Immediately after watching John Maclean’s feature film debut, Slow West, I had a nagging feeling that his film style reminded me of another director. I couldn’t nail down his exact style, which is bright but gruesome, gritty but aesthetically pleasing, serious but absolutely hilarious. It didn’t hit me until after some serious thought who the best director to compare him to is. I hesitate to say it, given the high profile comparison, but Maclean has an approach that feels very similar to Wes Anderson. They both take characters that could be easy to simply laugh at, but whose heartfelt conviction is too winning to deny. They both pay close attention to the details of art direction. Heck, there is even a random moment of French-speaking, poetic love-pondering among strangers—very Anderson-esque. Both Anderson and Maclean have a level of self-awareness that adds an intriguing edge and humor. In the case of Slow West, this self-awareness lifts the film up beyond what, on the surface, could have been a run of the mill western with off-beat characters. Instead, what Maclean presents is a campfire tale just bizarre enough to believe and beautiful enough to entrance.

Young, Scottish, and totally out of his element, Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is making his way across turn of the century wild Colorado, heading west in pursuit of his love, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). A wonder that he’s survived as long as he has, Jay happens upon Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) as Silas holds up a Native-killing ex-soldier in the woods. Silas convinces Jay he’ll never make it to his true love alone and offers to take him for a fee. Jay, shaken by this recent encounter, sees his logic and agrees. They take off together, Jay trying to get to know his new trail partner, Silas making it clear he’s a loner.

Their first stop, at a tiny supply depot, turns unexpectedly violent when a poor immigrant family attempts to hold the general store up to steal money. Things escalate, in this brilliantly directed scene, to a bloody end. But this is life in the Wild West, death is all too common. Jay leaves the situation shaken, but stronger. Silas’s obvious lack of conscience, however, troubles Jay. Jay attempts to go out on his own, running into a kindly German writing a book on the diminishing Native American culture and population. “Theft,” he claims. Jay’s faith in the goodness of people seems momentarily renewed. Until he wakes up alone on the ground, all of his things stolen. Not the only example of humorous irony in Slow West. It’s used in abundance throughout, always with a subtle cleverness that makes for unexpected laughs at unassuming moments.

Unbeknownst to Jay, Rose and her father John (Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann aka The Hound) have a price on their heads, and Silas is actually a bounty hunter. Jay is leading Silas right to her. He isn’t the only outlaw interested in the high reward, however. As the paths of these lawless men cross, more about Silas’s past comes out, and his evolving personal integrity. To Silas, Jay’s undying love, (though it may be misplaced), and virtue are signs of the possibility of decent humanity in the West.

As the various bounty hunters descend upon Rose and her father—one a priestly-looking silent type with a sniper-looking rifle, the other Silas’s old mentor, the fur-coated Payne (Ben Mendelsohn)—it becomes an all out shoot out between the competing parties, as Jay rushes to defend his love.

The film is maybe less fairy tale and more cautionary tale, but the storytelling presented in the film is excellent. Not to mention peppered with Tarantino-quality fighting and deaths. But where Tarantino makes us laugh as reaction to his choreographed gore, Maclean’s humor is a bit higher brow. And the entire thing is infused with an honest and hefty measure of heart. It’s a difficult balance of emotions, and masterfully executed.

Fassbender, while never disappointing when presenting as cold and curt, turns out to have some decent comedic timing. Smit-McPhee takes the cake. His baby-face certainly makes his naive boy-in-love believable, but he adds a wise-beyond-his-years soulfulness that takes Jay beyond pathetic and upward to sweet and charming. The one most likely to be buzzed about after the film releases is newcomer Caren Pistorius as Rose, who holds very little screen-time but owns it when she has it.

Everyone’s on their A-game, including Jed Kurzel and his score (whose abilities to enhance ho-hum genre music we’ve most recently enjoyed in The Babadook). Slow West is the perfect example of a first time filmmaker who knows what he wants and how to invoke talent, making for a visionary and excellently finessed film. With a literal body count at the end, Maclean ties all his loose ends in the satisfying way of most parables. But, like he does throughout his film, what makes it ultimately so entertaining is how much the film goes against expectations, and for a Western—a genre filled with expectation—that’s no small feat.

A version of this review first appeared as part of our Tribeca 2015 coverage. 

Fans of the terrific cult British teen drama Skins have long suspected that it was only a matter of time before Jack O’Connell rose to star status. Fantastic as many of the young actors of that series were, O’Connell always stood a cut above the rest, elevating even the most contrived material through sheer conviction and passion. The show made it clear that if O’Connell was only given a more mature, nuanced story, he would be an actor to look out for. Thankfully, provided a platform to fully demonstrate the considerable range of his talents, O’Connell ably rises to the occasion in the brutal, riveting prison drama Starred Up.

O’Connell stars as nineteen-year-old Eric Love. We first see Eric being transferred from a youth prison to an adult prison for being “starred up” – or being too high-risk to still be treated as a juvenile offender and thus given an early transfer. He has already been hardened by the time of his arrival. A troubled life has prepared him, to an extent, for his stint in this new prison. He carries himself with the attitude of someone who has already seen it all. But he is also still young, and he only acts like he is smarter and more in control than he actually is.

Yet the system doesn’t faze him – even as it starts to throw right hooks that probably ought to cause him to bide his time and “play by the rules,” as one person describes it. His initial arrival tells us volumes about who Eric is and what he has been through. After going through processing with a bleary look of boredom, his first act upon arrival is to masterfully, efficiently craft a razor-blade shiv. Eric is a veteran of this world, not a newborn babe up for the slaughter.

Director David Mackenzie shoots the film with a keen sense for purely visual storytelling. The majority of pertinent information is provided largely through images, and Mackenzie patiently allows us to slowly grasp the complex order of this world. He trusts that even when we don’t understand specifically what is taking place that we will get the general gist and pick up what we didn’t quite catch later (Mackenzie packs the margins of the narrative with an exceptional amount of detail that he never feels the need to call too much attention towards). This is valuable because the dialogue is thick with heavy, sometimes indecipherable, working-class British accents. Mackenzie aims for immersion, and he shoots the film in a docu-realistic style. Cinematographer Michael McDonough, best known for his work on the similarly understated yet vibrant Winter’s Bone, matches the handheld shots with cinematography that subtly drains the color to emphasize the bleaknesss and realism.

Eric is volatile, looking everywhere for an excuse to lash out. His emotional instability is exacerbated by the presence of his father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), a prison lifer and the second-in-command of the prison’s drug trade. Neville was absent from Eric’s life growing up, and he has no clue how to act as a father to his child, even as he draws himself closer – initially to stop Eric from disrupting the drug trade and later out of a real but misplaced concern. An alternative father figure for Eric arrives when counselor Oliver Baumer (Rupert Friend) saves him from a harsher sentencing for severely beating up a fellow inmate on his first day. Oliver has Eric join his therapy group, filled with younger inmates, to try to work through his issues. The film’s central struggle centers on the pull-and-tug between Neville and Oliver over Eric. Despite how stereotypical and familiar that conflict and these characters sound on paper, the performances, the writing and the direction invest every moment with a sense of ruthless psychological realism. Oliver may be idealistic but his resolve is brittle and his optimism has its limits.

Starred Up’s script is based on writer Jonathan Asser’s actual experiences volunteering as a counselor for the HM Prison Wandsworth, and Oliver is plainly a stand-in for Asser and his perspective on the prison system. Starred Up may not be a social problem film, but in its piercing, untarnished depiction of the prison system, it becomes a powerful indictment of the institution’s many failings. Asser isn’t just interested in the prisoners and their day-to-day struggles – although that is his primary focus. Rather, he wants to build up the entire ecosystem of this world, including the guards and administrative staff, and how the system fails every person that is part of it. Starred Up makes the compelling argument that incarceration is simply easier than rehabilitation, even if in the long-run the latter would probably be more successful – but it would also be prohibitively time-consuming and less profitable.

Like the television series Orange is the New Black, the film wishes to find the humanity hidden within the institutional structure and spread empathy to the under-examined figures who are stuck there. But that’s where the parallels between these two works end. For one thing, Starred Up is set at a maximum security prison with some of England’s worst criminal offenders. For another, it’s unsparingly unsentimental in its look at the prison system. Perhaps most crucially, it concerns itself with masculinity and the corrosive way it is practiced in the prison system. Traditional masculinity defines the behavior and interactions of every inmate. During therapy, individuals make slights about other members’ mothers and the integrity of their heterosexuality (tellingly, Neville secretly has a relationship with his cellmate that he is desperate to keep under wraps). It constantly threatens to boil over into fighting, or worse. Everyone is posturing: they have appearances and reputations to maintain — ones that matter for the largely career criminal make-up of the prison who have no other options or hopes for control or power beyond these prison walls.

However, for all its cutting social commentary, Starred Up is not only a well-observed psychodrama. It is also an intense thriller. Eric’s arrival shakes up the social order of the prison. This is coupled with his unpredictable behavior. His actions ripple out to effect the whole prison hierarchy. When he runs afoul of the prison’s lucrative drug trade, he puts his life greatly at risk, both from above and within. But Eric welcomes it, needling people to see how far he can push them and jumping to violence as a first response to conflict. Mackenzie ratchets up the tension until it becomes unbearable and destruction feels all but inevitable.

If the way Starred Up is never showy, that owes partly to having a number of big performances that more than make up for the visual sparseness. There are three tremendous performances, from Mendelsohn, Friend, and especially O’Connell. O’Connell is remarkable, matching his co-stars beat-for-beat and occasionally even out-classing them. He has the charisma of a leading man, but he also has the committed rigor of a method actor. It’s at once a huge, explosive performance and also a deeply interior one. O’Connell commands the space around him in ways that actors twice his age have no clue how to do. Notice the way he carries himself. There is a full-bodied physicality to his acting – even just furrowing his brow or shifting his eyes, O’Connell is able to convey a surprising amount of information. Eric exudes restless energy. He knows no other way of life and he has resigned himself to his fate. But there is more than just weariness and barely suppressed rage here. There are hints of genuine fear. He is just a kid somewhere underneath it all. O’Connell shows this layer while also making Eric more formidable than just about every person surrounding him. It’s a fearless, mesmerizing performance. If this doesn’t make O’Connell a star, I’m not sure what will.

Ryan Gosling knew this was going to happen. His directorial debut screened in the Un Certain Regarde category of Cannes and, naturally, packed the house as if it was the most highly buzzed Palme D’Or contender of the year. Two hours later the film ended, and people took to Twitter in disbelief, shock, and sarcasm engaged to the max. Yet, the film already began building a loyal fan base who defend its great aesthetics, originality, and the fact that it’s never boring. But getting your teeth pulled out by rusty pliers is probably never boring either. After making whatever Lost River is, there’s no way Gosling didn’t expect exactly that kind of reaction. Is there a point in even laying out the plot here? A mother (Christina Hendricks) works in a seedy bar and has to take care of two boys, one of whom is nicknamed Bones (Iain De Caestecker) and is sort of our protagonist. After getting news that they’re about to get displaced, she takes another job in an ever seedier bar, operated by her banker Dave (Ben Mendelsohn) so that she can pay three months in advance. Meanwhile, Bones attempts to outwit a local gang leader called Bully (Matt Smith) to help with the rent, and gets moral support from a friend called Rat (Saorise Ronan). Yes. Bones, Bully, and Rat.

The actors do a decent enough job and go beyond the call of duty that their names suggest, but it’s Mendelsohn who outshines everyone and truly looks like he belongs in the fucked up world Gosling juke-boxed together. The film spins out of control quite quickly and goes into experimental mode; becoming a lab for Gosling to play around with a Greatest Hits collection of influences (David Lynch, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Gaspar Noe most notably, though the re-occurring image of burning buildings recalls one of my favorite cinematic shots, possibly ever, from Akira Kurosawa’s Ran) without needing to make much sense. The idea is to evoke a nightmarish atmosphere and make the whole thing into some form of parable for the housing crisis in middle America, or you know, he’s just fucking around. Whatever it is, he’s got me cursing for the first time in a Cannes review and that’s because most of the scenes, as great as they look (an image of a burning bicycle, the macabre bar where Hendricks begins to work, and the images of her in the plastic suit are undeniably striking and get etched into your mind, for better or for worse) don’t amount to anything substantial. This isn’t just style over substance, this is style raping substance.

The music deserves a mention, however, because (and this is a direct Refn influence) the electronic notes work in sinister fashion to help the overall grotesqueness occurring on-screen. If there was a Cannes award for Best Soundtrack, Lost River would be a shoe-in. As it stands, it’s nothing more than a first-time director’s messy homage to some of his favorites. The reason it’s getting so much attention, and will most likely go down as a cult favorite in certain circles, is because the director happens to be Ryan Gosling. Thanks to his name, though, he manages to assemble artists like Mendelsohn, Ronan, cinematographer Benoit Debie, and composer Johnny Jewel who elevate this psychedelic bad trip from complete disaster into a twisted kind of entertainment.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival under the name Two Mothers (an arguably more fitting title) has been since changed to Adore, Anne Fontaine’s film about two best friends who end up in relationships with each other’s sons. Due to the on-the-nose dialog the characters are not able grow beyond two dimensional, and although the film begins as a wild ride with a tantalizing setup in tow, it puts itself in cruise control for most of the way.

Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) have never parted ways since growing up together in a serene Australian beach town. The two best friends are now neighbors and each have a son of their own, who are now young adults and have also remained best friends since childhood. From the very beginning you could sense an offbeat relationship between Lil and Roz, which is only magnified when Lil’s husband passes away and the two get even closer. While they both deny that any sexual attraction between them exists, Roz’s husband believes otherwise.

But as it turns out, the sexual attractions that unfold are even more taboo than one would have initially thought. One of the first indications of an attraction between Roz and Lil’s son Ian (Xavier Samuel) is when they share a smoke together, something that makes Roz feel sinful because she has not smoked in such a long time, but Ian assures her that feeling sinful is not a bad thing. Flirting quickly escalades into a sexual encounter that is witnessed by Roz’s son Tom (James Frecheville), who immediately makes his intentions with Lil abundantly clear.

Adore plays out only a little less soap opera- esque than the story sounds. First of all, everything mentioned takes place in the first thirty minutes of the film, allowing opportunity for the story to develop when the film jumps ahead two years after the initial encounter. Secondly, the characters are wise enough to realize that the age gap will eventually become a factor, though it does not make the situation any less difficult for everyone involved.

However, the film cannot completely rid itself of its melodramatic tent poles. Sure, the story carries on but nothing that happens outside the first thirty minutes is at all surprising or half as exciting as what came before it. Adore is very unbalanced in its emotions by coming off far too dramatic in some scenes while being too nonchalant during others.

There is so much beauty packed in every aspect of Adore that it actually becomes a little overwhelming. Residing on a postcard beach that is completely surrounded by crystal clear water makes it easy for the cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne to capture the stunning imagery. There is rarely a scene where the sun is not shinning or the water begging to be occupied. Though the attractiveness does not stop with scenery, the chiseled young men look like they walked straight from the runway, even their own mothers (who are equally as gorgeous) comment on how they “look like young gods”. I realize that it sounds like I am complaining about how everything looks beautiful, but aside from its unconventional setup nearly everything else found in the film is too perfect and calculated. Adore seems to reside in a fantasy world that is proven when the characters never seem to age along with the timeline.

Considering Adore is based off a novel written by a female and also directed by one, you would not assume the female leads would be so utterly inert. Both mothers have seemingly no control over the situation and easily give into the sons desires without much of a fight. The film does not do itself any favors by completely missing the emotional angle that it tries so hard to attain and instead generating unintentional humor. Unfortunately Adore’s promising premise never fully ripens into something worth biting into.

Adore trailer:

It would be easy to mistake The Place Beyond the Pines as a sequel to Drive as this film also stars Ryan Gosling as a stuntman turned getaway driver who is a soft-spoken badass that beats people with hardware tools. But I am here to tell you that The Place Beyond the Pines is not what you think it is; in more ways than one. Derek Cianfrance makes some interesting storyline decisions that I would consider spoilers if they were revealed, therefore, I will offer nothing more in this review than what the trailer does.

The Place Beyond the Pines contains of one of the best opening scenes that I have witnessed in some time. We see Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling) without his shirt which exposes his fully tattooed body as he flips his butterfly knife back and forth. Still continuing in the same shot, he grabs his jacket, steps out of his trailer and walks through the buzzing sounds and bright flashing lights of carnival rides. The camera follows behind the bleach blond haired man while he lights up a cigarette and walks to the opposite end of the carnival up to a large tent. People are congregated outside and are eager to take his photo as he walks by. Just as he enters the tent an announcer introduces the motorcycle stuntman over the loudspeaker. When he reaches his bike we finally see his face for the first time, it also features a tattoo. Luke fastens his helmet before he and two others ride their bikes into a large metal ball cage and proceed to ride their bikes at top speeds past each other. All of the above had to be choreographed and perfectly timed as it happens in one continuous shot, lasting nearly a full three minutes.

Working as part of the traveling carnival brings Luke to Schenectady, New York where he runs into an old flame, Romina (Eva Mendes). It has been a year since they last saw each other and a lot has happened since. Romina is now dating another guy but the bigger news, as Luke soon discovers, is that she now has a three-month-old boy, and it is his. When Luke realizes that he cannot be a part of his son’s life, he at least feels obligated to provide for his son. The only problem is that his motorcycle stunts earn him more fans than it does income.

While blazing through a wooded trail on his dirt bike, Luke winds up meeting a mechanic named Robin (Ben Mendelsohn) who offers him a job fixing engines and a place to stay. Their friendship grows quickly but Luke’s bank account is not growing at that same rate. Robin feels bad that he does not have the amount of work Luke wishes in order to provide for his son. So he throws out a wild suggestion that even the thrill-seeking biker has to laugh at, which is to rob a bank. But Robin is not kidding around. He explains that he has done it four times in the past with success and knows he can do it again with Luke’s driving skills. The two will have to be clever to outwit the New York Police Department, especially the ambitious cop named Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper).

The Place Beyond the Pines feels like three separate films, each containing their own set of main characters, yet all remain connected at the same time. The first act is absolutely heart-pounding. It is focused entirely on Luke’s character and results in several armed bank robberies followed by high-speed pursuits. But then the film pumps its brakes and shifts its focus on the opposite side of the law for the second act. Avery ends up discovering that his own police department is corrupt and must decide whether to expose them or not. I will not even go into what the third act is about, just because it is better to experience it yourself firsthand.

One thing that I found particularly interesting is that everything in The Place Beyond the Pines has justification. The man who is robbing these banks is not doing it for self-gain, he is doing it to care for his infant son. Even the corrupt police department hints some of the shady acts are done for the greater good; such as when they plan to use some of the drug evidence from one case to catch drug criminals on another.

As a whole, the acting performances were all stunning. What may come as a shock to a lot of people is that the most impressive performance was not from Gosling, but rather from Cooper. Granted, Gosling gave a solid performance himself, but Cooper stood out as a smart cop who is stuck having to make difficult moral decisions. Mendelsohn did not have a particularly huge role yet he still managed to be a memorable character as a goofy and over-friendly mechanic. Eva Mendes and Ray Liotta are also good as they both tend to be.

For a film that is nearly two and half hours long, The Place Beyond the Pines seems to fly by. It lures you in with a heart-pounding beginning, keeps you guessing during the middle, and has you on the edge of your seat at the end. The film is a crime epic about how a single split second decision can have life lasting consequences. With the fantastic cinematography by Sean Bobbitt and a score that perfectly sets the unsettling tone of the film, The Place Beyond the Pines stands out as one of the better films of the year so far.