Style will carry a film fairly far. It is, after all, a visual medium. In a genre film it’s especially useful in elevating the expected into more artistic territory. With a photographer-turned-director like first-timer Tyler Shields, style appears to be the home base and comfort zone from which his expression springs. Which makes for a unique looking film debut, but also drives home a very basic film lesson: style is swell, but story is everything. Final Girl (not to be at all confused with The Final Girls, a slasher film spoof slated for October) is Shields’ first film and while every frame exudes the talent of a man who understands lighting, costuming, coloring, and staging, he has managed to make a film that would have made an amazing photography show but is ultimately a frustratingly scarce horror film. The tale of a gorgeous young assassin facing off against four sadistic teenage boys to the death is an intriguing premise for a thriller, and yet Shields proves that premise and style can only take a film so far.

Set in some ambiguous time period where teenage boys own tuxedos and wear them to the local diner, and assassins in training wear cocktail dresses and heels, Final Girl doesn’t offer much in the way of backstory. Character motivation, it’s implied, is up to the viewers interpretation. So when the film opens with Wes Bentley interviewing a young girl and he succinctly mentions the death of his wife and child, that is apparently all the understanding we’re meant to have of why he’s chosen this newly orphaned girl, or who they are meant to work for, or how it is they choose “bad guys” to go after. It’s not much, not much at all. And in the following scenes where Veronica, played by a very blonde Abigail Breslin, goes through a series of training sessions with Wes Bentley’s William she doesn’t think to ask him all the questions that any normal viewer would have only ten minutes into the film.

While always inexplicably training in her fancy dresses and heels, Veronica is led through a series of very specific trainings: she has to exert enough energy in a choke hold to cause her mentor to pass out, she needs to rely less on her gun and more on her physical prowess, and she’s injected with an LSD-like cocktail so that she can simultaneously experience her worst fear (a fear that is sadly irrational for someone supposedly so badass) and experience what her enemy would be going through should she be able to drug him before facing off. It’s all very specific and very leading. Could it be she’ll need to do all these same things in the near future?

In an early scene we meet the four teenage boys who will soon be Veronica’s prey, led by The Hunger Games’s Alexander Ludwig. With nary an introduction its established quickly that these well-tailored gents have a bad habit of picking up pretty blondes, taking them to their hangout in the woods, and engaging in a game of cat and mouse with them before serially killing them. Why has William picked up on these boys’ hobby when local police haven’t seemed to do so? Especially with a noticeably high count of missing females in the area and a presumably easy trace back to the young men? No idea. But when Veronica shows up at the diner, blonde and appealing, the boys take the bait without question. Thus the tables turn and though she feigns fear at the beginning, Veronica uses her (very specific) skills to give the boys the revenge they deserve.

The rest of the film is split into four fight scenes between Veronica and each of the boys. Based on the limited screen time each guy has had, we know approximately one thing about each of them. Perhaps the writer, Adam Prince, thought it would be clever to define each of these young men by one particular trait, either playing with a weakness they have, or a sadistic trait they possess, but because it’s all laid out so clearly in the one shot each boy is given on their own, when those same traits are used against them by Veronica it’s hard to see much cleverness in it. Presumably, we can only work with what we’re given.

Each frame shrouded in a perfect vignette, a pool of light, and the brightest of colors popping amidst the darker backdrops, one gets the sensation after a while that they’ve seen this film before, but as a spread in Vogue. There’s no denying Shields’ photography talent, but if the point in photography is that the visual story told is succinct and intriguing, this method does not translate to a 90-minute film. Stills from the film will undoubtedly lure in viewers, but turn those perfectly staged frames into action and the energy is lost.

The dialog is pithy and unnatural, attempting to keep up that ambiguously old-timey vibe. The ending is expected but no point in searching for character arcs or discovering anything new about any of the characters that wasn’t fed to us within the film’s first 20 minutes. It’s hard to watch a talented cast look so beautiful and perform absolutely nothing of substance.

The cinematography and set design and lighting aside—since they were all performed by someone other than Shields—we can only hope that before his next foray into filmmaking Shields picks up a few tips on the basics: story and directing actors. Even in a genre as forgiving as thrillers where a little action can make up for a lot, there are necessary building blocks. Final Girl is the best-dressed girl at the party with absolutely nothing of interest to say.

With Welcome to Me, director Shira Piven and star Kristen Wiig ride a fine line. It’s a depiction of mental illness that manages to make you laugh without ever being offensive, and it’s by far Wiig’s most thought-provoking performance to date. She plays Alice Klieg, a small-town woman obsessed with television and showbiz (she worships Oprah on a daily basis on VHS tapes she’s memorized word for word). When she wins 85 million bucks in a lottery, she grabs her dream by the throat, throwing oodles of cash at a local broadcast company to produce and beam out her very own show, “Welcome to Me.” She’s mentally unstable, though, and when she quits her psychiatric meds, she begins to wobble off the rails, a full-on train wreck surely on her horizon.

In her sophomore feature, Piven’s crafted a film that’s deceptively elegant in its earnestness; a comedy on the surface, a piercing observation piece at its core. In a press roundtable interview, I spoke to Piven about the film’s subtleties, Wiig’s performance, and the tricky business of portraying mental illness on-screen.

Mental illness are stigmatized in society. How did that affect your approach?
If your main character is mentally ill, you have to tread lightly and very sensitively. For me, there are two things that come to mind. One is, it’s important to separate the person from the diagnosis. Two, [you have to be] really respectful and never laugh at the mental illness or the person, exactly. There’s a lot of humor in this movie, but me and Kristen felt that we want to laugh because the situation is absurd. Alice is a real person in a real world. I love her and I love the script because she’s someone who we recognize. I feel like we all know Alice, or we are Alice in some way. We have to give her dignity. I also think, on a social level, it’s more and more important that we become more open about mental illness, that it’s not stigmatized and marginalized.

I think we’re conditioned to accept portrayals of mental illness in movies a certain way. They’re often caricatures. Kristen doesn’t do that here, though, and I don’t think many other actors have the skill required to walk the fine line she does here.
Yeah, I think it really is a fine line. I sometimes like to call her performances a little bit death-defying, like a high-wire act. But it’s also how we cut the performance together in the edit room; creating a performance for film is a tricky business, and it’s a collaboration between the writer, the performer and the director. I feel like if you take all the things I said into account of being respectful of the mental illness and treating the script with sensitivity and allowing the actress to be who she is, hopefully the collision of those things will come out well. I think it’s so funny at moments—Alice is hilarious—but she doesn’t know she’s hilarious. She’s just living her life. We laugh in recognition.

For me, it was important to cast an actress with a basic comic center. I feel like she lives and breathes in that comic center, but she also has a vulnerable side. She can go to those dark places, darker than I imagined she could as an actress.

Darker than you intended?
Not intended, but she goes to places in this movie she’s never gone before. So I’m not gonna say, “Could you audition for me and show me that you can go there?” She did it so honestly and beautifully.

Was Kristen in mind for the character?
The script wasn’t written with her in mind, but she was my first choice. There were a lot of ideas floating around for actresses, and initially I thought a lot about Joan Cusack. She was kind of a muse for this character in my mind. I think Joan and Kristen have similar sensibilities. There was a boardroom scene where Joan Cusack, Kristen Wiig, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Wes Bentley and James Marsden are all together, and it was really fun. They were excited to work together.

I like that Alice has a distinct look: her fanny pack, the way her apartment is decorated. When did that vision come together?
The fanny pack was in the script, but I had this vision of how she should look. Kristen and I agreed on the heart of the character, but we didn’t necessarily agree on how she looked at first. I think Kristen thought Alice would look a little more realistic and plain, and I felt Alice was a little bit of a heightened character. I didn’t want her to play her in a heightened way, but I saw her in colorful dresses that might be from the ’40s or the ’50s. I felt like she shopped in thrift stores. The costume designer, Susan Matheson, agreed with me. “She would shop in Palm Desert thrift stores! She’s a desert flower!” She came up with this orange terrycloth dress. Kristen was eventually won over by these ideas and embraced them.

Something that came to mind for me was that a personality like Alice wouldn’t need a cent of that 85 million dollars to be successful on Youtube. Was that in mind for the movie’s ending?
Yes, in a way. It’s funny, we found some interesting people on Youtube when we were in pre-production. There are some amazing Youtubers going off in a similar way to Alice. I hate to talk about the end of the movie because it’s so open to interpretation, but it goes back to James Marsden’s line when he says, “She wants to be televised.” And Gabe (Bentley) knows she’s found this form of expression, as narcissistic as it might be, so he gives her a camera.

I read that this was originally a TV pilot.
I think Eliot Laurence (the screenwriter) was hoping for it to be a Showtime or HBO series, but when I read it, I felt I was reading a screenplay. I felt obsessed with it being a movie. I didn’t even know if I was giving him good advice or not, but I said, “Would you like to rewrite this as a screenplay?” He was thrilled with the idea.

Could you talk about what it was like shooting the dog neutering scene?
The dog neutering was a little like life imitating art. We had a lot of meetings about dog neutering. [laughs] It was some big conundrum of how to do this. We had a vet tech on set who was advising us and brilliant prop people. The prop people got these amazing props that looked incredibly real, and Kristen had these delicate hands; she really did the surgery. The surgery looked really good, but at one point we had the vet tech—who had similar hands, amazingly—come in and do some of the really exacting surgical stuff. We had some taxidermy dogs we filmed. The dog wrangler, who was fantastic, said she could get Alice’s dog to play dead on the table, and she did!

I’ve been asking everybody about this because I’m kind of obsessed: I think not enough attention is given to actors who act with their bodies. When you see Academy Awards clips, they always show actors yelling in a small room, or crying. Kristen tells stories with her body very well. Can you talk about her physical performance?
That’s cool! Such a great observation. I love it. I come from a theater background, and on stage you can’t just be a talking head. Really good actresses have intense physical training. She’s very in her body. Even in the first scene when she’s watching Oprah, you can see her just leaning into the TV. One of my favorite physical moments was a scene where she’s listening to her theme song. She’s supposed to just be lying around, listening, but I thought it would be really great if she did that dancing we do when we’re alone in our apartment. I thought Kristen would be great at that. That was just delightful.

I think it’s really haunting the way she walks through the casino in that pivotal scene.
That’s an even better example, because she’s not doing movement, per se, but just owning the space she’s in in an incredible way.

Before Alice wins the money, she has a very scheduled existence. After she wins the money, she throws all that to the wind. Part of it has to do with the meds, but what about the money made her throw away her routine?
That’s where the teeny hint of fairy tale comes in. She has this lonely life, going to a convenience store to get her pudding and issue of O magazine. I think Alice is someone who fantasized about what she’d do when her ship came in. Her ship comes in, and she just goes for it, takes that leap off the bridge. Her apartment is still there, with her sleeping bag and the whole thing, but I think she takes that leap of faith. That’s what makes it a great story, in a way, because we all fantasize about that leap of faith, and she does it. She inspires people around her, and I think Gabe sees her just going whole-hog for what she’s going to do. Even though everyone’s trying to stop her and she unravels and it’s a big mess, it says something about the dangers of following that narcissistic path, but she’s also inspiring at the same time.

Was there any improvisation involved in the film?
There was a lot of improvisation. We definitely shot the script and got everything we wanted from the script. We didn’t use whole new setups for the improvisation, but we used the setups we were in and had them riff within it. I would throw lines or ideas out for an alternate moment, and Elliot would sometimes hand rewrites to Kristen. She trusted him so much because she really loved the writing. I think her prepared statement in the casino was one of those alternate takes he wrote on the fly. She and Tim Robbins improvised the banana moment.

Joan Cusack has one of my favorite movie voices of all time. I could listen to her talk all day. Tim Robbins, too. I love the way Joan says “baby” to Alice in studio.
I’ve known Tim since I was 24 years old and I’ve known Joan since we were 8 years old. They’re both kind of heroes of mine. They’re friends, but they’re both people who I creatively admire so much.

Do you think Alice and Gabe’s relationship goes anywhere?
I think people like Alice with borderline personality disorder who have relationships…they have to have a devoted partner. It’s an unpredictable roller coaster, and I think Gabe is limited in his own way. I think they’ve found a match in each other, but it’s always hard to say how it’s going to turn out. One of the great lines is when Gabe says, “I’ve been divorced twice. And by twice I mean three times.” We hope for them.

There’s something poetically comical about self-help jargon escaping the mouths of the world’s least qualified advice givers. Most recently Jake Gyllenhaal’s Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler dispensed memorized wisdom while in the throes of sincere depravity. Now we have Alice Klieg, plagued by borderline personality disorder and well versed in Oprah-ese. Off and on on her medications, she spends her days in her color coded house watching hours of recorded talk shows, reciting along with their hosts all the life enhancing mumbo jumbo that daytime TV can offer. Kristen Wiig plays Alice’s mentally unsound and painfully awkward protagonist, and it’s because of her this film doesn’t end up feeling mean hearted, since Alice’s behavior make for some serious laughs at the expense of mental disease and the people who take advantage of an unwell woman. Because of Wiig’s charm and the line-toeing nuance of Eliot Laurence’s script, Welcome to Me explores the larger themes of self-medication and personal treatment and how artistry and imagination plays into finding a middle ground where one can at least live a satisfying life if not one defined as “normal.”

Alice lives a life of routine. She sleeps in a sleeping bag above her bed covers, her TV is not allowed to turn off and constantly plays a slew of her favorite Oprah episodes, and every day she buys herself a lottery ticket. One day her numbers match and her life is changed. Alice is functional enough to understand money can change your life. So, along with her best friend Gina (Linda Cardellini) she starts to have some fun. She moves into a penthouse in a Palm Springs hotel, buys herself colorful clothing, and treats her friends and family to expensive meals, among them her supportive gay ex-husband (Alan Tudyk). When she and Gina serve as audience members in an infomercial and Alice gets to be on stage in front of the camera, she finds a new high to achieve to. And with money, she doesn’t even have to try that hard.

Gabe and Rich (Wes Bentley and James Marsden) are the brothers who own the studio where Alice visited the informercial and their business is dying. When Alice marches in and lays down cash to buy herself a weekly two hour talk show, Rich agrees immediately, while Gabe seems to understand Alice’s demands come from someplace unhinged. And so Welcome to Me is born, much to the annoyance of the studio’s producers (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Cusack). Alice’s terms are met in detail, so her show has her coming in on a swan, she spends portions of the show cooking low-“carbohydrant” meals (she’s convinced herself a high protein diet will aid in her therapy), and most awkwardly of all she directs elaborate reenactments of the most distressing and humiliating moments from her life in an attempt to get the last word.

It’s all quite hilarious, even if you aren’t sure at every moment if you ought to be laughing. And when Alice throws more and more money into the show to up its production value and glorify herself, her narcissism and blatant use of others starts to take its toll. Her downward spiral into her disease in the end is much grittier than expected, given the lightness up until then, but in that way it very effectively expresses the highs and lows of borderline personality disorder. It’s volatile and uncomfortable.

Wiig has proved she’s branching out past the safe humor of SNL, riding the dramedy line in such films as Hateship Loveship and The Skeleton Twins. Her deadpan sincerity to her roles adds the dramatic seriousness needed, but only in Welcome to Me do I feel we’re really seeing the vulnerability she’s capable of. Not to mention her ability to so quickly go from Alice’s hissy fit style hysteria when talking about past wrongs to calculated monotone-delivered speeches on reaching one’s personal potential. Her range has never been more evident.

Director Shira Piven, relatively unknown with only one other feature and a TV documentary under her belt, most proves her abilities in the performances of her actors, allowing their talent to play out. Bentley especially impresses as a shy and rather broken man who joins Alice in finding personal therapy. With its bright coloring and Gondry-esque TV set Piven’s world in Welcome to Me is a bit exaggerated, which may draw away from the gravity of Alice’s condition, but never seems to make light of it. Much like Alice’s zen-like therapist played by Tim Robbins, Piven creates a safe place to explore.

It’s not too far fetched to believe if we say our mantras and layer on the systems, something will catch and we may just fix ourselves. Its why those who buy one self-help book are the most likely to buy another. Welcome to Me touches on a need in all of us to try to reach some level of self-proclaimed normalcy as well as the innate need to feel accepted by others for all our flaws and quirks. Borderline personality disorder is mostly a heightened emotional state and a distorted sense of self-image, and I doubt there’s anyone out there who can’t identify to some degree with what Alice feels. Mental illness is no laughing matter, but therapy absolutely is, and this film’s strength lies in Alice as the face of what we’re all searching for—and that the seemingly-put-together life gurus just don’t imbue—someone searching for help who actually looks like they need it.

Shortly after the announcement that Knight of Cups would have its World Premiere in competition at the upcoming Berlin Film Festival, the latest project written and directed by Terrence Malick has followed up with a first-look trailer. Full of strangely framed shots from renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who last worked with Malick on The Tree of Life, make sure to watch our video essay on the Screen Poetry of Terrence Malick), several of them upside down, the Knights of Cup trailer gives brief glimpses at the infidelity and celebrity status that the film might ultimately be about.

Starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the well-known cast extends well beyond its three leads including names like Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Armin Mueller-Stahl, the voice of Ben Kingsley and others who may or may not survive the final edit. Knight of Cups’ official synopsis is about as cryptic as the trailer:

Once there was a young prince whose father, the king of the East, sent him down into Egypt to find a pearl. But when the prince arrived, the people poured him a cup. Drinking it, he forgot he was the son of a king, forgot about the pearl and fell into a deep sleep.

Rick’s (Christian Bale) father used to read this story to him as a boy.

The road to the East stretches out before him. Will he set forth?

The Knight of Cups trailer is available online through FilmNation, watch it below:

A lot of bad came from the recent economic recession, but as far as entertainment goes one upside was the emergence of the kind of drama we could each of us relate to. Our love for forensic science and superheroes will never fade, but recent years have brought us a new common denominator. The gritty down-on-his-luck anti-hero, driven to great and terrible things by the forces most of us have felt. The most obvious and recent character audiences embraced in this category is Breaking Bad’s Walter White, and indeed it’s nearly impossible to watch After The Fall and not think of him.

In the film Wes Bentley is well cast as Bill Scanlon, a mild-mannered insurance adjuster. Devoted to his family and determined not to worry them or admit defeat, he keeps it to himself when he loses his job, choosing instead to leave the house every morning as though going to work, and spending his days in parking lots and his car trying to find other work. His wife Susan (Vinessa Shaw) is none the wiser and his two sons carry on as usual. When the pressures of having no income pile up and the stream of judgement from his wealthy father-in-law roll over him, he finds himself taking his gun out of his safe and wandering out into the desert outside his Albuquerque suburban neighborhood to potentially do something drastic. But while Bill hardly has the demeanor for suicide, he stumbles into a model home and happens across a philandering couple. They see the gun, offer up their wallets, and finding the whole affair to be a lot easier than he’d ever have imagined, Bill takes it.

This introduction to easy money kickstarts Bill’s life of crime, mostly restricted to petty theft of small businesses. With his new income, Bill finds his confidence come back to him, and by preying on those who he’s noticed to be rather deserving of punishment anyway, he’s able to justify his behavior as somewhat altruistic. Of course, Bill can’t help but be the innately good guy that he is, so it’s no surprise when he makes friends with the lonely and distraught cop Frank (Jason Isaacs). Frank begins to investigate the building cases of theft at gun point while simultaneously getting to know Bill and his family. The inevitability of Frank connecting the dots is a no-brainer, but the intriguing parts of this film lie in Bill’s own guilt around his actions.

First time director Saar Klein has most notably built his career around editing—a few times for the great Terrence Malick. His film has a dreamy neutral-toned feel to it that is very Malick-esque and his pacing and dedication to themes of relationship in the film are also similar. However, unlike Walter White, living in a similar Albuquerque suburb and choosing a similar career path of crime, Bill’s motivations seem entirely less plausible and less gripping. His choices reflect that of a coward at best, and even more so as those of happenstance. More intriguing are the decisions of those around him. Wes Bentley is an excellent actor, and he plays Bill with a likable innocence that makes his crimes more funny than dramatic. What’s missing is another level of depth to Bill, not written into the script. A sense of how his actions change him, as it seems plausible any sort of dramatic turn as this would leave him different. Or even a further analysis of the darkness inside Bill that would make him capable of this level of deceit.

Similarly Isaacs’ detective Frank wears his issues on his sleeve, openly showcasing his self-imposed exile as divorcée and missing father. Even his gruff accent paints a sense of obviousness on him. Add a stereotypical drunkenness and penchant for guns and here’s a typical movie cop. Adding to the confusion is a horribly misrepresentative movie poster. Wes Bentley with gun in hand and an American flag behind him? The silly tag line of “Desperate times call for dangerous measures.” If it’s meant to be ironic, I have a feeling that will be lost on most people. This is not an action film. Bill Scanlon isn’t an all-American man.

After the Fall starts strong, pulling in anyone who recalls the difficulty of the recession or relates to a man on the brink. And don’t get me wrong, I love a story of moral ambiguity, but Klein fails to push in further leaving us wanting. Bill’s tale is interesting, and the ending certainly leaves us with no real sense of closure, but more than that is a lack of layers in Bill’s character and psyche that might make him more interesting to watch and certainly more appealing to root for. He’s not a hero, he’s not an anti-hero. He’s an accidental criminal with a guilt-complex.

Originally titled Things People Do, the film’s old title perfectly sums up the surface-level of complexity the film offers. However, the new title implies a level of depth it simply doesn’t deliver. Klein proves he can handle the behind the camera elements of filmmaking and the editing room to boot, but he might try his hand at someone else’s writing next time if he wants the attention he deserves.

After the Fall opens in limited release and on VOD Dec. 12.

There are two movies playing out in the Norwegian film Pioneer. The first is a gritty procedural of a deep-sea dive, and the second, and more dominant, is a tense thriller. While at first glance these two separate stories of the film feel markedly different, even potentially at odds, they are two parts of a whole. Each shares a feeling of claustrophobia, physically and psychologically, that carries the film and makes it an engrossing experience.

Back in the late 1970’s, Norway discovered oil off its coastline and sought to build a pipeline. But the government would only agree to the pipeline’s construction on the condition that test dives were made to ensure the safety of the program. This required co-operating with an American company–here represented by Wes Bentley and Stephen Lang–that had the necessary equipment to successfully manage the dive. This makes for more than a simple cultural clash. First, it allows writer-director Erik Skjoldbjærg to play up the pernicious international interpretation of the United States as a domineering, empire-building bully. Second, it enables Skjoldbjærg to reference his debt to 1970’s American conspiratorial thrillers.

Little about the start of Pioneer’s initial premise suggests what it will turn into. Petter (Aksel Hennie) and his brother Knut (André Eriksen) are two of the Norwegian divers tasked with performing the test dive. Skjoldbjærg sketchily lays out their relationship, antagonistic but ultimately loving. They stand in stark contrast: Knut is a family man with a wife (Stephanie Sigman) and son; Petter is the slovenly uncle. Here the film finds some melodrama worthy of a very poorly written soap opera (and I say that as an apologetic fan of soaps). The film never convincingly establishes these relationships, but then again its real interests seem to lie elsewhere.

However, the film excels in other regards. During the dive, inexplicably something goes wrong, leaving Knut unconscious and his diving mask smashed open. In a fantastic, nerve-wracking scene, Petter gives Knut his oxygen tank and swims back up with his brother’s body, under threat of getting decompression sickness.

Skjoldbjærg’s manner for shooting this scene is one he takes for the rest of the film. He situates the viewer both in the psychological head space of his protagonist and the physical space of the environment. Both confining and paranoia-inducing.

At this point–about 40 minutes in–the film shifts gears. Knut doesn’t survive the incident, and Petter suspects foul-play. As Petter’s superiors and government agencies systematically deflect his concerns and questions, he becomes further convinced of his suspicions. But almost to the end of its runtime, Pioneer continues a sense of skepticism around Petter’s reliability. For one thing, prior to the dive, Petter and the other Norwegian divers were placed in a pressure chamber to test their ability to withstand the deep ocean pressures. The chamber had a hallucinatory effect on them. This element calls into question Petter’s credibility, and his obsession with discovering the truth becomes all-consuming as he grapples with his own grasp on reality.

A favorable opinion of Pioneer depends entirely on one’s response to the presentation of the plot. A favorable assessment might politely describe it as convoluted. The film’s plot is, centered as it is on a conspiracy, needlessly self-involved and complicated. But I think criticizing it for this misses the point. As previously mentioned, Skjoldbjærg draws inspiration from 1970’s American thrillers. These films–like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor–arose out of disillusionment after Watergate and the Vietnam War. While a few of these films have really great plots, they were more interested in a sustained feeling of paranoia and distrust, and they often had their conspiracies encompass just about everyone imaginable, including the highest reaches of government.

Pioneer does not attempt anything quite so vast and far-reaching, but does play around in that same convention of thrillers. Plot matters less here than a constant sense of dread and obscure mystery. Trying to pick apart the film and its plot is easy to do. The focus should be on the nervy, tension-filled pleasures of the film. (After all, The Parallax View, for example, does not make a lick of sense and is a standard of the genre). In its back-half, Pioneer holds an adrenaline-fueled single-mindedness: Petter is an everyman caught up in something even he does not quite fully understand. His investigation involves plenty of double crosses, reveals, counter-reveals, and moments of misdirection. Eventually the plot ceases to matter.

It helps that the film has such a strong visual design to support this shaky plot. Cinematographer Jallo Faber does an excellent job of creating a moody, anxious atmosphere. He nicely plays around with lights and shadows to capture the insidiousness at hand. Skjoldbjærg’s shoots a number of scenes in close-ups that emphasize the tight spaces and the feeling of being trapped. But every so often he will pull back and show a character dwarfed by their environment, as just another pawn in the game at hand. This is smart, involving filmmaking that elevates a premise that has only so much momentum to it. By its end, Pioneer drags out, running out of avenues in its loopy storytelling. After all, even the best conspiracies have their limits.

Pioneer trailer

Spanning the farthest reaches of time and space, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar will show you worlds so wondrous you’ll feel the floor fall out from under you and the breath leave your lungs. It’s an experiential, transportive sci-fi film that’s even more spectacular than advertised. The film is made a mess of, however, by a clunky and scatterbrained plot. Nolan burrows deeper than ever into his creativity to build an epic journey into the stars, but more of that energy could have been devoted to making his on-screen explorers, their relationships, and their internal struggles, as inventive and sharply-executed as the visuals. Still, you’ll be floored by Nolan’s outer-space opus, its imagery overwhelming in scope and wonder, its ambition boundless. This is a worthy moviegoing experience, despite its flaws.

Oh, the amazing things you’ll see: alien tidal waves thousands of feet high; planets where time itself gets bent and stretched beyond all recognition; clouds frozen into floating ice chunks; a black hole that looks unlike anything I’ve seen on film. But before shooting off to the edge of the galaxy, the story begins on the ground, in the dirt, on a farm owned by a country-bred former astronaut named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). He’s raised a brainy daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and a son, Tom (Timothee Chalamet), with his caring, wise father-in-law (John Lithgow). Earth is plagued by parasitic dust storms called “The Blight” that have ravaged the planet of her crops and diminished the global food supply to frightening lows.

One day, Murph discovers a gravitational anomaly in her bedroom she claims is the doing of “her ghost”, who’s allegedly also been pushing books off her bookshelf. Following clues extrapolated from the anomaly, Cooper and Murph end up at a secret NASA compound where they find Cooper’s old mentor, Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), who consequently needs him to lead a mission through a wormhole near Saturn to track down a team of previous explorers who were tasked with finding a new home planet for the human race. His crew mates are Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), snarky scientist Doyle (Wes Bentley), the jittery but brilliant Romilly (David Gyasi), and a walking homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a talking robot named TARS who looks like a mobile version of the monolith from Kubrick’s masterpiece. Cooper accepts the mission, and doesn’t know when he’ll be able to return to little Murph, who’s resentful and torn to pieces. Nolan cleverly pairs the image of Cooper speeding away from the farm in his truck, kicking up a trail of dust, with audio from a space shuttle countdown and liftoff, a shining example of his audacious filmmaking style.

The plot is rooted in complex physics, metaphysics, relativity, and other concepts richer than the average moviegoer is used to. Nolan and his co-writer and brother, Jonathan Nolan, must have been terrified audiences wouldn’t be able to keep up, because the dialogue is so over-explicated and reiterative (if they reference Murphy’s Law one more god damn time…) your ears will turn beet red. If clarification was the objective, the Nolans achieve the opposite; the incessant exposition and space-time mumbo-jumbo only make things more complicated, and the heady concepts swirling above it all only add to the confusion.

Cluttered as it is, the script poses some fascinating scenarios. A great example is the aforementioned time-bending planet, whose proximity to a black hole means that for every hour Cooper and his team spend on its surface, 7 years pass for everyone else on earth. An unforeseen accident that extends the team’s stay on the planet leads to the film’s most devastating scene, in which Cooper returns to the ship, opens his video mailbox, and discovers the severe consequences of his mistake. McConaughey, convulsing and drowned in tears, breaks your heart. This portion of the film is terrific, because it’s a case in which the big, bombastic on-screen action dovetails perfectly into a moment of raw human emotion. It clicks, and it’s divine.

An older Murph is played by Jessica Chastain, whose poise as an actor makes her the film’s second-biggest boon, next to McConaughey. Cooper and Murph’s inter-dimensional father-daughter relationship is the glue that binds the film, which otherwise would feel like a collection of unrelated sci-fi short stories. Matt Damon enters the fold at around the halfway mark as one of the original astronaut explorers, adding a welcome layer of mystery to the proceedings. Bill Irwin, who voices TARS without an inkling of robotic inflection, lends the film a surprisingly significant amount of warmth and humor. What’s frustrating, though, is that 50 percent or more of the actors’ dialogue seems to be fixated on tiresome exposition, Hathaway being the prime victim of this design choice. She tries valiantly to emote, but labyrinthine chatter about space-travel mechanics constantly gets in her way.

Where the film threatens to fall apart is in its final act, a prosaic series of events sorely lacking finesse. Nolan’s finales often come off as emotionally cold or overwrought because he’s so self-serious and obsessed with juggling pathos, plot twists, philosophy, and mind-bending visuals all at once. Interstellar is sadly no exception, with a climax so disorganized that you’re frantically trying to shuffle things around in your head to make sense of it all, too preoccupied with deciphering logistics to feel the full impact of Nolan’s message, which he means to be poignant, but ultimately thuds. The shame is, the message is a beautiful one, in which we’re asked to consider the preciousness of the time we have with our family, and confront the inevitability that one day, we will all drift apart into eternity. I was ultimately touched by the heart of the story; I just wish I didn’t have to shove so much space junk out of the way to get there.

Nolan shot Interstellar in 35mm, VistaVision, and IMAX 70mm, which gives the breathtaking imagery a sort of dirtiness and inelegance that fits the story well, while sufficiently supporting the grandiosity of his vision. The mind-boggling proposition of visually representing four or more dimensions on-screen has always been fascinating to me, and Nolan and his team (including Her cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema) have concocted the most awe-inspiring version I’ve seen. It’s encouraging to see a big budget supporting such an artful, sincere endeavor. Flying under the radar, surprisingly, is Hans Zimmer, whose tasteful, nuanced score is one of his best, floating in and out of scenes fluidly and emphasizing only when appropriate. His notorious blaring, thrummy horns are replaced by sensitive, heavenly organs, which is a saving grace, because the last thing Interstellar needs is more chaos to further obstruct its purpose.

Interstellar trailer

According to IMDb and as of this writing, Abraham Lincoln has been (or will be) portrayed in movies and on TV over 350 times, from 1911 (His First Commission) to 2015 (The Gettysburg Address), and by the likes of everyone from Henry Fonda (1939’s Young Mr. Lincoln) to Louis C.K. (during the 2012 season of Saturday Night Live). Joining these actors and others is a young man making his onscreen debut, Braydon Denney, in a 2014 film from a first-time director.

The Better Angels is the story of a very young Abraham Lincoln. The film takes place in Indiana the early 1800s, when Lincoln was about eight-years-old. The future president lives off the land with his strong-but-silent father, Tom (Jason Clarke); his doting mother, Nancy (Brit Marling); as well as a sister and a cousin. The times are lean, the work is hard, and the fun is sparing, but through it all young Abe gains wisdom that can only be amassed through life experiences. One of those experiences is the death of his mother, with whom he was very close. Another is the later introduction of his father’s new wife, Sarah (Diane Kruger), with whom he becomes just as close.

Because we live in the era of superhero movies, it’s only fitting for one of America’s greatest heroes to get a proper origin story. Abraham Lincoln gets one in The Better Angels and it’s superb. What makes it so great is how the story is told.

So many depictions of our 16th president – now matter how good – are loaded with facts, details, and recitations of historic speeches and quotes and conversations. All of this is fine, but it’s all been done. The Better Angels writer/director A.J. Edwards prefers showing Lincoln’s story as opposed to just telling it.

The story is visualized through a stark, at points bleak, black-and-white lens, making good times look bearable and bad times look desperate. But there’s also a beauty to it, a rich texture to the nature-heavy settings photographed by cinematographer Matthew J. Lloyd. The wood is old and strong and the fruitful earth is at times stubborn, but the water runs cold and the sun shines no less brightly than it does in color. It’s not exactly an Ansel Adams piece, but the efforts to be one are noticeable.

Edwards’ script is as bare as the winter fields of Indiana, with an efficiency of dialogue that is fitting for a family of five living in harsh conditions in the early 19th century. Children are seen, not heard, and anything worth talking about among the adults might get in the way of working the land. Even punishments are dealt – and received – in silence.

While told along a chronological timeline, the film is more a collection of moments in young Lincoln’s life than it is a story about those moments. This collection is the genius of the film.

Combined with the sparse dialogue and the stark black-and-white imagery, the moments collected in the film, shot loosely (sometimes too much so) with a handheld camera, are presented like clips from a home movie that had been edited together on one reel and found in an attic decades later. The subject is now a known quantity, but with this “home movie,” how those moments from the subject’s past then shaped the subject into today’s known quantity become brilliantly clear in hindsight. Through these moments in the film, the viewer will learn about Abe’s honesty, his stoicism, his intelligence, his work ethic, his first exposure to slavery, and the driving force behind his considerable compassion.

There are also moments when others recognize Abe is different. He’s smarter than the other kids (and many adults) and by a considerable distance. His mothers know it and both make efforts to get him a proper education. It’s when Abe is in school that his teacher, Mr. Crawford (Wes Bentley), notices the same. It takes Abe’s father longer to come around because that’s how men were in the early 19th century: learn a trade, not a lesson. Thankfully, both mothers won that fight.

The title The Better Angels has a dual meaning. One is a direct reference to the closing statements of Lincoln’s first inaugural address:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

The other would be the better angels of Lincoln’s childhood: his two mothers. His bond with his birthmother is undeniable, and a devastating quote from his step-mother solidifies her meaning in his life:

“I’ll never take your mother’s place. But I’ll love you as she did. If you choose to love me less, I’ll still love you the same.”

A.J. Edwards has studied at the foot of director (and this film’s producer) Terrence Malick, and that influence shows in Edwards directorial style. This is not a bad thing, as even a mediocre film made by someone inspired by Malick is worth a look. Fortunately, this film is far above mediocre and somewhere closer to masterful.

Closing weekend of the Mill Valley Film Festival just proves the authority of this small festival. It’s rare for a film festival to have such a high percentage of excellent films. No wonder its gained a reputation as a finely curated festival with its tastes squarely in line with mass audience appeal, not to mention the Academy. Surrounded by the beauty of Marin County, and with the emphasis always fixed on the art and not a hectic or saturated film lineup, Mill Valley provides one of the best festival experiences a modern movie lover can have. It’s been an excellent 11 days and the last two days left us especially satisfied.

Part-Time Bad Guy

[Ananda]

With film leads Wes Bentley and Jason Isaacs on hand to support him, first time director Saar Klein happily introduced his film After the Fall Saturday night, immediately telling the audience he wanted them to feel they could laugh, even if it seemed uncomfortable. An award-winning editor, Saar has worked most especially with Terrence Malick with whom he edited The Thin Red Line and The New World. If nothing else, Saar at least picked up on Malick’s sense of quiet storytelling, and his film uses the technique expertly.

The tale of an insurance adjustor, Bill Scanlon (Wes Bentley), who has recently been laid off, the film begins with Bill continuing his daily routine in order to avoid disclosing to his wife (Vinessa Shaw) that their situation has changed. Exhausting all his contacts, Bill tries with no success to find himself another job. At a particularly low moment he takes his pistol, wanders off into the desert and contemplates just what he’s capable of. Driven by thirst he wanders into a nearby model home, stumbling upon an adulterous couple using the house’s accommodations. They mistake his gun in hand as a stickup and offer all their money. Driven to new lows, Bill takes it, willingly. Thus Bill’s entrance into the quick cash life of petty crime, and as the bills pile up, he risks more and more to steal his way into keeping his family afloat.

As an especially upright man in every other aspect of his life, it’s not surprising Bill befriends a local down and out detective (Jason Isaacs), despite the threat this poses to his new career. But Bill’s downfall may just be that he isn’t actually a bad guy. Klein’s morally ambiguous tale is appealing for much the same reasons Breaking Bad sucks viewers in, and it even takes place in Albuquerque as well. But whereas Walter White honed his criminal craft, Bill is always at odds with his new profession, and at every moment at war with himself. Bentley handles the complexity with ease, his face reflecting Bill’s innocence, but always with an undercurrent of tension, ready to snap. Isaacs as Detective McTiernan is more of a stretch, but Klein pulls it all together into an intriguing and compelling film.

In The Way Of Beauty

[Ananda]

As if bringing us the raw and transcendent Dallas Buyers Club last year didn’t prove his worth enough, Jean-Marc Vallée presents another stirring biopic. Based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the film Wild recounts Strayed’s journey to face her demons by walking 1,100 miles on one of the longest trails in America, up California to Washington. Buying herself REI equipment she doesn’t know how to use, and loading up an enormous hiking pack, Cheryl (mesmerizingly played by Reese Witherspoon) slowly sets out along a path in the Mojave desert with no clear ambition other than to try and find where she went wrong in life. Still in grief at the loss of her mother (portrayed in memories by Laura Dern in scene-stealing loveliness) and having recently divorced her husband after cheating on him multiple times and fallen in with heroin users, Cheryl’s final fall to the bottom was an unplanned pregnancy and subsequent abortion.

Cheryl’s distrust of men is everywhere throughout the film, instilled in her by an abusive alcoholic father, and perpetuated by the occasionally skeezy man  she runs into as a single woman on a reclusive trail. Some of her more harrowing moments have less to do with the wild and more to do with the people she comes across. With a subtle and highly effective narrative running throughout the film, the words of the book are used excellently to showcase the transformation happening within Cheryl during her journey. As she learns to forgive herself. As she learns to let go of her anger at the universe for taking her mother so early. As she finds strength and manages never to give up despite having permission to do so.

While there is clearly plenty of beautiful landscape to look at throughout the film, Vallée’s camera focus always includes Cheryl. It’s her connection to the world she’s trudging through that allows viewers to experience her realizations with her. With exquisite cinematography by Yves Bélanger and a perfectly paced screenplay by Nick Hornby, this film may just win as my favorite of the festival. And I’m not alone in my thinking. The California Film Institute awarded the unparalleled Laura Dern with the Mill Valley Award for her performance in Wild, presented to her by Andrew Stanton, Pixar legend extraordinaire. Her passion for the film was eloquently stated in her acceptance of the award, and I’d be surprised not to hear her name circulating among award buzz in the next few months.

Hope Endures In the Desert Sun

[Bernard]

After watching Abderrahmane Sissako’s stunning ensemble piece Timbuktu, the general feeling people walking out of the theater was one of deflation. “I’m going to need a pick-me-up after that one!” I heard someone say. The film, set in the harsh desert landscape of the titular North African city, does admittedly end on a tragic note. The impression that endures, however, is of the beautiful relationships and quiet moments shared by the characters before the film’s dark finale. C’est la vie.

The film’s handful of stories are more parallel than interwoven, overlapping at key moments. The larger theme of the picture is the contentious, often violent dynamic between the oppressive Muslim jihadists patrolling the streets with their weapons and the indomitable citizens who refuse to compromise their humanity, often paying the highest price for their transgressions.

These are sweet people: We see a loving family of three, living a quiet life under the Sahara stars, herding cattle during the day; a group of musicians, playing their instruments quietly so as not to alert nearby jihadists. Despite their innocuous lifestyles, their oppressors always loom, ready to descend: A young woman is forced to marry a jihadist man, despite her mother’s refusal; a woman fishmonger is taken into custody after refusing to wear gloves. Their fighting spirit is inspiring, and Sissako does African cinema proud.