In large part, what made Joe and Andrew Russo’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier such a successful and somewhat transcendent superhero movie was that its going concern wasn’t a global or even galactic catastrophe, but a personal one. The friendship between Brooklyn bros Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan) threatened to fall apart over the course of the film’s explosive events, though, in the end, their lifelong bond endured.

“I’m with you to the end of the line,” Captain Rogers says to his brainwashed, killing-machine friend at the close of Winter Soldier in a chilling, melodramatic declaration of brotherly love. Their bond is once again the beating heart of the story in the Russos’ follow-up, Captain America: Civil War, and it’s the key ingredient that makes Marvel Studios’ latest offering their best yet.

Unlike last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Civil War is an ensemble superhero movie whose heroes don’t get lost in all the ass-kicking commotion. Sure, there’s more than enough ass-kicking to satisfy even the most rabid MCU fan (more on that later), but the impressive thing is that each character has an emotional arc that’s at once affecting and easy to keep track of.

Take for example Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch. In Age of Ultron, we learned that her parents were killed in a city-leveling act of war; at the outset of Civil War, we see her on the other side of that scenario as we watch her inadvertently kill innocents during an Avengers mission in Nigeria. The wicked irony of the situation leaves her in an awful state of mind, but she finds solace in the arms of her otherworldly android teammate Vision (Paul Bettany), who’s feeling romantic butterflies in his semi-synthetic belly for the first time.

You’ll find simple, affecting side stories like this running throughout the movie, but the going concern is the moral divide between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). Following the destructive events in Nigeria, the governments of the world decide it’s time for the Avengers to answer to a higher power, stripping them of the liberty to choose when and where to act. Tony, tormented by guilt (the lives lost in Nigeria, New York and Sokovia as a result of the Avengers’ gigantic battles hang over his head like the sword of Damocles), is in favor of the proposal; Steve still feels the world is safest in the Avengers’ unshackled hands.

Some of the heroes vote with Tony, like Vision, his best buddy, War Machine (Don Cheadle), and the painfully conflicted Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson). Falcon (Anthony Mackie) goes into hiding with his Captain, and they finally track down Bucky, the ever-elusive Winter Soldier, who’s deemed public enemy number one when he’s framed for recent deadly terrorist attacks. When Steve uncovers that the person responsible for the attacks is a man named Zemo (Daniel Bruhl), he gathers fresh recruits to help him stop the mad bomber, including Scarlet Witch, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). Tony’s counter move is to recruit two new faces to the MCU: The Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and a bright, super-powered teenager from the Bronx named Peter Parker (Tom Holland). Yes, Spider-Man’s MCU debut is as amazing (no pun intended) as anyone could have hoped.

The ensuing clash between team Stark and team Rogers (taking place in an evacuated Leipzig/Halle airport) is the most gloriously nerdy thing I’ve ever seen. It’s so fun I wanted to burst, with the Russos giving each of the heroes an incredibly cool moment or two to flex their powers in strange and inventive ways. What really puts things over the top is the dialogue, which showcases each character’s colorful personality in an economic, wildly entertaining way. Spider-Man is fascinated by Bucky’s metal arm (Holland is terrific), Ant-Man is still getting used to the abilities he gained in his solo movie (he even breaks out a new trick), and Black Widow and Hawkeye discuss how bizarre it is to be fighting each other as they pull their punches.

The airport showdown (shot in glorious IMAX) is hard to top, but the climactic one-on-one battle between Iron Man and Captain America (with poor Bucky caught in the middle) raises the stakes to new levels of tear-jerking high drama. The unexpected star of the show here is RDJ, who gives not just his best performance as Stark, but one of the best performances of his career. Civil War is as much his movie as it is Evans’, and the emotional rollercoaster he takes us on is unpredictable and utterly heartbreaking.

Civil War is the best thing Marvel Studios has produced. Not only does it work well as the third act of the ballad of Steve and Bucky, but it sets up the future of the MCU brilliantly. I can’t wait to see how the odd mentor/pupil relationship between Tony and young Peter Parker develops in next year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, and the romance between Scarlet Witch and Vision is so strange and delightful that it may be one of the main reason’s people will shell out even more dough when we arrive at Avengers: Infinity War (or whatever they’re calling it these days). Then there’s Black Panther, whose forthcoming solo movie will mark the first minority-led (and directed) entry for Marvel studios. Somehow, eight years in, the future of the ever-expanding MCU looks brighter than ever.

Green Room is sure to go down as the most overwhelmingly intense movie of 2016, and unless another filmmaker can match Jeremy Saulnier’s knack for suspense, violence, and pulling the rawest performances out of his actors possible, it’ll reign as genre-movie king for a good long while.

Starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Blue Ruin‘s Macon Blair, and Patrick Stewart, the film finds a hardcore band trapped in the green room of a secluded punk rock venue in the forested Northwest, surrounded and outnumbered by murderous neo-nazi thugs led by a cunning leader (Stewart). Over the course of one night, blood and limbs fly, bones break, flesh gets ripped to shreds, and egoes get smashed to pieces as we bear witness to the ensuing melee.

In a roundtable interview, we spoke to Saulnier and Yelchin in San Francisco about the movie, which is in theaters now.

Murder Party was also primarily shot in one location. That was shot about a decade ago. I’m curious how you’ve approached Green Room differently and how you’ve applied the things you’ve learned over the past ten years.
Jeremy: After Murder Party, which is an overnight, sort of contained scenario, I swore I’d never do it again. So…I’m an idiot. I learned a lot about what’s supposedly cheapest and most convenient, which is shooting a film in one location so that you have control over it. But, cinematically, I found it lacking. I was using a great steadycam operator and kind of set him loose, but I didn’t feel like it was fully realized, visually and cinematically.

For Blue Ruin, I did the opposite: tons of locations, open air, eight-page scenes. That was what I was attracted to. Green Room was just an idea I loved but was resisting because of the nature of what it contained. The siege scenario. But I felt like, because of the dynamics of it taking place in the green room of a concert venue during a live show, it was just something I couldn’t let go of.

Visually, I had an exterior element that was kind of swirling and always moving, very visually rich and kinetic. Inside, I had had to work on how to cover these scenes without exhausting the actors. I didn’t quite figure that out because you had to get these performances and you couldn’t be so kinetic. Green Room is much more visually precise and better realized. I wasn’t afraid. When we had to lock a camera and just shoot what the actor was saying, the impact of the performance is what’s really driving the story, not so much how I use the camera. We let the actors lead the way.

You’ve been DP on all of your films until now. What was it like passing on the torch and focusing on directing?
Jeremy: Based on the necessity of this production, it was easy and kind of inevitable. For Blue Ruin, it’s a kind of quiet film. There are about three major dialogue scenes, and the rest is primarily wordless. Every shot was the story. My intuitive approach to how I was moving the camera and how I was framing the camera is how I told the story. I couldn’t do it any other way.

Green Room, with the ensemble cast, the stunts, the bloodwork, the special effects…it was way more of a challenge than Blue Ruin. I wasn’t going to try to shoot this. Sean Porter was brought on because he has a diversity of styles. He isn’t trying to put his imprint on a director’s film. He tries to translate what they’re going for. I saw It Felt Like Love and Kumiko: The Treasure Hunter, which are very different films, and I would never peg them as being shot by the same person. For that reason, I knew that he could translate the visuals as I would have.

I love following your career, Anton. Your role choices are interesting to me. I don’t know you, but from everything I’ve heard, you’re an incredibly intelligent person.
Anton: That’s debatable…[laughs]

I think you exude a keen intellect when you’re onscreen. Do you choose roles that allow you to display that?
Anton: The thought just crossed my mind that I should find someone really stupid to play. [laughs] I think at this point I want to be doing different kinds of characters and changing physicality…It’s hard, because movies don’t really come out in order. Sometimes they never come out. So work that [I] do that in my mind I’m plotting my…not so much career trajectory, but my creative trajectory…a lot of times, people don’t get to see that. Something that I may have done three years ago may come out tomorrow, and three years ago I was on that creative page, but I’m not anymore! You get judged by that moment. For me, at this point, I’m trying to figure out what I can do creatively. It’s about trying to find new things and trying to figure out voices and borrowing from things and learning as much as possible so that I have an archive of things to borrow from.

Jeremy: I can attest to the fact that he is an overthinker. He gave me a huge phone book of notes about his character, not to change the script, but just his insights and how he would steer the character, emotionally. That I loved. Anton has a very good idea of what he wants to do, and he wants to talk about it a lot. Sometimes I want to, you know…

Anton: Not talk about it. [laughs]

Jeremy: This film is so physical. The dialogue, if you look at it line by line…it’s like, what are we saying here? It’s all kind of throwaway. But when you see the character, he’s not very proactive. He’s forced to live or die. He’s not trying to be a cinematic movie hero. He’s forced into that role and has to go kind of full-gonzo to get there. It’s really fun to see it come alive on camera.

Anton, are you the kind of actor who needs to be riled up before a tense scene? This film is obviously full of them.
Anton: It’s just focus. I know Jeremy’s really busy, but I send him all of that stuff. It’s a selfish thing. I need what I’m thinking to come out into the world, even if it’s a two-word approval, like, “Yeah, I agree,” I need that approval so that in the morning I can get up and use that when I go to work. It’s a weird version of focusing. That being said, it’s not just me focusing. I was thinking a lot about Callum and [Imogen] and Alia and Joe, watching those guys. Patrick Stewart on the other side of the door. When you’re part of a cast like this, you’re fortunate enough to have people who are constantly informing what you’re doing.

It’s very touching for me to see Callum’s face when I get hurt [in the movie]. The empathy and kindness he was exuding in that moment aided me so much. I love that guy, weirdly. We’ve never had an experience like that in real life, you know what I mean? He’s a great guy, and we’re friends. But there was something about that…you share really intimate things with people [on movies] that you just wouldn’t, even if you’ve been friends with them for years. You don’t share the things you’re forced to share [on a movie set].

The big thing I was scared of was that [the cast] would get together as a band and dislike each other.

Jeremy: That wouldn’t have happened. That’s how I cast movies.

Anton: Well, I was still scared, but those guys are good dudes. They’re good people.

Jeremy: The environment we create is, every actor on set wants to be there. They were invested. When you have that chemistry, that mutual support…it becomes real. Everyone feeds off of each other. When you’re in the room, you’re at the mercy of every single performance. You cannot have one that’s off. That real-life energy, that charge, was palpable in every take.

What’s the message of the picture?
Jeremy: There are lots of layers there. There’s subtle political commentary in there. There’s a thesis to the movie, and that’s more about stripping down ideology and affiliation and who we think we are in labels. It’s about a learned aggression and violence…all sorts of shit. But really, it’s entertainment. It’s about good, old-fashioned escapist filmmaking. Drawing from my favorite experiences with Blue Ruin, which were derived from watching audiences respond to intention…that was so fucking exhilarating for me.

With Green Room, what I wanted to do was infuse an archive, my experience in the punk rock and hardcore scene. I wanted to have something to show for it. I wanted to make a genre film but infuse it with the energy of the hardcore punk scene, which I really loved and also defined my youth.

What are some new things the movie brings to the table as far as genre filmmaking?
Jeremy: I really try to not let specific genres influence me. I’m certainly collectively influenced by all of the films I’ve ever seen. I did watch Straw Dogs for a reference. I knew this plot wasn’t going to be very thick. Straw Dogs was about the experience and tension and tone. A very thin plot. This is the point of Green Room. We’re not going for a convoluted plot. Contrived plot twists, injected character conflict or love stories that just don’t belong…it’s this insane, visceral experience. It’s an overnight clusterfuck, and it’s terrifying. It’s designed to be the most tense film I could ever imagine.

I approached it as a war film. That’s what it was. It’s a siege scenario. It has aesthetic elements that could be attributed to the horror genre. Certainly a lot of graphic violence. The way I approached it with the production design and the actors was that it was a very grounded war film, but on the other side of the door, there are amateurs.

We’ve been talking a lot about actors.
Anton: What’s wrong with that? [laughs]

[laughs] Jeremy, is there a technique you have when working with your actors?
Jeremy: [To Anton] What is my technique? No, seriously. Do I have a technique? I don’t perceive myself as having a technique.

Anton: I think, when you watch Jeremy’s movies, there’s a real sensitivity to performance. There are two parts of me. There’s the really critical, film-nerd part of me that loves that, and then there’s the part of me where I’m like, “I really didn’t like that movie, but I want to work with that director because he loves actors.” I think you can see that in Jeremy’s films. I love Macon [Blair]. He’s such a good actor, you know? What a beautiful performance in Blue Ruin. I was geeking out on meeting him. But you see in Blue Ruin that there’s a real sensitivity to people’s performances, and that’s what it’s like on set.

I know that Jeremy was going through a lot of stuff that we had no idea about, actually. And I’d say, in a microcosm, that is your approach. We had no idea what Jeremy was dealing with outside of just trying to man this ship on the day, and it was really about being sensitive to what we were doing and trying to get the right moments. It’s a real love for performance that, as an actor, you appreciate. It’s giving you a chance to make stuff, and I think that is a way of working with actors. That is an approach. I’m sure there are directors who don’t like to work with actors and don’t know how to be sensitive to actors. The groundedness in these films comes from his sensitivity.

The Jungle Book, Disney’s latest cartoon-to-live-action adaptation, gets a lot of things right: It’s wildly entertaining, full of great vocal performances by a stacked A-list cast, and boasts a hilarious/creepy musical number by none other than Christopher Walken. But, as delightful as it is hearing Walken sing a jazzy Disney classic (fond memories of Pennies From Heaven come rushing back), the thing that makes this John Favreau-directed romp so enjoyable is its spellbinding presentation, which is worth the price of admission alone. This thing looks and sounds like pure movie magic and elicits the same gasps of wonder the original 1967 animated feature did at the time. Hell, this modern update may even be better. Time will tell.

Aside from star Neel Sethi, who plays our tumbling, red-loinclothed hero, Mowgli, every character is a computer generated, anatomically correct animal. Cartoons they are not: wolves don’t have insanely big “Disney eyes,” and birds don’t suddenly flash inexplicably human-toothed grins. These animals look real. They’re of our world. The animators and sound designers have done such good work here that it’s hard to express in words how damn amazing this thing looks, so let’s dive into the other aspects of the movie as a sort of respite before I continue gushing about the sound and visuals.

The story feels like a mash-up of the original 1967 animated musical and 1994’s The Lion King (several images—a stampede, a fiery final battle—will give you deja vu). It’s a combination that goes together like peanut butter and jelly. But PB and J can get old (especially when you find it). There are no ideas, themes, plot contours, or characters in this modern update that feel fresh or exciting. This isn’t a big issue, though, as the narrative formula Favreau and his team follow is tried and true and will work like gangbusters for those stepping into the theater expecting nothing more or less than a good ol’ time at the movies.

Plot-wise, screenwriter Justin Marks stays pretty close to the ’67 original. Mowgli is found in the jungle by stoic panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), who brings the “man-cub” to a pack wolves led by the noble Akela (Breaking Bad‘s Giancarlo Esposito). Nurturing Mowgli as his adopted mother is Rashka (Lupita Nyong’o), who rears him as her own. There’s no greater threat in the jungle than prowling tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba), and Mowgli has the unlucky distinction of being at the top of his kill list (for reasons learned later in flashback).

To keep Mowgli out of the tiger’s clutches, Bagheera leaves to take the boy to the nearest man village. They get separated along the way thanks to a ferocious interception by Khan, and Mowgli falls in with loafer bear Baloo (a game Bill Murray, which is always a treat). Mowgli uses a pulley contraption to knock bee hives down from a high ridge (the animals disapprovingly refer to his handmade tools as “tricks”) and the two become fast friends. They, in fact, break out a jaunty rendition of “Bear Necessities,” which will please fans of the original and likely underwhelm youngsters who bring no nostalgia into the theater.

Baloo and Bagheera embark on a rescue mission when Mowgli’s captured by monkeys and taken to King Louie (Walken), a gigantic orangutan who’s like the jungle’s Don Corleone. He wants the boy to harness the power of the “red flower” and pass it along, making him the true king of the jungle. The “red flower,” of course, is fire, and when Mowgli learns that his family has been terrorized by Khan in his absence, he chooses instead to use the “red flower” as a tool of revenge.

It’s hard to understand how the digital artists made the animal characters both anatomically accurate while also expressing the wide range of emotions brought forth by the voice actors. Animals can be extremely expressive with their faces, but the fact that these onscreen beasts are speaking English and it doesn’t look weird at all is a feat of animation that’s hard to wrap your head around. Most CG animals look too clinical and fall headfirst into the uncanny valley, but these creatures look utterly seamless. While the plot isn’t anything special, the movie has a unique momentum to it in that you’re constantly dying to see which animal will be brought to life next (the elephants are particularly wondrous).

The unsung heroes of The Jungle Book, no doubt, are the sound designers and engineers. Their work here is astonishing. The animated characters look great, but what really sells them and makes them look convincing are the sounds they make as they walk around the lush jungle environments. Baloo is a big ass bear, so when he plops down to eat his honey, you can hear and, more importantly, feel the thud. Great sound design typically goes unnoticed, but in the iconic scene where Mowgli gets seduced by giant snake Kaa (Scarlett Johansson), her hypnotizing hisses swirl around you and squeeze like her coils, Johansson’s sultry voice fading in and out, swinging back and forth on the speakers.

Favreau’s always had a knack for giving his movies a sense of constant propulsion, even when there isn’t that much going on. His movies tend to just glide by, and The Jungle Book is no exception. It’s a rollercoaster thrill ride with simple, somewhat clichéd set pieces that nevertheless work like gangbusters because Favreau’s a good filmmaker who knows what beats to hit to get maximum excitement out of an action scene. There’s a tense hide-and-seek sequence involving Mowgli and Louie in the monkey temple that we’ve all seen before (you see the jump scare coming from miles away), but the way it’s edited and shot is just so riveting that you can’t help but eat it up.

There is one aspect of the movie that is, unfortunately, a constant distraction: Sethi’s dialogue delivery. Honestly, the kid’s just not good at saying his lines convincingly, and it makes some scenes just feel weird. It’s not his fault, really. He’s acting opposite imaginary characters whose voices are provided by some of the best actors in the business. But the sad reality is that it’s pretty jarring to hear this kid speak semi-awkwardly while his co-stars coast through their lines like butter.

What Sethi’s is good at is emoting with his body; he’s a physical actor, and a talented one at that. He’s a convincing wolf child, leaping through the trees and sliding down slopes with an effortlessness and sense of purpose, like jungle parkour is all he’s ever known. The film’s best, most touching moment sees Mowgli help a herd of elephants save one of their young, who’s fallen into a pit. The sun is rising, and in semi-silhouette, we see him save the calf (using one of his clever “tricks”) and wave goodbye to his new friends. He feels honest in moments like these, and thankfully, there are several. Sethi’s a mostly worthy Mowgli in a more than worthy retelling of a gem from the golden age of Disney Animation. If they can keep up this standard when bringing more cartoon classics into the world of live action, I say keep ’em coming.

Writer’s note: If you can, watch the movie in IMAX 3-D. The sound is spectacular and the 3-D is some of the best I’ve seen. Also, the closing credits definitely benefit from the added effect.

Sold, an adaptation of the Patricia McCormick novel of the same name, follows a Nepalese girl named Lakshmi (Niyar Saikia) who falls into a world of sex trafficking and abuse when she travels to India. She’s imprisoned in a brothel called Happiness House with several other children, watched over by their tyrannical brothel madam (Susmita Mukerjee). Life becomes a constant struggle as Lakshmi suffers the harrowing brutality of her dire situation, though she never gives up hope that, one day, she and her new companions will find freedom.

The film also stars Parambrata Chatterjee, Gillian Anderson and David Arquette.

A movie designed to raise awareness about the rampant child trafficking going on around the world, Sold will see a limited theatrical release this weekend, where audience members will be encouraged to bring the film to their hometown, college, high school, or private group. For more information, visit soldthemovie.com

We spoke to Mukerjee and director Jeffrey Brown in San Francisco, where the film is opening this weekend at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.

I’m interested in getting your input on this considering the film’s unique strategy to spread awareness. The movie market has started to squish, in a way, over the past several years. Blockbusters are doing well and small, independent pictures have more avenues to find an audience than ever before. But mid-sized productions are sort of going away or not doing so well at the box office. It’s an interesting time.
Jeffrey: It’s very interesting. It’s a very different world than ten years ago, five years ago. For us, the theatrical distribution of this film is a way for everyone to learn that they can bring our film to their community. Our film was really created as a weapon for change. You can watch it at the theater and bring it to your high school, your college campus, your faith-based community, and you can start using it as a fundraising tool. On our website, soldthemovie.com, you can learn about our partners and you can learn about the fund that we’re creating. We’re channeling money to survivors of trafficking. What we want to do is shine a light on child trafficking. Every year, 1.8 million kids—and I think that’s a massive underestimate—are trafficked every year.

I’m sure the research process was…well, I’m sure it was many things.
Jeffrey: We followed the same track as [Patricia McCormick,] the author of the book that we optioned and turned into a movie. We did the same research she did. We went to the same organizations and went to many beyond that as well to really understand the issue. We took our cast and crew into red light areas, and they had long, in-depth conversations with survivors.

Susmita: I went to the red light areas because I was playing the part of madam. I needed to see what it would be like to be in the head of a person like this who would so ruthlessly sell thirteen and twelve-year-old girls. It was a very difficult and dark journey. The perception of the brothel madam…it’s not what it is in the Bollywood movies. That’s very glittery…it wasn’t real. It was a very difficult thing to go through the head of such a woman. Meeting several of these women helped me connect to them. I was privy to very, very intimate stories. Not all of it was used in the film’s narrative, but to me, as a subtext, I could understand very clearly the kind of dark character I was playing.

It must have been something else entirely to step into the shoes of someone like that.
Susmita: It was so devastating. I watched a screening the other day…there’s a schism. I cannot feel that, oh, I did that particular scene that way. I don’t know who she is. It’s very overpowering. It’s something rancid. Decay. And yet, from this decay, a flower can be born. It can become so big that it destroys the darkness.

If somebody looks at this movie as a propaganda film…so be it. If to do propaganda is to be able to make a difference, so be it. Who says art has to be something intellectual, something where you just see visuals and soak into the beauty of the frames and feel happy? You’re not paying money just to be happy. If you want to be happy, go dance in the rain, soak in the sun.

Jeffrey: Our film is about a very heavy topic, and we spent a lot of time aesthetically figuring out how to tell the story in a way where people would be inspired to action and not overwhelmed and depressed. You can enjoy the movie as a piece of art but also be inspired to take action. We use all the tools a filmmaker has. There’s a Banksy quote I love. He says, “If Michaelangelo and Leonardo and DaVinci were alive today, they’d be making Avatar, not painting chapel ceilings.” He said, if you really want to change the world and not simply redecorate it, make movies. It’s democratic, and it’s the art form that will change the world.

I feel like our film is already doing that. We’ve literally built 20 schools in Nepal. Nepal had 5,000 schools destroyed in the earthquake. We built 20 with one showing of our film.

It sounds like the amount work you guys are doing is a pretty big sacrifice on your part.
Jeffrey: Susmita came on her own dime from Mumbai. Another actress came from London on her own dime. From L.A., New York. Everyone who’s worked on this film has been touched by meeting these kids, who have gone through this harrowing experience. We’re in the service of them. No kid should be treated as a commodity.

As you said, you want to inspire people with this film. I imagine making it inspiring was difficult considering the awful things we see and hear. It’s a challenging film, too.
Jeffrey: Structurally, I think it’s most similar to The Shawshank Redemption. An innocent is forced into a prison situation. The person who runs the prison is incredibly powerful and corrupt. The innocent person is helping others while trying to figure out how to get out of there. There are many movies about disenfranchised children. Imagine if Slumdog Millionaire had a social agenda. How powerful would that be? We could have gotten thousands of kids educated and out of the slums of India. Why aren’t we using the most powerful art form for good? For me, this is a massive experiment to see how much we can do to help kids.

Susmita, you said something that caught my ear. You mentioned that, if people think this is a propaganda film, then so be it. I think people have certain expectations of what a movie can and should be or do, and they don’t know what to do with movies that exist outside of their definition.
Susmita: It’s not just about that Friday on which a film releases and you’re counting how many people see it and how much money is coming in. This movie was not made for that. The director and producers were very clear from the outset that this movie is not about making them billions. It’s a tool of social change. It starts from your the heart, not your pocket.

It’s a stunning lineup this week on the Way Too Indiecast as Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, joins the show along with director Marc Abraham to talk about their new movie I Saw the Light, based on the final years of country music icon Hank Williams’ life. Mr. Hiddleston also talks about working with Elizabeth Olsen, learning to sing with country legends, and his take on irascible MCU fans.

Also joining the show is filmmaker Dennis Hauck, whose new film Too Late is in theaters now, exclusively screening in 35mm. The film stars John Hawkes as a private detective and is divided into five short stories, each consisting of one, uninterrupted shot. He talks about why the movie took years to make, his decision to only screen on 35mm, working with John Hawkes, and everything else you need to know about one of the most unique film releases of the year.

Topics

• Tom Hiddleston and Marc Abraham Talk I Saw the Light (5:36)
• Dennis Hauck Talks Too Late (43:03)

Articles Referenced

• I Saw the Light Interview
• Too Late Review

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Director Marc Abraham takes a unique approach to the musician biopic with I Saw the Light, a movie spanning the six music-filled, final years of Hank Williams’ life. Intertwining the country icon’s songs with his turbulent life experiences (revolving largely around his wife, Audrey, played by Elizabeth Olsen), the film focuses not on Williams’ artistry, but the events and environments the art was born out of. From his agonizing bout with spina bifida to his unfaithful marriage to his spiraling addiction to drugs and alcohol, Abraham covers the singer’s darkest days, which culminated with his death at the early age of 29 in 1953.

The film’s star is fan favorite Tom Hiddleston, who bears a striking resemblance to Williams and sings every note of the legendary songs we see onscreen. It’s a layered role with several shades of grey lurking beneath the surface, but the English actor came prepared, having spent long periods of time in Nashville with some of country music’s most respected artists, learning to sing in an accent far removed from his own. The work shows in his tortured performance, which is simultaneously tragic and celebratory of Williams’ spirit.

In San Francisco we spoke to Hiddleston and Abraham about I Saw the Light, which is in theaters now.

The opening shot really knocked me over.
Tom: What’s interesting about that shot is that we shot it very fast. Marc had actually given himself and me some time, generously, in the schedule. We had a very tight schedule. We shot 130 pages in 39 days. We had to move quickly. He had actually created a space in the schedule to make sure we had time to breathe so that we didn’t have to rush it. The opening is the first time that the audience will hear me sing, without musical accompaniment, and it’s a declaration of intent. Interestingly enough, after having created all that space and all that time, it didn’t take very long.

I think it was a brilliant and brave decision by Marc, and terrifying for me initially, to start the film with a very cinematic sequence that invites the audience to engage with the poetry of Hank Williams in a completely different way. They may come in expecting to hear “Hey Good Lookin’,” they may come in expecting to hear “Lovesick Blues.” They may come in expecting to see white fringe and cowboy hats and clichés of country music. What Marc did is, he said, “Here’s something else.”

Marc: As Tom said very eloquently, as he always does, it was a statement of intent. There are all these expectations, and a lot of people think they know Hank Williams’ music, but what they don’t understand is that he was one of the most important literary influences of the late 20th century because his poetry changed the way music was actually looked at. The lyrics were extraordinarily vulnerable for a man to be singing. “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” Men weren’t doing that. What I wanted to make sure was that people were hit smack-dab on the jaw with the beauty of his words. The way to do that, I thought, was to make it as unadorned as possible and create it out of space and out of time and, as Tom said, without horsecrap on the boots and the kind of hee-haw aspect people were kind of expecting.

The purpose of it was also to say, this is not an imitation of Hank Williams. This is not us trying to mimic him. This is our version, a portrait of a very important artist, a young man. We had the benefit of one of the world’s great cinematographers, Dante Spinotti. We shot it on a stage and we had painted a giant black circle and hung black all around it with a ton of smoke. We put a stool in the middle of it and asked Mr. Hiddleston to come on out. He came on out, he sat on that stool, we floated those cameras, and Tom, as Hank, was about as naked as you can be. We wanted to let people know right off, this is how naked we’re prepared to go, this is how it’s going to sound, this is who this man is, and he’s doing his own singing.

The movie’s not about Hank writing songs. The songs are almost like punctuation. I think that’s an interesting approach.
Marc: I love that you say that. I have never cared for watching movies where artists are doing their painting or typing at the typewriter and tearing the [paper] out, other than maybe The Shining. That’s not something that I even know how to do. Nor was I interested in any of the psychological explanations for why Hank Williams became Hank Williams. He was a poor kid from Alabama. Why he became who he was and how he had that inside of him…you could get Sigmund Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard…they could all spend time trying to figure it out. I doubt anybody could answer that question. What we wanted to do was show an artist as a young man. Not the roots of his psychoanalysis but the cultural environment and personal environment, which is where the fertilizer was.

That’s, in fact, how Tom and I ended up working together. People think he probably played the guitar for me and I sat back, scratching my jaw, and thought, “Well, can he be Hank Williams?” You know how we did it? We talked about what movie we wanted to make. He and I, who had gotten to know each other over a very lengthy period of time; what did we actually want to do?

Tom: Marc drew together the music with the marriage and the man. The placement of the music…What I’d hoped people would see was that these songs came out of his experiences. That’s the other thing: These songs and this film are about a man who loved women. Every song you could listen to that Hank wrote is about women. It’s about falling out of love, being in the doghouse, loneliness, separation from women.

“Why don’t you love me like you used to do/why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart.”

“You’re cheatin’ heart will make you weep/you’ll cry and cry and try to sleep.”

“You’re my gal and I’m your fella/you dress up in your frock of yella/you’ll look swell and I’ll look swell/setting the woods on fire.”

This is a guy with a huge love of women. His whole career was about flirtation and sexuality. I think what was so brilliant about Marc’s script is that he really drew that together, the songs and Hank’s relationship with women. It’s very telling that the majority of characters in the film, apart from Hank Williams, are women. And they’re played by women: Elizabeth Olsen, Cherry Jones, Maddie Hasson, Wrenn Schmidt. Those were the major figures in his life. That was the fascinating central thesis of the screenplay. The way the songs

The way the songs were dispersed, as you say, was like punctuation and expressive of other things in Hank’s life. I suppose the best example of that is at the end of the end of the film when I sing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He’s not long for this world at that point. Is he singing to himself? I think so. Probably. I think he’s singing about regret. But he could also be singing to Audrey.

So…I’m kind of a failed country musician. [laughs]
Tom: [laughs] That was the last thing I expected to come out of your mouth.

It’s true! I tried to play country music for years, but I’m from [California] and I don’t have the accent to sing that kind of music.
Tom: I don’t either!

But you have license to adopt it because you’re an actor. That’s an incredible opportunity. I’m so jealous. In your research, you got to spend time with Rodney Crowell! That’s amazing!
Tom: Yeah, it’s amazing. And not just Rodney, but everybody he knows, everyone who was open to working with me. The generosity of spirit shown to me by the musicians I met in Nashville is something I’ll never forget. Within three days, I was in Ray Kennedy’s studio, recording music on the same equipment Hank recorded on, standing around a single microphone with Richard Bennett, Chris Scruggs, Rodney Crowell, Wes Langlois…These guys have been making this music for years, and they were just jamming. To sing my first cover of “Lovesick Blues” with them and the band is an insane privilege. You’re absolutely right: a gift.

When some people try to sing country, it sounds fake. I should know. [laughs] It’s almost like a caricature. You really have to connect with the lyric. You can tell that you get the emotion behind Hank’s lyrics.
Tom: That all came from Rodney, in a way. I didn’t know where to start. He said, “You have to find out what these songs mean to you. There’s no way you’re going to transmit the power of these songs if you don’t invest yourself inside them.” It’s got to be real. I love the challenge of that; it is an acting challenge. It’s a challenge of interpretation. Whenever you take on a big acting role, you’re interpreting that character’s emotional truth and filling it with your own. The same is true of these songs. When I was singing “Move It On Over,” that’s my mischief, my rebellion. When I’m singing “Cold, Cold Heart,” that’s my sadness. It’s filtered through the prism of Hank, but really, it’s me. Has to be.

There’s something special about Elizabeth that I can’t put my finger on. What is it?
Marc: She has a bearing beyond her years. She’s 26 years old or something, but she has a weight to her that’s undeniable. That’s something that’s genetically inside her. I personally feel that the thing she brings to Audrey that is just so essential is that she’s a keenly intelligent woman who doesn’t really suffer fools or foolishness much. Because of that, she invested Audrey with a sense of intelligence. She took a character who is easily dismissed as being a shrew, a bitch, a difficult person, Yoko breaking up the Beatles…because of her bearing of intelligence, when she performs and you see her with Hank, you come away with, “You know what? You think I’m an asshole? You think I’m a bitch? You try living with this guy.”

Tom: She’s very honest. I suppose it’s best illustrated by describing the opposite. I’ve worked opposite actors who are immaculate in delivering what they’ve prepared, and sometimes they don’t have the life experience to represent the particular emotional truth. So they reach for an idea of what they think that is. Lizzy is incapable of falsity in her acting. She has extraordinary integrity. The choices she makes are very instinctive. When you’re acting opposite Lizzy, you’re acting opposite a real person. The magic of the scene comes from the rally you play with each other. That’s when acting’s fun, to be honest. When you’re doing preparation, that’s a solitary activity. When you’re reading a script, that’s a solitary activity. There’s so much about acting that is, necessarily, a solitary activity. But when you’re on set with your scene partner, the beauty of it is that you take the leap together. You don’t really know where the scene is going to go, and if you’re working with someone really good, as she is, what you have to do is listen.

This is kind of an impossible question, but I’m going to ask you both anyway. You’ve spent so much time getting to know Hank Williams and the man he was. In your opinion, what was his greatest fear?
Marc: This is not to diminish the question, but there is no possible way I can give you a sense of what his greatest fear was. I can tell you that he was incredibly vulnerable. What he wrote was undeniably vulnerable. That’s what he was telling us. I know those are feelings that he must have had. I have no idea what his greatest fear was. You could surmise that one of the things that he most wished had happened in his life was that he had a daddy.

Tom: I can tell you a number of things I don’t think he feared. He didn’t fear death. I don’t think he feared any one person…he wasn’t afraid of people. Maybe his greatest fear was of losing himself, somehow diverting from his own integrity. That there were people who would try to reshape him or change who he was, smooth out his rough edges so that he would stop being him.

Tom, you’re so generous with your fans, me included. We see stuff about you on the Internet and it just makes our day. It makes us smile.
Tom: Thanks, buddy.

It’s great! Thank you. We appreciate it.
Tom: I love what I do. I really love it. And I wouldn’t get to do that without an audience to watch it. There is no such thing as acting in a vacuum. I started in the theater, and I learned that the audience is an integral part of the conversation. I came from the audience. When I became an actor, I just wanted to become a part of the conversation in the way actors I admire contributed to it. Bruce Springsteen said that his life’s work is a conversation. I’m flattered that if I have any fans, they follow my curiosity into wherever my work takes me. I don’t take that for granted. There are people who are willing to pay money to see my work. I wouldn’t be allowed to do what I do without that, so I have enormous gratitude. It’s still a source of constant surprise and delight that I have fans at all.

Some fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are so starved for advance information about the stories you’re telling with those movies.
Tom: I am still so surprised and grateful that I’m allowed to make a living doing what I do. I have loved cinema and theater for as long as I can remember for in all its variety and diversity. The idea that I get to be a part of it is extraordinary to me. But even as much as I’ve loved it, I love to be surprised by it. I don’t want to know too much about a film before I watch it. I might see a trailer, but I don’t want to see articles about it, I don’t want to read reviews about it, I don’t want to know what happens to the main character. I don’t want spoilers. I want to be surprised.

I just worked with Bill Corso, who was the makeup head on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. We were working together for three months. He had so many stories he could have told me. But in the makeup bus it was banned. We just didn’t go there. I didn’t want to know what happened to Han Solo. If I had found out, I would have strangled him! He’s Harrison Ford’s makeup artist and he could have told me that in a second, but he was so respectful.

Listen, this is really getting to the heart of the matter. You’re sitting in the theater and you hear the opening fanfare. Maybe it’s the letters of Universal spinning around a globe, maybe it’s 20th Century Fox. It’s the flickering Marvel logo, the Lucasfilm thing. A drama teacher told me this once when I was training: The audience’s capacity for delight at that moment when the lights dim and the music starts is at one hundred percent. There’s an absolutely palpable electricity in the air. If you know what’s going to happen [in the movie beforehand], it’s all over! All I’m trying to do is keep the magic of that expectation alive. I understand the enthusiasm, I understand the curiosity. Unfortunately, my mother and father raised me with some self-discipline, so you won’t get those secrets out of me!

If you saw her recent hosting stint on Saturday Night Live, you know that it’s easy to imagine an alternate universe in which Melissa McCarthy is an SNL alum, using the late night show as a springboard in very much the same way Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have. McCarthy’s new comedic venture, The Boss, directed by her husband, Ben Falcone, feels like a movie based on one of her most popular characters from said alternate-universe SNL (in our reality, it’s a character she, Falcone and collaborator Steve Mallory created during their time with The Groundlings). It’s an unabashed star-vehicle that, while not as successful or funny as last year’s Spy, is still solid entertainment and even harbors some heartfelt moments that add some unexpected dimension to an otherwise straightforward story.

McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, an enterprising billionaire/motivational speaker who wins at everything, stomps over everyone, and pushes away anyone who gets too close to her heart. Ethically impaired and insanely confident, Darnell is both a symbol of white privilege and female empowerment, giving McCarthy lots of room to flaunt her gift of gab and sling inventive vulgarities like only she can (the movie’s R rating is essential). One minute she’s asking her dutiful assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) to apply whitener to her teeth, a plastic contraption holding her mouth open so wide she looks like the Predator; the next, she’s demanding her helicopter pilot remove his shirt as they fly off into the night sky. Darnell is McCarthy’s critique on rich, greedy people and it’s really funny for the most part though some jokes (like a recurring one involving her bullying a young girl for not being effeminate enough) fall absolutely flat. Overall, it’s a sharp performance with some hit-or-miss material, which is common for movies of The Boss‘ ilk.

The story starts with a montage origin story, showing how Michelle grew up an orphan, suffering rejection after rejection as she struggled to find a home and a family. Eventually, she gives up and adopts a one-versus-all attitude, becoming a cutthroat, take-no-prisoners, turtleneck-wearing finance mogul. One of her victims on her rise to the top was ex-lover and fellow big-business bastard Renault (Peter Dinklage), who’s since dedicated his career to stealing and piggybacking on Michelle’s success (though he still has a burning passion for her “wonderful body”). Renault is presented with the perfect opportunity to strike Michelle down when she’s arrested for a white-collar crime that lands her in rich-person jail for a while (inmate tennis court and all) and results in the government seizing all of her assets and belongings.

The only person Michelle can turn to is Claire, who’s hesitant to take her former, tactless, self-obsessed boss in from off the street. Her apartment is cramped as it is, but Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson, cute as a button and full of potential) convinces her to lend a helping hand. From there, a family drama develops, with Michelle building a Girl Scout-adjacent brownie-selling empire for Rachel and her friends; everything goes swimmingly until Claire and Rachel start to feel like a family, prompting Michelle to run away scared and sell the company to the slimy Renault. It’s as contrived a plot as any, but McCarthy makes it work with a tearful scene that sees Michelle admit to her deepest faults. In a movie full of absurdist, in-your-face humor (in an Anchorman-inspired fight scene, McCarthy clotheslines a little girl in slo-mo), this admission of guilt actually feels real, almost jarringly so. The rest of the chosen-family drama that plays out isn’t nearly as genuine, though, which is a big problem considering that the story essentially hinges on the relationship between the three leading women.

The crudeness of the comedy won’t be for everyone, but I took a fair measure of enjoyment in watching a Girl Scout gang war break out in a quiet, posh neighborhood. Screwball physical comedy is well within McCarthy’s wheelhouse, and she goes for it big-time, from getting pancaked by a faulty sofabed to selling the classic fall-down-the-stairs. Perhaps the film’s biggest feather in its cap is that it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors—this is a movie driven by women, with men existing only on the periphery, which is always refreshing in the male-dominated Hollywood landscape. McCarthy’s been better in other projects, but The Boss is nonetheless a crudely entertaining studio comedy and a solid showcase of the surging actor’s many talents.

Few filmmakers can put together a hangout movie like Richard Linklater has, and his crowning achievement in that realm is, to this day, 1993’s high school cult classic Dazed and Confused. The movie’s trailer recommended you “watch it with a bud,” but most of us who’ve seen it know that there’s no need; Linklater’s wonderfully funny, charismatic, super cool characters are all the company you could ever want.

Billed as the “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, Linklater’s latest, Everybody Wants Some, follows its predecessor’s formula to great success, its director’s tools now several times sharper than before. The two films share a general locale with both taking place in Southeast Texas, but while Dazed followed its characters on the last day of high school in the ’70s, the new film takes us to the early ’80s, following a fictional university’s baseball team as they shack up and party on over the long weekend before the start of the fall semester.

Bromance and romance overflow as we watch the boys get acquainted with each other and with the pretty girls scattered around their little college town. Our in is Jake (Blake Jenner), a chipper freshman who’s joining the team as pitcher. When he arrives at the semi-decrepit campus house designated for the team, he’s met with a mixed reaction: the older players don’t take kindly to pitchers, while Jake’s fellow wide-eyed newbies have no problem palling around. The common denominator is the team’s passion for partying, and party they do. By day, they laze about, smoke pot, sit in circles and space out to psychedelic rock records; by night, they’re tearing it up at local clubs and trashing their already-crumbling abode beyond recognition with all-night ragers.

While this may sound like a re-up of Animal House, the film actually skews more toward the arthouse, with Linklater threading some unexpected poignancy underneath all of the (incredibly funny, entertaining) shenanigans. Jake’s more than happy to partake in all the meathead madness, but as we learn more about where he’s from and the people he used to hang out with, it becomes clear that he’s a bit smarter and more compassionate than the lovable lugs he’s bunking up with. Jake’s full personality is brought out when he meets Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a theater major with the proverbial key to his heart. She has a way of stopping him dead in his tracks, and their hot August romance is a showstopper in itself; Jenner and Deutch are that rare onscreen couple who are so easy with each other that you suspect their romance may spill over into the real world.

Enough can’t be said about the rest of the feathery-haired cast as well. Square-jawed Tyler Hoechlin plays team captain McReynolds, whose violent competitive streak is at first repugnant, though his die-hard dedication to the team makes him more endearing as the weekend rolls on. Each of the dozen-or-so housemates has a similar, gradual development to their character that’s facilitated by both the memorable performances and Linklater’s uncanny dialogue, which sounds so natural it’s staggering to learn that absolutely none of it is ad-libbed. Some of the movie’s highlights involve the guys just lounging around, saying stupid stuff. It’s easy, simple viewing on one level, but the artistry lies in the affection that grows for the characters as we spend time with them.

Everyone will walk out of this movie with a favorite character, and the fact that (at my screening, at least) they varied wildly speaks to how great they are. There’s Finn (Glen Powell), the faux-intellectual ladies man; Dale (J. Quinton Johnson), the cool-as-a-cucumber, cultured team veteran; Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the golden-haired, guru-like stoner with a secret; Beuter (Will Brittain), the cowboy outsider with a needy girlfriend back home. The list goes on, and every one of them is fantastic and hilarious. My favorite is Plummer (Temple Baker), a secondary character who nonetheless makes a big impression with his sleepy-dumb-guy appeal. I had a friend just like him in college (that’s a line you’ll hear a lot of people say walking out of the theater). This was actually Baker’s first acting role, but Linklater’s casting instincts are ridiculously good at this point in his career. The chemistry between the cast members is like butter, which is and always will be the key to hangout movies.

One of the most extraordinary things about Boyhood is that it doesn’t have any sort of forced dramatic agenda. It’s a quality Everybody Wants Some!! shares; there are no big fist fights, shocking betrayals or tearful breakup scenes to be found. There’s emotion running throughout, but it all flows and arises organically, which takes away a lot of the anxiety we’re used to swallowing in coming-of-age tales. This is easy viewing through and through, though that’s not to say it’s shallow. It’s far from it, in fact; living with Linklater’s characters as they explore life, unsupervised, without inhibition, engages the heart and takes you back to a freewheeling, optimistic state of mind and body that many of us let go of a long time ago.

Like his 2011 film Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special was born out of fear, specifically the fear of losing his son.

“I think, really, we’re terrified of losing them, so we’re going to try to figure out who they are to try to help them. Help them become the ones who manifest their own destiny,” the director told me during an interview I conducted a couple of weeks back. That fatherly fear is at the core of the film, though the story blossoms into something much bigger, touching on themes of friendship, homeland security, science, and religion, all in the mode of a sci-fi thriller.

Michael Shannon stars as a man escorting his supernaturally gifted son to a secret location, all while evading an armed religious sect and U.S. military forces. Aiding them on their journey is an old friend (Joel Edgerton) and the boy’s mother (Kirsten Dunst); a government scientist (Adam Driver), meanwhile, tries to understand the family’s plight as he tracks their location.

Terrifically thrilling and deeply affecting, Midnight Special is yet another showcase by one of this generation’s very best visual storytellers and opens in theaters this weekend.

Some people consider your movies to be vague or overly ambiguous. That’s maybe the biggest criticism levied against you.
It’s funny how everybody wants to be polite. Obviously, I made the film with an open ending on purpose. It’s like, let’s talk about it! If you don’t like it…maybe, rather than just being entrenched in your position, if we talk about it, you might be illuminated on something. It was funny, I had a good conversation with a lady in Berlin about [the movie]. She had a very specific place where she thought I should end the movie. She was very specific about not liking the end of the movie, and I said, “That’s cool. Where would you end the movie?” She told me, and I thought, that would be a terrible ending! She was like, “Well, it’s right. That’s where you should have ended it.” I was like, I really don’t think you’re right! I didn’t convince her, but it was at least fun to have a conversation.

So you do enjoy those conversations.
I do, yeah.

I do, too. If I meet a filmmaker and I didn’t like their movie, maybe, and I get illuminated by their insight…I love that.
The reality is, making movies is really complex. It’s a strange algebra. There are so many variables that go into them. I would be shocked if you met a filmmaker who said, “My film’s perfect,” you know? I don’t know if I want to be friends with that person.

Tommy Wiseau.
[laughs] It goes beyond ego. I want these films to be conversation starters, so of course it makes sense that I would want to have conversations about them. As long as people don’t ask me too many specifics about things. It’s cool to see how people’s minds work on them and work on the problems I created. It’s cool to hear how people interpret things, sometimes random, sometimes spot-on, sometimes differently. It’s fun.

In some ways, this movie is like the Superman movie I always wanted in terms of tone and taste, do you know what I mean?
I do.

The existential crisis of Superman is something that’s seldom handled well.
That’s very interesting. I think Zack Snyder scratched the surface of it. I think someone—maybe it was JJ Abrams—was talking about [doing] a Superman film and he was like, “I just wonder how he didn’t kill anybody as a baby.” I know that there are other people who have takes on it. I never saw this character as a superhero—I just saw him as a boy. His illnesses I just thought of as being organic, even though they’re supernatural. The same thing happened with

The same thing happened with Take Shelter. To your comment, specifically—wanting to see a certain version of a kind of movie…This is going to sound ridiculous, but Take Shelter was kind of my zombie movie. Take Shelter was my take on all those cool feelings in a zombie film where people are preparing for a disaster or preparing for the zombie stuff. I just wanted to make a movie that lived in that part. Then you start to make it deeper and more meaningful and relate it to your life, but that was very much the case with Take Shelter and here [with Midnight Special] too. I really liked those movies of the ’80s and sci-fi movies from that period. I kind of wanted to live in that world for a little bit, which doesn’t negate, though, my approach to the story or how I broaden its veins into my own life. It doesn’t discount that feeling, that sense you get after having seen stuff like that. I felt that way with Mud, too. I had this notion of what a classic American film was. I couldn’t tell you one specifically, but I can tell you a combination of several. Cool Hand Luke, The Getaway…I kind of wanted it to feel like some of the things I felt during those movies.

Midnight Special applies to that. So many people try to make these one-to-one analogies with these films, especially with the endings and other things. Those are kind of lost on me. That’s not how I thought about them. I just thought about the essence of those films.

Hitchcock’s movies were driven by his personal fears. Would you say you’re the same?
Absolutely. One hundred percent. The interesting thing about Hitchcock is that he chose fear as a predominant format to work in, which makes sense because that’s best for directors.

How so?
The feeling of fear is most directly linked to the toolbox that a director has to work with. This shot plus this shot equals this feeling. This music here, this framing here. I’m not going to give you much lead space in front of your eyes, and that’s going to freak people out. It’s different in comedy or drama…they’re not really genres. They’re these feelings. Fear most directly relates most to what a director does. I approach it a little differently. Definitely in Take Shelter, there are some scary moments, and they’re intended to be scary. I was getting to use that toolbox. I approach fear more from the standpoint of a writer. I use fear as a catalyst. Fear makes for a scary scene—“This is going to be a scary moment”—that’s what I’m talking about with Hitchcock. What I’m talking about as a writer…fear is a catalyst for a bigger idea. It’s a catalyst for the thought that you’re trying to convey to the audience, which for me is always an emotion—it’s not a story. It’s not plot. It’s not, “I’m going to tell you a story about what happened to a guy.” It’s, “I’m going to tell you a story about how a guy feels.”

Fear is a great place to start from. Fear is what motivates us as humans to get out and gather the food and build the shelter. It’s like a foundational element of humanity. But fear is only a catalyst. For instance, this film is about the fear of losing my son. That brings up a lot of emotions and other things, but that’s not a thought in and of itself. I can’t just make a movie about a guy afraid of losing his son. What does he do with that? What’s he trying to do with that fear? I think that forced me to think about the actual nature of parenthood. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to, I think, define for ourselves who our children are, in the purest way we possibly can. Sometimes, our own point of view gets in the way and we project that onto our kids. But I think, really, we’re terrified of losing them, so we’re going to try to figure out who they are to try to help them. Help them become the ones who manifest their own destiny. We have no control over that destiny. We have no control over who they become. At best, we can try to help them realize who they are and help them become that.

That became a thought. Fear produced that thought, which became the backbone for this movie. In Take Shelter, I was afraid of the world falling apart. I was afraid of not being a good provider for my family, or an adult, or a good husband. I was afraid of all those things, and there was a bunch of anxiety that came from that. But that’s not what that movie’s about—that movie’s about communicating in marriage. That movie’s about the foundational principles of marriage, which I think is communication. That’s why I made the daughter deaf. I think, in order to get that, I needed to have fear. Shotgun Stories is about the fear of losing one of my brothers. But ultimately that’s not what the movie’s about. It’s about the fruitlessness of revenge, a revenge that was born out of that fear.

I think there’s a huge misunderstanding among moviegoers in this country. People are obsessed with plot. That’s how they critique movies—solely on the plot! From the stunning opening of this movie, it’s clear you’re not interested in exposition. This is cinema, that’s it. We’re dealing with emotions, images, and sound. I wish more people appreciated that. I think maybe they do, subconsciously.
Maybe they do, you know? It depends on what people want out of a film. At different times you want different things. A lot of people—and I’m this audience sometimes—want escapism. Look at the way people use score. Score, even more than expositional dialogue, is the way to telegraph a pass, like in basketball. You never telegraph a pass—you never want the defense to know where you’re looking, because they’ll know where you’re going to throw the ball and then they’ll steal it. You can telegraph so much by having two characters speak, and then you put this music underneath it. Everybody knows they’re supposed to be scared, or they’re supposed to be happy, or they’re supposed to be sad. When you remove score, which I mostly did in Shotgun Stories, it’s very offputting to people. All of a sudden, they’re having to judge a scene on its own merits, not on this feeling that you’re giving them. They actually have to start listening. That’s just an example of my broader approach: If you remove certain things, people have to listen.

Some people don’t want that experience when they go to the theater, and that’s okay. I’ll catch you the next time, or maybe I’ll catch you on a Sunday night, when you’ve got a little more free time. It’s my job, though, to try and understand the nature of how people receive stories. It’s natural to search for plot. That’s how our brains work. I don’t hold it against anybody, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to challenge them through a new type of organization of information. Because that’s all it is—you’re just organizing information in a certain way so that it lands at certain times. My movies have plot. I just don’t think it’s the going concern. I think writers are so concerned sometimes with just making things clear.

I know that studios are. They test these things to make sure that no stone is unturned and that people are getting what they want. But what people want isn’t always what they need. I’m fascinated by story dynamics. I’m fascinated by what works for an audience and what doesn’t, what keeps them engaged and what doesn’t. If you’re not working on the edge of all that, you’re never going to have a situation where someone says, “My nails were dug into the edge of my chair,” and one person writes, “This movie is boring as hell.” I have to be okay with both of those responses. I don’t think I could get either if I was just trying to walk down the middle of the road.

About the opening, again, which I love so much…
I think it’s the best opening I’ll ever do.

Some people might consider it disorienting, but I think, for this story, you get exactly the amount of information you need.
What’s funny for me is, I think it’s so obvious. I’m wondering, like, will people just know that, once he picks the boy up into his arms in the hotel room, that obviously he’s not a kidnapper? Yes, they do, but since it hasn’t been so specifically told to them, they feel it, but they don’t know it yet. That’s a really great place to be. To me, it’s just so obvious. “That mystery’s solved.” But it’s not yet. It’s not totally solved. I have this line of Sam Shepard revealing, “The birth father, Roy Tomlin.” I wrote that scene specifically to be a surprise to the FBI, because they haven’t had the ranch under surveillance long enough to know that he was the birth father. The thing I’m wondering is, is it a surprise to the audience? That’s what I [mean] when I talk about narrative mechanics. I’m just so fascinated. When did you know? Here’s when I tell you, or here’s where I specifically don’t tell you.

Obviously, Joel Edgerton’s profession in the film—that was really specific. I remember giving [the script] to this young girl who was going to be a PA on our film. I gave her the script, and maybe she wasn’t the sharpest tack in the drawer, but she read it and just so clearly was like, “You have to tell us sooner that he’s a state trooper. We need to know that because I was really turned off when he did what he did at the end of the film. If I had known that, I’d have felt a lot better about his character a lot sooner.” She was so earnest in her argument. But it’s like, don’t you understand that you having all these emotions is part of the process? It’s part of the story. It just made me smile, and she probably thought I was a dickhead.

Joel gives you so much.
He’s a great actor.

In that scene in particular, he tells you what you need to know in how he behaves.
There you go! I thought it was pretty obvious. He walks over to the fallen state trooper and speaks in a way that no normal person would speak on the police radio. I was like, well, I’m just letting people know there. That’s what his character would do. A bad version of that writing would be [for him] to go over and say, “Hey, hey, there’s a police officer shot.” That wouldn’t be honest to him either. He wants that guy to get help. That’s why he goes and does it. He did not want to go shoot that guy. You could have Jeff Nichols the writer brain go, “If I have him speak that way, I’ll show my cards too soon.” But that’s as dishonest as having him explain that he’s a state trooper. Both of those things are dishonest. My fear for this movie…any shortcoming is when I might have been to purposefully ambiguous in a scene. I’ve read that critique, and I’ve gone back in and I’ve looked at it, and I don’t know. I’ve been able to reason out why they would behave that way. Point being, character behavior trumps all narrative desire.

I paint myself into corners all the time. It’s like, okay, I have this very strict rule about character behavior and dialogue, but I need this piece of information in the movie. It’s my job to craft a scene that allows that piece of information to come through, or we don’t get it. Then I deal with that consequence. It’s like an austerity to the writing you have to apply. You really have to stick to it. You really do.

Kirsten Dunst’s character is one of my favorite motherly characters in a while. You don’t see this stuff often. Without spoiling anything, the things she does, the way she reacts to things—it feels authentic, it feels real.
I think she’s the strongest character in the film. I think she’s able to do something the male characters can’t, specifically Michael Shannon’s. I’m not just saying this to gain the pro-women’s lib lobby. Watching my son be born and what my wife did and then what she did the year that followed…there’s no doubt in my mind that women are the stronger sex in terms of fortitude and emotions. I was very struck in high school when I read A Doll’s House by Ibsen. It’s about a mother that leaves her children. I came from a home where that would not be possible. But it is possible. That’s why the mother in Shotgun Stories hates her children. She blames them for her place in life. Their existence lowered her, in her mind. I was fascinated by the idea that there could be a mother character that would come to the conclusion first of what the inevitability of parenthood is. It made sense to me that a mother would be the one to understand the cycle of parenthood before the father, who has undeniably committed his entire life to the safety of his boy. It takes the mother to realize the cycle that they’re a part of.

I don’t think Michael’s character understands it fully or is willing to accept it fully until the boy gets out of the car. I think it’s important, but it’s also a big narrative risk. You’ve built this father-son story, the mother doesn’t come in for the first thirty minutes, and she’s tangential. Then you do this physical handoff where she’s the one who physically represents their position to their child at the end of the film. I had no idea if it would work, and for some people, I’m sure it doesn’t. I reason out, character-wise, why it would work out that way. Like I said, she’s the stronger of the two. I’m glad to hear you say you like her…because I like her.

That moment you mention where the boy gets out of the car broke my heart.
Good! That’s the one. David Fincher talks about how every movie should have an emotional punch in the gut. That was mine. I have one in each of my films. I’m glad you liked it.

Sevier (Adam Driver) is great, too.
Adam Driver is, in my opinion, going to be one of the most important actors of our generation, irrelevant of Star Wars. I think he’s that good. He’s that interesting. I want to make a detective movie with him really badly.

Why a detective movie?
Because I want to make a detective movie.

[laughs]
Because I’m a huge fan of Fletch. I just want to make a private eye movie.

With Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater returns to the youthful hangout vibe of Dazed and Confused, this time focusing on a college baseball team in the ’80s as they party around town on the weekend before school starts. The cast, made up of relative unknowns, has an easy chemistry and flowing dynamic, something Linklater has learned to orchestrate masterfully over his thirty-year career.

The story is inspired by Linklater’s experience as a college athlete in the ’80s when he met teammates who would become lifelong friends. As always, he captures the everyday idiosyncrasies of his characters’ personalities in subtle ways we probably don’t notice, consciously. What is noticeable, though, is how entertaining and surprisingly profound it is to spend time with these brutish baseball-heads as they run wild, unsupervised, in a land where they’re kings, as long as they can keep their eye on the ball.

In a roundtable interview, we spoke to Linklater about Everybody Wants Some!!, which opens this Friday, April 1st.

Did Boyhood‘s success help this movie get made?
This [movie] has an interesting relation to Boyhood on a lot of levels. I conceived them at the same time. I started shooting Boyhood when I started writing and thinking about Everybody Wants Some!!. I started writing notes and I thought, I have this film about growing up, but I also have this college movie. Somewhere in ’05, ’06, I actually wrote the script and tried to get it made. I was having trouble getting it off the ground. Filming the very last scene of Boyhood, I was telling the actors, “I have a college movie…” and it hit me that that movie starts right where this movie is ending. I hadn’t really planned it that way but I thought, that’s perfect. There would be this continuation with a very different character. The success of Boyhood helped me get it made. It did help.

When I was in college, I was a nerd, but all of my friends were like the guys in the movie. So, watching this movie was kind of special for me because it was like hanging out with those guys again. A lot of my other friends never wanted to hang around those guys because they viewed them as stereotypical jocks. I like how your movie captures what’s special about their little sports bubble they live in.
The funniest guys I was ever around were these teammates and roommates in college. Just hilarious. None of them had any comedic aspirations. “I’m going to be a comedian! I’m going to be a writer!” It never crossed any of their minds in that regard—they were just making the best of their situation. I think it’s baseball, too. Football, basketball—they’re really different sports, you know? Baseball has a lot of time around it. You have to be relaxed. In football, there’s no room for humor—you could get killed! You’re just dialed in. It’s like going off to war. If you fuck up, you’re dead. In baseball, you’re relaxed and focused, which is kind of a hard thing to balance. But baseball requires it and the arts require it, and you do better. So if you can be kind of funny on the bench, it’s good for the team. A [baseball] coach will keep a light attitude while a football coach isn’t farting around. Baseball is just different. It’s a different mentality.

There are some parallels you can spot between this movie and Dazed and Confused. The hazing scenes, the character arc of someone entering a new phase of their school life, being dismissed and guided by their more seasoned peers. Did you make any conscious efforts to echo back to Dazed and Confused?
I didn’t have to. I was always very upfront that this was sort of a sequel. If you imagine Mitch’s character, played by Wiley Wiggins, playing better and getting a scholarship, this would be where he’d show up at college. It’s a different guy because I waited so long—Wiley’s, like, 38 years old now. I think I was always upfront about it being, that was my high school, this is my college. It’s a similar kind of ensemble vibe, so that’s as far as that goes. I think the humor, the initiation you mentioned—I think it’s more sophisticated, more psychological. You can’t get any worse than paddling and treating girls like hot dogs. That’s really low. This movie is more subtle. I thought [the connection between the films] would be more subtle and for people who knew the films. But I think they found out that, with a cast of relative unknowns, that that was an appealing aspect. So many people have seen Dazed that it would become a marketing element, which is okay with me because it just so happens to be true. [laughs]

The chemistry between the cast members is great. I’m wondering if you had any bonding sessions with them.
Oh yeah. It was, like, enforced. I have some land outside of Austin. I built a farm and I have a bunkhouse. They lived there. I was like, “Hey! This is your home for the next three weeks.” They all moved in and it was just the most fun work-play environment. They just jumped in, man. Full-force. We’d rehearse scenes and the guys who weren’t in it could go swim or play ball or just have fun. It was work, play. Work, play. In the evening, we’d watch a movie. Something period, something related. We never got off making the best movie we could. I think I’ve gotten better at casting over the years. I’ve learned things.

I think I’ve gotten better at casting over the years. I’ve learned things. In an ensemble environment, the wrong person, the wrong energy, will throw it off. I think, for instance, two guys—Niles and Beuter—are kind of on the outs with the team to a large degree. You could cast weirder actors who are kind of different, but that risks throwing off the vibe. I went to those two actors and went, “I want you to come in and do serious character work.” Juston Street had played some pro ball. I said to him, “What about Niles?” and he said, “I know that guy! Every team has one guy like that.” I said, “Why don’t you play that guy?” He said, “Yeah…I get it.” We had fun. We just went way out there with that guy. Will Brittain, who plays Beuter, he’s a serious, good actor. I think it’s the way the rest of the cast responds to that. They see them come in and do serious character work for technically less likable characters, and it ups their game. It sets a good example. There’s a pecking order to the cast. There are four or five parts that are smaller, four or five lines in the script. It’s about getting those to be additive, to make those real people who wouldn’t be forgotten and round out the ensemble. There’s a pecking order to the cast. There are four or five parts that are smaller, four or five lines in the script. It’s about getting those to be additive, to make those real people who wouldn’t be forgotten and round out the ensemble. The guys with the bigger parts were very generous.

Did the script change at all during those three weeks you were in the bunkhouse?
Yeah. It’s really about me adapting the script to this new cast I have. To me, that’s the crucial creative moment. The chemical magic happens there. That’s where the text, these preconceived ideas, meet real people you’re entrusting to carry the spirit of the movie. It’s important in every film, but with an ensemble, you’re collaging. “I don’t think you would say that. But you would.” I just took his line and gave it to someone else. It helps me as a writer in kind of the way you workshop theater. You have weeks of hearing it and you’re like, “Hmm…” Things I thought would be a running gag in the movie many years ago I just see not achieving liftoff. It’s kind of funny, but not that funny. I notice it’s not becoming what I thought it might, so it just kind of goes away.

It’s a fun process. You’ve got to get it right in the rehearsal. By the time you’re shooting, it’s just kind of an extension. On the day, we’re not filming and letting them do stuff. There’s just no time for that. I feel less secure with that. I don’t understand the idea of improv on camera. Any improv or new ideas, I just call that workshopping. That happens in the rehearsal. People always accuse me: “The whole film’s improvised!” Name one film that that could possibly work. I don’t understand it.

The last time I talked to you, it was with Julie [Delpy] for Before Midnight. You both said one of your favorite things about making that movie was the food.
We were in Greece! [laughs]

What was one of your favorite things about this production?
That’s so funny. Food is like a lot of things—you don’t even remember. Being an American, you don’t remember those things. But in Greece, you remember the food. [My favorite thing for this movie] was the cast. Their energy, their spirit. It was just fun. I’ll always have that. There’s something rewarding about working with young talent. They’re not jaded yet. More veteran actors have been burned in movies where they did what the director said and they don’t like it. “Maybe I shouldn’t listen. How vulnerable should I allow myself to be? Should I protect myself? Keep myself in my range of what I know will work even if it will embarrass me? Even if the film sucks, I’ll be okay. Or should I push myself out there for the movie?” Some actors quit doing that. Some of the best actors in film history quit doing that. I could list a lot of names. There’s something great about young actors who are giving everything of themselves and are there for each other.

[I was also] seeing if I could do it. It’s been a long time [since I’ve done one of these] big, youthful, ensemble things. My daughter just graduated from college, so instead of being the cooler older brother or uncle I was in earlier parts of my career, I’m technically old enough to be their dad! I met their parents the other night and it was like, “Oh! We’re the same age.” I thought I was, like, a little older than the cast. But I’m much older. When I was in college, none of them were near being born at the time. The gap’s getting bigger, but it was fun. I can’t help but think I’m a better director. I’m more confident, I know what I’ve done. It’s experience. You subtly see what goes wrong on other movies. They’re not glaring errors, but they’re things you can improve. You do that on every movie, and you carry that forward to your next opportunity to get it right.

The college atmosphere is so amazing in this film. You have all these little details. You have on character framed so that the graffiti behind them says “eat shit.” Finnegan has the old man pipe he hangs out of his pocket so everyone can see how cool he is. Were those details you knew for the characters and atmosphere as you were writing it or were they being put in during production?
A director’s job is to say yes and no to about 900 things a day. If Glen Powell comes up and says, “Hey, you know…Finn needs a pipe.” It’s up to me to go, “Oh no, Finn would never have a pipe,” or go “Yeah, you know, that’s a good idea.” He’s kind of this faux sophisticated guy in his mind. You’ve got a quick decision to make. You just have to have an instinct for it. That Truffaut film, Day For Night…my favorite line is when he goes, “I get asked questions all day long. Sometimes, I even know the answers.” I’ve found, as a director, [when someone asks] “Do you want the red thing or the blue thing?” you have to go, very definitively, “That one.” Everyone feels someone knows the answers.

Criterion’s confirmed Boyhood for the Criterion Collection. A lot of people are very excited for that. When is that going to be released and what kind of special features can we expect?
I think a little later in the year. We have a ton of behind-the-scenes stuff they have to work with. It’s a uniquely documented process. Photos, video…there are cool things coming. Interviews with the cast members over the years, the kids growing up. It’s always great as a filmmaker working with them. It’s that final little resting place for your movie. With Criterion, you’re good with them forever.

Are the Before films coming this year or next year?
I’m not sure of the release date for those, but I feel good that they’re doing the trilogy and Boyhood.

And someday this one too.
I hope so. When you get into studios, sometimes it’s a deal. I think it can work out. The Before films were from three different entities, so sometimes you have to wrangle those rights and get it all worked out.

I think Temple Baker is amazing.
Three of these guys we drew from college. Temple had played some high school ball. Those smaller parts…I wanted those guys to be athletes. I didn’t want to film around them. I wanted to film around the guys with the bigger parts. I just didn’t want to have to work that hard for the smaller parts. Temple had that raspy voice. I was like, “You’re the ultimate roommate!” He’d never acted, and he’s playing the dumb, drunk guy, but he’s brilliant. He’s way high in his class, aced his LSAT. I’d reference a movie or a book and the rest of the cast [wouldn’t know it,] and I’d be like, “I’m old. Different generation.” But he’d seen every movie, read every book. He sneaks up on you. I could tell similar stories about every guy.

With a rumbly belly and a slight twitch above my right eyebrow (which I assume was related to an acute nutritional deficiency stemming from my decision that morning to sleep in rather than eat breakfast before rushing out the door), I stare and drool like a famished dog at the assortment of hot, meaty, aromatic tacos laid out before me in the bright, virtually empty dining room of San Francisco’s back-alley taco spot, Cala.

Beef tongue. Pork. Mushroom and kale. Soft-boiled egg. Chile verde. The smells are intense, deep, and fresh, seducing me as they waft up and tickle my nose. It’s too much to take. I’m itching to wrap my fingers around those steamy tortillas and stuff slow-brasied goodness into my goddamn face. But I don’t dare lift a finger.

In just a few minutes, Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold will be huddling up with me (and two food writers) around the Mexico City-inspired dishes to eat and talk about City of Gold, Laura Gabbert’s documentary about Gold’s career, philosophy, and the city he loves, Los Angeles. After a short wait (that, due to my rabid hunger, feels agonizingly long), the mustachioed man of the hour walks in, we shake hands, and we eat. It’s gloriously tasty. Slowly but surely, in between bites, our conversation gets underway.

The film, shot over several years in and around the myriad neighborhoods of L.A., is equally touristic and philosophical, celebrating the unexplored corners and food stops of the city through the lens of Gold’s approach to culinary discovery. It premiered at Sundance last year, just weeks after Gold dropped the food critic anonymity game and began showing his face openly, to both readers and restauranteurs alike, citing the ubiquity of social media as the main factor in the decision. The film marks the first deep public look into Gold’s life and passion and is an inspiring, engaging piece of food-world filmmaking.

City of Gold is playing in select cities now.

Did Laura have complete creative control over the film?
I was allowed to tell her if something was unusually stupid, but that actually didn’t really happen. It’s not like I had final cut.

Were you in the editing room?
I didn’t go into the editing room. I didn’t really see anything until there was, like, a rough cut about two weeks before Sundance.

I imagine people would think something was up when you were being followed around by cameras during filming.
Yes and no. They were all restaurants I’d been to a million times. The ground rule was that [Laura] wasn’t allowed to film me reviewing anything. For most of the places we’d film in, a bunch of white people with film cameras wasn’t that much weirder than a bunch of white people without film cameras. My approach is sort of the opposite of what I call the “chamber of commerce” approach, where you go in, have a hearty handshake with the owner and he or she explains what the cuisine is about and what marvels your tongue is supposed to experience. Or the ones that are super food porn-y and they’re in the kitchen and it’s like, bang bang bang fireball, then perfectly plated thing. Then you have them do the, “Mmmm…” There’s none of that in this [movie]. It’s as far from the Food Network aesthetic as you could possibly get, probably.

It captures Los Angeles really well.
Thank you. That was the main thing we were trying to do, look at the city the same way I do. I’ve [seen] Laura’s first movie, Sunset Stories,  which is about this odd, beautiful friendship between two 90-year-old women in an old age home in Hollywood. You just can’t watch that movie without getting a little verklempt. She’s good at the verklempt. I was fearing that [City of Gold] would be too sentimental, but I was happy, because it didn’t seem to be that sentimental at all. There were a couple things, especially when they talk to the restaurant owners…which I have to say, I had nothing to do with. It happened almost by accident. They were going into the restaurants with me, we were shooting the food, then they’d go back the next day to shoot b-roll in the kitchen. They did that documentary thing, where you talk to the cooks and the people who run the restaurant on camera. It turned out to be some of the most interesting stuff.

I’ve always sort of ranted about how so many people define Los Angeles by flying into town, being put up in the Beverly Wilshire hotel and writing about what they can get to in ten minutes in their rental car. That’s fine, in a way, but there’s so much more.

Your work’s had a tremendous impact on so many people in that city. You’ve been writing about food now for thirty years. I’m sure you’ve seen a shift over the years in how people search for food, young people finding the kinds of places you like on their own. Is that heartening to see?
Yeah, it’s good. Food has become almost tribal, in a way that wouldn’t be thinkable ten years ago. People are on Team Vegan, or Team Omnivore, or Team Nose-To-Tail, or they refuse to eat any Mexican food that isn’t in some really inconvenient suburb. Or they’re localvores and everything needs to come from within a fifty-mile radius. Sometimes they coincide. I think it’s funny that the nose-to-tail people and the vegans have so much in common. They both have as their goal eating as few animals as possible. You go to people in bars and they’ll talk to you about homemade dinners until you just want to melt into a puddle and float down the drain. You have people who raise chickens in their backyard and they compete to see who has the yellowest eggs. It’s cool. It’s creative.

What’s the biggest misconception about your career?
Maybe that I spend my entire life talking about taco stands. I do, but I’m the critic for the L.A. Times. I’ve got a lot of turf to cover. I write about more of that than anybody else in my position, but it’s not the only thing I do. When somebody doesn’t like the review I’ve given their restaurant, they’ll always snipe about the taco thing. Then again, there are twelve million people of Mexican origin in the L.A. metro area—that’s a lot of freaking people! That’s bigger than any city in Mexico except for Mexico City. It’s bigger than Guadalajara. If you’re not taking the Mexican community seriously, then what are you taking seriously? What is more important than that?

You and Laura started this project years ago. I imagine it took some time to build trust between you two before the project could really get going.
We sort of met a weird way. A friend asked me to donate a “dinner with a critic” to her kid’s school’s silent auction. Laura bid on it and we went to dinner. She brought up the idea and I said no. She’d keep bringing it up, and the next year my kid ended up going to school with her kid, so I ended up being in the same drop-off line. It’s much harder to say no to somebody you see every day. And, obviously, the anonymity thing was more for the readers’ sake than for what was actually going on inside the restaurants.

It’s like, you go in [the restaurant] and it’s less being anonymous than that you’re not noticing them noticing you pretending not to notice them…It got to be a distraction. There’s a point at which, if there were people who don’t recognize a critic and if the chef can make a difference—which I will say he cannot—then it’s giving the advantage to people who have superior warning systems. All I can do is reserve under weird names and show up late so I don’t get jumped ahead in the line. Service doesn’t really get better, it just gets more nervous. They ask you how you’re doing every 45 seconds instead of every five minutes, which is not really an improvement.

Like Paul Bunyan, Bigfoot, and Pecos Bill, the heroes and villains of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice are more mythical than super, writing a new page in American folklore as they split the skies with each thunderous blow. Director Zack Snyder‘s approach to DC’s now timeless characters is apt—few modern myths stand taller than Batman and Superman—but, as usual, the Watchmen and Man of Steel director gets lost in the grandeur, delivering a solemn, overly studied, slog of a movie.

The super-brawl promised in the movie’s title is as spectacular as anyone could have dreamed, but before we reach the main event melee, there’s a two-hour-long preliminary bout that sees Snyder pitted in a sweaty grappling match against complex themes of ideology and theology. Spoiler: he loses. Consequently, we lose too. By the time Batman and Superman (and a few surprise guests) get all bashy-bashy, stabby-stabby, we’re bored to tears by Snyder’s glorified lecture on man v god.

Henry Cavill returns as alien do-gooder Superman, who, at the story’s outset, is the subject of worldwide debate. His city-levelling battle with General Zod (Michael Shannon) at the end of Man of Steel cost the lives of thousands, calling into question whether his actions were justified and whether his presence on earth is a benefit or detriment to the future and well-being of mankind. Some see him as a messiah; others, an omnipotent pariah who could reduce our planet to dust should we refuse to bow down.

One man who has no plans of kneeling to “the Superman” is billionaire brooder Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck). One of the buildings decimated by Superman and Zod was Wayne Enterprises, which toppled right in front of Bruce’s eyes, hundreds of his employees’ lives blinked out in what some would call “collateral damage.” It’s a tragedy that haunts Bruce almost as much as the memory of losing his parents to a mugger in that classic alleyway scene we all know so well from countless movie, comic book, and TV iterations of the Batman origin story (which Snyder mercifully zips through in the opening credits). The story picks up 18 months later, with the Bat keeping a watchful eye on the bulletproof Kryptonian as he patrols the skies, above all men and above the law.

Bruce and the rest of Superman’s detractors are given more fuel to feed their fire when more lives are lost during a rescue of his beloved Lois Lane (Amy Adams). A reactionary congressional hearing is held, calling for him to appear in court to consider the consequences and ethicality of his actions. As fear and paranoia surrounding the continue to spread, tech genius Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) offers a solution to the world’s Superman problem in the form of Kryptonite weaponry. All he needs is to get his hands on a chunk of the extraterrestrial rock, but his political maneuverings to do so are blocked by Senator June Finch (Holly Hunter, unexpectedly one of the movie’s strongest assets). As Superman is increasingly viewed as more of a threat than a savior, however, Luthor’s scheme begins to fall more easily into place.

For what seems like ages, Snyder and writers David S. Goyer and Chris Terrio bat around big ideas like the ever-evolving nature of homeland security and, most predominantly, the fraught relationship between man and god. The movie’s got the “god” part down: Batman, Superman, and the debuting Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, a delightfully entertaining ass-kicker) come across as all-powerful goliaths, striking the most epic superhero poses this critic has ever seen (Snyder’s signature slo-mo, while as excessively implemented as ever, lends itself to characters of this magnitude).

As for the “man” half of the “man v god” thing, the movie drops the ball with an earth-shattering thud. The story’s obsessed with outlining the principles and lofty motivations of its heroes and villains without giving us a sense of what they are like as people. We’re so drowned in doom and gloom and planet-sized moral quandaries that we have no real grasp on what these heroes are actually fighting for. Clark’s got Lois and his mother Martha (a returning Diane Lane), and Bruce has got his butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons) and the memory of his parents, but all of these side characters are presented more as plot devices and pawns rather than living, breathing, relatable people. Snyder paints in such broad strokes that the nuances and details of our world are lost in the monstrous swirl of dark, folkloric imagery and ham-fisted dialogue.

When Batman and Superman finally fight, it’s so brutal and well-staged and irresistibly geeky that, while it doesn’t make up for the disastrous bulk of the movie that preceded it, it at least wakes us up from our stupor. Things get even better when Wonder Woman arrives to help them fight the Big Bad that eventually arrives to crash the party, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying the hell out of the climactic battle. If there’s a criticism, it’s that much of the dichotomous intrigue of Batman and Superman’s comic book confrontations is lost. When the two have battled on the page, the hook is that Superman should be able to crush Batman, but the fact that Bruce Wayne is not a good person (and is willing to cheat to win) gives him an unexpected edge. In the movie, Bruce is indeed a bad person; problem is, Clark doesn’t seem to be one either. He acts decidedly un-heroic on several occasions, flexing his super powers with a smug smirk on his face as he tosses Bats around like a ragdoll.

The character work is flawed all around, but this incarnation of Lex Luthor is the most confusing of the bunch. He’s more of a lunatic manchild cut from the same cloth as classic Bat-villain The Riddler than the imposing intellectual bully we’ve seen in the past. Is that a good thing? Sometimes. Eisenberg puts on a good, charismatic performance, and his wiry frame is an interesting visual juxtaposition to the heroes’ bulky physiques. But a part of me would rather have a supervillain who’s more menacing and less of a mischievous meddler.

Batman v Superman is a bonafide letdown, but the blame doesn’t rest on the shoulders of the actors. Everyone’s game and looks great, especially Cavill and Affleck, who are both black belts in the art of chin-jutting, come-at-me-bro machismo. Adams, Lane, and Irons are invaluable as they try valiantly to ground the story in some sense of realism. But alas, the script doesn’t give them enough room to work (the movie’s 153 minutes, for goodness sake). If the aim was to offer a more mature, “serious” superhero experience than Marvel Studios’ Avengers movies, Snyder and his team overachieved; this is as cynical, depressing, and emotionally hollow a blockbuster as we’ve seen in some time, a filmic representation of the adulthood misery that’s pushed the wonder of childhood fantasies out of the hearts of crotchety old-timers everywhere. Surely we were meant to have more fun than this.

The Divergent series has, in many ways, been doomed from go. Propping up the dystopian hero’s story is a clumsily conceived, confusing “faction” system that makes so little sense it can cause spontaneous combustion if meditated on for extended periods of time. So, here we are, considering Allegiant, the third entry in the series based on Veronica Roth’s popular YA books, directed by Robert Schwentke. While the overlong, bland, uninspired, nonsensical movie didn’t cause said spontaneous combustion, my explosive demise is imminent; there’s another one coming out next summer, part two of this miserably drawn-out finale, and if there’s any silver lining, it’s that we can at least say there’s an end game in sight.

Again, we join Tris (Shailene Woodley) as she continues to unravel the mystery of “the founders,” the people who set up the cockamamie faction system however-many years ago. To catch up: Until the final events of Insurgent, Chicago had been divided into districts, whose residents are assigned according to their dominant personality traits. Upon opening a mystery box left by the founders, Tris and the rest of Chicago learns that there are people beyond the sky-high city walls that have confined them for all this time, a revelation that effectively collapses the longstanding faction system and sends plucky Tris, her super-soldier boyfriend Four (Theo James) and their rebellious friends on a quest to find out, once and for all, what’s beyond the wall.

An underwhelming run-n-gun sequence follows our heroes as they evade military forces sent by Four’s mom, Evelyn (Naomi Watts), who in the last movie disposed of the tyrannical Janine (Kate Winslet), only to (predictably) adopt the former leader’s totalitarian tendencies. The group makes it over the wall, but not before two of the series’ prominent characters of color—played by Mekhi Phifer and Maggie Q, who are each given virtually no dialogue as a parting gift—are gunned down, likely to make room for the new influx of white actors we’re about to meet (Daniel Dae Kim shows up for a second too, another minority bit-part designed to create a false sense of diversity). Not an uncommon Hollywood practice, but frustrating nonetheless.

On the other side of the wall, we find a Martian-looking wasteland, an army bearing futuristic weaponry, a new city (built, amusingly, on the remains of O’Hare International Airport), and a benevolent leader David (a sleepy Jeff Daniels), who informs Tris that she is the sole success of the “Chicago experiment” the founders set up all those years ago. There are details, but they’re too stupid and uninteresting to get into here. The basics are, Tris is the key to the prosperity of the human race, and David, who (surprise!) isn’t as benevolent as he appears to be, pampers her into ignoring her friends to concentrate on fulfilling his Hitler-y dreams. Four, Christina (Zoe Kravitz), and Tris brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) do their best to snap Tris out of her self-aggrandizing daydream while also dealing with a civil war that’s broken out back in Chicago between Evelyn and Johanna’s (Octavia Spencer) respective followers.

The logic of the faction system was already frustrating, but now the series introduces this master-race narrative that only makes things worse. It simply isn’t clear what the message is Roth and the filmmakers are trying to get across. Is it that everyone’s special? No one is special? Tris seems pretty special. So do her friends. They all specialize in one thing—Four kicks major ass, Caleb’s good with tech—but the movie seems to be saying that their laser career focus is the result of genetic tampering or something, which leads us back to the secret behind the faction system mess. I can feel my body wanting to burst now, as I type this.

The enjoyable thing about Insurgent was that the action was urgent and inventive, but the set pieces here feel more trite and way less entertaining. The folks beyond the wall have nicer looking lasers and flying bubble ships than the dirty trucks and machine guns we’ve seen in the previous installments, which is a welcome change, but one can’t get over the fact that every bit of art design we see feels woefully generic, as if they were scrounged from a bin of unused video game assets. Unexpectedly missed are the surrealistic dream sequences from the first movies.

Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher of all is how a movie can fail so epically with such an amazing cast of seasoned vets and young stars populating the screen at any given moment. For goodness sake, you’ve got Spencer, Watts, and Daniels bouncing off of Woodley, Elgort, James (who’s not half bad here, actually), Kravitz, and Miles Teller, whose charisma can make the most terrible line work, at least to some extent. The Whiplash star is a standout as the opportunistic Peter, whose flips in allegiance have been enjoyable throughout the series. My feeling is that the cast makes a terrible script feel somewhat coherent and emotionally grounded, and for that the unlucky few who actually see this movie in a theater should be thankful.

Bernard flies solo on this week’s episode as he interviews Eye In The Sky director Gavin Hood. From the ethics of drone warfare to the art of creating a film’s rhythm, the conversation spans myriad subjects surrounding the drone-warfare thriller starring Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman, Aaron Paul and more. Plus, Bernard shares his Indie Pick of the Week, flash-reviews Hello, My Name Is Doris and Knight of Cups, and rants about Marvel and DC’s upcoming superhero team-up movies.

Topics

• Indie Pick (1:27)
• Superhero Team-Up Thoughts (3:08)
• Knight of Cups (10:21)
• Hello, My Name Is Doris (14:55)
• Gavin Hood (18:55)

Articles Referenced

• They Look Like People Interview
• Knight of Cups Review
• Hell0, My Name Is Doris Review

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In his latest movie, Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick asks us to join him, for the third time in a row, on a journey through the meandering thoughts of people lost in life, confessing their innermost moral quandaries to the cosmos as they stumble and crawl across god’s green earth and bask in heavenly sunlight. This time, the setting is Los Angeles, photographed in all its concrete, Art-Deco grandeur by trusted Malick collaborator (and Oscar darling) Emmanuel Lubezki. We follow and listen in on the thoughts of fading movie star Rick (Christian Bale) and, occasionally, his famous friends, as Malick lays out another unbearably thin narrative that’s as deviously frustrating as a 500-piece puzzle with 450 pieces missing. The eminently respected auteur clearly has a firm grip on the art of filmmaking—at his best, he’s one of the greats—but with his work becoming increasingly nebulous and less inviting to audiences, it’s come to the point where patience for his vagaries grows dangerously thin.

In an almost wordless onscreen performance (we hear his voice, but mostly in the form of narration), Bale drifts down the streets of L.A., occasionally jumping in thought to memories from Las Vegas, Century City and Santa Monica. Rick is in a perpetual state of punch-drunk spiritual crisis, surrounded by gorgeous women who glom onto his status, wealth and handsome looks until his emotional ineptness becomes too much to bear, at which point they make way for the next batch of girls to grab at his pants.

Rick’s fleeting romantic partners are played by a dizzying crowd of famous faces: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas and more can now add a Malick film to their resume. The roles are thin—Blanchett plays his ex-wife, Portman plays a fling—but isn’t every role thin in a Malick movie these days? Antonio Banderas makes an appearance a Hollywood playboy who throws a swanky house party littered with real-life celebrities playing themselves (“Look! It’s Joe Manganiello! Nick Kroll! Danny Strong! Wait…Danny Strong? Huh?”). Banderas takes over narration duties for a bit, spouting twisted, misogynist philosophy. “Women are like flavors,” he says in his sumptuous Spanish accent. “Sometimes you want raspberry, but then you get tired of it and you want strawberry.”

Malick does a good job of laying out the monstrous, indulgent allure of showbiz that pulled Rick in and broke him down into the wandering, pulp of a man he is. He’s become a phony, just like all the other soul-sapped leeches overpopulating the trashy town that bred them (to be clear, Angelenos, I mean Tinseltown, or the idea of it, not L.A.). Similarly swallowed by the city is Rick’s brother (Wes Bently), a non-famous drifter whose short temper is inherited from his and Rick’s late father. The particulars of the family drama (and, in fact, most of the particulars of Ricks life) are left for us to imagine on our own, but the quality of Bale and Bentley’s performances helps to form some semblance of an emotional arc.

Some (this writer included) would consider it a duty of a true movie lover to meet the filmmaker halfway when a film’s concepts or ideas are challenging or obscure. But with Malick’s recent work, it feels like he’s not meeting us halfway. We can only give so much of ourselves over to him before his movies start to feel like tedious chores. What’s so tragic about this is that, on a cinematic level, he’s phenomenal: he and Lubezki’s imagery is sweeping, evocative and immaculately conceived. Some moments—like a ground-level shot of Bale taking a knee on the concrete as an earthquake shakes the buildings and people around him—are so exquisite you could cry. But without a deeper sense of cohesion, these cinematic feats start to feel hollow as they pile on top of each other for two hours straight. As with Malick’s last movie, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups topples over, leaving us to sift through a mess of pretty pictures in a desperate search of some morsel of meaning. Like his characters, maybe it’s time for us to wake the hell up.

Crass, crude, foul-mouthed comedies have been all the rage at the movies for some time now, with the trendiest comedians from any given year dropping F-bombs, and spouting off rapid-fire fraternity jokes in their (almost always nudity-obsessed) star vehicles. Wet Hot American Summer and The State co-creator Michael Showalter‘s latest offering, Hello, My Name Is Doris, is the perfect antidote to the unending strain of Apatow offshoots: It balances classy, screwball comedy, bone-deep drama, and old-fashioned romance with the finesse of an Olympic gymnast. For once, it’s a rom-com with aims of enchanting and disarming us rather than grossing us out of our minds.

The film’s greatest boon is its star, Sally Field, an actor of age who puts on a performance so range-y, powerful and tender that it all but wipes today’s young, sparkling starlets from memory. She plays Doris, a sixtysomething recluse who’s lived in her mother’s cluttered house in Staten Island her whole life. Doris falls into lonely despair when her mother passes away but thankfully has her job as a paper pusher to keep her busy during the day. She’s the only person over 40 at her company though her role as office outcast could be more attributed to her cat-lady eccentricities (cat-eye glasses, headscarves, wooly knits and all).

Hope of getting Doris unstuck from her rut arrives in the form of her company’s new art director, a strapping, decades-younger Los Angeles transplant amusingly named John Fremont (New Girl‘s Max Greenfield). On several occasions, we get lost with Doris in fantasy as she daydreams about John confessing his love for her in front of their colleagues and hooking up with him in the breakroom. Field is ungodly adorable as she fumbles and fawns, and Greenfield does a good job of keeping us in suspense as to whether or not Doris has got a shot at John’s heart.

With encouragement from her best (only) friend, Roz (Tyne Daly)—who takes her to a life-altering lecture by motivational speaker Willy Williams (Peter Gallagher)—Doris decides it’s time to make a change and begins fashioning herself to John’s interests (facilitated by Roz’s granddaughter, who schools her on the art of Facebook stalking), making a concerted, somewhat creepy effort to cougar her way into John’s arms. Suddenly, she’s clumsily throwing around millennial slang, rocking neon yellow outfits and going to indie electro-pop shows headlined by John’s favorite band, Baby Goya and the Nuclear Winters (where the two “coincidentally” bump into each other).

Just as a tight friendship starts to form between them and the thought of romance doesn’t seem so inconceivable, John meets another woman, bringing Doris’ dreams crashing down. In a drunken fit of desperation, she sabotages John’s new relationship (via a lovelorn timeline post from her fake Facebook account), a plan that naturally backfires and leads to even more heartbreak. Showalter and co-writer Laura Terruso—who directed the short the movie is based on as a student of Showalter’s at New York University—hit every romantic, comedic, and dramatic beat so well that the movie transcends genre. This makes for such an enjoyable experience because, instead of trying to predict where the story’s going, we’re allowed to let go of preconception and go wherever the emotions may take us. Every laugh, every heartbreak, every moment feels sincere, not hokey or contrived. Nothing’s cheap; everything’s earned. The movie’s liberating in that way.

Field is so talented it’s scary. It should go without saying—she’s a two-time Oscar winner, after all—but the sad reality is that female actors over 50 are typically relegated to secondary, tertiary, often motherly roles. Her career, tragically, supports that narrative. But that’s why Hello, My Name Is Doris is such a gift; in all her glory, we get to see Field showcase her unparalleled mastery of physical comedy (watching Doris quiver and drool as John pumps up her deflated gym-ball office chair is insanely funny) as well as her earth-shattering dramatic chops. In the movie’s most powerful, unsettling scene, Doris hops up onto her couch, screaming at her brother (Stephen Root) to leave her house as she tearfully refuses to clear out the piles of old magazines and expired food her mother left behind. It’s scenes like this that reveal the psychological complexity bubbling beneath Doris’ cartoonish exterior. Such a wonderfully weird, layered character is only safe in the hands of an actor of Field’s caliber.

It’s been some time since Michael Showalter‘s Hello, My Name Is Doris premiered at SXSW 2015, where the film’s seasoned star, Sally Field, made waves with an outstanding performance as the titular, socially invisible cat-lady, who we follow as she lusts after her significantly younger co-worker (Max Greenfield). As would be expected considering Showalter’s resume (he co-wrote the great Wet Hot American Summer), the film is exceptionally funny; watching awkward Doris stalk her prey is adorable and awkward and hilarious. But what’s special about the movie is that Field not only makes us laugh, but finds incredible depth in a role that, ostensibly, is a walking cliché. One of the sad realities of the movie business is that actors of age as gifted and experienced as Field are rarely afforded meaty starring roles. But, thanks to Showalter, we’ve got this terrific little film that showcases Field and her talent full-force.

We sat down with Showalter and Field in a roundtable interview to talk about the film, which hits theaters today!

I love Doris as a character. Sally, what was your immediate reaction to her?
Sally: When I read the screenplay, I loved it. I said to my agents, “I want to do this.” They said, “You should meet Michael. What if you don’t like him?” We met, and immediately he said…

Michael: It was about the comedy.

Sally: We were addressing how you can blend both of those arenas.

Michael: The big question for her was, how are you going to do all this slapstick, screwball comedy stuff—the ball pumping scene, the dancing—with this really intense, sad stuff? I don’t want to water either one down to make it a fine line. I want the comedy to go all the way. We want to play every level as loud or as soft as we want. She did ultimately map out a way. She’s crying her eyes out in the scene where she gets drunk, but it’s this sort of dramatic, feeling sorry for herself kind of crying. In the scene where the brother-in-law comes to the house, that’s a different kind of crying. That’s all the way deep down in her. It was about figuring out all these different shades of this character and how to piece it all together so we weren’t repeating ourselves.

The film feels like a perfect antidote to the kind of issue that was addressed in the Inside Amy Schumer sketch that gave that shout-out to you and your career arc. I was wondering if that was a part of the appeal of this character. Here’s a character who’s not defined as a wife, as a mother. She’s discovering her vitality, really.
Sally: The appeal of the screenplay and the character wasn’t in that it’s a “not.” It was such a unique person. A three-dimensional character that really talked about how there are all these stages in life. People always think, “Well, there’s the childhood stage—we know what kind of development goes on there. You don’t know where to put your feet down because you’re a child. Then, there’s adolescence…everyone knows what a tough stage that is. Then, there’s young adulthood—you’ve got relationships and children and a career.” The thing is, those stages go on into your 30s, your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. Every one of them is this new place that you arrive. When you’re older, society doesn’t let you feel, “I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t know where to put my feet! I’m brand new and I’m too old to be this new!” That is, in a lot of ways, what this film is.

That is, in a lot of ways, what this film is. She has arrested development, yes. And she’s in her sixties, having a kind of adolescence, a birth of her own voice, her own vision of who she is, what she wants. It has to do with her mother passing away, so her life is just changing whether she wants it to or not. That is something that I really responded to, as well as the fact that age is such a weird thing. Inside, whether you’re 20, 30, 40, 50, 60…you’re still who you are. Who you are is lodged there. Human beings need to make contact with other human beings, so sometimes they don’t match, chronologically. If [Doris had] been the man and he’d been female…

Michael: It’d be Bad Grandpa.

Sally: [laughs] It’d be an Audrey Hepburn movie.

Michael: There’s a line from the movie Grey Gardens where the mother is in bed and Edie’s doing something and the mother says something to the effect of, “I lived my life.” The implication was, I may be crazy and living alone in this crazy house with a million cats, but she’s even worse because I actually had a life! I didn’t start living this way until I got way older. But Edie never even had a life! I did stuff, so I have an excuse to be this way. It’s so sad for Edie. It’s such a dig at her. That line resonated for me, and a lot of that is in this story. What Doris sacrificed for her mother was her whole life! It wasn’t just that—I think you learn in the brother scene that there were gender politics, but these were not areas the movie was going to delve into. But it was very real.

Sally: I always thought Doris was predisposed to be a hider anyway. I always saw her mother as being a big personality who took all the air out of a room. So Doris got smaller and smaller. Her mother was much more of a hoarder, so she’d bring home this stuff to please her mother. There was an injured part of Doris that preferred to hide. I recognized that, and sometimes it takes change to force you out of your own comfort zone. I don’t think she’s, like, a victim within it because I think in a lot of ways she was predisposed to be this way, and they were her choices. She could have walked away. She could have said, “You know what, Mom? Let’s see if I can earn enough money and get someone to look in on you. I’ve got some dating to do.” But she chose not to for a reason. Part of her couldn’t heal.

I think, right now, mean-spirited comedies are sort of fashionable. The humor in your movie is more classic, screwball stuff. We laugh at Doris, but it’s out of recognition. Like, when she’s daydreaming about her crush, we laugh because we’ve all been there. We’ve all liked someone like that. It’s good-natured.
Michael: The comedies I loved were not mean-spirited. I grew up on the comedies of the 70s and early 80s, which were silly—Steve Martin movies, Python, Woody Allen, Airplane! My comedic sensibility is really just silly and light and broad. Physical comedy. I love slipping on a banana peel and stuff like that. That’s always been my sensibility. I just really like silliness. It’s just my own aesthetic.

We mentioned the Amy Schumer sketch earlier in which she used your career to comment on how a female actor of age’s value is unjustifiably tied to her age. Do you find that perception to be accurate?
Sally: Of course. I feel like that’s accurate in show business and accurate in most of society. In this country, ageism for women, not necessarily for men, is a deterrent. You’re talking about show business, but it’s hard for women in every arena. It’s not getting any better. If you add any other ingredient on top of being female, like being of color, and then you add age…The statistics on all of that, of those who participate and whether they be in front of the camera or behind the camera, are pretty horrifying. They do not reflect where we are in society. I think the world has something to work on when it comes to empowering and bringing women to the table. Unless we can do that, the whole world will not heal. We’re out of balance.

First-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg milks a simple, succulent premise for everything it’s worth in 10 Cloverfield Lane, a quasi-sequel to 2008’s found-footage urban thriller Cloverfield. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays our resourceful, sharp-minded hero, who, after a wicked car crash, wakes up trapped in a subterranean survival bunker with a lumbering, creepy captor (John Goodman) who claims the outside world has been reduced to a wartorn, uninhabitable wasteland. It’s a powder keg of a movie with an old-school approach to storytelling that’s interested not in philosophy or meaning, but simply in the events unfolding right in front of our eyes. It’s a story that asks what (the fuck) is happening rather than why things are happening, and that makes it less complicated and more streamlined than the typical, weighty, modern-day thriller.

The first two acts are equal parts mystery and suspense, with the finale bursting at the seams with surprises and edge-of-your-seat thrills and chills. The script, by Whiplash director Damien Chazelle and newcomers Matthew Stuecken and Josh Campbell, is a solid chamber mystery that doesn’t push any boundaries but is the perfect support system for Trachtenberg and the actors to make the movie special with what they each bring to the table. High tension runs throughout the movie’s runtime (not an easy feat), and that’s a product of the performances, visual style, and pulse-pounding orchestral score by Bear McCreary. It’s a harmonious popcorn-movie affair, with nary a weak link in sight.

In a tearful hurry, aspiring fashion designer Michelle packs some light bags and peels off in her car, fleeing from a failing relationship. Night falls, and, distracted by her beau lighting up her cell phone, she flies off the road. The shock of the crash is unnervingly concussive, images of a tumbling Winstead and roaring sounds of broken glass (mixed almost painfully loud) cut violently into the film’s opening credits. Immediately, we get a taste for Trachtenberg’s punchy, mischievous style.

Michelle (Winstead) wakes up in a windowless room that would feel more like a prison cell were it not for the life-supporting amenities wrapped around her right leg (a knee brace) and stuck in her left arm (a flowing IV). Suddenly, the heavy metal door clanks open and in walks Howard (Goodman, having so much fun being a total creep), a nutty survivalist who claims there’s been a disastrous attack above ground that’s wiped everyone and everything Michelle knows into oblivion. What’s worse, he informs her that the air outside has been rendered unbreathable. Bottom line: for the foreseeable future, Howard’s bunker is her world.

Howard says he found Michelle in the wreckage of her accident and took her to his shelter, saving her from most certain doom. But there’s no way this ex-Navy weirdo is telling the whole truth, right? Every sentence that comes out of his mouth is either off-putting or suspicious, and he even suggests that Martians could very well be behind the attacks. He might as well have “UNRELIABLE” tattooed across his massive belly (right underneath another tattoo that reads “THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE!”).

Our instincts tell us that this guy is a full-on serial killer/rapist who’s lying about everything, but everything gets thrown off balance when Michelle discovers a third bunkmate, Emmitt (John Gallagher Jr.), who vouches for everything Howard says despite the grisly lout beating the shit out of him for knocking over a shelf full of food. The plot is almost solely driven by the questions that naturally arise from Howard’s deceitful air (What are his true motivations? Has the world really gone to hell like he says?), and in this respect Goodman works wonders with his performance. He’s terrifying alright, but there’s a sadness underneath the surface that gives him dimension and keeps us on our toes. Michelle’s mind always seems to be on the go, her eyes taking in the details of her environment, searching for a potential tool she can use to get her out of whatever pickle she’s in. It’s a thoughtful performance by Winstead, who makes sure Michelle is the farthest thing from a damsel in distress. The actors make their characters’ mental and emotional underpinnings as interesting as any explosion of violence or plot twist, resulting in a more humanistic, tender film than one might expect.

It’s difficult to convey just how intense 10 Cloverfield Lane gets without venturing into spoiler territory. (What’s interesting to note, however, is that Trachtenberg’s career really began to build traction after he released a short film based on the video game Portal; that game’s narrative has more than a few things in common with 10 Cloverfield Lane‘s, which I found intriguing.) The revelations and twists that pile on in the latter half are delightful, not so much because they work on the page, but rather because they arrive so perfectly, bathed in suspense and terror and wackiness and all the things you’d find in the best episodes of The Twilight Zone. If there’s a downside to the lingering questions being answered it’s that the answers we get pale in comparison to the air of mystery they smash apart.

Now, the elephant in the room: How, exactly, is 10 Cloverfield Lane tied to Cloverfield? The surprise won’t be revealed here (the project was overseen by the Mystery Man himself, JJ Abrams, after all), but what I will say is that most of the pleasures found in Trachtenberg’s film have nothing to do with the found-footage original, with which it has almost nothing in common. In fact, this movie is significantly better than its predecessor, so it’s probably best to leave any expectations the Cloverfield brand may conjure in your mind at the theater door.

A tale of love and nightmares, They Look Like People is a haunting, fun, emotionally rich genre piece that gives you plenty to ponder after the closing credits. Filmmaker Perry Blackshear and actors Evan Dumouchel and MacLeod Andrews ran a tiny, DIY production with a crew that consisted mostly of themselves, but they’d have had it no other way. Their goal was simply to make something together, bounce ideas off of each other and strengthen the bond and friendship they already had. In this regard, the project was a complete success. The fact that the movie kicks copious ass is just icing on the cake.

The movie follows Wyatt (Andrews), a disturbed man who foresees an impending war with otherworldly shape-shifters. Teetering on the edge of madness, he stays with his friend Christian (Dumouchel), who’s trying his best to understand Wyatt’s paranoia but struggles to come to terms with his bizarre visions. Confused and pushed to the breaking point, their friendship is put to the test, all leading to a heartstopping moment of truth that will change their lives forever.

I spoke with Perry, Evan and MacLeod during their visit to San Francisco this past February to talk about They Look Like People, which will be available to watch on demand in the coming months. To keep track of the movie, visit theylooklikepeople.com and like their facebook page.

I liked how the film explored mental health. I remember when I was battling depression I’d sometimes think terrible thoughts about my loved ones. It was really weird.
Perry: My friend went through a really tough time and started to think people were spying on him and also that people he loved were evil things pretending to be his loved ones. This friend is now extremely successful and married and is about to have his first kid. There isn’t anything deeply wrong with him, but I think that kind of thing can happen to anybody. It’s scary, man.

Evan: We’ve had a lot of people talking about how they can identify with what’s going on in the film. Maybe not just those kind of thoughts, but any issue you have with a friend. It resonates with people by simply asking them how they would react to a similar experience.

MacLeod: There has been a handful of people who very specifically have had similar circumstances with their friend.

Perry: We guys are really emotionally inept. [laughs] Sometimes when your friend is going through something, you’re just like, “Cool, man. Well…cool.” [laughs]

Evan: “Whoa, that sucks, bro.”

Perry: You can’t just say, “Call me if you have a problem.” There have been times when I’ve missed those kinds of signs. You have to kind of stay with someone. The movie’s about paying close attention to stuff like that.

What’s nice is that your movie is a love story between to guy friends who are very vulnerable. I feel like the media doesn’t really depict men as being vulnerable or needing help enough.
Evan: I would argue Whiplash is a love story between two men! [laughs]

You know what? I interviewed Damien Chazelle and I said that to him. I said that I felt it was a sexual movie, not in the literal sense of Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons being romantic, but in the tone of their relationship. He looked at me like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Evan: I definitely feel like it’s a love story, or at least a way that men can be men with each other that’s not about anything that’s sexually charged. There are a lot of different kinds of love. I think it’s important to explore that.

Perry: I wanted the movie to be about love between humans. People have said “bromance,” but I think it’s that these friends just happen to be guys.

MacLeod: But I think it is specifically about Christian’s experience and how he perceives masculinity; how he approaches women, how he wishes he could.

Talk about the scene where you’re doing judo with Margaret.
Evan: The take you see in the film is the first one. We didn’t know if we had the camera set up or the sound right. She had told us that she was a brown belt in judo, but that’s like someone saying they’re a concert pianist and you’ve never heard them play the piano. We were like, “Cool. She’s probably taken a few judo classes.” She proceeded to dismantle me. Everything you see, like when she asks me if I’m ready, I’m just being real to the experience prior to getting my butt kicked. [laughs] I got the wind actually knocked out of me. That’s all take one.

Perry: Right before she put the rear naked choke on him, she said, “I just did this at a wedding, and the guy passed out.”

How about tapping on her ass? Was that planned?
MacLeod: That’s just what happened. He was trying to tap out.

Evan: Mostly I was fighting for breath.

I was watching the movie in my apartment, and when she did the judo throw I was like, “OOOOHHHHH!!!” My wife asked if I was watching UFC, which I do a lot, but I told her, “No—this dude just got judo thrown on his ass on the fucking grass!”
Perry: Who’s the woman who broke, like, 100 girls’ arms?

Ronda Rousey.
Perry: Margaret used to do judo with her. But yeah, that was the first take, and we didn’t know what was going to happen, so you can actually hear in the footage all of us go, “OH MY GOD!!!”

Evan: Then we did four more takes, and we used the first one anyway. [laughs]

Just sitting with you I can tell you guys make a good team.
Perry: The whole reason I made the movie was to work with these guys. We bought the plane tickets for the movie before I wrote the script, which was a big leap of faith on their part. I told Margaret I was making a movie and it had no script, and she said yes. It was a really tiny crew and very collaborative. It was extremely hard. A lot of times the difficulty on set is navigating the different personalities and millions of logistics, but this movie felt like the four of us together, hiking up a giant mountain. There were no overlords.

MacLeod: I think we’re all sensitive to trying to take responsibility and work harder. If one of us would be tiring out, the others would be like, “I can handle this right now.” We’d kind of clap each other up.

Evan: We could all sense when we needed to be there for each other.

MacLeod: Perry’s been on tons of film sets and has seen everything that can go wrong on them. To us, an important thing was to come out of making this movie and still be friends. Perry presented to us this little constitution of ten laws that ended up being so important. One of them was to try and get eight hours of sleep a night. No drinking. If two of the three people take the other one aside and say, “You’re getting a little grumpy. You need to go have a snickers,” you have to stop and go eat something, no matter what. You start getting angry and short with people, and a lot of times it’s because you’re hungry. All three of us would do that at some point.

Evan: Another really important one was 20-minute naps after meals.

MacLeod: Snack time and nap time.

Perry: It’s basically preschool.

MacLeod: Preschool is kinda genius! It’s the basics of what people need!

That’s going to be the headline of the article, by the way: “Preschool is Kinda Genius.”
Perry: We didn’t have much money, but the equity we had was each other. It was very important to protect that and to make sure we were functioning.

MacLeod: The three of us working together was the point. The movie turned out great, but it was secondary to the process of working together. Protecting the friendship and the process was more important that manipulating each other.

Perry: I have a lot of director friends. On bigger sets, there are a lot of tough decisions to be made about relationships and success. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but our number one priority is to make sure we stick together.

Moving forward, how do you protect that bond? It’s going to get harder.
Perry: One of the biggest things I learned is that there’s more than one way to make a movie. Our way isn’t necessarily the right way, but it worked for us. The Duplass brothers make Hollywood movies, but they have a union crew. Once they set up the set, they get them out on the lawn for a day, and it’s just them and the cinematographer and the actors in a room. They protect the things that matter. We learned the things that are really important to us: the story, the characters, and the relationships. If other stuff started to infringe on those, we’d bring it back to what mattered. Hopefully, we can keep doing that even if things start getting bigger. My favorite thing about moviemaking is making them together, with your crew.

There’s a climactic moment of suspense at the end of the movie involving a paper bag. Regarding what’s underneath the bag: it could have gone one of two ways. I love the way you chose to go. I feel like most movies would go the other way. Was that always the ending, or was there a serious decision to be made about which way you went?
Perry: There was a decision to be made. The ending changed throughout writing the script a lot. Even though it’s a movie about monsters and scary stuff, it ended up being way more personal than we expected. The ending emerged from that.

Evan: I think it speaks to Perry’s use of structure and creating a truth to the answer to both questions. I’m really happy about it. The question exists in people’s minds of whether one or the other could be the case. Each could have been true for somebody, and that’s cool for me to hear.

Perry: We wanted to end in a way that gave some answers to some questions, but left others unanswered.

The story of British ski jumper Michael “Eddie” Edwards is of the classic underdog variety: In the 1988 Winter Olympic games in Calgary, he inspired people around the world with his bright personality and infectious enthusiasm, becoming the first ski jumper to represent Great Britain at the games. Funny thing is, Eddie lost. He lost BAD and in spectacular fashion. In both the 70m and 90m events he came in dead last, failing utterly and completely by most competitive standards. Nonetheless, the guy garnered millions of fans simply because he was happy (almost hilariously happy) to be there and do his absolute best.

What Dexter Fletcher‘s Eddie The Eagle gets right is its willingness to poke fun at Eddie, played here by Kingsman: The Secret Service‘s Taron Egerton. Too often movies of its ilk take their subject too seriously, in turn making the story feel schmaltzy, pruned and disingenuous. Fletcher’s film takes several liberties with Eddie’s journey, most notably inserting a fictional trainer (Hugh Jackman). This is easy to swallow: Historical accuracy will never be the most important aspect of telling someone’s life story. Capturing and paying respect to the person’s spirit and reflecting the true value of their accomplishments? That’s everything.

It’s the essence we’re after. In the case of Eddie, his essence is an ability to find pride, joy, and positivity in the face of adversity, derision, and even failure. When he was eliminated from Britain’s downhill ski team, he opted to take up the even more dangerous discipline of ski jumping instead of giving up. When he jumped a comparatively short distance than his competitors at the games, he celebrated and played to the cameras and excited crowds, simply happy to live his dreams. That’s his legacy, funny and inspiring at the same time, and that’s precisely how the movie feels.

Egerton—unrecognizable from his character in Kingsman, donning Edwards’ signature thick glasses, thick mustache and awkward posture—exudes the unlikely Olympian’s plucky positivity without being a caricature. When Eddie’s blue-collar dad (Keith Allen) pulls up to a bus stop to find his son packed and ready to leave home in pursuit of his Olympic dream, he barks at him to get in the car. “Have you ever had a dream?” Eddie asks, to which his father defiantly barks, “To be a plasterer! Let’s go home.” With his chin held determinedly high, Eddie says with compassion, “Bye, dad.”

When Eddie arrives in Germany to train for Olympic qualification, he meets a drunk ex-jumper, Bronson Peary (Jackman), who reluctantly (after relentless pestering) agrees to train young Eddie to land jumps instead of breaking his neck. The juxtaposition of the grizzled veteran and the clumsy rookie is good fun and would have worked better with a few tweaks to Jackman’s character or even a different casting choice. The Austrailian actor simply looks too put together and dashing to be a convincing drunken mess, and the alcoholism angle screenwriters Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton go with feels unneeded, a futile attempt at making Bronson look like a loser. The actors do have chemistry, though, and Jackman’s pure gold in a scene that sees him illustrate the art of a takeoff via a feigned orgasm á la When Harry Met Sally. The moment is so absurd (especially in the family-movie context) that you can’t help but laugh at how much fun the movie’s having.

With the help of Bronson, Eddie finally makes it to the Winter Olympics in Calgary (despite dastardly attempts by the British Olympic Committee to block his participation, mostly because he’s goofy looking) where he at first enjoys his sudden stardom but then is reminded by coach Bronson to take himself more seriously and put forth his best effort despite the fact that he’s been ski jumping for a fraction of the time his competitors have. To the shock of everyone watching his Olympic escapades, Eddie vows to compete in the potentially deadly 90m jump, which leads us directly into the movie’s obligatory “He did it! He did it!” crescendo. The rousing finale’s done excellently though a random subplot involving Bronson’s old mentor (Christopher Walken) deflates the excitement for an excruciating few moments. There are no revolutionary changes made to the underdog formula, but the movie is special in that it celebrates the pride one finds in the simple act of participation.

Ski jumping, as it turns out, is one of the most cinematic of sports: Watching a human being soar through the icy air with long, slender skis stuck to his feet is an awe-inspiring sight, and Fletcher gets a lot of mileage out of a sport that pretty much looks the same every time (the variable being whether the poor guy eats snow or not; we see both successful and failed landings), using CGI stylishly and tastefully and giving us a terrifying sense of how goddamn high these athletes actually go. Looking down from the top of the 90m jump is bloodcurdlingly scary, and Fletcher makes sure to drive home just how crazy Eddie is to take up such a dangerous sport with such little experience. Once Eddie’s in flight, however, Fletcher has fun with interesting angles and brisk editing that, at its best, is exhilarating.

Most of Eddie the Eagle‘s success can be attributed to young Mr. Egerton. He makes us laugh at Eddie without making him clownish, and he makes us care for him without being corny. It’s a spot-on performance that sets the pace for everything else in the film, and he should be proud of the fact that, in this instance, he acts circles around the infinitely less memorable Jackman, a bonafide screen veteran. The gap in tone and timing and attitude between this role and Egerton’s turn in Kingsman is cavernous, and he makes the jump effortlessly (apologies for the totally-intentional pun).

As is the case with Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight, you’ll find no heroes in John Hillcoat‘s likewise numerically titled Triple 9, a solid, well-acted crime-thriller in which nearly all of its dozen-or-so main characters carry a badge, though about half of them are crooked. These slimeballs use their position in law enforcement as a guise for a big-time heist operation; their non-criminal counterparts on the force are bent on smoking out who’s behind the bank robberies as the perps hide in plain sight just one desk over. The “good cops” aren’t as straight-laced as you’d imagine, however: Policing the rough Atlanta streets keeps their skin and wits tough and their scary obsession with putting the heist-pullers away could put innocent people in danger.

By all accounts, it was Hillcoat’s name that first compelled the stacked, A-list ensemble to flock to the project, and it was the complex, unpredictable, multi-protag script that got them to stay. Each talent—Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, and the list goes on—makes a big impression; this is an ensemble piece through and through. But the egalitarian approach to the ensemble doesn’t work as well as it does in Hateful Eight or even Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight because the characters’ murky motivations, combined with the dizzying, often disorganized plot, make the experience as a whole a little hard to follow. There’s too much to keep track of, too little to latch onto.

A team of trained professionals led by Michael (Ejiofor) pulls off a bank robbery in the heart of Atlanta. They’re working (reluctantly) for Russian mob boss Irna (Winslet), who’s tasked them not with bringing her bags of loot but with retrieving a safety deposit box she needs to free her husband from prison. Jorge (Clifton Collins Jr., terrific as usual) and Marcus (Mackie) currently work as cops and Michael and Russel (Norman Reedus) are ex-Special Forces. These four are cool as cucumbers but Russel’s strung-out younger brother, Gabe (Aaron Paul) nearly causes the caper to go South. Going forward, as they resume their lives post-heist, the sloppy Gabe will more than likely become a liability and the rest of the team knows it.

Draped in woefully mismatched, fake-fancy garb, Irna is a welcome change from the familiar crime boss archetype, at least in tone and, of course, gender. Considering this role and other, villainous turn in the Divergent series, it seems the Oscar winner’s developing a taste for the wicked. She’s really good at it: The blood boils when we learn Irna’s holding Michael’s son—who also happens to be her own nephew (Gal Gadot plays his mom)—captive, blackmailing him to reassemble his team and carry out yet another risky operation, breaking into a Homeland Security facility of all places. To pull it off, the team resorts to using a “triple-nine” (code for “officer down”), distracting local law enforcement as they snatch Irna’s precious cargo in the shadows.

They need a good (unsuspecting) cop to be the “triple-nine” and Marcus nominates his new partner Chris (Affleck), who’s just transferred from another division. The new guy has just been branded a walking dead man by his own partner. One of the many x-factors in the scheme is Chris’ uncle (Harrelson) is a detective on the force himself and is leading a tireless investigation on Michael’s undercover gang. When the shit hits the fan and Chris sits in Marcus’ crosshairs, it’s amid a tornado of unexpected betrayals, murders and changes of heart that change the complexion of the “triple-9” altogether.

The plot’s too intricate and the dialogue is too expository to give the character work the clear focus it deserves. The performers are terrific and enrich their characters even when their screen time is woefully limited but one can’t help but wonder how much smoother the movie would flow with less attention dedicated to the plot. There’s no central character, after all, so every moment the actors get is incredibly precious. Fortunately, the actors make the best of their constraints, with each of their characters ultimately sticking in your mind in one way or another. None of them (besides Winslet) are playing against-type, so they all seem comfortable in their roles, which works greatly in the movie’s favor.

Aside from the acting, the movie’s greatest strength is the action sequences which, despite being preposterously elaborate and chaotic are presented with great care. The action is surprisingly easy to follow, and Hillcoat’s gift is that his set pieces, as they move briskly along through interiors and exteriors and different neighborhoods, simultaneously immerse us in the gritty surroundings and thrill us with expertly staged gunfights, foot-chases and fisticuffs. As far as the action is concerned, the presentation is slick, slick, slick. If only the narrative would take a few steps back and let the human drama and gunfire take more of the spotlight, Triple 9 could have been tremendous.

“What the hell am I doing here?” I thought. Standing next to me by the Oakland Technical High School football field was Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman, leather jacket and all; next to him, his Eddie The Eagle co-star Taron Egerton and the movie’s director, Dexter Fletcher. The Australian megastar’s dashing good looks had me flabbergasted enough, but nothing was more distracting than the fact that I was standing next to WOLVERINE, my childhood hero! Reading the comics rabidly back in the ’90s, I never expected Logan would be this tall in person…

Making the scene even more absurdly amazing was the action playing out on the field just yards away: Throwing passes and running drills with high-school kids were Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Johnson and recently-retired Seattle Seahawk Marshawn Lynch, who were there in support of Fam 1st Family Foundation. Again I thought, “What the hell am I doing here?”

What I was doing, actually, was talking to the three talented men in front of me about their new film, based on the story of Michael “Eddie” Edwards (Egerton), a British ski-jumper who captured hearts worldwide with his inspiring journey to and performance at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Jackman plays his reluctant coach, a fictional character conjured to provide Eddie’s story with a bit of friction and an element of camaraderie. When asked about the creation of the character, Jackman joshed: “I did test for Eddie…” His joke was met with thunderous, perhaps slightly exaggerated laughter from me because I was starstruck and shameless and simply couldn’t resist (I’m sure my fellow journalists participating in the roundtable can sympathize). He’s a real charmer, that Wolvie.

While I still have no clue how in the world a schmuck like me ended up in the star-studded situation I did, I’m glad fortune chose to smile on my that sunny day, allowing me to bring you this interview about a movie I found to be genuinely funny and inspiring and a whole mess of fun for all ages. Sure, it was cool chatting it up with your favorite X-Man. But the truly important people that day were running up and down that football field, the kids who, hopefully, with the boost of these famous fellows’ encouragement, will fight tooth and nail to reach beyond their wildest dreams in the spirit of Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards.

You can watch Egerton and Wolv…er…Jackman in Eddie The Eagle this weekend as the movie opens nationwide.

Walk us through the decision to include Hugh Jackman’s character in the movie since he wasn’t a real character.
Dexter: [The movie’s] about Eddie and his journey but it’s also important that there’s some sort of attempt to explain who Eddie is and what he’s going through, why he’s feeling the things that he is, and also have a character that pushes back against him [so that] the audience feels they’re a part of that journey as well. Initially, that’s the heart of it. We as an audience need a character who’s going to push Eddie on why he’s doing what he does. But it develops into something more interesting than that. You’ve got to have a human relationship at the heart of a film like this because that’s what people understand. It was important that Eddie didn’t feel like this lonely character. So we created this other character and it becomes a movie about friendship. That’s really important. You create a character who’s the polar opposite of Eddie and it throws a light on both of [them] and gives [the actors] something to get their teeth into. And Hugh Jackman wanted to be in it!

Hugh: I did test for Eddie. [laughs] Just to be clear, most of this movie is based on truth. There are some deviations but the key things, the most amazing things—his jumping, the injuries, the coming back, the fact that he was sleeping in a closet—all that is true.

Dexter: There were people that did help along the way and, of course, in a film you’ve got six, seven different characters coming in and playing some part in that journey. That becomes confusing. So we reduced that into one super-character which, in fact, would be Hugh Jackman. It’s a storytelling exercise. It’s facts told in a fictional way.

Taron, what was it like playing this role that could potentially inspire children and young adults? How does that make you feel as an actor?
Taron: If that’s the case, I can’t imagine anything more rewarding for an actor. That’s truly, truly gratifying on a level more than anything. The thing I love about Eddie is that he’s someone who’s easy to make fun of, deride, mock—but actually, he’s got this incredibly unique quality so few people have. Not that he’s impermeable but he takes the negative and is able to turn it into fuel for the positive. So, when someone says something unkind to him or tells him he can’t do it, in a very quiet, dignified way, he doesn’t engage with it or retaliate—he just allows it to make him stronger and tougher. I think that’s probably one of the most valuable lessons you can learn.

One of the things that appealed to me most about the movie is that it doesn’t take itself so seriously. We can actually laugh at Eddie a little bit, in a good-natured way.
Hugh: It’s called being British! [laughs] It has got that British, Full Monty quality. If you’re too earnest and on-the-nose in England, it’s never going to work! I think Eddie enjoyed having a laugh. If anyone ever in sports has shown [they] like to have a laugh at themselves, it’s Eddie Edwards.

Taron: Eddie’s a bright chap; he’s not an idiot. He knows that what he did was funny. He had been doing it a fraction of the time his competitors had been doing it, and it was this terrifying, death-defying jump he kind of threw himself into. That’s funny, and he knows that. When he saw the movie, he was thrilled. I think it’s because he knows that we struck the balance. There was a funny side but obviously, to him, it was a very serious thing. I know Dexter was very conscious—and we were, too—of making it a balance. You have to leave the theater going, “Yes! He did it!” I hope we’ve succeeded.

Hugh: At one point, [Eddie] actually broke his jaw and tied it up with a pillow case and competed like that.

Taron: We shot that, actually, but it didn’t make it in!

Hugh: Oh, really?

Dexter: We did! But also, I don’t think we treat [the story] in a sort of sentimental, mushy way. If you’re going to get up on those ski jumps, you’ve got to have a certain amount of fortitude. He’s not like, “I hope I don’t hurt myself.” He doesn’t even think about that. Being unsentimental allows him to be strong. We know he’s a strong character with a strong story, so we can afford to laugh at him.

Hugh, when looking at your role here, Charlie Kenton in Real Steel and even Wolverine, there’s a through line of rogues with a heart of gold. What draws you to characters like this?
Hugh: It’s the opposite of me because I’m seemingly very likable and outgoing but underneath there’s just zero heart. [laughs] I’m sure sometimes these kinds of roles come to me because of Wolverine, who’s sort of the ultimate reluctant hero. I just really love this story. If there had been some other construct or character, I probably wouldn’t have been part of it. I loved working with these guys and I do love, I suppose, seeing on film that idea of redemption. [My character] is someone who lives with a lot of regret and is, therefore, kind of cynical to the world. Deep down, he realizes he stuffed up his chance for whatever reason. Lack of self-belief, obviously. I love the idea that people are redeemable, I suppose.

Dexter: I think also that you’re not afraid to play the human flaw, you know? To play someone who’s flawed is a more interesting thing altogether. He’s flawed; he’s human; he’s real. I think that needs to be something you readily tackle and relish as well.

Perhaps for the entirety of his career, Aaron Paul will be tied to the iconic role of Breaking Bad‘s burnout-turned-meth-hero Jesse Pinkman. It’s something he’s thankful for: “I’m very blessed to have played an iconic character,” he says graciously. Since that landmark TV show, Paul’s stayed away from drug-addict roles for obvious reasons. But when he was presented with the script for John Hillcoat‘s ensemble crime-thriller Triple 9, he jumped at the chance to work with the director, despite the fact that he’d once again have to pick up a pipe on-screen.

The decision paid off: Paul is an absolute standout in a movie full of Hollywood heavy-hitters including Kate Winslet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Gal Gadot, Norman Reedus, Clifton Collins Jr., and more. Playing a member of a gang crooked cops pulling off an elaborate, dangerous heist, the still-evolving actor makes every onscreen minute count, creating a character with dimension and depth in what’s essentially a series of quick glimpses. Looks like he’s continuing to hone the tools he sharpened opposite Bryan Cranston on that seminal show forever doomed him to be referred to as “bitch” by his adoring fans. “I gotta take it in stride, you know?”

In a roundtable interview, I spoke to Paul about Triple 9, which is out in theaters nationwide today.

You’re sort of unrecognizable in this movie. The hair, the strung-out-ness. How did you go to that place? It feels like he’s so out of his depth at this point in his life.
He’s going through a lot. It was kind of easy; it was just on the page. I think these characters were so well developed before I even attached myself. Before we even started, John gave us all a giant folder of information, a dropbox that just kept filling up every day with images that are impossible to erase from your mind. Decapitated heads…he wanted us to draw from our own knowledge.

He had me go on some ridealongs with the LAPD and I saw some pretty crazy stuff. We drove around East L.A. in a neighborhood I’ve never been to in my life. You just see how cops are viewed. We pulled over this guy whose girlfriend had just been shot. She was in the front seat, his mom was in the back seat. This was now his third strike because he had a loaded gun on him with the serial number scratched off. Things got pretty real. He was arrested went down to the station. They take off his shoes, he’s handcuffed to this bench, and they ask me if I want to go in and interview him. He has tattoos all over his face—scariest guy I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m like, “No…I don’t want to go.” There was no reason for me to go interview him but I did end up going in to talk to him. He ended up being a fan of Breaking Bad, which is pretty funny.

What was your reaction to the script and this idea of these characters pulling off a “triple 9?”
God, I loved this script. I knew with John holding the reigns it was going to be such a brutal telling of this story but in a grounded way. I didn’t know what “triple 9” meant before shooting this film but it absolutely makes sense. If someone wants to cause a distraction in the police force, that’s definitely the way to do it. I love the story.

Early in the movie, you and Norman have a pivotal scene together. I think it’s such an important scene because you have to establish a lot of the emotional stakes for what’s to come for those characters.
Norman and I have been friends for the past sixteen, seventeen years. It’s the first time we’ve worked together, and we’re playing brothers, so we already have that bond, that love there. That scene you’re talking about was an added scene we shot after we were done shooting. They wanted to do just that—raise the stakes, really let people know that these guys aren’t just friends; they’re brothers. They love each other. It was great. I love that scene.

There are similarities between this character and Jesse Pinkman. Do you feel constrained by how iconic that character is?
I definitely don’t see Jesse Pinkman leaving me anytime soon. I know for the rest of my life I’m going to be called “bitch.” I gotta take it in stride, you know? I’m very blessed to have played such an iconic character [on a] show that became a part of television history. He’s a part of pop culture. It’s all about trying to do something different from that guy. This is really the first role since that show where my character’s picking up a pipe. I get offered drug addict roles all the time, on a weekly basis. I just try to stay away from that. But this script was impossible to ignore. It was beautiful. And, of course, John Hillcoat was the first name I noticed before I started reading it. It was a great ride, but when [my character] picked up the pipe, I was like, “Aww…Does he have to do that?”

The movie felt a lot like Heat.
Yeah. Heat is one of those timeless films. I really hope Triple 9 becomes that. My father-in-law was so excited. “It was like Heat! It’s like Taxi Driver!” I agree with him. It’s one of those gritty, brutal, crazy films.

You’re an actor who acts with his whole body. I appreciate that. Is it something you think about when you’re on camera or no?
It just kind of comes with the territory for me. Every character’s a little different. The only similarity is that I tend to gravitate toward characters that are going through a lot, emotionally. I think emotions run through your entire body. You kind of put yourself in a situation and force yourself to believe in whatever’s going on and hopefully people buy it.

In Need For Speed you were at the head of the ensemble. For this movie, it’s more of an egalitarian mix. How are those experiences different?
[One’s] less work, less shooting days. But I love them both. I love the ensemble cast. There are twelve main characters in this film and everyone has such a pivotal part in the story. With Need For Speed, I was in almost every scene. It was a lot of work.

What about the next movie, Eye in the Sky? What’s it like going from playing a criminal in this movie to playing someone who’s straight-laced and in the military?
I do play the darker side of things. But I always try to bring some sort of heart to my characters. With Triple 9, he’s technically a bad guy but you feel for him. He has a line he will not cross and this is that line, so he’s desperate to stop it from happening.

He’s really the hero of the movie.
Finally, someone said it! [laughs] It’s great being the bad guy and it’s also great being the good guy.

Who’s an actor that would be a dream for you to work with?
Oh man, there’s so many. I think probably Daniel Day-Lewis. He’s my favorite actor, for sure.

How about actors who aren’t alive?
You’re really changing things up on me, man! I would love to work with Marilyn Monroe. She’s such an idol, such a legend. I’d just love to kind of hang out with her in between takes and see what she’s all about.

A genre adventurer of sorts, filmmaker John Hillcoat has made a western (The Proposition), a post-apocalyptic drama (The Road) and a period gangster movie (Lawless) in his career thus far. Now, with Triple 9, he tackles the crime thriller genre, assembling an A-list cast (including the likes of Kate Winslet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Clifton Collins Jr., Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Norman Reedus, Aaron Paul, Anthony Mackie and more) to tell a gritty, urban tale of crooked cops, bank heists, double-turns and gang violence. Set in Atlanta, the film holds authenticity as its highest priority as the dozen-or-so protagonists maneuver, duck and dodge around each other until the bloody, bitter end.

In a roundtable interview, I spoke with Hillcoat about the film, which opens tomorrow nationwide.

You’ve expressed your desire to elevate genre movies. How did you elevate the crime thriller with Triple 9?
I feel like this genre, in recent years, has become very unrealistic. Initially, there were the golden years when film noir was created and all these fantastic, murky shades of grey were created. In the ’70s, they took all of these great genres and shook them up and gave them this kind of gritty realism. That’s what I miss in contemporary crime thrillers. The characters always seem to be chasing the plot. I wanted to find something where you didn’t know what was coming. In a lot of this genre, I feel like I already know what’s going to happen before it happens. [I also wanted to show] shades of grey instead of black and white. Again, in this genre, it’s become, “there’s the good guy, there’s the bad guy.” With all of that, I also wanted to bring it into a contemporary landscape. The world of crime out there in urban cities has completely changed.

When this script crossed your desk, was it something where you were looking to do something in this vein? What got your neurons firing?
I’d been looking for a contemporary crime thriller to do for well over a decade. My problem was, every time I’d read something, I felt like I could predict what was coming around the corner. My manager and producer brought a first-time writer and showed me this script because they knew I wanted a crime thriller that was a bit more unpredictable and grounded in reality.

There’s a lot to keep track of in this movie. It’s a controlled chaos. As I was watching the movie I thought, the casting is so key because these characters have to make big impression in just a small amount of screen time.
That was the single biggest challenge out of anything, to assemble that cast and line it up to where they all had a window available at that one time. It was beyond any rubik’s cube out there. The intention was to create a milieu and world you’re immersed in as opposed to the classic, two-hander thing. I love a film like Nashville where you’re just with characters very briefly but you feel like you could disappear into their lives. Life is like that too in a crowded urban environment. I wanted to get that sea of humanity. That’s what was great about this cast—they’re all so different and bring such idiosyncratic detail. We were conscious of that going in. They had to make interesting choices and create layers because of exactly that: screen time.

I was impressed by the action mostly because the things that are happening onscreen are unpredictable and chaotic and unexpectedly change location frequently. But I never felt lost, geographically. That must be incredibly difficult to pull off.
It took immense planning. We had whole maps of neighborhoods, we had meetings with different departments, we had models made. We had different visual references made for different departments saying, “Look, here’s an accident. We want it to look like that.” There was a lot of research as well. I was working with a very gifted second-unit action guy who did the Bourne Identity films and has an immense knowledge of that. We love realism and accidents, so we’re always on the lookout for how we find those and reference those in each situation and make it work cinematically.

I think you’ll know what I mean when I say this—I feel like you as a filmmaker respect the act of violence.
I take violence very seriously. I feel like there are no real victors. There’s always an element of chaos and, psychologically, no one comes out unscathed. I think that’s the key, for the actors to feel very much like it’s their choice or whatever they do that creates the situation, the build-up to it. Then, it’s how they process it afterward. When I’m working with an actor on these sort of things, I’m looking more at the before and after than the actual incident. We are human, and that’s the thing I try to do, get that human experience instead of just seeing bodies flying apart. That doesn’t mean anything. And you’ve just reminded me, that’s something we were very conscious of: We wanted to make every single death that happens matter. It’s a significant event every time. In crime thrillers, that’s really not considered. The body count is just, like, very gratuitous.

I thought there was strategic value to the decision of killing off a particular actor early on in the movie. Audiences are very familiar with this person. It was kind of like a Janet Leigh in Psycho thing.
That was very intentional. We wanted to create a situation where even the characters would suddenly take this situation very seriously. It’s that feeling of not knowing who’s next. And yet, we all know—and they know as characters—that they’ve chosen this life and nothing’s going to change that. They kind of know that, eventually, they won’t be retired on a tropical island. That’s not really what comes of this. And they never know when that moment is going to happen.

You’ve said before that you’ve witnessed violence growing up and have been a victim of violence. Do you think, as a filmmaker, that you have to have had that hands-on experience to portray violence onscreen authentically?
I think it’s definitely helped and given me more respect in trying to get to the truth of the matter and take it more seriously. I’m very influenced by other movies, but I do love that kind of one foot in reality. That has, unfortunately, [happened to me]. But I would never perscribe that as a prerequisite for film students. [laughs] “Doing a crime film? Shoot yourself in the leg!” [laughs] I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone but it certainly has impacted the work I do very much.

Bipolar disorder is the common ground that brings two opposites-turned-soulmates together in Touched With Fire, a cute but redundantly lyrical sanitarium romance inspired by Kay Jamison’s book “Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament” and the real-life experiences of writer-director Paul Dalio. Carla (Katie Holmes) and Marco a.k.a Luna (Luke Kirby) are manic-depressive poets admitted to the same psychiatric hospital where they at first can’t stand each other (naturally) but soon form a tight bond as they indulge in their shared mania and protect each other from unenlightened oppressors. The creative energy that forms between them is explosive and romantic, but when they choose to start a family, their manic tendencies begins to put their future in danger. Meanwhile, their stubborn, disapproving parents threaten to tear them apart for good.

In several ways the movie ponders the relationship between bipolar disorder and art, from Marco often referencing the legendary work Van Gogh did while manic to the couple explaining to their parents how they absorb the world in a deeper, fuller, more vivid way than normal people are capable of, which allows them to express themselves freely and unfiltered. Dalio also represents the disorder visually, using off-balance camera moves and surrealistic imagery to reflect our heroes’ mindstate. On occasion, the symbolism can be a little too plainspoken: When the couple are unwillingly separated and forbidden to see each other, Carla returns to the waiting room where they first met; we feel she’s missing Marco already, but suddenly an apparition of him appears to further emphasize her longing. The sentiment is nice and the device fits the artistry theme, but it’s a little excessive.

Dalio, who’s dealt with manic depression in his life, used battle rap as an outlet, performing under the name Luna. We see much of his personal struggle in Marco (who also battle raps under the Luna moniker) and the film’s greatest strength is that it feels passionate and personal throughout, evidently pulled directly from pivotal points of life experience. If there’s an issue with how the film ponders mental health it’s in the final acts, when the story starts to feel too studied, overly saturated by the influence of Jamison’s thesis. It’s especially jarring when the author makes an appearance as herself, meeting with the couple to discuss the dulling effects medication may or may not have on the creative process.

Movie romances often live and die by the actors’ eyes: If we don’t see that thirst in their eyes, we ain’t buying it. Holmes and Kirby, thankfully, are convincing in their desire, particularly early on in the film when they’re sneaking away to the hospital library in the middle of the night, going on manic adventures through time and space, unlocking the mysteries of the universe with childlike glee. The adventure’s all in their heads, of course, but Dalio does a nice job of bringing us into their headspace, sprawling projected images of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” across the library walls to reflect the scope of the couple’s obsession. Moments like these, when Dalio’s visual style feels pitch-perfect, are magical.

On several occassions, Carla and Marco’s parents stage both planned and impromptu interventions, expressing insensitively their wish for the couple to stay far away from one another so as not to further enable their shared mania. The drama in these scenes sometimes works, but more often than not the confrontations feel too transparently educational, with the young actors essentially explaining their mental disorder for those of us in the audience who don’t understand it. Holmes is particularly good, though, at attempting to make the scenes feel natural with her facial expressions and subtle body movements.

When Carla and Marco are alone, running wild with the ecstasy of being unshackled from the doldrums of everyday life, Touched With Fire feels vital and flowing and engrossing. The filmmaking seems to dull, however, when the couple are on their meds and fall back down to earth. There’s no reason a film can’t stay cinematically interesting while still reflecting the internal repression of its characters and, unfortunately, coupled with the staged nature of the later dialogue, the sober segments of the story don’t quite hit home.

Robert Eggers‘ The Witch gets under your skin and stays there, making you feel a certain kind of filthy for a good chunk of time (for me, a few days of looking over my shoulder at night and rubbing the back of my neck like a crazy person). Contributing to the film’s noxious effect on the psyche are a litany of major and minor details: the American-gothic allure of the 1630s New England setting; actor Ralph Ineson‘s incomparable, gravelly voice; a collection of the most sinister-looking animals you’ve ever laid your eyes on. (Away, evil bunny! Away!) But the real reason The Witch sticks so tightly to the back of the mind is that it leaves us lost in the fog, uninterested in demystifying the terrible, unsettling, supernatural events we bear witness to. Super-serious horror movies aren’t my preferred branch of the genre but when they work, as Eggers’ film does, I can’t help but bow down as I quiver in my 17th-century boots.

The backdrop of this “New-England Folktale” (as the movie is subtitled) is an isolated farm on the edge of a dark wood where a Puritan family resides and tends to crop. Why anyone would choose to live with an ominous ocean of decrepit-ass trees at their back I don’t know, but in this instance, it was the decision of the family’s patriarch, William (Ineson). After being banished from their plantation community (for unknown reasons), the family needed a new place to make a life for themselves, hence the lonely little farm at the foot of hell’s gates.

With a stern hand and a booming voice, William raises his litter alongside his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), who’s scary in a stoic, nun-like way. They’ve got an infant, Samuel, who one day disappears while under the watch of their eldest, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). While the parents and Thomasin’s younger brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw, who has a shining moment that must be seen to be believed), are convinced the newborn to have been taken by wolves, young twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) have a more twisted theory, that baby Sam was taken by the witch of the wood, who they believe to be none other than their dear older sister. The mischievous tykes’ tall tale would probably fall on deaf ears under normal circumstances, but Samuel’s vanishing has thrown the family into a state of panicked hysteria; suddenly, sweet, sensible Thomasin becomes the family scapegoat. Eggers gives us a glimpse of moldy corn, which may or may not effect your perception of the unfolding events. Curious.

Female repression emerges as the movie’s major theme as Thomasin is poked and prodded into a corner with dubious accusations slung at her by the twins and her own mother. The hatred mistrust spirals out of control when Caleb wanders into the forest and returns one night, naked and not quite himself. The blame’s heaped on Thomasin and even William begins to question his daughter’s virtue. One can only take so much abuse; if they want Thomasin to be the witch so desperately, maybe she should play along.

Eggers’ film is rife with Satanic imagery (the family’s goat is suggestively named “Black Philip”), but the real horror comes from the volcanic family tension and their religiously fueled motivations. The movie’s set in a time when things we now consider supernatural—witches, ghosts, demonic possessions—were strongly accepted part of the natural world. The Puritanical mindset of the time almost acts as a magnifying glass for the subconscious fears of moderns like us: Misogyny is disconcertingly prevalent in today’s society, but discrimination against women was even more extreme in the time of The Witch. Gender inequity is the source of myriad societal fears, anxieties, struggles, and conflicts, and at its core, Eggers’ story digs down to the roots of this enduring friction, particularly in this country. The fact that Thomasin is on the brink of sexual awakening just as her loved ones turn on her adds another layer of richness to the predominantly feminist narrative.

A jump-scare rollercoaster The Witch is not; it’s more like those dead-drop rides that crane you into the sky at an agonizingly slow clip and then plunge you toward the ground when you reach the apex. Moments of subtle, subconscious dread are stacked on top of each other carefully by Eggers until the overwhelmingly tense final act. I was relatively calm during the majority of the film, but I was absolutely frozen in fear for the last twenty minutes or so. The horror is cumulative, and the escalating, asymmetrical shape of Eggers’ story is a nice change of pace for the genre.

Take one look the detailed design of the family’s cabin and the period-accurate costuming and it becomes clear that Eggers’ background in theater production and scenic design is one of his most valuable assets. The textured, ashy, gothic imagery brings Bergman to mind, which speaks for itself. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, costume designer Emma Fryer and composer Mark Korven (whose wailing choral arrangements are absolutely blood-curdling) keep the movie’s production standards high on all fronts, working in concert to make The Witch one of the most put-together, elegant horror productions in recent memory.

Out in theaters today is Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s (A Hijacking) latest film, A War, a humanistic exploration of the personal and psychological struggles of soldiers. Set in Denmark and Afghanistan, the film stars Pilou Asbæk as a company commander accused of committing a war crime under duress. The consequences of his actions in the field are felt not just by him, but by his wife and kids back home. War movie sensationalism is cast aside in favor of introspective complexity in this unique, exceptional take on a Hollywood genre that’s run cold as of late. Lindholm’s use of real veterans gives his film a layer of realism that heightens the drama in a powerful, sobering way.

I spoke to Lindholm about the film and his experience making it, which is out in theaters now.

There’s a lot of moral and emotional complexity to your movie. It’s a bit challenging in that way, and it’s also about war, which makes it even trickier to market to big audiences. That being said, how does it feel to be nominated for an Oscar? That recognition will obviously garner the film a considerable amount of attention and ensure an international audience.
I mean, we are enjoying every second of it. This movie started out with me writing the first word in a blank document, then reaching out and meeting all these Danish veterans that served in Afghanistan and meeting Afghan refugees. It was never the aim to have international success and actually be nominated for an Oscar and reach this large an audience. But nevertheless, we’re here now. For me to make those phone calls to the refugees, to the veterans, telling them, “You didn’t know whether I was going to do a good film or a bad film. You had no idea. But you all were loyal and shared bravely your experiences with me. To be able to share this with them is just amazing. A lot of the soldiers who were in the film are flying out here to party with me after the Oscars. That’s basically what I’m looking forward to. [laughs]

The film will be reaching a worldwide audience now with the Oscar recognition. But as you eluded to, the most important audience, perhaps, are the veterans who were brave enough to work with you on this movie and share their stories. What was it like screening the movie for them?
Oh, that’s always the most scary part, you know? I’ve made films now for ten years and I’m kind of getting used to the fact that it’s nerve-racking to know the critics are going to watch it and that the reviews are coming out and all that. But in this case it’s even harder because the witnesses are the men and women, the soldiers. To have them view it…I can’t describe how nervous [I was]. I was walking around for two hours not knowing where to go. Luckily, in this case, everybody was very pleased. We see now that the movie also translates well to the international veterans community. In that way, we feel great that we’ve been able to be loyal to the reality we’ve portrayed.

Most of the veterans I’ve met are very humble, almost shy to share their wartime stories. For you to find this group of soldiers who were so open about their experiences is incredible.
I never asked them any questions. I sat down and listened. When I start a conversation with one of these soldiers, I’d never ask, “How was it?” and so on. It’s technical questions, like “Why do you enter a compoound like that?” To get them speaking about it from a professional point of view. It’s their pride. They know this. They’ve rehearsed it so many times. By being loyal to that and wanting to understand I guess opened them up to understand that I was not there to be a parasite. I actually wanted to understand the reality. Slowly, when everybody starts to feel comfortable, they will start to share. Then it’s my job to be the editor and find the bits and pieces I can use. But I never sit down and ask emotional questions about the war. I know that if anyone came in and asked me about the most vulnerable place in me, I would shut down and not talk about it. If that’s where the conversation ends with them, that’s okay becasue I can use the technical stuff the film. How do you handle a gun? How do you talk to the locals? Understanding that will help me portray it.

I met the first soldier at a wedding and, as we know, magical things can happen when you’re a little drunk. Not too drunk, but just a little. At this wedding I had had a couple of drinks and I ended up at the bar with another man who had been in Iraq three times and once in Afghanistan. He just started to talk about how it was to be home and wanting to raise a family. He was the first generation of being a professional soldier in Denmark ever. That opened up a conversation we continued throughout the next few years. He invited in people he served with. Him giving approval to me helped the other guys open up as well.

I have a certain reverence and respect for soldiers when I’m around them. They’ve done things I can’t imagine. There must be a great pressure to tell their stories authentically but does that impede on the artistic process in any way? You are a storyteller with a vision at the end of the day.
The reason I do these stories, is because I want to show these stories we often see in the news from a human point of view. I don’t want to be political, I don’t want to be judgmental. I just want to understand what it is to be human in that situation. The film I did before this one is called A Hijacking, about Danish sailors being captured by Somali pirates. I don’t meet these people as me being a civilian and them being soldiers. Me being a civilian and them being heroes. I always just try to meet them as human beings and try to relate to what they’re going through. This is where we’re equal. I think this is the most important thing we can do as human beings. There are a lot of points where we’re different. All of us. But where we’re the same is the most important. That’s where the audience can relate to these guys. Even though it’s not comparable, I live a life as a filmmaker where I have to leave my kids and my wife for a long time sometimes to do my films. I know the feeling of not being able to connect with them on a proper phone line. Then I can chip in, and the soldiers will be able to relate to that. It’s not a consequence of being a soldier; it’s a consequence of being away from your family. My point of view as an artist is to make a film about human beings in a conflict instead of making a film about a conflict.

What’s unique about the Danish perspective on war?
The unique thing about our perspective on the war in Iraq and, in this case, Afghanistan, is that it’s the first war we’ve fought since the second World War. In the second World War, we fought for five hours and then gave up. As you can imagine, it has defined my generation in that we’re very new to this. In many ways, we are in a post-Vietnam phase in our country right now. We are not used to being a warfaring country yet. I guess that gives us a naive perspective of what’s going on. I still feel I need to confront stuff that a lot of other nations have accepted. I think the Danish perspective is that we’re new at this. We’re still learning. Therefore, we may be asking questions other nations have started to forget to ask.

There’s a pursuit of authentic truth in your productions. I like that you wanted to reference reality in your work, not other war movies. What are the benefits of this approach to storytelling?
There’s a contradiction here. I’m an educated screenwriter. I realized quite fast that I’m not amused by my own imagination. I find it boring. If I have to sit for two hours and make stuff up, I’m like, “I can’t do this.” But if I connect with the world, that’s interesting. I love to connect with these people. One of the big benefits is to share this and try to understand the world. It helps me on a personal level to constantly confront my perspective of the world. At the same time, you can say that, by sharing, this is not my project in the world but our project, all the people who have chipped in to make this film possible. I’m a team player. I’m a soccer player from childhood. I love to be on a team. I feel the most creative and most energized when I’m surrounded by people who want the same thing as me, whatever we’re doing.

This might be a little complex, but every human being in this world is trained from the day we are born and on to understand the world around us. We all enter new rooms every day. We all always spend a second when we meet a stranger to feel if this person is sad or angry or depressed or whatever. We don’t need any time to actually relate to other people. With moviemaking, it seems we think the audience has left that ability outside the cinema. We tell them all kinds of information to make them understand who we’re dealing with. I often get frustrated with being over-informed by all kinds of details about characters in films. I just want to watch a film where I can relate to people on a human level like I relate to people on a human level on the streets or in a restaurant. I remember watching the American documentary Restrepo and suddenly relating to these guys on a human level. I especially remember the scene where one of the soldiers has an anxiety attack because one of the other soldiers is shot and killed. In the middle of the firefight, he breaks down. For me, that’s proof of human life in war. I wanted to portray that and not just make references to other films. When I’m seeing explosions in war films, they’re always way too big. When I’m watching explosion

When I’m seeing explosions in war films, they’re always way too big. When I’m watching explosions from a helmet cam, I see a lot of dirt and sand in the air. And then silence. And then the screaming starts. The timing of reality is slightly different. I found it more interesting and more beneficial to try to approach the reality of it. I think our human ear and human eye is somehow educated to understand what is real and what is not real. I want to invite people into a natural portrayal of war instead of being another fascinated film about war.

Robert Eggers‘ The Witch opens this weekend, and if you shell out your hard-earned money to watch an independent, historically authentic period piece about a 17th-century Puritan family, I’d say that’s a win for all of us who love weird, geeky productions like this one. The slow-build horror movie centers on a cast-out family of seven living on the edge of a dark and scary wood, their minds warped and ires aimed at each other by an external, possibly supernatural force. Starring Ralph Ineson as the father, Kate Dickie as the mother and Anya Taylor-Joy in a breakout performance as their eldest daughter, the film is more Satanic-family-drama than scare-factory, though its climax had me absolutely frozen in fear. Atmospheric, well-acted and directed, and full of disturbing imagery you won’t be able to shake, The Witch is one horror fans shouldn’t miss.

In a roundtable interview, I spoke to Eggers about the film, which opens wide tomorrow, February 19th.

The 17th-century Puritanical mindset is something that’s pretty integral to your story. What’s special about it to you?
The most interesting thing to me was that the real world and the fairy-tale world were the same thing for everyone except for the extreme intelligentsia. Everyday life was imbued with supernatural stuff. Witches were real; that was something everyone knew and understood, and that was the end of the story. A witch today is a plastic Halloween decoration without a lot of impact, so if I could find a way to get audiences into the mindset of a 17th century English settler, the witch could be real and scary again.

Were there any models you had in terms of trying to recreate the sort of dead vernacular in the film?
I have a background in Shakespeare so I’m sort of comfortable around this kind of language but writing in it wasn’t easy. I studied the grammar and the vocabulary—there are books that do that kind of stuff—but then it was really digging into primary source material and jotting down phrases and sentences of all different kinds of situations and categorizing them. If I needed a greeting, I would take it. In earlier versions of the script, there were disastrous, cannibalized collages of other people’s words. It took a while to turn it into me. It’s a really interesting period for the English language.

What I really liked about the movie is it puts you in this state of mind that’s almost hallucinatory. I’d swear I saw things I didn’t actually see.
I like strong imagery and there were certain things I wanted to show. But your imagination is better than what I can give you. What scares you is more personal than anything I can provide. It’s important to keep things in the shadows and keep things restrained because then they can actually be effective. Some things, if I showed them to you, would not be scary—they’d just suck. Better to keep it in your imagination.

Was there anything you read in your research process that you really liked?
I don’t know if this is my favorite but I used it a hell of a lot: Louis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety, which was, like, a prayer manual. The majority of the prayers in the film are from that book. Kate Dickie, who played Katherine…the script would sometimes say “Katherine prays.” She had a digital version of that book on her iPad and she was just walking around the corn fields reading it. It was pretty cool.

Ralph Ineson has one of my favorite voices. Was his voice one of the reasons you wanted to cast him as William?
Honestly, before I thought we could cast Ralph, his voice was the voice of William when I wrote. I was expecting we were going to have to go down the route of getting a name to do our poor little indie movie. But luckily, when we finally found investors, they trusted in my vision to cast who I wanted. I was like, “Wow. Well…let’s try Ralph out!” He’s fucking incredible and he was so committed to the role. I’m happy to see him on the screen.

Did you set the movie in the early 17th century partly because there’s something inherently scary about that historical period?
Yeah. The idea of the supernatural world being real in the past was kind of crucial for me. When we do supernatural movies that take place today I find it hard. It’s metaphysical truths that don’t work for anyone today. There are obviously successful examples that prove me wrong, for sure, but I also just like the past. I don’t want to make contemporary movies currently. I just don’t give a shit. People ask why it’s set in 1630 and not during the Salem witch trials. Aside from the fact that I could have never afforded to have something of that scope, this is much scarier. [The family’s] so much more vulnerable because they’ve just arrived at this place.

Female repression is something that exists today but in the time your movie’s set, it was much more extreme. I imagine it’s helpful to your story that women in this period kind of had this ceiling they’re never able to break through. That’s a big theme.
I tried my damnedest to do my interpretation of how a family in Puritan New England might have experienced a witching. I wanted the camerawork to be subjective but I wanted to be objective about the themes and let people come to their own conclusions. Feminism just bursts onto the screen, out of history. It just rises to the top. You cannot ignore it. It’s clear, looking back from a contemporary perspective, that the evil witch in the early modern period is men’s fears and ambivalences and desires and fantasies about women and female power. It’s also women’s own fears about themselves and their own power and fears about motherhood. The shadows of that still exist today. Sometimes they ain’t shadows.

There’s sort of a hint in the movie involving moldy corn [as to what’s going on with this family]. How important was it to give moderns an idea of what was happening?
That’s cool that you saw the ergot because most people don’t. I one billion percent do not think Salem was because of ergot of the rye. I sound like a freshmen in college, constructionist loser, but we live in a world with certain rules that are given to us by science and we say it’s the best way of understanding things. But science really isn’t objective, actually. Today, science is our god. It’s not too juvenile to say that, in one hundred years, people will look back at us and think we’re wacky. All these different pieces, from ergot to what’s in your imagination, is all tied up in interesting knots.

Costume design is something I’ve been fascinated with lately. What was your approach?
We were just trying to recreate the clothing of the time. I took a lot of work. The source material, the creation of the script, is pretty easy to access for anyone. But the stuff we had to do to make the clothing and build the farm was more obscure. I was working with historians and museums and people in the living history communities to try to create this stuff. I did so much research for years, waiting to get the money. When I brought on Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir, I gave them piles of stuff and they were pumped. We went to great lengths. All the clothes were hand-stitched and made from patterns of extant clothing. One big compromise is that they are not all hand-woven cloth. Linda ordered swatches of all this stuff, and when we could afford it we used it, but where we couldn’t, her modern equivalents were fantastic.

With the farm, I wanted to build it the way they did back then, end of story. Craig said, “That sounds like a great idea but it’s the winter and we’re never going to be able to do it when we’re up to our balls in snow.” But everything that’s onscreen is the real thing. Everything onscreen is going to be the real materials. That did mean having to use traditional techniques and tools to make the stuff. Where we could use modern tools we did, but if modern tools betrayed the authenticity to the camera, we couldn’t use them.

It almost feels like a religious experience, watching a movie that’s as beautifully alien and removed from convention as Embrace of the Serpent. Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra‘s Amazon-set drama is an indignant lament on the devastating, festering effects of colonialism, but it’s more experiential and less studious than that sounds. The black-and-white river imagery is supple, hypnotic and frightening, in that startling way that most unfamiliar things are, at first, frightening. The scariest thing, though, is how vividly Guerra shows us—via two white men’s parallel river quests, separated by 40 years—the extent of the destruction pale-skinned conquerors wreaked on the indigenous cultures of the region. Even scarier: the realization that the eradication of our indigenous people, in our America, makes Guerra’s dark fable hit uncomfortably close to home.

Like the narrative (which is based on a pair of white explorer’s real-life journals), the production’s heroes are dual, with cinematographer David Gallego having as much influence on the film’s success as Guerra. With locations as lush as the ones we glide and trudge through on the winding South American riverways, it seems best, for a story this restrained and contemplative, for us to simply, respectfully bear witness to the indescribably beautiful surroundings. There’s no need to breathe life into what’s already teeming with overly stylized presentation, and thankfully, Gallego’s got taste. The choice to go monochrome supports the thrust of the story; what would have been about color and vibrancy is now all about light, darkness and shadow.

At the center of the first story is Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet), a German explorer in search of a rare, sacred flower called the “yakuna.” Theo’s fallen ill on his expedition, tended to by his local guide, Manduca (Miguel Dionisio Ramos). As they land their boat onto the riverbank, they’re met by Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a shaman who doesn’t take kindly to white men, whose violent conquest has rendered him a companionless river dweller, the last of his tribe. Locals like Manduca, who cooperate with the whites and have adopted many of their Western customs are, to him, just as disgusting. Reluctantly, Karamakate agrees to be their guide (only he knows how to reach the yakuna), enticed by Theo’s promise to help him find the last remaining survivors of his tribe, who the German claims he’s seen with his own eyes.

On their journey, the cultural divide is slowly bridged: Karamakate keeps Theo’s illness at bay with herbal medicine; Theo shares some of the worldly belongings he’s hauling around in his clunky luggage box. (Meanwhile, Manduca straddles the cultural line.) Their bond is shaken to the core when they come across a grove of drained rubber trees and indigenous workers mutilated and enslaved by the invaders. Tensions are heightened again when they happen upon a Catholic mission where a mad Spanish priest rules over orphaned indigenous children, forcing them to abandon their old customs as he abuses them on a whim in a multitude of sickening ways. This portion of the film is almost unbearably awful to watch. It speaks to Guerra’s integrity, though, that he shows no measure of restraint in depicting something so horrible as cultural extermination. Again, the true horror is how easily linked the priest’s child abuse is to issues of our time (Spotlight comes to mind).

Theo has a mental breakdown when his compass is stolen by one of the locals, fearing the technological trinket will sully the purity of the tribes traditions. Karamakate takes the fit as a sign of ignorant condescension, and they’re back to square one. Our link to the second story, set in the 1940s, is Karamakate, the older version of whom is played by Antonio Bolivar. We flash over to this second journey intermittently, which sees the shaman in a sorry state of soullessness, numbed to nothing by the continuing white-man takeover. He meets a new, American explorer, Evans (Brionne Davis), who, like Theo, is trekking towards the yakuna wonder-plant. The tone’s much more pensive and dirge-like in this less-eventful second story, which is mostly about the sorrow that’s built up in Karamakate following decades of watching his home ravaged by Western “progress.”

As grim and yucky as this all sounds, the movie isn’t without a few moments of mirth. Evans blowing Karamakate’s goddamn mind with a phonograph under a starry night sky is heart-meltingly cute, and when young Karamakate and Theo exchange the occasional glance of recognition and acceptance at each other, it gives the story just the right amount of hopefulness it needs to avoid being completely depressing. What’ll be most challenging about the film for many is its pace, which is relatively lax and often stretches moments and shots longer than normal. Some would call this meandering; I’d call it glamorously introspective (I have no qualms about staring at Gallego’s images for an extra beat or two—or three). Guerra’s made a magical film in that it feels strangely organic and of the earth. The mechanisms we’re used to recognizing and latching on to—performances, camera moves, editing, sound design—flow together so naturally in Guerra and his team’s hands that Embrace of the Serpent feels of the earth, not of 35mm celluloid.

2016 is the perfect time to make a sequel to the 2001 cult-ish classic, Zoolander. The vapid, narcissistic, pea-brained male models that populated that movie have now taken over the earth in the real world, in the form of the “selfie generation,” a bunch of real-life Derek Zoolanders, Mugatus and Hansels running around, staring at themselves like idiots in their little, digital mirrors as they dream of YouTube stardom and Kardashian-level success. I’m a big, fat, thirtysomething, generationally supplanted crank (make me young and beautiful again!) and I would love nothing more than to watch Ben Stiller and his middle-aged cohorts rip this new wave of self-obsessed monsters to shreds (too harsh?) via a new go-round with Mr. Magnum himself.

Zoolander 2 tries to do that and, and fails at all of it. Hard. Like, heartbreakingly hard. The movie opens with Justin Bieber being brutally shot to death and then taking a selfie before he peaces out. That and a selfie-stick car crash are really the only jokes we get about selfie culture, and they feel in bad taste, almost too real to laugh at (people applauded at the sight of Bieber getting shot to death in my theater, which I found to be more than a little sick). Zoolander is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, its male-model characters gifting us with the some of the most glorious displays of sheer stupidity put to screen. There was orange-mocha-frappuccino; the Mer-Man commercial; the iconic “Hansel. He’s so hot right now. Hansel.” That movie was a non-stop shit show of giant laughs that I enjoy to this day, so the fact that its sequel is so unfunny and off-base is a really tough pill to swallow.

The new story picks up with Derek (Stiller) and Hansel (Owen Wilson) estranged, both from each other and the outside world. Derek’s living as a “hermit crab” in a snowy cabin somewhere in “extreme northern New Jersey;” Hansel’s living in a desert hut, in a serious relationship with an orgy of lovers (which includes Keifer Sutherland, playing a straight-faced version of himself). They were driven apart by a freak accident at the Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Who Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too that killed Derek’s wife and mother of his child, Matilda (Christine Taylor, who makes a couple of brief cameos) and scarred Hansel’s face irreparably. As a single parent, Derek fails again, losing his son, Derek Jr., to child services when he “can’t remember how mom made the spaghetti soft,” depriving his son of nourishment completely, apparently.

Derek and Hansel make up and reunite when they’re beckoned by the world’s latest, greatest designer, Don Atari (SNL’s Kyle Mooney, whose interpretation of passive-aggressive hipster youths is the movie’s highlight) to walk the runway in his ultra-hip garb. The joke’s on them when they’re shoved onto the runway in cheap shirts with the words “OLD” and “LAME” printed on them and they’re ridiculed by their glitzy, fresh-faced onlookers. The world’s passed them by (sob). There’s a larger, more pressing issue, however: There’s been a string of celebrity murders being investigated by the Fashion Police, led by Valentina (Penelope Cruz), who believes Derek has the key to finding the people responsible. Derek agrees, as long as she helps him reunite with his lost son.

The plot’s as uninteresting and flat as it sounds, a trashy send-up of the international spy thriller that chose to spoof that genre seemingly arbitrarily. But all that could be quickly forgiven with some good, solid comedy. Alas, Zoolander 2 isn’t funny, not one bit. The botch is in the approach: Stiller, who directed and co-wrote with Justin Theroux, Nicholas Stoller and John Hamburg, makes that godawful mistake most bad sequels make, attempting to emulate and bottle the magic of the first movie. This never works, and the fact that it’s now 15 years since Zoolander was released only makes things worse: Comedy has evolved many times over since 2001, and the same tricks don’t work anymore. A character being woefully uneducated and small-brained, for example, has been taken to new levels by, say, a show like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Charlie Kelly is the new king of dumb-funny). For this second installment to really work, it would have needed to reach new levels of stupid, in a sense. Instead, it reaches new depths of disappointing, leaning on nostalgia and old, worn-out tricks. Watching Derek go on a joy ride “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was funny the first time, but not so much in 2016.

There’s a freaking ass-load of celebrity cameos in this thing, and not one of them is worth the dough it cost to get them on-screen. Sting pops up. Arianna Grande’s in there. Katy Perry. Benedict Cumberbatch. Billy Zane returns. Will Ferrell‘s back as walking bitch-fest Mugatu, and he’s even joined by Kristen Wiig, playing his vaguely European partner in crime, but even they seem off their game. None of these or the myriad other appearances are amusing and, in fact, they’re a bit uncomfortable to watch. Neil Degrasse Tyson shows up to say, directly at the camera, “I’m Neil Degrasse Tyson…BITCH!” Ooh! A respected educator and astrophysicist cursed! The moment’s clearly designed to make audiences explode in applause; instead, it only elicits groans and eye-rolls. We’re familiar with these cheap parlor tricks and we’re ready for something new, and all Stiller gives us is a regurgitated mess.

What makes Deadpool a very, very special member of the Marvel Universe is that he rides that Bugs Bunny plane of existence where he has a direct, ongoing conversation with us, the audience, as he partakes in the same superhero escapades of his spandex-clad counterparts. For fans, the prospect of him hitting the big screen was an exciting one—a Deadpool movie, done well, has the potential to undress superhero movies in a spectacular, hilarious way. After years bubbling up to the surface of the cesspool of weirdo movie projects no one wants to finance, Deadpool is finally here, and it does (hooray!) walk through many of the creative doors a fourth-wall-breaking character like “The Merc With A Mouth” kicks down. What’s a disappointment is how surprisingly tame the comedy feels and how conventional the movie feels as a whole, but if it’s simple, off-the-wall entertainment you’re after, you’re going to leave the theater mighty happy.

The movie’s self-awareness is may be the biggest hook for those of us with previous knowledge of the titular character (played by a fiery Ryan Reynolds), but for mass audiences, its clear appeal is its free pass to show us hard-R, bloody, vulgar stuff you almost never see in superhero movies. Kick-Ass constitutes the “almost,” but Deadpool hits the anti-superhero-movie thing on the head much, much harder. The tone is firmly set in the funny opening credits sequence which, instead of sprawling filmmaker Tim Miller‘s name across the screen, cites the director as “Some Hack” and the writers as “The Real Heroes Here.” The jokes, which mostly take aim at studio-movie clichés, are well thought-out a lot of fun, though they never feel as smart or ahead of the fanboy curve as I’d hoped. Most of the laughs come from a place of recognition, like pointing out how shameless Marvel’s Stan Lee cameos have become or referencing the colossal blunder that was The Green Lantern (which also starred, as you probably know, Mr. Reynolds). The best gags are the ones that come out of left field, like when Deadpool slyly hints that the main reason the movie got financed was due to the support of Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman.

Reynolds (who’s been vocal about his desire to reprise the Deadpool character after the missed opportunity that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine) doesn’t shut his yap for virtually the entire movie, a difficult task for even the most seasoned onscreen comedians (Jim Carrey and the late Robin Williams took on many a gabby, cartoonish role in their respective careers, and even they had their fair share of missteps). That the Canadian heartthrob sails through the material so comfortably is super (pardon the pun) impressive, especially considering how much harder it is for uber-handsome leading men to get us to laugh at and/or with them (Cary Grant was one of the few actors who could be “the fool” and make us feel sorry for him despite his immaculately chiseled chin). Now, is Reynolds as funny and brilliant as the three legends I just name-dropped? That’s a big NO. But most actors of his generation and ilk would crash and burn in this kind of role, and he keeps his composure uncommonly well.

After the movie’s first scene, a quippy, brain-splattering freeway shootout in which Deadpool’s badassery and loudmouth personality are established, we flash back to learn about the life of Wade Wilson, a mercenary with a barkeep best friend called Weasel (T.J. Wilson) and a kindhearted, prostitute lover, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Setting Wade on his path to becoming the one-and-only Deadpool is the news that he has late-stage, terminal cancer. When a shady figure offers him a cure in the form of experimental therapy (which, as chance would have it, affords the patient super powers), he reluctantly seizes the opportunity. Bad move; the organization administering the treatment turns out to be totally evil. Wade’s cured alright (he even acquires super-healing powers), but he’s left covered from head to toe in Freddie Kruger-esque burns. In a word (his word), he’s “un-fuckable.” The dejected Wade can’t bring himself to return to Vanessa with his disgusting-ass face, so he instead sets out on a revenge mission in search of Ajax (Ed Skrein), the mad scientist who screwed him over in the first place.

Deadpool starts in a good place but eventually starts to skip to the same beat as all the superhero movies it pokes fun at, pitting our antihero against a sadistic bad guy in a CGI-heavy final battle, the fate of his love hanging in the balance. Some mutant sidekicks join the fray in the form of the Russian, steel-bodied Colossus (Stefan Kapacic) and the explosive Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand). These two are mostly used to emphasize how much edgier Deadpool is than your everyday X-Man, though it’s pretty clear that, deep down, he sits comfortably on the good-guy side of the larger spectrum—what’s more heroic than risking life and limb for your lover? Take away his potty mouth and murdering addiction (he only kills bad guys, after all), and he’s just like the rest of Professor Xavier’s gifted students. That’s the movie’s biggest issue: bells and whistles aside, it feels like just another superhero story. The irony stings. Still, it’s entertaining throughout and the laughs are well-earned and rival those found in the excellent Guardians of the Galaxy . That’s a win deserving of a lifetime supply of yummy chimichangas.

There’s something genuinely interesting about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when it first gets going. As a relative newbie to both Seth Grahame-Smith’s book the film is based on and the Jane Austen book that book is based on (forgive my ignorance, I beg you), the juxtaposition of the white upper crust at the turn of the 19th century with the socio-political, blood-letting genre pleasures of zombie and martial arts movies is a lot of fun. Not blow-your-mind, innovative fun, but straightforward, shoveling-popcorn-in-your-face, night-out-at-the-movies fun. The novelty wears off, though, and what’s left is a decently entertaining but frustratingly anti-climactic pop culture mash-up that doesn’t quite live up to its potential.

Writer-director Burr Steers does indeed have a few good things in place at the film’s outset, most notably a game young cast who generally hold up their end of the bargain. Elizabeth (Lily James), Jane (Bella Heathcote) and the rest of the Bennet sisters grab our attention immediately, gossiping and fantasizing about their respective dream suitors as they tighten each others’ corsets and polish their pointy zombie-slaying weapons. (The movie’s gender-reversal twist is that, in this world, the women generally do the fighting while the men often cower away in a corner. It’s a strong sentiment that loses its power due to Steers trumpeting it too loudly.) The strongest male warrior in the land, the brooding, handsome Mr. Darcy (a pleasantly ashy-voiced Sam Riley), who Elizabeth at first detests. The sexual tension between them is as thick as butter, of course (they’re both stubborn loners), and James and Riley do a fine job building that chemistry. Jane’s matched up with Mr. Bingley (Douglass Booth), but their relationship’s only significant to the plot and nothing more.

Elizabeth and Darcy is where all the real action and drama stems from; their union is inevitable but is stopped dead (cough) by an impending wave of zombie hordes that threatens to wipe out all of London. While the hard-headed Darcy prefers to meet the undead head-on on the battlefield, Elizabeth meets a shady stranger who proposes a treaty with the zombies, facilitated by a process that placates their hunger for human flesh (feed them animal parts and they stop being belligerent assholes for a while). The plot really starts to get in the way of the actors in that they aren’t really given a lot of space to explore the more interesting corners of their respective characters’ personalities before a stupid string of exposition ruins the mood. That being said, James and Riley are a wonderful match and go above and beyond to keep us invested.

What’s worse, with all the anticipation built up of an unstoppable zombie army and the promise of a great war with the undead for the fate of London, we get absolutely nothing of the sort. There are a few displays of zombie slaughtering throughout the movie, but an epic, sprawling, LOTR: The Two Towers melee never comes. A disappointment to say the least.

The movie’s half-comedy, of course, its silly premise a clear giveaway that we shouldn’t take the material so goddamn seriously. Problem is, the movie just isn’t that funny. Again, much of the humor relies on the subversion of gender roles too heavily (is seeing a woman kick ass in a movie really so uncommon that we need to point it out so incessantly?) and the novelty of aristocrats being highly skilled warriors loses its luster before the plot even gets going. The movie’s major highlight is Matt Smith, playing the prissy Parson Collins who, despite his best efforts, can’t convince any of the Bennet sisters to take his hand in marriage. He first has his sights set on the already-spoken-for Jane but then concedes that he’ll settle for any of the sisters, a sentiment that isn’t met favorably by the girls or their parents (Charles Dance and Sally Phillips). Parson’s inability to see himself for the idiot the rest of us see him as is one joke that never gets old, thanks to the refined talents of Mr. Smith.

Steers tries to represent the wit of Austen’s material as best he can, but all the nonsense of the (frankly awful) zombie-slaying half of the story gets in the way at every turn. There’s a balance to be struck between respecting the integrity of Pride and Prejudice while having fun with the wacky experiment of throwing zombies into the mix, and Steers’ attempt is decidedly wobbly. The romance done well, but the decapitation, stabbing and zombie mass-destruction? That bit could have used an extra dash of crazy sauce to even out this unappetizing plate of lit-horror fusion.

In traipsing Old-Hollywood comedy Hail, Caesar!, sibling duo Joel and Ethan Coen reflect on the cyclonic nature of showbiz, much like its spiritual predecessor, Barton Fink. That movie (which, my god, is now 25 years old) is nastier and more idiosyncratic, skewering the film industry with voracious (and incredibly funny) disdain. The Coens’ 2016 offering is more relaxed and lighthearted, but what it lacks in crackling energy and forward momentum it makes up for with finely tuned, detail-oriented jokes and an overabundance of charm.

The charm factor is in effect no more than during one of the film’s several movie-within-the-movie, genre-parody scenes, in which Channing Tatum (playing Burt Gurney, a Gene Kelly-like hoofer) performs a jaunty tap number in a sailor suit. (Few current screen actors can move like this man, and the Coens don’t squander the chance to let him tear up a song-and-dance routine.) The movie’s set in 1951, predominantly unfolding on the grounds of Capitol studios (the same fictional studio from Barton Fink), and Gurney’s ditty is one of the many movies being filmed on the sunny studio grounds, including a glittery synchronized-swimming production (starring an Esther Williams-channeling Scarlett Johansson) and “Hail, Caesar!,” a Ben Hur-style epic starring self-involved, strong-chinned leading man named Baird Whitlock (played by George Clooney in the vein of Charlton Heston).

While most of the characters we see are cleverly-packaged homages to the stars of Dream Factory heyday, one is taken straight from the Hollywood history books. Capitol is absolutely bustling with chaotic activity on a daily basis, and one man is responsible for holding the whole operation together: Eddie Mannix, a real-life, legendary studio exec who put out fires at MGM for years. He’s embodied by Josh Brolin, who leads the charge as the main focus and anchor of the otherwise scattered story. Mannix is a bulldozing man on a mission, zooming around the lot and around town making unblinking threats and using cool-headed negotiation tactics to keep all of his pictures running on schedule and in harmony. There’s no one better, and a lucrative job offer from Lockheed has him considering leaving the loopy microcosm of Capitol to make a bigger buck, albeit for dirtier work.

Much is made of Mannix’s soul searching; the film opens with him repenting in a confessional, a place we see him return to twice more as he considers the Lockheed offer and reflects on the more questionable facets of his moral make-up and career choices. Brolin and the Coens have always had a fruitful partnership, and while Mannix isn’t as monumental a creation as Llewelyn Moss, for instance, he’s still interesting enough to stand out amid the crowd of larger-than-life personalities running around the rest of the film.

One such personality (my favorite, in fact) is Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a singing cowboy star who can perform eye-popping, impossible feats on horseback and has a gift for lasso acrobatics, but can’t read proper dialogue for squat. When he’s shoehorned into a production that calls for him to wear a tuxedo and walk into a room full of aristocrats speaking in Mid-Atlantic accents, it makes for one of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in recent memory (watching the baby-faced buckaroo do his involuntary cowboy strut in a tuxedo nearly killed me). The comedy’s all in the details, like how the stuffy production is under the hilariously named “Laurence Laurentz Presents” banner. Hobie isn’t a mere caricature, though; later on, he plays a key role in the film’s plot that shows us that he’s a true hero (which explains why he’s so awkward on a proper movie set; he’s too genuine to fake anything).

The dilemma at the center of the story that keeps the movie from being a randomly arranged series of unrelated scenes involves the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock by a stable of scorned communist screenwriters. As Mannix tries his best to handle the situation, he’s bombarded by a litany of on-set issues: Johansson’s starlet is looking to avoid a pregnancy scandal; the great Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) refuses to tolerate Hobie’s atrocious line-reading skills. On top of that, he’s stalked by the film’s resident Hedda Hopper-esque columnists, persistent twin sisters played by a fantastic Tilda Swinton.

Mannix’s plate-spinning is involving enough, but I couldn’t help but yearn for more time with the rest of the cast. Johansson, Swinton and Tatum are super entertaining and part of me thinks it would have been nice to make Hail, Caesar a true ensemble piece, downsizing Mannix’s screen time a bit to give the others more room to do their thing. The Coens seem to be having a lot of fun stepping into the shoes of filmmakers from classical Hollywood and drinking in its grandiosity all while skewering the absurdity and silliness of its inherent artifice. They’ve become such assured storytellers and filmmakers that, even when they take it easy, we’re on the edge of our seats, grinning from ear to ear.

Studio-financed dramas based on real-life heroism stories are a dime a dozen. We’ve all seen a million of them and pretty much know beat-for-beat how they operate, which is pretty much the same way all Hollywood blockbusters operate. (“Here comes the part where the handsome white man beats impossible odds and saves everyone!”) One always hopes, when one of these incredible-true-story cash-ins comes along, that the filmmakers seize the opportunity they’re given and actually do something interesting and artful.

Regrettably, the opportunity is typically squandered, and such is the case with The Finest Hours, a decent dramatization that’s too restrained and measured to be interesting. A product of Disney, the Craig Gillespie-directed thriller is inspired by the efforts of a handful of Bostonian U.S. Coast Guard rescuers who save around thirty men from a ravaged oil tanker in the middle of the stormy North Atlantic. Such a story sets the foundation for the bevy of visual effects teams to go absolutely ham with digital rain and pummelling waves and sweeping views of raging sea storms. The CGI maelstrom indeed looks pretty impressive, but it’s all stuff we’ve seen before in other, better movies of the same ilk. Plus, oddly enough, despite the chaos surrounding our plucky heroes, it never quite feels like they’re in all that much danger.

In February 1952, an oil tanker was literally ripped in two by a winter storm off the coast of Boston, prompting the Coast Guard to deploy a sizeable team of their best to search for survivors. In a cruel twist of fate, a second tanker in the area, the SS Pendleton, was split in half as well. With the Coast Guard crew’s numbers severely diminished, just four men are sent on a small motorboat to somehow navigate the crushing, freezing waters and locate the Pendleton and its survivors.

They’re led by Bernie Webber, played by an unexpectedly wooden Chris Pine. Webber’s a man’s man, but he’s shy and mildly awkward, socially. Pine doesn’t find any depth within the character, which is a disappointment, though his co-stars feel similarly docile (Ben Foster, playing one of the four rag-taggers, is also uncharacteristically sleepy in his performance). Half of the movie follows what’s left of the Pendleton crew, a collection of archetypes embodied, again, by talented actors seemingly on cruise control. Casey Affleck plays the crew’s impromptu leader, Raymond Sybert, a sort of ship whisperer who devises clever plans to keep the Pendleton afloat until help comes. Raymond, like Bernie, is a softspoken outcast of sorts, their respective journeys parallel and largely flavorless.

We don’t know much about Raymond’s background, but we learn a lot about Bernie’s in the film’s open, which flashes back to the meet-cute between he and his sweetheart, Miriam (Holliday Grainger, who has the lovely look of a classic Hollywood starlet). When Bernie’s out on his impossible rescue mission, we occasionally check in on Miriam, who’s worried into a frenzy, taking much of her frustration out on Bernie’s commanding officer (Eric Bana). Grainger’s gifted, and maybe the nicest thing about the movie is that she’s given ample time to explore Miriam’s different colors of desperation and anger and denial.

The Finest Hours‘ issues really boil down to the fact that it moves forward in such a sleepy fashion that the stakes seem to evaporate into nothing as we watch the actors navigate the uninventive script (by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson) without any vigor or enthusiasm. The generic, sweeping score is relentless in how it dictates the tone of the scenes before the camera or the actors are given a chance to, which is another added frustration. It’s an incredibly bloodless affair, and the ending is so protracted and full of pointless, long stares that I was absolutely itching for the thing to be over.

Our eyes see bloody chaos as our ears are treated to rapid-fire literary musings in The Lesson, a pedagogic dark fantasy about a teacher driven so mad by his rotten, closed-minded students that he decides the only way to unlock their learning potential is to pin them to their desks—literally, with a big, fat nailgun. Director Ruth Platt juxtaposes torture-porn trappings with heaping helpings of high-minded brain food, a curious pairing that works to great effect. It’s a bloody British parable with wicked, well-written dialogue and a surprising measure of visual sophistication that won’t be for everyone (the squeamish, as well as those in search of simple-minded thrills, will likely choose to skip class partway through) but will be a joy for those willing to test their movie-watching mettle.

Fin (Evan Bendall) has just only turned sixteen, and already his life’s fallen to shambles. His father’s working abroad, his mother’s dead, and his brother, Jake (Tom Cox), who wants nothing more than to kick Fin out of their childhood home so that he and his European girlfriend, Mia (Michaela Prchalova) can have the house to themselves. The poor boy leads a loveless life, the only bright spots being the occasional, sneaky sign of affection from Mia and the minor mayhem he causes around town with his best mate, Joel (Rory Coltart).

The boys are a pair of dickheads, vandalizing private property for kicks and bullying anyone unlucky enough to catch their eye, including their uptight English teacher, Mr. Gale (Robert Hands). They sleep through his lectures, bark at him without a shred of respect and even subject him to physical abuse, sticking chewed up gum in his hair out of sheer boredom, in front of the whole class. On Fin’s 16th birthday, the pair are treated to a hard life lesson when Gale finally snaps, kidnapping them with two swift bops to the head. Fin wakes up in a dusty garage, covered in blood, tied to a desk next to an unconscious Joel as Mr. Gale declares class in session and starts scribbling on a whiteboard. Using torture tools as motivation, he forces lessons of ethics, philosophy and literary greats like William Blake, John Milton and Thomas Hobbes on the bruised and beaten Fin. The boys’ only hope is Mia, who’s taken to the stormy streets in search of her missing housemate.

The scenes outside Gale’s gore-garage feel a bit dull in comparison. Fin’s domestic issues with his brother and his lukewarm romance with Mia lack the soulfulness and fire seen in other indies that tackle similar domestic-dysfunction material. Hands is terrific, making every scene he’s in better than the last as Gale gets nuttier and nuttier and more frightening by the minute. There aren’t any big scares to be found in The Lesson, but the film’s real gift is that it’ll give your mind something to chew on for a few days. The value of education, the tragedy of untapped potential and the intellectual downslide of future generations are just a few of the litany of ideas Platt brings to the table. As fascinating as it is to have all of these interesting concepts and philosophies explored so thoroughly in a genre movie, it can sometimes feel like sensory overload when we’re also meant to stomach watching teenagers get impaled over and over. This is surely by design and meant to put us in Fin’s shoes, but there’s only so much one can take before the brain turns to jelly and the movie starts to lose its grip.

Rating:
7/10

An inventive satire about the ever-narrowing relationship between artist and audience, Director’s Cut has a lot of interesting ideas bouncing around inside its twisted, experimental narrative, though on a fundamental level, the movie simply isn’t that compelling. Penn Jillette plays Herbert Blount, a stalker psychopath who donates a ton of money to a crowdfunded horror movie, his reward being on-set access and permission to shoot behind-the-scenes footage. Not content in his role as financier, Blount hatches a plan to take over the movie by replacing the director, stealing the footage, and kidnapping lead actress Missi Pyle to shoot additional scenes. We learn all of this via a director’s commentary provided by Blount over his new version of the hijacked movie, a unique storytelling approach that’s amusing until the schtick grows old about halfway through.

At first, it’s incredibly intriguing to watch the opening credits of the fake movie while listening to Jillette in character as Blount, using his shoddy After Effects skills to cross out director Adam Rifkin’s name and scribble in his own as he drops nuggets of sophomoric moviemaking knowledge in an attempt to give us a peek “behind the scenes.” As a character, Blount is a moderately entertaining take on the entitled fanboy, an heightened representation of the dangers and mild absurity of crowdfunding. Blount’s creepy obsession with Pyle provides most of the movie’s humor, with him trying to pass stalker footage of the actress both out in public and in her hotel room off as new scenes for the movie they “collaborated” on. Jillette’s voice is one of the most recognizable out there, which is a good thing in that it always holds your attention, but a bad thing in that it’s hard to associate what we hear with Blount and not Jillette, the lovable entertainer we’ve associated that voice with for decades.

As the story unfolds and the gimmick loses its luster, Director’s Cut reveals itself to be a sort of bland abduction movie that doesn’t offer any real chills or thrills. It isn’t very disturbing, suspenseful, frightening or even funny. Playing themselves alongside Pyle are Gilbert Gottfried, Nestor Carbonell, Hayes MacArthur, Harry Hamlin and Jillette’s old friend and cohort, Teller. The horror movie they’re “acting” in is generic by design, so all of the interesting stuff is saved for the leads. The movie arguably exists in the found-footage category but doesn’t capture the real-world horror that sub-genre was designed to elicit, mostly due to the fact that the dialogue is a bit too theatrical.

The folks at Red Letter Media created a character called Mr. Plinkett a few years ago who does video reviews of movies while giving us glimpses into his twisted personal life, in which he kidnaps women and murders women and sells homemade pizza rolls via snail mail. It’s a similar concept but works better than Rifkin and Jillette’s movie because it delivers the goods, providing serious film critique underneath all the craziness. Director’s Cut doesn’t offer the raw, fundamental genre joys one would expect from such a wacky project. The idea to make a crowdfunded movie about a demented crowd-funder is fun, but this movie isn’t.

Director’s Cut Slamdance Review Rating:
5/10

In Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio plays survivalist legend Hugh Glass, a frontiersman betrayed by both his land and fellow man, left ripped and ravaged without anything left to live for. Inch by inch we watch Glass crawl and tumble across miles and miles of picturesque Great Plains scenery, and little by little it becomes clear that, despite the film’s impossibly grandiose, elaborate, labored production, its story is relatively uncomplicated. Sitting firmly in the annals of American Myth, Glass’ journey is about little more than the unexpected fruits of grit and resilience, a classic survivalist tale through and through.

It’s an interesting thing marrying such a straightforward narrative (based loosely on Michael Punke‘s 2002 novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge) with Iñárritu’s overblown sense of spectacle and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki‘s floating, balletic long-takes. The combination works, but on a level that likely isn’t as high-minded or deeply spiritual as the filmmakers intended. The sights are soar, the sounds swirl, but what keeps things grounded and compelling are the hardworking actors and the simple satisfaction of watching a man on a mission, fighting tooth and nail to reach his target.

The target is a cantankerous, slippery brute called Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) who earns Glass’ ire thoroughly. The rivals are a part of an expedition for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, scouring the land for pelts to trade. While gathered on the Missouri river, the group is attacked by the Arikara tribe in a dizzying, dazzling bombardment of grotesque tomahawk and arrow kills punctuated by blood-curdling screams of agony all around. The men barely make it out alive, their numbers severed. When a grizzly bear mauling leaves Glass fatally wounded, the captain of the hunting party (Domhnall Gleeson) deems it too dicey to transport him via stretcher across the rocky terrain, leaving him under the care of Fitzgerald and a boy scout-ish tagalong (Will Poulter). They’re offered extra pay to stay behind and give their dying comrade a proper burial upon his all but inevitable death, and while Fitzgerald hasn’t got an ounce of compassion in him, he needs the cash considering they were forced to abandon their precious pelts in the escape from the Arikara. Once the rest of the party leaves, however, he plots a scheme more befitting of his nefarious attitude.

Glass was a real man, though what we see in The Revenant has gone through three filters of fictionalization—the history books, Punke and Iñárritu. After the Fitzgerald betrayal, the film follows Glass as he uses his frontier skills to nurse himself back to health while he tracks down the man who left him for dead. It’s a big, heaping plate of revenge and outdoors survival that’s meaty enough on its own, though Iñárritu and Lubezki add unneeded garnishes (shallow spirituality and white-guilt symbolism) that almost spoil the meal.

DiCaprio’s performance is tremendous in that he uses every inch of his body to tell Glass’ story. It’s a mostly non-verbal role that sees him expressing a wide range of emotion with his eyes (in the chunk of the story where Glass is incapacitated) and with his entire body as he slowly rehabilitates and traverses the unforgiving terrain. Overwhelmingly, this is a story of despair and tragedy, but we do get to see love in Glass’ eyes early on. In flashback, we see his Pawnee wife and their teenage son (Forrest Goodluck), who he raised to be a tracker like himself. Their fates, of course, aren’t sunny because…Iñárritu. DiCaprio. Tragedy is their jam, man.

Iñárritu and Lubezki teeter on the line between visual splendor and artistic arrogance so precariously that it adds to the excitement of their films in an almost meta way. Sometimes the imagery is ingenious; when Glass is all but crippled, Lubezki presents the surrounding landscape as not beautiful, but paralyzingly frightening in its endlessness. But then a bird flies out of a dying woman’s chest and you can’t help but laugh at how silly it looks. The ambition is bloated and these guys are totally caught up in their artsy maestro bullshit, but even the weakest shots in this movie (most of them involving iffy CG elements) have enough flair to them that you can hardly turn your attention from the screen.

Subtlety and thematic complexity aren’t Iñárritu’s strengths, so when The Revenant lets go of its “big ideas” and focuses on Glass’ manhunt, things get really good. Hardy plays a terrific scumbag, so when Glass finally get his hands on Fitzgerald, it’s both gratifying and insanely intense. Admittedly, the pleasures found in the excessively gory final showdown are decidedly testosterone-driven, but if you approach the movie as a primal tale of bloody revenge (á la Kill Bill and Mad Max: Fury Road, for example), there’s no reason to apologize for reveling in all the limb-hacking and eye-gouging.

If there’s one thing about The Revenant that irked me, it’s Iñárritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith‘s decision to push the story as a revisionist western in which the sins of the Native American genocide are examined through the eyes of a bunch of white guys. It’s an insult to both the Native American perspective, which is almost always grossly underrepresented in these kinds of stories, and to the real Glass, whose extraordinary ordeal is more than worthy enough of a movie on its own without faux-mystical themes muddying everything up.

Everyone’s got at least a few friends who aren’t the least bit excited by the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens this weekend. If they’re going to see a movie this weekend, it’ll probably be Sisters, and they’ll probably be left underwhelmed and bored to tears as they try to ignore the dispiriting sounds of laughter, cheers, and lightsabers clashing in the theater next door.

This endlessly dull house-party comedy stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as Kate and Maura (get it?), respectively, siblings who return to their childhood home when they’re informed that their parents have sold it to a snooty young couple. As a loving sendoff for the house, they throw a gigantic party, inviting all of their high school friends and dancing their adult cares away to cheesy ’80s and ’90s radio jams. Predictably, the party gets out of hand, laying bare the sisters’ deepest insecurities and frustrations with each other. Laughs, laughs, laughs, dramatic climax, sweet reconciliation, laughs. We’re all familiar with this studio-comedy formula by now, and I for one am beyond sick of it.

Poehler and Fey have a schtick, and it’s a good one. They’ve set several live television shows on fire together over the years. They’re a phenomenal package. It’s only logical that you’d give them a movie platform to do what they do best, but as a star vehicle, Sisters is a jalopy. The story’s barely there (it’s about their characters learning to let go of their childish ways or something), so all the pressure’s on the dynamic duo to be funny all the time and keep things entertaining. There are a handful of solid laughs here and there, but in a movie with literally hundreds of one-liners and slapstick gags being thrown at us in rapid succession, a handful ain’t gonna cut it.

The problem is that there’s no discipline to the storytelling, so the movie plays out like an improv fest where the jokes feel too standalone and random to support the story or the characters. Maura’s a divorced nurse who’s always trying to fix everyone else’s problems and Kate is a mom who needs to grow up herself if she ever expects her teenage daughter (Madison Davenport) to respect her. Clichéd as they are, these characters could have worked, but once the actors start flying off the cuff and doing their typical “crazy girl” thing, the notion of Maura and Kate quickly melts away and we’re left with Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and their run-of-the-mill Saturday Night Live yucks. Things get so scattered and feel so unscripted that it almost feels irrelevant to mention the movie’s director, Jason Moore—this is the Amy and Tina show, through and through.

Speaking of SNL, the only highlight of the film is current cast member Bobby Moynihan, who plays a wannabe life-of-the-party guy who incessantly spouts bad jokes and goes ape-shit when he accidentally snorts a pile of cocaine. Perhaps the movie’s biggest surprise is that Mya Rudolph, who’s almost always excellent and hilarious, is woefully unremarkable in her role as party-pooping mean girl. Rachel Dratch is here too, doing a watered-down, unfunny version of Debbie Downer. I expect more out of all of these people, and the fact that the youngest, least experienced SNL player of the bunch is the only one to register real laughs is frankly unbelievable.

The real bummer here is that we’ve all seen Poehler and Fey be great elsewhere. Hell, even their previous movie team-up, 2008’s Baby Mama, was pretty fun. But Sisters just feels like they jumped in front of a camera without a plan and rehashed that terrible brand of humor where they rely on the shock value of four-letter words and general crudeness instead of crafting real, clever punch lines. I weep for those who forego The Force Awakens for this forgettable failure.

For a documentary about the man behind one of the best, most influential restaurants on our planet, Noma: My Perfect Storm is terribly uninspired. It’s about René Redzepi and his amazing Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, the epicenter for Nordic cuisine that has topped the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list four times since 2009. Chef René and his team are relentlessly focused, innovative and dedicated, nearly to a fault, and yet Pierre Deschamps documentary is the complete opposite: rudderless, overwrought and unoriginal.

The focus is squarely on chef Redzepi, his food philosophies, ego, work ethic and accomplishments. It’s a solid underdog story. Redzepi’s vision for Noma was to introduce the world to the first purely Scandanavian restaurant, sourcing ingredients from local farmers and crafting region-specific dishes you’ll only find in their little corner of the world. The irony here is that this Nordic culinary revolutionary is actually an immigrant from Macedonia who regularly faced discrimination for his Muslim background on his journey to the top. The adversity molded Redzepi into a bit of a rebel, a proud outsider who exercises his passion on his terms and cares little what his peers and critics think of him.

The story’s drama comes from a February 2013 norovirus outbreak that affected over 60 of Noma’s patrons, a botch that arguably lost them their top spot on the Best Restaurants list that year. A year later, still reeling from their prior defeat (though they won’t admit it), the Noma team attends the awards ceremony again. Redzepi goes on bitterly about how the ceremony is all arbitrary bullshit anyway, but fast forward a few minutes and he’s a ball of giddy excitement as it’s announced that Noma’s retaken the top spot. It’s intriguing to watch his psychological ups and downs, but the film is never piercing or incisive enough to explore that side of his psyche in a way that’s challenging or revealing.

The most upsetting thing about this food doc is that it doesn’t seem to share the same passion for food as its subject. The amazing plates Redzepi and his team design and debate over so meticulously aren’t showcased often or artfully enough, and this gets very frustrating, very fast. When we do see a close-up of one of Noma’s marvelous plates, it’s almost always out of context, with no insight provided into the conceptualization of or inspiration behind the glistening food in front of our eyes. Deschamps doesn’t seem concerned with weaving together food photography and narrative in a meaningful, coherent way, and that hurts the film bad.

Deschamps is so interested Redzepi’s temperament in the kitchen (one scene sees him berating his cooks for confusing lemon thyme with thyme-thyme) that there isn’t much room left for the film to revel in the beauty of the world-renowned chef’s delectable dishes. Periodically, the Noma crew will have these food jam sessions where the cooks will freestyle some brand new dishes and present them to the rest of the team for evaluation; if the dish is good enough, it may eventually end up on the menu in some form. It’s nice to see Redzepi interacting with his team in such a loose, casual, positive environment, complimenting his cooks on their “fucking amazing” creations. But we can’t get a good look at the food! I found myself squinting to catch a glimpse of the experimental dishes the young cooks worked so hard on, but Deschamps never lets us get in close.

It’s easy to get onboard with a character examination about Redzepi—he’s a fascinating guy with a chip on his shoulder and a truly great mind for cuisine. But Noma: My Perfect Storm doesn’t reflect in its form chef Redzepi’s obsession with food, which in this case turns out to be a fatal flaw. The film is too fixated on what’s in his head to truly appreciate what he’s making with his hands.

Editor’s Note: This review was written with a spoiler-free mindset; my intention was to preserve the film’s major secrets and revelations so that you may discover them on your own.

With a deep sigh of relief, Star Wars fans can finally rest easy: Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a bombastic, high-energy, eye-popping space opera with loads of heart and soul (two key ingredients the prequels tragically lacked). It doesn’t quite capture the storybook magic of the original trilogy, but the classic Star Wars spirit lives on via returning cast members and some scrumptious fan-service callbacks. What’s most intriguing is the new stuff: a hungry young cast putting on worthy performances; a savvy director whose eye for action makes the series’ signature space battles pop and sing like never before; an exhilaratingly dominant female presence. The film gives several of the series’ longstanding traditions a loving kiss goodbye while also forging forward, setting the tone for what Star Wars will be now and in the future.

The story, by director JJ Abrams and co-writers Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, picks up thirty years after the events of The Return of the Jedi, with the Empire long-fallen. Taking the Empire’s place is the First Order which, in all honesty, looks and operates exactly like the Empire (they’ve even got armies of stormtroopers, and fleets of TIE Fighters and star destroyers). The Rebels have been replaced by the Resistance, led by general Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). The good-guy and bad-guy factions’ shared mission is to locate a digital map which contains the location of the long-missing Jedi Master, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Harboring and guarding the map is an adorable, globular droid called BB-8, who’s stranded on the desert planet Jakku when his master, Resistance ace pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), is captured by the First Order.

On Jakku, BB-8 meets tough-skinned scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley) and stormtrooper-gone-rogue Finn (John Boyega). Both are charismatic and have rich histories and a few secrets to hide. Poe is star quarterback-cool and makes a big impression though he’s less of a presence than Rey and Finn and looks to have more of a central role in future installments. Looking at the movie as a sort of baton pass from old characters to new, it feels like a clean, seamless handoff. The new heroes feel as organic and fleshed-out as their predecessors did in their respective debuts in A New Hope. The nature of heroism has been a primary theme throughout the series, and it’s further explored here; one of the protagonists could in a certain light be considered a bit of a coward. But there is no courage without fear, of course.

Personifying the dark side of the force this time around is the sinister Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), a volatile, loquacious villain with dreams of picking up where Darth Vader left off (he keeps Vader’s charred helmet as an object of inspiration). The movie’s open sees him slaughtering a small village on Jakku in search of the map-guffin, and in later scenes, we learn the source and extent of his inner rage. He works for a bigger bad (I’ll let you discover who that is on your own) and also has a peer/rival in General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson), a tyrannical, barking military leader who’d be a Third Reich shoe-in in our galaxy. His pet project is a massive, world-ending new weapon he can’t wait to unleash on the Resistance.

In what instantly becomes one of the series’ best aerial action sequences, Rey, Finn and BB-8 stumble upon a “garbage” spacecraft in a junkyard and use it to take out pursuing TIE fighters. Little do they know, they’ve just hopped into the legendary Millennium Falcon—Rey mans the cockpit, Finn takes control of the same swiveling turret Han and Luke once did, and a spectacular, careening, nostalgia-dipped dogfight ensues (this sequence really is a wonder). After successfully evading their enemies and exiting the planet’s atmosphere, our young heroes eventually find the ship’s original owners, Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), who reluctantly agree to help them deliver BB-8 to the Resistance (and Leia, who Han hasn’t seen in quite some time).

Seeing the returning actors reprise their roles is a delight though unsurprisingly there are occasional lapses in conviction on Ford’s part (when the movie calls upon him to run and gun he puts on the face of a morning jogger). The prop throwbacks and easter eggs get tiresome after a while (the film will often all but pause for applause when showcasing these classic movie relics) but they’re sure to make fans go wild and maybe even draw a tear or two. The larger narrative pays homage to the first films as well (search for lost Jedi Knight, blow up big enemy weapon) and, uninspired as this is, Abrams and co. introduce enough twists into the formula to make old tricks feel new again. What makes the returning characters’ involvement worthwhile are plot developments that are best kept a secret, though what I will say is that the ongoing Skywalker/Solo family drama is kept alive in exciting, unexpected ways.

Something that feels sorely missed in this seventh installment of the long-running space opera is, well, operatic speech. There was a theatrical, melodramatic thrust to some of the original trilogy’s classic lines that, while cheesy to some, made those iconic movie moments feel timeless and momentous. Shakespearean, even. With the exception of one exchange during the film’s most emotional scene, there aren’t many lines I can point to as being quotable or particularly weighty. Perhaps time and rewatches will prove me wrong.

The two standout actors of the film are, without question, Ridley and Driver, both of them sharing strong chemistry with the rest of the cast and, most of all, with each other. Rey and Kylo Ren are grade-A characters who are easy to invest in and bring a new energy to the Star Wars universe. Boyega, Isaac and Gleeson do fine jobs as well though I suspect those characters’ greatest moments are still yet to come. A major frustration for me was Iko Uwais and the rest of The Raid crew’s wasted casting—these guys are the best movie martial artists in the business, and they’re given nada in the way of fight sequences. Big shame.

One of the main points of anxiety for Star Wars fans anticipating this film is the implementation of CG effects. While for the most part the digital elements look fantastic (Lupita Nyong’o‘s character, Maz Kanata, is an incredible CG creation), some of them look downright out of place, like Kylo Ren and Hux’s master. This is the first successful marriage between Star Wars and digital effects, but the marriage ain’t a perfect one by a long shot.

There are moments when Star Wars: The Force Awakens feels like a modern action-adventure classic; the climactic, snowy-forest lightsaber fight, for example, ranks up there with the best in the series (in fact, the entire third act is unbelievably good). But where the movie falls short is in continuing the original trilogy’s spirituality angle. Star Wars has always been about faith and family—Abrams nails the latter, but has somewhat forsaken the former. We acquire little to no new understanding of the force and its mysteries, and the characters who do struggle with faith don’t do so in a way that we haven’t seen before. The movie gets more right than wrong, however, and all things considered, it delivers where it counts. This thing is an entertainment orgy of galactic proportions, a fun-filled, planet-hopping, visually breathtaking adventure that gets the next generation of Star Wars stories off to a good start.

Standing in defiance of the techie takeover that’s been wiping clean San Francisco’s weird, colorful corners and pockets, the 100-year-old New Mission Theater—following a $10 million renovation by Alamo Drafthouse—opens its doors tomorrow, inviting us to dine on high-end finger food as we watch movies of all shapes and sizes within its historic walls.

For its grand opening, the theater will be playing Star Wars: The Force Awakens on all five of its screens. Moviegoers are offered assigned seating and can order food and drink throughout the movie via a silent ordering system involving pencils, paper, ninja-like servers and a whole lot of nervous hand gesturing. Not a perfect system by any means, but all the scrambling adds to the Alamo ambiance.

The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain was founded by Tim League in 1997 and has since expanded to 20 locations across the U.S., the New Mission being the latest addition. League’s hired former Roxie Director of Programming Mike Keegan to run the theater and, considering the man’s prior accomplishments (he’s helped program many of SF Indiefests wild and weird events and once organized a cat video film festival), San Franciscans are in for a treat. Helping Mike ensure the theater is an active contributor to the Mission District community is Private and Community Events Director Elizabeth Duran.

The theater’s adjoining bar, Bear Vs. Bull, will act as a separate entity; you can grab drinks before or after a movie or simply stop by and hang without purchasing a ticket at all. Beverage Director Isaac Shumway and Chef Ronnie New will be sure to keep your belly happy as you enjoy a night out with your buddies and/or significant other.

Sitting in front of one of the theater’s beautiful screens, I spoke with League and Keegan about the future of the New Mission and the journey that got them to this point. For more info, visit drafthouse.com/sf

As far as magnitude goes, there’s no bigger way to open this theater than on this weekend, with this movie.
Mike: We like to live by the seat of our pants, and there’s nothing more terrifying than opening a giant project, years in the making, with unrealistically high expectations!

I think the both of you have done countless cool things for the film community, kind of keeping the game off-balance with your ideas. Talk about coming together to work on this particular project.
Tim: We’ve known each other for a little while. I think we met through a mutual friend—it’s a really small world of people who do this type of programming. Our friend said, “You guys should meet—Mike’s nice!” And this guy will tell you if a guy’s not nice. [laughs] We chatted and Mike had left the Roxie and was out doing cat fancier tours or whatever it was. [laughs] It wasn’t really a formal process. It’s cool in this world because you’re kind of judged by your past work. We liked what he had been doing and thought it would be a good cultural fit for Drafthouse.

I’ve enjoyed your work at the Roxie very much over the years, Mike. This is a great, big new platform for you. What can we expect from you in the future?
Mike: The cool thing is, it’s five screens. You have flexibility because you have everything from a 320-seat room to a 34-seat room. You can basically show the best version of whatever should play in each room. You could play a masterpiece gem in a 34-seat room and do great, and you can have a four-quadrant Marvel movie in the big room. Everyone’s psyched and everyone’s happy. You hope that the audience will get to a point where they’d want to see all five things and that they feel like this is their place.

Tim: That sense is what’s pretty unique about our company, in a way. We’re doing some pretty interesting, almost subversive advertising for people who are watching some pretty down-the-middle movies. It’s like, “You like movies? How about these movies you may not have heard of?” It’s a way of converting a lot of people who may not know a lot about film history to come check out some other stuff after they’ve watched something like Star Wars, for example.

Mike: I feel like, over the past fifteen years or so, there’s been much less of a divide between high and low art. “Content” is a big word going around—people are just open to things that interest them. Whether it’s a stuffy art movie, a crass action movie or anywhere in between. It’s the right time to open a place like this.

With The Hateful Eight, particlarly the road show version, Quentin Tarantino is trying to give people a movie experience they can’t replicate at home. Your company does that kind of work as well. Talk about the importance of watching movies in wild, weird ways.
Tim: We look at ourselves as not necessarily competing against home video. We look at ourselves as an option for people deciding on what to do when they’re outside the house. This experience, from beginning to end, has to be compelling enough for people to choose it over going to a comedy club or going out for drinks. It’s an out-of-the-house entertainment option. Sometimes it’s more over-the-top for us. But I just like watching a movie. The technical aspects, the food and beverage—that’s all a part of just watching a movie.

A lot of the new companies that have popped up in San Francisco have sort of taken over and farmed new money without giving back to the community. It seems like this theater will play a big part in preserving the integrity and authenticity of our city.
Mike: We have a Community Director, Liz Duran, who’s from KQED, Sketchfest and the San Francisco Film Society. She’s on the ground, letting neighborhood organizations know that we’re here and we want to work with them. Kids can come watch movies on the weekend for a dollar. We’re here for everything.

The queso’s still on the menu!
Tim: That’s the only holdout. It’s a brand new menu except for the queso. If you’ve lived in Austin, that’s the number one question me and Mike have been fielding. “You’re bringing the queso, right?” People who aren’t from Austin have no idea what you’re talking about. [laughs]

So this is the first theater in the Alamo chain to have a unique menu?
Tim: Yeah. What we normally do is, we have a core menu, and we hire a local chef in the market and they change about 25% of it or so. Then they work on rotating specials once a quarter. If Hateful Eight is coming out, they’ll make a special menu for it. That kind of stuff. For this one…so many things are unique about this facility. I wanted the San Francisco theater to be very special, so we spent a long time trying to find a chef that we liked and was also a big movie fan. I wanted this to be a dream job for that person.

Would you say you created a dream job for yourself?
Tim: That’s exactly what I did. I was an engineer and I didn’t like it at all. I got there right on time, left right at five and took an abnormally long lunch break. I would leave my door open, you know? [laughs] When I was 21-years-old I immediately leapt into the middle class, but it wasn’t how I wanted to retire. My satisfaction came after 5 o’clock. Now, I love what I do.

I think what’s cool about you guys is that you’re a chain but you don’t feel like a chain. You’ve grown and done it the right way. How big can the company get? How big do you want it to get?
Tim: I set a goal to be at 50 locations by 2018, and then we were going to assess it and see how we did. If it still felt right, we could go bigger. I don’t know. I’m focused on that 2018 number. It’s already gotten really interesting. We were talking to the VP of Disney because they like what we’re doing. We can find smaller movies and open a movie across our circuit. That’s how we started our distribution company. Anomalisa is Paramount, but it’s also a challenging film. It’s going to be hard for that film to find an audience if it doesn’t get an Academy Award. That’s a movie where everyone on the team loves it and we’re going to collectively dive in and do everything we can. We worked directly with the studio. We said, “We’re going to post some numbers because this movie is extremely special.” We want to share it with as many people as possible. You can’t do that as a single-screen theater. Now that we’re bigger, we can make some noise for a movie like that.

Sometimes I go to the theater and I look around, and no one looks like they’re actually present. Their mind is somewhere else, their hands are itching to grab at their phones.
Tim: I think that speaks to why our no talking/no texting policy is so important. Not to sound pretentious or old-fashioned, but it’s so crazy to me what’s happened to people throughout their day. You could be having a conversation with somebody and it feels like they’ve gotten bored with what you’re saying and they pick up their phone and multi-task. Going to see a movie and making this mandatory situation happen where you have to put your phone away and focus on something that’s longer than a minute is actually kind of important, to shut down for 90 minutes and dissolve into a movie.

Somebody asked me, “What do you think about the future of movies? What will movies be like in 25 years?” I want it to be exactly what it is today, which is exactly what it was in the ’40s. I want the lights to go down and you just lose yourself in a story. No bells, no whistles. I don’t want anything more.

Tom Hooper‘s gender-identity period drama The Danish Girl is meant to usher in a better semblance of understanding regarding trans people for those uneducated on the trans experience. It’s about late Danish artist and trans pioneer Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne), who in 1930 became one of the first people to undergo gender transition surgery, a journey she embarked upon with the full support of her wife, Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander). The story’s presented in the most palatable way possible for wide audiences: exquisite costumes, silky cinematography, gorgeous actors and grand orchestral swells are the film’s veil. Sweeping all that aside, however, reveals an awkward story whose character’s motivations and authenticity feel questionable at best.

Before Lili, there was Einar Wegener, a well-known, respected painter. He’s madly in love with his wife, Gerda, who’s a painter as well though she hasn’t yet achieved Einar’s level of success. Unexpectedly, an act of husbandly support by Einar turns into the most pivotal moment of his life. When standing in for one of Gerda’s models, he becomes she, the women’s clothing she dons awakening a true sense of self. She’s reborn as Lili Elbe. On a lark, she accompanies Gerda to a party and, while Gerda sees it as something of a game, Lili experiences an internal rebirth. From there, questions and threats arise, anxieties fester and mettle is tested as she pursues her her dream of reassignment surgery, though one thing that stays rock solid is the love shared between she and Gerda.

Without a doubt, as a love story, the film is tender and touching and full of integrity (most of this can be attributed to Vikander and Redmayne’s performances, the former of which approaches greatness). But there’s something seriously amiss with the film’s representation of Elbe’s psychological progression throughout the transition. In real life, Elbe spoke of herself in third person so as to express herself to a world totally ignorant to the trans experience. Redmayne does so in his portrayal as well, though his Lili feels more like someone with dissociative disorder than someone wrestling with gender identity. She fully considers Einar to be dead and forgotten, practically wiping her previous life from existence. The real Elbe blossomed into her true self, became more herself than she was before, which by most accounts is a common trans experience. But according to Hooper’s film, she suddenly transforms into someone else entirely as if she was possessed by some other being in her former years. Whether this was intended or not, that’s how it comes across, and the interpretation just feels wrong.

Redmayne’s gifts are unquestionable, but his character’s development being as misguided as it is undermines his work. It’s extraordinary to watch him move and he really seems to have unlocked his feminine side, especially when you notice his unease when Lily’s forced to wear men’s clothing. But when the script dictates that he must act like an insane person he can’t help but get tripped up. Gerda’s journey is much more compelling and logical as she walks beside Lili through the hellfire and brimstone. Vikander exudes so much love, compsassion and charisma that she steals the movie right out of Redmayne’s hands. In fact, when viewed primarily as Gerda’s story and not Lili’s, the movie isn’t half bad. Her career takes off once she starts painting Lili, though it quickly becomes clear that the romantic nature of their relationship is all but dead. Still, she has the courage and commitment to stand strong by her soul mate no matter the circumstances, and in doing so proves herself a hero. It’s a well-realized character and a stunning performance by Vikander, one of this year’s outstanding actors. Matthias Schoenaerts makes a strong impression as well as the couple’s only ally (and Gerda’s eventual lover).

It’s hard to fault Hooper and his art department’s visualization of ’30s Europe. The craftsmanship behind every bit of scenery and costuming we see is staggering, though there’s something offputting about how manicured Lili’s world is considering the uglier aspects of her story. Perhaps a rougher presentation would more appropriately reflect her state of mind. It’s a minor qualm, though, next to the idea that people may come out of this movie believing all people in transition hit some sort of identity restart button, wiping old memories away and storing them in a box somewhere. The most gorgeous pictures in the world can’t cover up phoniness, and that’s exactly what Hooper and Redmayne’s Lili feels like: phony. A pretty portrait of the wrong woman.

Tom Hooper‘s The Danish Girl follows the true-life gender transition of artist Einar Wegener to Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) and its effect on her marriage to fellow artist Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander). Acting as stand-in for one of Gerda’s female models ignites a reawakening in Einar as he discovers he was meant to be a woman. Met with resistance at every turn, the reborn Lili’s only supporter is Gerda, the two of them fighting together to build a life in which Lili can finally be herself.

In a roundtable interview in San Francisco, we caught up with Hooper to talk about the film, which opens tomorrow in select cities and expands wide on Christmas.

The difference between Gerda and Lili’s way of dressing struck me. Gerda is so fashion-forward and Lili is much more traditional.
Paco Delgado is a genius. He’s the costume designer. He’s done Pedro Almodovar’s films for years. We did Les Miserables together, and I thought his eye for detail was extraordinary. We were lead a lot by the photos we have of the real Gerda and Einar. It became clear that Gerda’s eye for fashion was immaculate. One of the ways she paid the bills was doing covers for fashion magazines. What was extraordinary was that Einar was aspiring to a very different idea of the feminine, which was quite bourgeois conservative. It’s actually quite conventional—she just wants to be identified with the other half of the population. I think in that kind of anxiety to be validated as a woman she felt safer in a conventional style of clothing. It’s also interesting to me that the film doesn’t involve Lili learning to be like Gerda. Gerda’s body language is actually quite masculine.

I get quite excited by actors who are good at expressing themselves with their bodies, and Alicia and Eddie are two of the best young actors doing that kind of work.
Yeah, I love that. I think a lot of screen actors kind of act from here up (brings hand to chest). They’re so used to being in close-up [that the rest of their] body goes to sleep. I started to become very aware of it when I was doing The King’s Speech. Geoffrey [Rush] was actually mime-trained and is amazing with his body. I’d be doing close-ups with Geoffrey and I’d go, “Look at what he’s doing with his hands,” so I’d pull back and do a mid shot. Then I’d go, “Actually, I like the whole profile,” so I’d pull back again. I’d come out of that experience thinking more about body shape.

What was very interesting was that, after doing all of these things as a director, you never ever say to an actor, “I’m sorry. At that moment, you betrayed your gender. You were not convincingly a man.” You never say, “You weren’t in gender.” I’ve never actually corrected someone on their gender. The really fascinating thing was having to think about the way gender is constructed. You start thinking about to what extent culture has put pressure on us to take on a certain construction of gender and how much of it is innate. I go around now seeing much more how people have constructed themselves. It’s really affected the way I look at the world.

What was your process with Eddie when you started this journey, turning him from a he to a she?
It started with a lot of research. I was lucky enough to have a meeting with Lana Wachowski because Eddie had done a film with her. She gave us a great reading list, and through her we discovered this book by Jan Morris called Conundrum. It’s the most brilliant book about transition. We met trans men and woman. There’s a great one called April Ashley who was a famous model in the ’60s in London and had an amazing life. We sat with her, drank champagne, had tea time and listened to her life story. We did some early tests on a stills camera, and a lot of it was about this idea that we were revealing Lily rather than him transforming into Lily, this late femininity being revealed. That idea of getting him to that point of confidence where he carried the woman inside him and really start to show it and reveal it was a key concept early on.

I like the way you shot the scene where Lily is posing for Gerda for the first time. It’s like she’s rediscovering her body.
It was a very key scene. To get it right, we were showing a release into anxiety. Obviously, the discovery that she’s making in that moment carries with it a lot of stress and conflict. But it’s also this release out of anxiety and into this possibility of being her authentic self and the potential experience of joy she’d never imagined. In Lili’s memoirs, that’s the moment she talks about as being key. Of all the scenes, I think it was important to get that one right. Her body’s waking up.

Something interesting I read was that Lily often referred to herself in the third person.
In her memoirs, she talks about Einar and Lily in the third person. Eddie and I had long debates about [this]. In modern trans experience, you’d probably talk about “I” rather than talk in the third person. But we wanted to capture this period in the 1920s when there wasn’t an existing language for being a trans person. She was trying to find a way to communicate this to other people, and a way she could do it was to say that there is a struggle between Einar and Lily, and Lily has to win.

Talk about the pool of talented trans actors out there and how filmmakers like yourself can create opportunities for them. You hired a number of trans actors for this film.
I just think it’s a necessary shift. It’s all about equality of access. I still think we have a huge issue in the film industry with equality of access with women directors. It still feels like there’s sexism operating in that world. For people of color, there are barriers of access. There’s a greater fight of making sure there’s equality of actors for people who feel their voices have been marginalized. There’s a great journey to go. I think trans employment is very important. On Les Miserables, my musical director was a woman called Jennifer White. I feel like, particularly in the U.S., there are huge issues of discrimination in the workplace against trans people. If this film in any way can keep the process of shedding a spotlight on those indignities, that would be great.

This movie’s coming out at a very interesting time because of the Caitlyn Jenner story. What do you expect this to add to that conversation?
I speak from a London perspective, not an American perspective, but I think there’s a generational thing where the older generation are perhaps far less progressive in their understanding than the kids coming through now. It would be great if the film could reach those very people who are kind of closed to this narrative and open people’s hearts to caring about Lily and trans stories in general. I don’t know whether it can do that, but it would be great.

Talk about Eddie as an actor. He’s got a one-in-a-million smile, which I think is invaluable in this movie.
He has this great gift where he takes the audience with him on every step of the journey. I don’t feel Lily is “othered” by Eddie’s performance. If anything, Lily’s journey feels inevitable in Eddie’s hands. He has this gift where you understand every step. Not many actors can do that. There would be moments that would feel strange, but he has this compassion. It allowed us to go on a journey that, in theory, could have been unwatchably painful. But you stay with him. He’s also the nicest person on the planet. He went off to the Academy Awards, came back after the weekend and was completely unchanged. He’s the same guy.

Alicia is having such a year.
One of the first things I said to her was, “Because Eddie’s working so hard to be this person, don’t be lazy. Don’t think about how different Gerda differs from you. Can you be as specific with her as Eddie’s being with Lily?” I thought she really embraced that idea. Early on, she had an idea of Gerda having a personality that is more charismatic than she is herself. She’s quite a contained person. Mainly, I was intimidated by finding someone to act opposite Eddie. If you didn’t have two actors who matched each other, it would have been quite tough. I felt like Alicia had such a great, big heart. It’s this love story, and you see how Gerda has this inexhaustible source of love for Lily that helps her through this transformation.

I love Matthias Schoenaerts.
I still can’t believe he’s in my film! [laughs] I asked my casting director Nina Gold if we could ever get Matthias and she was like, “Probably not.” But he said yes! He’s like a natural film star. He’s so still and simple and powerful. There’s a calmness to him.

In a drastic, surprisingly smooth departure from his typical work directing major studio comedies, Adam McKay tackles the dense subject matter of The Big Short, a screen adaptation of Michael Lewis‘ best-selling book about the devastating financial collapse of the mid-aughts. A heavy drama boasting an all-star ensemble (including Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, and more) playing men who watch the world burn to ashes around them from a credit and housing disaster only they saw coming, the film operates in a dark world of complex real estate jargon and impending Wall Street doom. Nevertheless, the film is imbued with a crackling, unpredictable energy a filmmaker with McKay’s comedic and improvisational background naturally brings to the table.

We spoke to McKay in a roundtable interview about the film, which opens this Friday in select cities and expands wide on December 23rd.

As a filmmaker, how hard or easy was it to maintain the balance of making sure your audience understands all of the Wall Street terminology while also being entertaining?
I think what we did with breaking the fourth wall was inspired by Lewis’ book. If you look at his book, he does a lot of footnotes where he says, “You’re still keeping up with what I’m saying. You deserve a gold star.” He kind of talks to the reader a little bit. That inspired us doing that in the movie. I just felt like the movies had to be inclusive. One of the ways the banks get away with ripping us off is by making us feel stupid or bored by financial talk. I wanted to open it up in a fun way because, once you get it, it’s a really energetic, exciting world. I figure if a college dropout who directed Step Brothers can understand it, the rest of the audience can. That was my operating premise. This isn’t that hard—it’s just moving dead money around and giving it weird names.

The balance is a different question. Ultimately I felt like this movie had to be driven by those characters. That’s what drove me through the book—Dr. Michael Burry, Mark Baum, Jared Vennett, the young guys. That’s the meat of this story. They’re us. They’re the people that the rest of the banking world doesn’t respect—they’re obnoxious, they’re weird. There’s also the big question of why they saw [the crisis] when no one else saw it. In the edit room, that was a big thing we looked at, balancing, trying to get the audience to have enough information so that you can go for the ride. But sometimes I’d have to stop the movie and go, “What the fuck is a synthetic CDO?” For the most part, the audiences really love it and feel like it pulls them into the movie more. The only people who have been bitching about it have been super stodgy film formalists.

You come from a theater/improv background where addressing the audience is quite common. Why do you think it’s considered such a radical idea in movies?
There’s definitely a snobbery about it that I’ve noticed. It’s a film school thing. In film school they teach you “show, don’t tell.” They literally do exercises with it. Friends of mine who were in film school talk about how you’d get in trouble if you’d tell and not show. I think it’s become this sort of unspoken rule. But some of my favorite movies of all time involve breaking the fourth wall or using narrators, like 24 Hour Party People. That’s a movie that I love. There’s such an energy to it. American Splendor. Scorsese’s done a bunch—Goodfellas, Casino. You freeze the frame, you talk. That new show, Narcos, does it a lot. I think it’s kind of changing. Early on, there was a power to film in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s where they’re showing. They’re showing a lot. I think now, because there are so many mediums going on, we can blur it a little more. I’m less precious about it. I find it really exciting to [break the fourth wall].

You worked with four A-list actors on this movie. How much direction does each of them require, and are there different techniques you have to use with each of them?
You kind of dial into each actor and what they need. In the case of Bale, he comes to set and he is the character by the time he arrives. But he’s sort of internalized all of the guy’s physical tics and emotional outlook, but we’re trying to find the right pace for it and how much [he] lets out. Do you want to see a full tour de force of what the guy is in every scene? He and I worked a lot on when to use different aspects of the character. We were constantly having a discussion about that. Occasionally, the real Michael Burry’s voice will just get loud for no reason when he’s talking to you, so we talked about when to use that. It’s a constant checking-in with Christian. He’s completely grounded in the guy, but you try to find the right times and places and make sure it feels real.

Carell is very different. Carell almost hunts down the truthful moment like he’s got a pack of dogs. When he doesn’t have it, he gets very pissed at himself. He’s just chasing it and chasing it. When I do comedies with him, it’s not like that, but with this I realized my job was to be like his hunt-master. The two of us would just chase it down. You’re just nudging it and pushing it. When you get there, it’s very cool because he’ll never say “we got it,” but then suddenly, he’s silent. I’ll say “we got it,” and he won’t say anything and we’ll move on. He’s really, really hard on himself in a great way.

Gosling had an odd role in this movie. He’s both inside the movie and outside the movie. He can talk to the camera. So he was closer to a writer-director. The way we’d talk was closer to the way Will Ferrell and I talk. He’s a super collaborative, funny guy. Brad Pitt just came in with this fully formed character. He had the hair, the beard, the look. He knew exactly who this guy is. I was like, “Hey, I want to do this scene in the kitchen.” He was like, “Yup. I want to talk about saving seeds in Monsanto.” Melissa Leo lands, gets off the plane, smokes the scene in fourteen takes, says goodbye, gets on the plane and leaves. It’s like, “Where did that come from?!”

Coming from the world of making really big studio comedies, how easy or difficult was it to pitch yourself to take on a very different project?
You’re one hundred percent right. I’ve tried to make other movies. I tried to make Garth Ennis’ The Boys at one point, and I couldn’t get anyone to make it. That was a case where I went to all the studios in town and I could feel when I was pitching it [them thinking,] “Oh, he’s a comedy guy.” It was a tricky, ambitious project, but it didn’t help that I was a comedy guy in their eyes. In this case, I got very, very lucky. The company that I went to, Plan B, are the coolest people in the world. Really open-minded. The second I pitched my take they were like, “Why didn’t we think of this? This is perfect.” They were one hundred percent behind me from the beginning. And at that point, you have to put up or shut up about the script. When Paramount got the script, they actually liked it. Then we got this incredible cast, so we were good to go. I give all the credit in the world to Plan B for being open enough to talk to me about this. Not only open, but excited to talk about it.

How deeply involved were you with Michael Lewis in translating his book to screen?
Basically, I had lunch with him before we were going to get going. He said to me, “The book was my baby. You take the baby to college now.” He really loved the script. The greatest moment was when he saw our third-to-last screening and just went on and on about it and effusively loved it. Of course, we all reacted like giant geeks!

As a moviegoer, Steve Carell continues to surprise me as his career goes on. He’s always revealing new layers to his gifts. You’ve known him for years—has he always had these dimensions to him or is he really evolving with every project?
I think he’s definitely evolving. He’s got a little bit of Peter Sellers to him in the sense that he’s very meticulous and mathematical in the way he goes about comedy. It’s all very small, precise choices. I always knew he was a very detailed technician. But I don’t think I started thinking, “Oh, wait a minute—he can play these other ranges!” until Little Miss Sunshine. He was pretty frickin’ good in that, but then I thought, “Alright, he’s a good actor, but I’ve always known he was a good actor.” But then he did The Way Way Back. That was the first time I thought, holy shit—this guy’s really good. There’s this anger there and all these emotions. And then, of course, Foxcatcher blew me away. That’s how I ended up casting him in this role. I thought, son of a bitch, I think he can do this. He’s got the anger, he can transform enough. I was knocked over by what he does in this [movie].

What’s it like not working with Will Ferrell?
I can say this: Life is twenty percent less enjoyable. He came and visited us for, like, three or four days on set just because he wanted to hang. We had the best time with him. I always miss him. He’s the best! But I think it was good that we did something separate, you know? I actually was talking to him about doing a cameo, and he was like, “McKay, go do one without me!”

Talk about the pressure cooker of working with Paul Rudd on Ant-Man to craft what that movie became.
I gotta tell you—it didn’t feel like a pressure cooker. It felt like I was in heaven. I grew up on Marvel comics. I met with Kevin Feige and I could tell, “This guy gets it.” Sometimes you meet with these executives and it’s like, “They kind of get it…” The bummer of that is when you write something really cool and they don’t get it. It was so much fun knowing that, if we wrote something cool, Feige was going to get excited about it. We just had the best time, man. It was Rudd and I holed up in a room for two straight months, writing giant action sequences. Everyone assumed I was just doing the comedy, but we rewrote huge parts of that movie. [We got to write] the whole Falcon fight at the Avengers [base]. It was so much fun. I told Feige afterwards, “Any time you need me, give me a call. That was a blast.”

In one of the most riveting lead performances of 2015, Christopher Abbott plays the emotionally adrift James White. He’s a twentysomething in the midst of a terrible family double-tragedy: his father’s just passed and his mother, Gail (Cynthia Nixon), has terminal cancer. It’s a chilly November morning in New York City and there’s a memorial for his father being held at his mom’s apartment where friends and family have gathered to mourn, but that’s not where James is. James is slumping through a raging club, drunk and delirious, pushing his way past sweaty young bodies in his stinky gray hoodie (which he seldom changes). He emerges from the den of excess, steps into sunlight and hops into a cab. When he finally arrives at the gathering, he meets the grieving guests with dark circles under his eyes, smelling of gym socks and booze. All he wants is for everyone to leave so that he can continue to bum on his mom’s couch and party every night. He’s an easy read: Scumbag. Slacker. Fuck-up. Freeloader.

James White, the moving directorial debut of Brooklyn filmmaker Josh Mond, doesn’t let you write James off so easily. In addition to being a total slob and a bully who’s more than happy to lay hands on any stranger who rubs him the wrong way, he’s an attentive caregiver, a loving son and a good friend. He’s only got one friend, Nick (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi), but they’re tight; they back each other up in bar fights, and Nick’s happy to help take care of Gail at the drop of a hat. James can be a dick, but slowly we begin to understand his mental oddities and hangups. He unleashes his anger on people outside of his tiny inner circle because he’d never intentionally hurt the ones he loves. Does that make him a good guy? An asshole? He’s neither, existing in that complicated, dark, mysterious space in between. He’s a ticking time bomb, and as his story unfolds, we learn what makes him tick.

Sympathy for James blossoms as we get to know him, but melodrama and sentimentality are virtual non-factors in Mond’s storytelling. James White is a chillingly up-close-and-personal observation of a young man bubbling with so much emotion that he exists perpetually at the precipice of physical and psychological implosion. Dire, stressful situations like James’ are ugly and messy and horrible, so Mond doesn’t attempt to paint a pretty picture.

Still, glimmers of sweetness arise as we unpack James’ mental baggage. He’s got some serious (scary) anger issues, but being around his mother brings out his softer, compassionate side: When Gail’s admitted to the hospital following a frightful mental lapse, James gets frustrated that he can’t find her a bed amid the chaotic hospital traffic of busy doctors and nurses. In the name of her well being, he tries exercising patience. “All I’m trying to do is get her a bed,” he pleads with the bed manager. “She’s down there sitting in her own shit. I’m just trying to do anything I can do to help her.” The most powerful scene involves son helping mother from bedroom to bathroom, carrying her weight as she’s too sick to stand. Gail’s too exhausted to make it back to her bed and asks James to sit for a minute, burying her head in his chest. “Where do you want to be?” he asks her gently. “Paris,” she whispers.

Such subtle, penetrating character work is a hallmark of the film collective to which Mond belongs, Brooklyn’s Borderline Films. Mond and fellow filmmakers/best friends Sean Durkin and Antonio Campos were the guys behind Martha Marcy May Marlene and Simon Killer, and James White fits comfortably into the group’s catalogue of low-and-slow psychological dramas.

The Borderline fellows have also exhibited a keen eye for visual poetry and meaning, and Mond’s film may just be their crowning achievement in that regard. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély employs the same clingy, close-proximity technique that made his work on Son of Saul so widely discussed and dissected in cinephile circles, almost never straying more than a foot from James side even as he rushes through swinging doors to escape uncomfortable interactions. Staying so tight on James never gives us an inch of breathing room should we feel the urge to shy away from his pain or the tension of the disaster he’s dealing with.

Given this perma-close-up technique pretty much defines the film visually, the pressure was on Abbott to turn in a breakthrough performance, and he obliged to astounding effect. The former Girls actor powers through the movie with the force and velocity of a cannonball, bringing a different color and energy to each scene. Without a doubt, Abbott proves he’s a world-class talent, and Nixon’s equally stunning performance takes James White to another level.

Opening this Friday, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is a modern-day retelling of Aristophanes’ ancient Greek play Lysistrata set in Chicago’s South side. Nick Cannon stars as the titular character, a drill rapper caught up in a gang war with a crew led by a man they call Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). With men, women and children dying on the streets every day as a result of the rivalry, the gangsters’ female counterparts decide to deny their partners sex until they stop the violence and come to a peace agreement. Led by Chi-Raq’s girl, Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), the militantly celibate women hold their ground as the gangs, the police and politicians ponder the price of their senseless dick-measuring.

In a roundtable interview in San Francisco we spoke to Cannon about the film, which opens this Friday and also stars Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, Dave Chappelle, Jennifer Hudson and John Cusack.

This role is different than anything you’ve done before.
It’s quite different. [laughs]

What was the biggest challenge for you, working on a movie like this?
The overall piece is a challenge, to take something Aristophanes created over 2,000 years ago and set it in Chicago with Spike Lee at the helm…that’s brave, you know what I mean? That’s a challenge because Spike is a visionary, but it’s also taking something that’s so classic and true, and the film’s in verse. [Spike said,] “I feel like you can fulfill this role.” Him making that creative choice, it’s like, it’s an honor, and I’m going to give you my all. Everything I could do to honor the authenticity of the souls in that community is what I attempted to do.

Spike Lee said recently that everything he’s done has led to making this film.
He did say that! It’s true. He came to me before I saw the script, before I heard the full synopsis. He said, “I want to save lives on the South side of Chicago. I was like, “I’m in!” It’s true when he says, “If I save one life, if I bring awareness and stop one senseless act of violence, I’ve done my job.” For all the other films that he’s made that have made strong statements and empowered so many in front of the camera, behind the camera, people whose lives have been changed by this gentlemen…for him to really get connected with the community and say, “We have to stop the killing of our own,” not just in Chicago, but all over the world…that’s a big task. I understand why he’d say everything he’s done has led to this point. He knows how precious life is, and if he saves a life, that’s tremendous.

There’s been some controversy surrounding the film.
See, that’s the thing. I’m all up for opinion, all up for the debate. But I want it to be intelligent, you know what I mean? I want people to understand—it’s a satire. Some people don’t even know what that is, but they want to comment. You’re more than welcome, but understand that satire is what Kubrick did with Dr. Strangelove, what Spike has done before with Do The Right Thing. There were some hilarious moments in Do The Right Thing. There’s nothing exploitative about what’s going on in that film. The same thing is true with Chi-Raq, if not even more. You can’t judge anything off of a two-minute trailer. That’s coming from a place of ignorance. No one has seen it. I still haven’t seen it. You can’t speak on it in that sense. The devil is the author of confusion. We should be upset about a lot of things, but not this. The man is using his art to raise awareness, to create a conversation. Let’s be upset about what’s going on in our community. Let’s be upset that there was a 9-year-old executed in the same neighborhood we shot this film in.

I’ve been coming up with all these different ways to digest what’s going on in the social media aspect [of the film.] It’s as if someone’s like, “Man, look at that Picasso. That don’t make no sense! It’s too colorful! He’s coloring outside the lines!” If you don’t understand what Picasso’s artistic vision was…this is this man’s artistic choice to [use] an elevated sense of satire and a classic tale to portray this story. This is art. He’s using art to evoke change.

Hopefully, once the film comes out, people can have an intelligent debate about what’s going on. There are so many powerful messages in this movie. I think a lot of people are going to take back the things that they’ve said once they see it. That happened with Do The Right Thing. When that came out, people said, “This is going to cause riots. This is bad for our community. It’s a hate film!” And then it went on to be one of the greatest films for our community ever. Spike knows what he’s doing. I’m saddened by a lot of the voices that have come out to speak against the film and haven’t seen it.

Do you think the movie’s trailer is a good representation of the film?
I love the trailer. I think it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. It’s created this interesting conversation. It’s got people stirred up. That’s what art’s supposed to do. The thing that saddens me are the comments coming from some of people speaking out. Do you see that you don’t sound intelligent the way you’re speaking right now? That you don’t even understand what satire is? It makes me cringe. People who understand satire and Greek theater, they love it. People who don’t understand what art is…I guess we probably didn’t make this for you. It hurts my soul when people say, “They ain’t got no real killers in this movie! It’s real out here!” What?! We know, but we don’t want to glorify that. Let’s tell it in an intelligent way. Spike chose a high-versed style, something most can’t do. People will see that he’s a genius and he knows what he’s doing.

I’m a huge fan of hip-hop culture.
Thanks for that…I am, too! [laughs]

I’m a big fan of battle rap, too. You’ve given a platform to Hitman Holla and Conceited on Wild n Out, so thanks for that.
We got a couple of new cats coming too. We gon’ go in next season. We got two new secret weapons we gon’ lay on ya’ll.

It was striking to me that, in the lead-up to this film, you released a song in character.
Yeah.

And people don’t get it.
Yeah! The crazy thing is, I’ve got a whole album of that drill shit! I’m sitting on it. I ain’t ready yet, but it helped me get into character. Wesley Snipes plays the antagonist of the film. His name is Cyclops. They’re the Trojans and we’re the Spartans. There are these Greek war references but in a drill music fashion. I was like, they’re not ready for it. Hamilton’s on Broadway right now. You can take elements of hip-hop and teach history and show the juxtaposition between love and war. But some of these cats ain’t ready for that. I think hip-hop has evolved. You wouldn’t be mad at Frank Sinatra for releasing a record from one of his movies in character. “That ain’t you, Frank!” Yeah, of course it’s not me! It’s the character I’m playing! When you think about embracing the art, how dope is it that I can release a whole project as a character from a film? I would love hip-hop to understand that we can evolve to that space, but we’re still kinda stuck in that mentality of, “If you ain’t real, you shouldn’t be talking about it.” So Al Pacino couldn’t be Scarface? He wasn’t from Colombia, you know what I mean? He don’t talk like that. But he embodied a character and gave you a piece of art. That’s what we did with Chi-Raq, not just with the film, but with the music as well.

Rappers have been killing people on records for years, but none of them want to come out and say that, really, most of them are playing a character.
You know what’s interesting? Hip-hop has always been about how “real” you are. “Keeping it real.” But none of those guys are really who they say they are! I don’t have no fake name—my name is Nick Cannon, and I’m never trying to be anything that I’m not. I’m happy being this guy. But some of the guys we look up to and call themselves “the realist”—it’s like, yo dawg, you stole someone else’s name, someone else’s whole persona, and you think that because whoever you’re affiliated with you’re allowed to talk tough-guy gun talk? You’re an entertainer. You’re an artist. If you were the biggest dope dealer in the game, you’d still be doing what you were doing! Unfortunately, what has gone on even in the South side of Chicago is, we got it all screwed up and misconstrued. We think, “I gotta really be a killer to be a dope rapper. I really gotta have bodies.” No! We’re kings and queens. Respect life. Let’s focus on that. We can talk about the hardships we’ve experienced, but let’s not think it’s cool to kill somebody to make us more popular and make us more money. We’ve gone down a demonic path if that’s what we’re doing.

It’s been an outstanding 2015 for Pixar. Coming just months after the studio’s conceptually elaborate and ingeniously inventive Inside Out is the more traditional, poetic and pure The Good Dinosaur. The former is a dazzling exploration of the human mind, the latter an agrarian ballad of the soul. Directed by Pete Sohn, The Good Dinosaur flips the classic boy-and-his-pet tale on its head with an odd role reversal: the towering beast is the talkative one, his human sidekick a non-speaking, mangy, doglike traveling partner. Still, the story’s mostly rooted in convention, fueled by good-natured, broad comedy and familiar life lessons to any and all Disney fanatics. It doesn’t break new ground in the same ways Inside Out does, but in the realm of visual artistry and craftsmanship, The Good Dinosaur is king.

Before any of the characters say a word, we get a demonstration of just how insane(ly talented) the digital artists at Pixar really are. Lush landscapes are blanketed by golden sunshine, shadows cast by the plants and animals living in tranquil harmony. It’s unmistakably our world (it’s breathtakingly convincing, really), but with a twist. As the movie opens we see earth 65 million years ago, around the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction. Rather than colliding with big blue, it whiffs and zooms onward into the cosmos, birthing an alternate timeline in which dinosaurs rule the planet for millions of years to come.

With knobby knees and an endearing lack of coordination, our leaf green apatosaur hero, Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), is welcomed into the world by Momma (Frances McDormand) and Poppa (Jeffrey Wright), hard-working farmers who hope he and his siblings, Libby and Buck, will help them tend to the family’s land for generations to come. This first portion of the story feels the most familiar, with the kids learning responsibility by plowing the fields and feeding the chickens at the foot of a toothy mountain range, the teeming landscape looking a lot like the American Northwest.

Arlo’s a bit of a runt and has an issue with fear, an undesirable trait Poppa’s determined to stomp out by taking him on a hunting mission, their target a young human “critter” who keeps stealing from the family’s corn harvest. A dark storm builds during their riverside pursuit, and Poppa tragically gets swept away by a flash flood, Mufasa-style. The family mourns, and just a short time later, Arlo sees the critter swiping corn yet again. He pursues with vengeance on his mind but, like his father, he gets swept away by the river’s current, leaving him stranded miles from home. His unlikely companion on his journey home is the critter, Spot (Jack Bright), a homo sapien who scrambles around on all fours and barks and snarls at anything of interest (Looney Toon the Tasmanian Devil comes to mind). Together, the once-enemies learn to trust one another as they search for home, meeting colorful allies and baddies along the way.

Mother nature is unquestionably the star of the show, arguably taking precedence over Arlo and Spot. There’s a strong sense that nature is the be-all-end-all, this enormous, beautiful, unfathomably powerful thing that the characters are at the mercy of at any given moment. Many movies cast our planet as a pretty backdrop, nothing more. But the folks at Pixar are more thoughtful than that, invoking the almost religious reverence of the great outdoors of classic great plains westerns and the films of Werner Herzog. Dinosaur feels most like a western when Arlo and Spot meet a family of t-rex buffalo herders, led by a grizzly, slow-talkin’ patriarch, played by the most popular cowboy thesp of the moment, Sam Elliott (the designers cleverly fashion the characters’ top teeth to resemble the actor’s signature snowy ‘stache).

The movie’s got a lot on its mind, touching on themes of family, loss, fear, and even the timeless battle between herbivores and carnivores: early on, Spot scavenges for animals and grubs for Arlo to eat, all of which repulse the long-necked plant eater. Eventually, they bond over their shared love of fresh berries and even share a moment where they wordlessly consider the value of fresh fruit. What’s problematic is that the film only touches on these ideas and doesn’t follow through in a fulfilling way, save for the main theme regarding Arlo finding courage in compassion. The story also seems to be leaning towards a message of chosen family, but that all gets undone in the end when Arlo and Spot make a heartbreaking decision that, while emotionally wrenching, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

These issues are easier to swallow when you consider how touchingly the characters’ friendship is developed. The movie’s most tender moment involves Arlo and Spot using sticks and lines drawn in the dirt to express to each other the hurt they feel for their lost loved ones. It’s nice to have a movie come along every once in a while that lets its characters shut up for a minute and appreciate their surroundings. The Good Dinosaur is more humble than Pixar’s typical fare, choosing to refine and riff on familiar ideas and themes rather than build new ones from the ground up and live on the cutting edge. It doesn’t feel hip and new, but timeless and classical, like movies from Disney Animation’s ’90s glory days.

In 1976, when Rocky Balboa was introduced to the world (by writer/star Sylvester Stallone and director John Alvidsen), he represented every man and woman who strived for greatness in a world that expected nothing of them. He was the ultimate underdog back then and, to most of us, still is today. Now, nearly 40 years later, the Italian Stallion is training a new underdog boxing hero ready to prove that it’s time to pass the torch.

His name’s Adonis Johnson, he’s played by Michael B. Jordan, and he’s the hero at the center of the seventh film in the Rocky series, Creed, directed by Ryan Coogler. Adonis is the son of Rocky’s dead former nemesis turned best bud, Apollo Creed, but hides his paternal lineage so that he can find his own path to glory. He grew up loving to box just like his dad (though he resents Apollo for reasons he keeps close to his chest) and moves to Philly so that the one and only Rocky Balboa can train him to be the best boxer in the world. The aging former champ reluctantly agrees, though he soon discovers that a fight of his own awaits, this time outside the ring.

It’s a simple hero’s tale Coogler, co-writer Aaron Covington and spiritual guide Stallone are working with, though it’s the finer details—the psychological nuts and bolts of the characters, the searing performances, the showstopping camerawork—that make Creed the best Rocky movie since the character’s debut.

Adonis first meets Rocky at his restaurant, Adrian’s, named after his late wife whose absence has left a hole in the former world champ’s heart. Given Rocky’s tight relationship with his father, Adonis decides to address him as “unc” as he picks his brain for boxing knowledge. For two actors who come from completely different eras of Hollywood and schools of acting, Stallone and Jordan match up incredibly well as mentor and pupil, perhaps even surpassing the chemistry Stallone had with Burgess Meredith. There’s always been a fiery energy to Jordan’s performances, from his early days in The Wire and Friday Night Lights to Coogler’s own Fruitvale Station, so he’s a perfect fit for a story about a young man learning to fight smart, not angry.

The issue with Adonis is, well, it isn’t a simple one. He seems to become most emotionally distressed at the thought or mention of his father, but it’s not clear exactly why his resentment runs so deep. The only way Rocky has any hope of unlocking Adonis’ potential is by getting to the root of his uncontrollable aggression, which manifests itself as carelessness in the ring. It’s that same carelessness that got Apollo killed in the squared circle, and Rocky wants no part in helping his best friend’s son meet the same fate. When he receives the news that he’s facing life-threatening health crisis, his will to guide Adonis runs dry. “It was all in our heads,” he says to the heartbroken kid. “We aren’t family.” Stallone’s been playing Rocky for decades, and he hasn’t felt this in-tune with the big lug since the first movie.

This is where the relationship balances out. Adonis refuses to let his mentor call it quits on life by refusing treatment. He strikes a deal: “If I fight, you fight.” The franchise’s classic montages return, with Adonis sprinting all over town and honing his footwork with his coaches and Rocky coping with the side effects of chemotherapy. Adonis isn’t as jacked up and bulky as his dad and Rocky were, but he makes up for it in speed and ferocity, a dangerous gift he works hard to harness. The training’s all in preparation of Adonis’ unlikely title fight in Liverpool with unstoppable Brit “Pretty” Ricky Conlan (ABA heavyweight champ Anthony Bellew).

Providing a welcome, steamy distraction from the rigors of fight camp is his musician downstairs neighbor, Bianca (Dear White People‘s Tessa Thompson, channeling Lisa Bonet in High Fidelity). Something that makes Rocky Balboa such an interesting character is his narrow-minded devotion to his wife. Adrian is his everything and has been from the moment they met. Thompson is terrific as Bianca, but the character doesn’t feel as vital to Adonis’ journey at this point. In future installments, her role will likely be expanded and tread new ground, but for now, she takes a back seat to the real object of Adonis’ obsession: Apollo.

That’s the key here, Adonis’ internal fight with his father’s legacy. Legacy, not memory. They never met: Adonis was born of an affair, his father dying in the middle of the ring before he was born. How haunting it must be, to live under the long shadow of a man you never knew. How consuming the appetite for violent release must be. Creed‘s story comes from a very personal place for Coogler, and you can feel it. The young Bay Area director took a long-running franchise and infused it with his own life experience, and that’s a wonderful thing. It’s a triumph in that it sets a precedent for other filmmakers who work in the franchise bubble to liberate themselves artistically from the clutches of legacy, lineage and fan expectation. Like Adonis, Coogler’s finding his own way.

The character work isn’t what people will see Creed for; it’s the fights, of course, and what Coogler and his team deliver are some of the most dynamic, vicious, tactile boxing scenes ever filmed. Honestly. It sounds like hyperbole, but these fights knock everything else we’ve seen in the Rocky series so far clear out of the ring. An early exhibition fight is done in one continuous shot, the camera as fleet-footed as Adonis, staying close so that we can see the sweat dripping down the back of his neck. The big finale is all about virtuosic editing, staying in the pocket when Adonis is dipping and dodging against the ropes and glimpsing key characters in the crowd at the perfect moments. To say the fight scenes are thrilling is an understatement; by the end of the movie, I was in tears. Talk about exceeding expectations.

It’s a very special episode this week as Bernard presents Sound Conversations, a collection of interviews with directors, documentarians, actors, festival programmers and, most importantly, sound designers, about the art of sound in film. Technique, philosophy, tradition, experimentation—all angles of sound design are covered as we explore one of the most underappreciated aspects of filmmaking with some of the most talented people in the biz. Joining the show are the sound-obsessed artists behind Love & Mercy, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 10,000 km, Gett: The Trial of Vivianne Amsalem, Foxcatcher and many more. Listen in and listen close—it’s Sound Conversations!

Topics

• Bel Powley & Marielle Heller (2:23)
• Carlos Marques-Marcet (5:17)
• Shlomi Elkabetz (11:57)
• Chris Strachwitz, Chris Simon, Maureen Gosling (35:39)
• Bill Pohlad (21:45)
• Oren Moverman (25:57)
• Anita Monga (33:06)
• Paul Hsu (38:31)

Articles Referenced

The Diary of a Teenage Girl Interview
10,000 km Interview
Gett: The Trial of Vivianne Amsalem Interview
Love & Mercy Interview
Anita Monga Interview
Time Out of Mind Interview
This Ain’t No Mouse Music Interview

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For the past five years, the Hunger Games saga has been the preeminent young-adult fiction franchise on the big screen, with Jennifer Lawrence‘s Katniss Everdeen leading the charge not just for the people of Panem, but for a new wave of female-led action blockbusters. As the series has progressed, the American-Idol glamor and spectacle of the first entries has gradually fallen away, developing into a gloomy story about loss, misery, corruption and failure. The final film in the series, The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay – Part 2, directed by Francis Lawrence, is the grimmest and most depressing of all, with icky, gut-punch character deaths at every turn and a color palette so nocturnal and dreary you’ll be starving for sunlight—whether you find the movie entertaining or not is a question of taste, but I predict wide audiences will find Katniss’ final fight too irksome to enjoy.

On one hand, it’s heartening that a movie franchise aimed at teens has such a firm grasp on the devastation of war, both in the body count it leaves behind and the extent to which it ravages the mind. Half of the cast doesn’t make it out alive, and the film takes time to make sure we feel the weight of each death. It’s the nature of the story novelist Suzanne Collins and screenwriters Peter Craig and Danny Strong have been telling over the course of the series’ four movies—to put an end to the elder upper class’ corrupt regime, in which the olds keep peace by slaughtering children under the guise of a televised arena “game,” the younger generation must sacrifice everything in the name of a better future for their own children. In-your-face as the symbolism may be, these are compelling themes Collins and the filmmakers delve into.

The burden of Mockingjay – Part 2 is that it must, in all earnestness, embody that grand sacrifice in gory detail. In other words, the movie’s directive is to make you feel like shit, and for better or worse, it does just that. It’s a suffocatingly bleak story (especially given its target audience) that starts with Katniss rehabilitating severe throat wounds inflicted (at the end of the last movie) by her once-lover, the Capitol-brainwashed Peeta Malark (Josh Hutcherson). Romantic, right? Despite Peeta’s newfound obsession with killing Katniss, the two of them are smooshed together by the rebels’ leader (Julianne Moore, who plays a great weaselly, two-faced politician) to join a handful of other Hunger Games champions and military randoms in a strike team whose mission is to shoot propaganda footage as the rest of the rebels storm the Capitol and take fascist President Snow (Donald Sutherland) down for good. Katniss, of course, has other plans: she wants—needs—to take Snow’s life herself.

Snow and his cohorts are well prepared for the rebel attack, turning the Capitol into a giant Hunger Games arena, lining the streets with deadly booby traps (“pods,” they call them) designed to slaughter invaders in horrifically gruesome ways. One deathtrap sees our heroes nearly drowned in a city square quickly turned into a giant pool of black ooze; another finds them in the sewers, swarmed by a horde of fangy crackhead-zombies in close quarters. These two scenes are the only action-centric high points of the movie, and they’re well done, no doubt. The claustrophobic sewer skirmish is particularly excellent; Lawrence finds fear in the dark so well that the movie goes into full-on horror mode, which is awesome. That, unfortunately, is sort of where the movie’s awesomeness ends.

Pacing is a crippling issue for Mockingjay – Part 2. It starts slow, with the rebel troops mobilizing and Katniss wallowing in despair. Then, a surge of excitement in the city square and sewers as we watch our badass heroes finally kick some ass and, for some, go down in flames (literally). But the thrills are fleeting, giving way all too soon to the rest of the movie, which is even sadder and sappier than the first act. The action is abbreviated, sorrow is bulky, and the storytelling as a whole feels janky and numb. Lawrence’s Katniss is the most iconic heroine of the past couple of decades at least, and she’s able to, on occasion, give the movie a jolt with a piercing glare or a wail of anguish. She’s a savior in that way, though the movie’s dangerously close to being beyond saving.

It’s painful to see is our last glimpse of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, again playing Moore’s right-hand advisor. In a movie this dark, this layer of meta-mourning doesn’t help the experience at all. The Hunger Games series has been, in large part, a winning endeavor. The movies are solid sci-fi adventures (Catching Fire was terrific) with more brains than your average tentpole and a measure of love-triangle indulgence that never feels trashy. Most notably, the series made a bold statement in the face of Hollywood gender inequity, proving female-led movies can rake in just as much dough as any testosterone-pumped dude-flick. The last chapter in this landmark saga is an ugly one, but not so ugly that the magnificent Lawrence won’t live to act another day. For that, we’re fortunate.