A Most Violent Year – After a somewhat intriguing debut with 2011’s Margin Call,  J.C. Chandor has made two miserably dull follow-up features, All Is Lost and his latest, A Most Violent Year.  That year is 1981, and Chandor’s crime drama chronicles an up-and-coming oil supplier (Oscar Isaac) trying to make it big in New York City without caving in to (too many) illegitimate business practices.

Isaac resembles young Al Pacino in the first two Godfather films in both look and manner here, a high compliment to be sure.  There is a clear spark between him and Jessica Chastain, whose scenery-chewing performance as his wife balances well with his restrained, slow-burning intensity. However, the movie itself drowns in its own austere predictability.  The production design is excellent and absorbing and Bradford Young’s cinematography gives New York an amber, menacing glow, but the movie still never comes alive.  The script is full of vague, uninsightful musings on American life imbued with tired machismo, but it isn’t interested in showing anyone really living. Grade: D+

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Inherent Vice
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Written by: Paul Thomas Anderson (screenplay), Thomas Pynchon (book)
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterston, Josh Brolin and Owen Wilson

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, like the Thomas Pynchon book it’s based on, is a peace sign followed by a middle finger.  Toward the end of the movie, private Investigator and relentlessly chill dude Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) flashes both of those to a mother and her children in a vacant parking lot as they carry away several kilos of cocaine from his vehicle to theirs.  They’re members of the Golden Fang, which during the course of the long and winding narrative evolves from the name of a boat to the name of a drug syndicate to a warped, corporate state of mind.

Doc is placed on this perpetually confusing road by an ex-girlfriend, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), who tells him of a wife’s plot to throw a wealthy realtor into the loony bin and make off with all his money.  From there the movie trapezes through an intricate and head-spinning web of other similarly bizarre set-ups — a brothel very poorly disguised as a massage parlor, a Hippy Last Supper with musicians and Nazis (and probably some who are both), a mental institution called “Straight Is Hip.”

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American Sniper
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Written by: Jason Hall (screenplay), Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen and James Defelice (book)
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner and Jake McDorman

A recurring theme in Clint Eastwood’s films is the intersection of an individual with their public image and the scrutinies that follow it.  American Sniper is another rumination on this theme, a weary dissection of the American soldier dressed up as a chest-thumping defense of the War on Terror.  Adapted from a 2012 memoir of the same name, Eastwood’s latest tells the story of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history who participated in nearly every major phase of the post-9/11 war in Iraq.

We first see Kyle as we saw him in the movie’s nail-biting trailer, examining a Marine convoy from a rooftop and watching as a child and his mother exit a building with an explosive device.  She hands it to him, and Kyle has to make the call on whether or not to pull the trigger.  He does, not once but twice, shooting the child and then the woman right as she prepares to toss the device.  It explodes inches from the convoy he was protecting.

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Foxcatcher
Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
Starring: Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and Vanessa Redgrave

I have major issues with Foxcatcher’s portrayal (or maybe I should say its incredibly vague non-portrayal) of homosexuality.  One of the lead characters, John du Pont (Steve Carell), is a deeply closeted man who cloaks his shame in patriotism. This should sound familiar to anyone who watched Clint Eastwood’s biopic J. Edgar, a much better film that balances the intolerable pain of the closet with the unforgivable decisions J. Edgar Hoover made as director of the FBI.

As with Bennett Miller’s two previous features, Capote and Moneyball, Foxcatcher is based on a true story and filmed with a restrained, melancholy stillness. The main crux of the plot is that du Pont uses his vast wealth to lure gold-medal-winning wrestling brothers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo, respectively) to his compound to train for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

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