A few months ago I shot the pilot for my new movie review show, Reel Talk, and now I am back with an all new episode, exploring a wide swath of films. Family fare? We got it with The Croods. Mindless action? Check out Olympus Has Fallen. And to close, a complex, substantive family epic in the form of The Place Beyond the Pines.

So sit back, relax, and let me tell you all about these fine films, in theaters and coming to DVD and Blu Ray.

Click here to view the show.

Of course as Wahlberg/Lugo whines his way through his personal trainer lifestyle, he seizes on a self-help guru as the answer to his dilemma on how to get what he can’t get via talent or ability. This leads to a half cocked idea to kidnap and extort money from another douchebag that is Lugo’s client by the name of Victor Kershaw, (played with movie stealing aplomb by Tony Shalhoub.) As Wahlberg/Lugo and his cohorts played by miscast Anthony Mackie as Adrian and miscast Dwayne Johnson as Paul, pull off the kidnapping I keep waiting for all that dark comedy everyone mentions in relation to this film and it never arrives for me.

What does show up however, starts with disdain and quickly moves to disgust as there is no redeeming quality to this film to latch onto to make me want to care for any of these characters or victims and by the time we get to Ed Harris as the retired ex-detective Ed DuBois, his wincing almost apologetic portrayal tells me in the end all I need to know: This piece of shit was nothing more than a payday for everyone involved.

At this I shift into the couldn’t care less point of view and I ride it out like a bad Miami Vice episode. Obviously, everything goes wrong for our trio and even with the few chuckles along the way, you can stick a fork in me like I was the very same grilled hands, Im done.

In reflection I find there is one thing that amazes me about this film – it shows me how there is value in something I don’t like, like Spring Breakers, and how it can still hit it’s mark and I can respect that, where by comparison something like Pain and Gain, that has NO POINT, can still get made and done so in such a clueless manner. This film is in the running for worst of the year and is so far my pick for ‘budget wasting worst’ at twenty five million. You should be ashamed Bay and everyone else who took part.

I spit on you with derision and disgust,

Rick

As the duo explores this underground lair, the ever sensitive Elvis starts to exude the creep that soon permeates everything in this film. Skilled filmmaker Aleksander Nordaas languidly explores this bizarre environment while building suspense to fine-tuned pitch, even before we meet Thale.

But, by the time Thale (played with a spooky brilliance by Silje Reinåmo,) literally pops up, the creep factor just escalates and the suspense continues unabated! This doesn’t feel anything like a conventional horror movie by this point, but its bizarre, mysterious and suspenseful nature still spooks me in a riveting sort of way! As the stoic and unflappable Leo tries to take the situation in hand and call for help, Elvis tries to shake off the death grip she put him in and digs around the premises some more, finally listening to log tapes left behind from what appears to be the medically trained deceased owner while trying to keep an eye on the beautiful blond Thale. As she retreats to a familiar corner of her room, she decides to trust his inquisitive and gentle gestures towards her. This is when we learn via what must be telepathy, the story of her life up until she is a young girl.

It’s all, ever so strange, and as Elvis lies writhing while Thale speaks mind to mind, Leo walks to the road and his car to get some lunch and make a call. This is when there comes that first ‘oh shit’ moment and the epiphany that this is a story about something very different indeed. As Leo makes his way back to the underground covert and a stunned Elvis tries to absorb what he has just experienced, is when we know there really is something out there. When the guys successfully barricade the three within the bunker awaiting help is when the film changes its stripes and becomes something beyond just a scary movie. It’s almost like a suspense mystery. One thing for sure, what it is – is remarkable!

Then I finally see what Leo and Elvis are up against, it is old, and of this earth yet unlike anything most of us humans are familiar with.

When help arrives it isn’t what any of us were expecting and just like everything else related to our beloved Thale, it is good and bad, yin and yang as Eline her dead caretaker learned early on when he took her as a child. There are gifts here and there is loss, there is death and there is life and ultimately there is a powerfully poignant reminder about how life will find a way where you never expect life to be. You are a small film with a big film’s audacity, not only offering a grand affirmation of Scandinavian folklore, but a reminder of filmmaking for the love and I say, bravo!

With all adoration,

Rick

Needless to say, Terrence Malick is such an artist.

Of course there is an innate character to the films of Malick which keeps many viewers on the outside, and this is no doubt the case with you, To the Wonder. I do not doubt that there will be those who view your divergences of story, your unexplained jumps in narrative, and your more dreamlike reveries as the indulgences of a pretentious, soporific auteur. But for those who travel along the same introspective wavelength and who can identify with the emotional core of your story, I have no doubt you will be one of the most transfixing, moving films they will find this year.

Olga Kurylenko as Marina.

Your story, so much as you can be said to have a traditional story, follows the wandering heart of Neil (Ben Affleck). In Paris he meets Anna (Olga Kurylenko) the spirited single mother of Tatiana. They fall in love, the kind of breathless and giddy love that includes ridiculous public displays and thoughtless acts of devotion. Marina follows Neil to America, where his return to his job and to the real world takes its toll on their relationship. The two never marry, Neil seeming opposed to the idea all together, and before long the torment of their nebulous relationship is tearing them apart.

Your narrative, ethereal and groundless as it is, moves through a series of moments and experiences that guide the viewer through the memories of characters who have moved through the many plains, hills, and valleys of extant love. We see events devoid of effecting context, happening seemingly in a vacuum. Fights spring up out of moments of unbridled love and passion. Conflicts end with tender embraces. Moments of emotional extremity erupt and are extinguished in fleeting moments barely registered. This transience of momentum and meaning could be infuriating to anyone who is only acquainted with the standard explication of love from Hollywood films, but will feel all too real and affecting to someone who has ever spent time reflecting on a relationship, or a history of loves lost, found, and abandoned.

Malick excels at this kind of storytelling, creating an experiential momentum that draws the view in like an undertow. His camera remains in motion, like the passage of time flowing through events, never allowing for a static view. He can find the unreal in reality, creating staggeringly beautiful tableaus and instances out of the everyday mundane. He has an uncanny ability to evoke the sensation of unwavering momentum present in moments of intense emotion.

An interlude involving Jane (Rachel McAdams), a woman from Neil’s past, will stand out to some as the pivotal moment of abandonment in terms of their patience with your story, and yet for me this segment was both visceral and affecting, a perfect microcosm of your power. During a reprieve from his tumultuous relationship with Marina, Neil reconnects with Jane in a hospital, begins seeing her, and enters into an idyllic relationship with her. Their time together is blissful, free of weight and strife. Yet when Jane declares her desire to be wed, to spend their life together, it rings almost as a death knell for their time together.

Neil (Ben Affleck) and Jane (Rachel McAdams) share a quiet moment.

This movement – and sometimes musical terminology seems to be the only way to truly define the acts of a Malick film – encapsulates the greater themes of To the Wonder. There is no explanation of why they were both at the hospital. Instead the moment appears and moves in the manner of a memory, with the act occurring in a vacuum of pure experience. The reason for moments is unimportant in the context of such reverie, paling before the ultimate emotional meaning of the recollection itself. Every moment of the movie is like this, culminating into an overall mixture of unstated and yet ecstatic understanding.

This will, of course, baffle some people. Malick does not make films so much as he makes narrative arguments made to explicate his very spiritual and enlightened point of view regarding greater truths of life. As The Tree of Life sought to make understood the unknowable mystery of all life and existence, To the Wonder hopes to dispel the Hollywood myth of falling love in favor of the more honest human experience existing with love. Everyone feels love, but how do we express it, how do we share it, how do we embrace it?

The answer, it seems, is that these questions don’t matter as much as does the act of commitment and dedication. At the outside of all of this action revolving around Neil is a priest played by Javier Bardem undergoing a kind of crisis of faith, his homilies regarding love accenting the scenes that we are experiencing. Ambivalence can poisoning the promise of any relationship, be it one of faith or romance, and these men have uncertainty in spades. As time goes on we find that love follows an assertion of trust and commitment. Trying to reverse that order, to hold out on committing until you are certain of love, is disastrous.

There is a richness and a fullness to your story that cannot be properly delineated in a scant 1,000 words. There is the recurring juxtaposition between being in love and being on the earth, which is given thematic import given the fact that Neil is an environmental surveyor. There are the many succinct and punishingly well-observed statements regarding love. You are a film of unerring conviction and uncompromising vision, the purest and most honest distillation of the fact of love I’ve seen in some time.

To paraphrase Marina, I’m glad we could go even a little bit of our way together,

Brian J. Roan

Shane Carruth created such a film with his 2004 debut, Primer. There, the simple concept of time travel (moving backward or forward in time) was invested with narrative complexity befitting the realities of the action. Now, he has exceeded that previous work with you, Upstream Color, a deceptively simple story made more deep and more invigorating because of the heady, universal ideas that make up the heart of you.

You begin with scenes of enigmatic beauty and oddity. A man searches in the leaves and soil of orchids at a local greenery for various elements. Meanwhile, a group of children playfully examine the effects of the compounds for which that man was searching. Kris (Amy Seimetz), meanwhile, goes about her daily life without a care in the world, until the moment when everything she cares about is taken away from her.

Months later she meets Jeff (Shane Carruth), who is drawn to her and slowly pulls her out of her shell. They are two broken individuals, struggling through daily lives that feel scarcely their own anymore. Yet in their frailty and in their growing connection they find a subtle strength that allows them to rebuild their lives and climb up from the depths of their loss.

Jeff (Shane Carruth) and Kris (Amy Seimetz) shelter one another from the storm.

And yet… and yet that is not all there is in this story. Another element of your plot, which I have purposefully left in obscurity, is working its power over them at all times. Without being aware of it, their actions are not fully their own, nor are their thoughts and memories. It is a subtle and nuanced, initially playful interpretation of what happens to all people under the influence of their partners, their parents, their upbringing in general. Yet, as things go on, the inconsequential nature of the outside force acting on them begins to shift into something else. It is not malevolent, because it is not purposefully cruel, but it is detrimental, and thus worth fighting against.

You are truly a movie that thrives off of the meticulous construction of your editing. It is easy to see how a film like this could have been done with the showiness and draggy exposition that many people might expect of such a thematically complex film. The mechanisms of the plot and the elements therein would have to be explained. The backstories of the characters would have to be fully divulged. Carruth, though, trims and intercuts and mixes moments and actions so precisely that it is possible from the outset to understand how things are happening without every truly grasping the larger picture as to why they should be happening. It is possible to predict the outcomes of certain initial actions, the reason for the effect, and yet the larger picture remains tantalizingly uncertain. It’s a miraculous, almost alchemical feat, and yet it is feels effortless.

In spite of this formal precision, or perhaps because of it, you are able to create a fully realized love story, a narrative of the ways in which people come to terms with their own senses of powerlessness and embrace the people in their lives who allow them to overcome it. Kris and Jeff both feel lost, lacking any defined understanding of their own actions, stripped of agency and lacking any kind of defense of their own selves. All they have is who they are, and that leaves them unmoored. And yet, in finding one another and caring for each other so deeply, they create a confluence of understanding that strengthens and empowers them.

Even as they slowly drift from one another, driven to madness by the emotions of some other entity being thrust upon them, some elemental part of them remains entwined, always giving them hope of a way out. So many romantic pairings in so many other films fall apart or become strained under circumstances much more banal and meaningless than those that afflict your protagonists. It is heartening and stirring, then, to watch them work together, feeling and loving one another as they do.

So what more is there to say? I feel as though I could spend hours defining what makes you brilliant, extolling what makes you so moving, and yet here I am already at a loss for words. You are a film that makes me think and feel beyond my ability to articulate. You are a film that demands a second viewing not as a way to clarify plot or themes left obscured, but so that one can luxuriate in so complete, uncompromising, and effective an artistic vision.

A complex film worth revisiting for pure joy alone; now that is a rare and valuable object indeed.

Love beyond words to express,

Brian J. Roan

It’s a bold and frankly stunning tact for a film to take with such a pat, seemingly ridiculous story. Four friends from childhood find themselves languishing in the stultifying sameness of their college lives, desperate to make a bold escape so they can finally see something new and become who they really are. This concept, the idea of escape and self-actualization, is a particular youthful ideal that never fully leaves us, and yet these young women exist in a nothing-to-lose kind of world wherein their own selves are the most important element, and thus they can excuse themselves from societal norms in the pursuit of the rush of their true reality.

This leads three of them – Cotty (Rachel Korine), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), to rob a local restaurant, in a scene that plays up the disparity between the pretty, small young women and the violence they use to get what they want. Only later on, when they stage a recreation of the act to the absent member of their party, Faith (Selena Gomez), does the real meaning and the true impact of that robbery come to the fore, leading to a sudden shift from the booze-sodden debauchery we had seen previously into the more mortally terrifying depths plumbed by the local gangster, Alien (James Franco).

This may all sound like nothing but madcap camp, and while you do approach that, you know better that than to let yourself slip so deep that your themes and characters cease to be taken seriously. Each of these young women represents a different aspect of our pop culture view towards womanhood, and each of them responds to the evolving situation in a way that is not only consistent with that archetype, but with the character created within it. Selena Gomez in particular impresses as Faith, the church-going young woman who has been blind to the growing violence and immorality of her friends. Her eventual breakdown is heartrending and raw, an expression of fear not only for herself, but for the lives and wellbeing of her friends. And their reactions hold up their same party-girl attitude, at first gently prodding her to join them in their descent, and then feigning sorrow when she refuses, all the while still carrying the energy of people waiting for the fun to begin again, unimpeded.

Cotty is the archetypical tease, never going all the way but reveling in the act of dancing close to the fire. She can bear Candy and Brit so long as the fun remains and the danger stays remote, but once stakes are introduced and the reality of the situation becomes inescapable her commitment flags. Alien, meanwhile, is all posture and pomp without the muscle to back up his claims. Garnished in guns and cash, he is nonetheless only as experienced as Cotty, though much more willing to carry his charade to the end. He’s a strangely sweet, deceptively cunning character, and Franco uses him to more than redeem himself from the debacle of Oz the Great and Powerful.

The manner in which these very real, very engrossing characters intertwine and collide is fascinating, as is the way your writer and director, Harmony Korine, displays them in the narrative, acting as a kind of amphetamine- and neon-infused Terrence Malick. Montages backed up by high energy dubstep give us the dizzying highs available to those who chase sun and drugs and booze. Meanwhile, conversations loop again and again in quieter moments, as though the speakers themselves are trying to feel out the words, trying them on and making them fit. Scenes are edited together with the beginning of the next scene, creating a subtle weave between sequences that draws up the same experience as thinking back on one moment while living in the moment that followed it. Past, present, and future coexist in the mind, and these women – who are hurtling through this spring break so fast and yet seemingly languishing in it for months – are experiencing all of these moments in a mash of confusion and clarity.

The key to you, though, if there can only be one, is the aforementioned scene wherein the girls who took part in the robbery reenact their heist for Faith. This scene, which takes place in a parking lot at night, is subtly terrifying and wholly organic, the kind of scene that moviegoers should be talking about all year, not only for what it accomplished in terms of base narrative momentum, but in how suddenly it relights our opinion of the entire tone of the first act. What once was absurd and comedic is suddenly fierce and raw, placing the audience firmly in the perspective of Faith, challenging our perception of what we’ve gotten ourselves into.

There are no shortage of moments both joyous and worrying, real and surreal within your narrative. The best way to see you, I’m sure, is with only the barest inkling as to your plot, the better to lose oneself in the hyperactive madness. That said, even though I’ve seen you already and know all of the twists and turns and surprises in store, I cannot wait to spend another heady, blissfully insane holiday with you.
Spring break forever indeed,
Brian J. Roan

With your quick introduction and pure brevity in establishing the setting as 1962 London, it is immediately apparent that you aren’t going to traffic in very many conventional ‘coming of age’, tropes and that is a welcome beginning. What seems to transpire through the first half of the movie is the often uncomfortable outcome of diverging life paths between two inseparable childhood BFF’s during an intensely introspective and turbulent era.

One path, that of Rosa, seems to go the way that the social pressures of the times would dictate – being that of the early 60’s – and the time of Cuban missile crisis and height of Cold War fear. Rosa’s path is selfish and hedonistic as was the era, and that in itself is understandable up until it involves Gingers’ dad, Roland. It is also about this time that the whimsical and girlish Ginger from not so long ago, makes fewer and fewer appearances. Its this transition in Gingers demeanor and Elle Fanning’s treatment of it that is riveting and so mature beyond her tender years, that it becomes the core epiphany of the film. As Ginger’s conscience and path lead to activism and a desire to make a difference, it is at this time when her biggest fears are confirmed and her crossroad is as fraught with as much angst and awkwardness as is humanly possible. It is a testament to Sally Potter’s filmmaking and unflinching cinematography that we see Ginger’s transformation so clearly.

What this chain of events does, is establish a betrayal that will consume Ginger and render Rosa a victim to her all encompassing needs. But there is more than that. Simultaneously there is the growth and atrophy of idealism. It is a powerful statement on human nature and what it says about us as people based on what we embrace in the face of crisis.

This is where Ginger shines, and though she endeavors to hold it together, it seems the betrayers aim to unsettle her at every turn. As the blush of youth falls from Ginger, once again it is the power and subdued brilliance of Elle Fanning’s portrayal the lends the emotional strength, grit and realism that will have her, as Ginger, do all she can to try to hold it together in the face of growing tension. When she can no longer keep upright within herself, the night of protesting, arrests and confinement bring her to a haunting mute calm on the edge of a knife that has me hold my breath. When her family finally confronts her and allows her to teeter off the edge it is an emotional firestorm that sweeps viewers aside like the torrent of a bursting dam and spills too many secrets for one young girl to carry, right out in the middle of the floor. It is messy and it is so like real life that Elle IS Ginger with complete clarity. When all the insanity dies down and we are left with that intimate moment with Ginger penning her eloquent poem is when I realize Elle has shown me something I have only seen in the Elizabeth Taylors, Natalie Portmans and the Glenn Closes and Meryl Streeps and Angelina Jolies, is that she is one of the greatest actresses of her generation, already, at the tender age of 14.

My heart and my hugs and all my admiration belong to you Ginger, always you!

Rick

Unfortunately, Stoker, it doesn’t appear as though you were ever taught that particular lesson. You begin, like a fearful symphony, on an ominous chord, striking and reverberant. Without knowing why, we are immediately brought into a sense of deep foreboding. From the inscrutable voiceover of your primary character, India (Mia Wasikowska), to the escalation of circumstances leading to the arrival of her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), there is a sense of universal unease at work.

India is searching high and low through field and valley for her annual birthday present, a pair of old-time flat-heeled shoes that are always left hidden for her and wrapped in a yellow ribbon. When she finds the present this year, however, there is only a key inside the box, a key which will open she knows not what. Then the news comes that her father has died in a terrible car accident two states away. India and her father were close enough to make her emotionally unstable mother (Nicole Kidman) feel left out, and the death impacts India terribly. The pain is exacerbated by the sudden arrival of her ingratiating uncle Charlie, who immediately catches the eye of her mother.

Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska, and Matthew Goode.

All of these pieces are set up with suitably moody, gothic economy by director Park Chan-Wook, whose visual mastery is imported to his first English-language film from his native Korean fully intact. There are scenes in you of obscure menace and beauty, such a the camera watching the path of a spider on the floor, or observing how India uses a boiled egg to drown out the sounds of gossip. However, after a time all of these trappings fail to cover up the elemental issues at the core of your story, what little story there is.

It all comes down to a question of pacing. A healthy dose of atmosphere and foreboding can bring our attention viscerally into a story, but it can’t serve to hold our attention long beyond the point of set up. At some point we need to begin to empathize with a character, or otherwise notice the way in which the story is moving forward so we can orient ourselves to the trajectory of a narrative. You fail to do either of these things, relying instead on temporary action to keep our interest in check.

India never becomes a character for whose safety we fear, knowing as we do that she is the center of the world to the only threat she might face. Even as her place in the story and her innocence becomes less assured, we are never given to feeling that the noose around her neck is tightening in any real or threatening way. Charlie immediately comes off as a sociopath and probable force for evil, and thus the eventual revelations regarding his character never come off as more than a moment in which the characters in the movie are just catching up to where we the audience have been since the opening act.

It all leads up to a final act that therefore feels overladen with a whole movie’s-worth of plot happening in a single flourish, revelations piling on top of one another so quickly that we barely have time to accept the new reality of one twist before it has been replaced. It leads to a further disconnect, as we detach from the narrative so as to hold back our feelings for when things have finally settled down. Each new revelation then becomes another moment ticking by unfelt before we are sure we can reacquaint ourselves with the characters and where they stand now.

All of this is to say that you are something of a disappointment, but even a disappointing time can still be one worth having. Without a doubt, Stoker, you are a film worth seeing, if only because you offer narrative, performances, and moments that I feel will not be doubled in the year to come. A unique and beautiful film, you do suffer from your flaws, but you do not wholly fail because of them.

Fraught but friendly,

Brian J. Roan

Yet somehow, miraculously, you messed up even that slight task, turning into a plodding, irritating, and downright alienating morass that is fine enough, I guess, but rarely really attempts anything better than just looking good – and even then only in the most facile and derivative sense of the word. From your confounding narrative to your overwrought and cliched world, to the deadeningly clumsy acting of your lead, every aspect of you seems to have been placed to leave an audience with a profound and disappointing sense of “meh.”

Joey King as China Doll, James Franco as Oz, and Michelle Williams as Glinda.

We begin in Kansas, as we must, by meeting James Franco as the titular Oz, a hack stage magician and con man who dreams of bigger things than his wandering circus life. He seduces a parade of women, callously using them and discarding them with nary a thought to their feelings or even their purpose. Is he doing it because he longs to be wanted? Because he suffers from sex addiction? His womanizing seems tied into his yearning for fame, but in what way we can never be sure. This is the first of many character mysteries that make it hard to get a handle on your narrative, which is especially problematic, as you make pretensions toward being something more than a pretty, glossy surface over a hollow core.

When circumstances lead to Oz having to make a quick escape, he leaps into a conveniently placed hot air balloon and sails off into a tornado, which whisks him away to Oz, a land that carries his name as well as his sense of surface appeal with not much else to offer. It is a world filled with arches of clouds and rocks and trees. It is a land where flowers sense that someone is floating by and will open languidly and splendidly. At the end of this Disney World-light river ride he meets Theodora the Good, a red clad witch played with beguiling impishness by Mila Kunis. She tells him that he is the wizard who has been prophesied to save the land of Oz from a great evil that… at the moment is both unknown and unfelt.

This is the first of many problems, but it defines a massive blind spot in your story. We are told that Oz will save the world, but in all honesty we only get one glimpse as to how the world has been laid low by the omnipresent but completely secret Wicked Witch. Even that one glimpse, though, is a direct outcome of Oz coming to Oz at all, meaning that without the savior, there would be no peril. He is an antagonistic force to our antagonist. Flying baboons aside, the Wicked Witch has done nothing but murder a king, an act which leads to nothing because the throne is left open.

Rachel Weisz as Evanora and Mila Kunis as Theodora.

I could go through, plot point by plot point, tearing you to pieces and begging answers to questions that I will never receive, but why bother? Instead I can just say that your plot vacilates between impenetrability, incompetence, and inanity while your other supporting actresses, Michelle Williams as Glinda and Rachel Weisz as Evanora, perform ably but broadly, even as your 1950s gender politics begin to eviscerate their and Kunis’s efforts. Your effects are omnipresent and overindulgent to the point of stultifying and deadening the audience, while director Sam Raimi adds so few personal touches that one could be forgiven for just assuming that this film was directed by the mere incorporeal idea of A Director. The less said about Franco and his murky, painfully misplaced performance, the better.

Are you bad? I suppose not. You never strive for something grand enough that you could be considered a failure on any real or meaningful level. You just exist, a vapid void of two hours speckled with loud noises and bright colors and some truly disturbing misogynistic undertones. And while that is disappointing, I guess it’s not worth shouting a warning from the rooftops about, primarily because that would suggest I have thought about you much at all since seeing you and deciding I ought to write you this letter.

Pointedly disinterested and unmoved,

Brian J. Roan

Dead Man Down, you are the rare film that begins at a level of impenetrable, inscrutable diffusion of fact and somehow manages to guide the viewer through the darkness and into the light. You begin as a story so extremely in medias res that most of the important action has already happened, or else has been happening for months. It’s a risky choice, a bold narrative move that at first confounds and frustrates, seeming to be the outgrowth of laziness or clumsy editing and direction. Then, as the story grows, as the characters begin to interact with new characters or in new situations, the threads of your plot begin to tangle, then weave, and then finally settle into a massive tapestry of betrayal, murder, revenge, and hope.

Dominic Cooper and Colin Farrell.

And in the end, the entirety of your theme seems to be found in that word, hope. Our main characters are damaged and violent individuals, all of them trying to carve out their own peace of mind through destruction and mayhem. As they move forward, however, new avenues open themselves to them, and it becomes their journey to either find the strength to move forward or risk a further backslide into past mistakes. All of this is masked in a naturalistically delivered story, dependent on delivering information in same manner in which one might expect it to be found in real life.

Films often use short cuts, random and clumsy exposition or flashbacks to fill in a story for the audience. You, on the other hand, depend on character moments to inform the emotion behind an act, or conversation to gradually expose the old wounds of those who had dressed and hidden them so well. Characters may go for scenes interacting with another character before their relationship is actually addressed. Actions may be viewed from one angle, without the significance to another angle of the story being explicated. All of these things create a necessary reality for our secretive and duplicitous characters to live in, but they could also have made you a film constantly muddied in shadow. And yet they did not.

It is an impressive feat, though one that is much aided by the assuredness of your writing, directing, and acting. Colin Farrell is Victor, a hired gun for a local criminal organization who serves as a kind of enforcer for Alphonse, played by Terrence Howard. Alphonse has been receiving threats for months, and when we begin he seems to have finally found the man responsible. Following a vicious gunfight, Victor goes home to his apartment, where he makes eyes with Beatrice, the withdrawn woman across the way. When she reaches out to him, it leads to a date that has all the hallmarks of a normal first date. Noomi Rapace plays the role of Beatrice as a woman who is as consumed with sadness and hopelessness as she is with anger. Her chemistry with Ferrell, who makes Victor terse and reserved, but not angrily so, is natural and infectious.

Noomi Rapace.

Their relationship, which only grows more complicated as it comes to light that she is blackmailing him to make him an instrument of revenge, is the heart of your film. It is the only thing which we see from genesis to fruition. Criminal plots and schemes of revenge are all already in motion, and thus it becomes clear that this isn’t a story about a coming storm of violence, but the shelter of affection and understanding that two people are slowly building to protect themselves from a world that they had already given up on.

Director Neils Arden Oplev is wise to keep the camera tricks to a minimum, while still allowing the occasional flash of showmanship to rise to the surface. His touches are brief but extreme, creating a fleeting sense of exhilaration that is then soon consumed once again by the tension of the moment. Trusting the story enough to allow everything to unfold chronologically, without resorting to expository flashbacks is another smart move, tying back into the aspects that I lauded in the first half of this review.

There are so many aspects of your story I cannot go into in firm detail, Dead Man Down. From the supporting turn by Dominic Cooper to the way in which all of the various plot threads I have left purposefully vague play out and resolve themselves. But let’s not worry about that. Let those who may discover your story on their own, and put the pieces together themselves. For now, let me just say that what I thought would be an exciting action film turned out to be a stunning little character piece, and that was a greater surprise even than all of your story’s twists and turns.

In fondness,

Brian J. Roan