crime comedy put through the Tarantino blender with Gleeson in the title role. Here his camera is well served by two commanding natural assets: the stunning Atlantic coastline of County Sligo and Gleeson’s equally rugged bear of a face on which hangs heavy the burden of the cross Fr. James is forced to carry. Calvary, named for the mountain of execution where Christ took the place of a sinner, asks you to consider the cost of atoning for modern human frailty. Had the script been a little less “referential” and a little more “reverential”, it might have made a bigger convert of this particular heathen. — Mike Reilly

Ivan Locke is a devoted family man and respected construction engineer. This makes it all the more out-of-character when he abandons his biggest project the night before a critical stage. Instead of heading home, Ivan commences the long drive south to London and a series of telephone calls to deliberately dismantle everything he has worked hard to achieve.

Locke falls into the entertainment classification of extreme ‘bottle drama'; a single location: the interior of Ivan’s SUV on his non-stop rush down the M1 motorway; and a single performer: Tom Hardy as Ivan, supported only by the voices of the characters who come and go in the series of phone calls by which the plot plays itself out. It shares this same conceit with movies such as Phone Booth and All Is Lost but its cinematic twin is most definitely Buried when it comes to strict adherence to setting and narrative device. But whereas Buried had a mystery underpinning the situation and a race-against-time element to generate tension, Locke has no such genre intentions.

The set-up screams ‘high concept’ and this will likely lead viewers to expect twisty turns, bombshell revelations and some climactic resolution at the end of the metaphorical and literal road. None of the above is to be found in Locke so look elsewhere if you want a Buried / Speed crossover. Locke is ultimately–and perhaps solely–a character study.

If I choose to reveal the key plot elements here — Relax! I won’t — I could argue that they are laid out pretty much entirely in the first 10 minutes of the movie. The dots are not hard to join and Ivan has pretty much connected it all for you by the 30 minute mark. Thereafter, the remaining hour of what is essentially a real-time unfolding of the story is concerned merely with the ‘whys’ of Ivan’s decisions with him trying to solve mini-crises that develop at his work site following his abrupt departure and at his intended destination where his presence is desperately required.

Therein lies the central failing of the movie. From the get-go, Ivan has set his mind to his course of action and will not be diverted from it, no matter the personal and professional cost to all concerned. The absence of any potential ‘will-he, won’t-he’ moments and the lack of any apparent wavering on Ivan’s part all drain the movie of dramatic and emotional tension and viewers have to rely purely on making an empathic connection to Ivan’s plight based on their own experiences and attitudes, always a risky proposition in scripted drama. It’s explicitly stated that Ivan himself even has no real emotional stake in the situation which has prompted all this drama in the first place so it will be hard for some viewers to root for a successful outcome to that thread. Equally the damage he’s done to his work situation is a fait-accompli to Ivan and any subsequent fallout will only be detrimental to a handful of minor off-camera characters. Emotional stakes were hard to latch onto for this viewer.

Only the conversations between Ivan and the wife and sons he is betraying have any emotional heft. The exchanges between Hardy and the actress playing his wife on the other end of the line (what little fun to be had was my trying to guess the names behind the familiar voices of Mrs. Locke and Ivan’s hapless Irish work lackey Donal) are nuanced and moving. Indeed, the one moment on which the drama might have pivoted involves the single intersection between Ivan’s personal and work crises. At a crucial juncture, a choice arises and Ivan is gifted with an opportunity to take the course of his uncertain future in a new direction. Sadly, his resolution is unwavering. He doesn’t even blink as he immediately spurns it. Even then, the dilemma resolves itself moments later and we have resumed the straight-line course towards Ivan’s inevitable fate.

The only thing not straight-lined about Locke is Ivan’s spiralling psychological state. It takes big acting shoulders to support a plausible representation of a fragile psyche and Tom Hardy does the heavy lifting here with aplomb. His usual high testosterone onscreen persona is buried beneath a scraggy beard and soft Welsh accent. Ivan is a man struggling to keep from coming apart at the seams and Hardy is literally acting head-and-shoulders (sometimes hands too) above anything he’s done previously. The only false note in the script which lets him down is the device of Locke occasionally ranting to the spectre of his dead father in the back seat. It’s an expositionary means to allow him to reveal the psychological causality of his actions but its very nature demands that Hardy play it as one-note-crazy. A better — and more consistent with the concept — approach might have been to have Ivan occasionally telephone a Samaritans or other crisis-hotline operator and share his daddy issues with a stranger with whom he could not so easily go full Looney Tunes.

In the same clumsy vein, Locke is happy to explicitly hammer out its themes for the audience rather than allow them the joy of self-discovery. Ivan has spent a career constructing buildings which last. He knows that the slightest flaw in their foundations can topple the mightiest of them. I believe the audience would have spotted the metaphor without the need to wedge it into a pep-talk to Donal. In All Is Lost, Robert Redford’s ‘the man’ said next-to-nothing and thereby allowed the audience to project and speculate. Contrastingly, Ivan isn’t done until he has earnestly explained himself to every one of his callers, leaving little room for ambiguity and interpretation. Whether or not you like this version of a bottled character study will depend on your taste for what’s in the bottle. Pass me another cider there, Donal. Slainté! — Mike Reilly