The year is 1998. Our film ends where the director’s other Oscar winning film ended: a grave. James Ryan turns and asks his wife whether he’s a good man; “you are” she affirms. He and the audience solemnly salute our fallen protagonist. A lot has changed in 17 years, but some things stay the same: Matt Damon is still getting dazzlingly rescued, Tom Hanks still plays the Inspiring Good Man, and Steven Spielberg still spells “subtle” in all caps.

Not that a lack of subtlety is always a bad thing. Spielberg movies are stories not poems; tugging heartstrings with meticulously shot, lushly scored, totally straightforward narratives. We know exactly how we’re supposed to feel by the end, and sometimes we feel it deeply. But even at their best, what we’re responding to is well-crafted storytelling: he might underline some truth hidden in the synopsis, but he’s not making new ones from scratch. The plot, with or without visual embellishment, is king.

So maybe someone else should have made Bridge of Spies. Cold War intrigue, backroom deals, messy themes of pragmatism vs virtue — this could have easily been a movie I loved. But when story is presented as king, it’s hard not to get hung up on it. Like Peter McRobbie’s turn as a CIA director, this one was surprisingly dull…es. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Spielberg wanted his stakes to be higher than history granted, shortcutting the most interesting details of the Abel/Powers story (courtroom arguments, negotiation tactics) in service of “grand” themes and artificial dread. Meandering towards a foregone conclusion, it plays like a lackluster Lincoln; set in a Civil War where both sides are already pretty much agreed on the whole slavery thing.

Which isn’t to say it needed more embellishment. If anything, this could have been trimmed into a fascinating character study. The relationship between Hanks’ Donovan and Rylance’s Abel is the best part of the movie, and poses a timely question: what do we actually stand for? Despite solid performances, however, we rarely get to see them as more than motiveless, spoon-fed archetypes. The Standing Man. The Noble Enemy. The One Who Always Does What’s Right And The Wife Who’s Proud Of Him. Everybody Else.

Sporting lovely cinematography and plenty of good-natured sentiment, Bridge of Spies is hardly a bad way to spend two hours. Yet for all the craft on both sides of the camera, the final product feels remarkably artless. As the title cards detailed Donovan’s future endeavors, I found myself wishing the movie had ended a decade later — thousands of lives would ostensibly provide those stakes Spielberg was grasping for. But without a clear vision, would it help?

The story of Philippe Petit poses an unanswerable question: what human experience is worth dying for? Perched on a tightrope between the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, he’s a Meru climber taken to absurd, logical heights: he doesn’t want to fall, but the beauty of his act — what makes passersby gape in awe rather than toss a begrudging quarter — is the overwhelming threat of death. Risk isn’t peripheral, it’s the primary aesthetic: a man staring mortality in the face and dancing. For what? Fame? Ego? “Art?”

The Walk doesn’t tell us much that Man on Wire hadn’t already covered, philosophically. But what it shows us is pure cinematic magic. 104 stories above Manhattan, all of Robert Zemeckis’ technophilic excesses become strengths: the exaggerated 3D disparity between wire and ground, the uncanny CG grace of Philippe’s movements, blinding fog and roaring winds in heavy-handed IMAX glory. When Petit steps onto the wire, we feel the weight of his vertigo; and when he finally conquers it, we feel his bizarre catharsis. I can’t explain it in words. All I know is there was something so calming, so optimistic about joining him up there. Maybe I’m just a sap.

Because why should it be optimistic, really? Philippe isn’t a rational character, and to any of us his actions ought to seem desperate and reckless. The coup of the movie, due in large part to Joseph Gordon Levitt’s charming performance, is that we cheer in spite of ourselves. Everything, from the terribly silly accents to Amélie-esque narrative flourishes, puts us in the headspace of this eccentric dreamer; an aesthete to whom ze towarrs (never les tours) beckon like sirens. I felt, in a small way, like I did watching Jodorowsky’s Dune: intoxicated by giddy ambition. The goal doesn’t need to make sense, it’s the wanting you want.

The Walk isn’t a remotely perfect movie, but those moments on the wire achieve something really special. Something rare in American blockbusters. Something tranquil, and celebratory, and — in some inexplicable way which has almost nothing to do with 2001 — profound. See it in theatres, on the biggest screen you can.

Chris and I exorcise all our terrible accents and The Wire references in week’s episode.

In 2010, a documentary crew filmed my typical Friday night routine: spending hours alone in a robotics lab, red-eyed and disheveled and muttering about calibration errors. When Wiseman’s At Berkeley eventually came out, a handful of reviewers singled out that scene as a metaphor for dehumanizing curricula, an “amusingly literal parallel” for “the worry that students…are being turned into robots.” I still haven’t seen it. But what it must have failed to capture — or what I lacked the hindsight to emote — was that those frustrating, sleep-deprived nights were some of the best of my life. And possibly the least calculated, most reckless. Frat parties are a temporary fix. Collapsing on a pillow after five consecutive all-nighters in service of a few numbers in a last-minute conference submission — that’s what hedonism feels like. Problem solving is addictive.

Mike D’Angelo called The Martian the God’s Not Dead of science flicks, and I know exactly what he means: it’s totally a uncritical celebration of the drug of problem solving, meant less to make you think than evangelize. Maybe fifteen minutes in, all requisite exposition is already out of the way. Matt Damon is stranded on Mars. He’s been allotted some five minutes of what I’d assumed would be the core of the movie: repetition, loneliness, despair. Then, looking out at Camus’ vast, absurd nothing, he laughs. “Nah. I’m not gonna die here.” Cue disco and space potatoes.

From there on out, the film progresses as pure science porn; outlines of Gravity and Contact painted with a notably giddier brush. Like a point-and-click adventure game, we’re perpetually faced with seemingly unsurmountable challenges and just enough items in our inventory to surmount them. The message of the film is the very reason the space program exists: there’s always an answer hiding somewhere, and the collective spirit of humanity can never stop looking. To search for reason in an unreasonable universe.

All that probably sounds a bit After School Special, and to a cynical eye, it probably is: everything, from the wavelength of Watney’s emotional troughs to the precise demographic balance of the cast, is calculated to maximize its positive message. So why turn off that cynical part of me? It has a lot to do with Damon’s charisma: like Oscar Isaac from Ex Machina’s friendly doppelgänger, he brings the perfect blend of jock-y playfulness, self-deprecation, and nerd cred to the role. It turns the whole thing into a communal experience, complete with that genuine hero worship of classic movies: we, the audience, are huddled around the screen together. And we really want to bring our boy home.

I found this movie irresistible. If you’re hoping for a rumination on the bleak loneliness of space, look elsewhere: The Martian doesn’t spend much time in Gethsemane. But between M Night Shyamalan, Ridley Scott, and Pirate Blonde Beard of ARES III, it’s been a great month for resurrections.

2015 has had its fair share of great movies, and hindsight may prove me wrong. But so far, this is shaping up to be the year of the Big, Promising, Competently Made Disappointment. Be it blockbuster (Age of Ultron,) indie (Z for Zachariah,) comedy (the bizarrely-still-in-theatres Trainwreck,) or awards-baiting-biopic (Pawn Sacrifice [review forthcoming],) buzzed-about releases which I had every intention of loving have consistently come in just a notch above “fine.”

I had every intention of loving Sicario, and boy did its first hour or so reciprocate. From the chilling prologue to the perfect Juarez sequence, the first half of the film is a masterclass in claustrophobic mood-building. Villeneuve knows the precise composition of dread: sharp crescendos of grizzly violence convince us that anything could happen, deep swells of bureaucratic procedural remind us that no one will care. It’s not a fear of death, so much as numb routine — that unremarkable whizz of a bullet, slump of a body, scratch of a pencil on some government form. “Illegal.”

If all that sounds timely and political, don’t you worry: the remainder of the film is firmly committed to saying nothing. No ends to connect, no arc for any characters to go on, no plausible motivations or logical narrative. Even the mood — that one thing the film so masterfully manipulated — follows no meaningful trajectory as the body count joylessly increases. I’m fine with uncertainty — Inherent Vice and its law-bending Brolin didn’t make a lick of sense either, and I loved it. But there’s a difference between haziness and laziness. This one felt like no one knew what was going on, and “that’s a metaphor for the drug war” doesn’t carry convincing weight. Like Fury, it takes an action-riddled turn which only serves to muddy the damnation of the first act; only this time, it’s not even ostensibly fun. Emily Blunt’s Macer, the clear audience surrogate, tells us exactly how we should feel by the end of the film: a vague hodgepodge of negative emotions, filled with holy indignance but unable to clearly state why.

The initial chill of Juarez propelled me through the lesser half of the movie, and lingered even as the credits rolled. Weak script aside, I was genuinely shaken. But with a subject this heavy, is “shaken” really the litmus test? Crossing lines is easy. The border between mood-building and sadism — between calls to arms and empty protest — is a point.

March, 2015. The festival circuit has just ended, national premier is a few months away, and director Craig Zobel is slouched in a La-Z-Boy nursing a well-deserved beer. It’s been a wild, wild ride. He flips on Fox to catch that new Will Forte comedy everyone’s been raving about. Thirty minutes pass in silence.

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

If I could describe Z for Zachariah with one word, it would be “odd.” Not in content, but in the fact that it exists at all. It’s an odd convergence of mismatched ideas, things which sound great individually but never really add up. Nuclear war has ravaged the earth, and Ann and Mr. Loomis believe themselves to be the only survivors. She clings to her faith, he clings to his science (why are those pronouns almost never reversed? Thank God / Science for Contact), but both know they have to rebuild. Forced together despite few commonalities, theirs is a tense union — and we have every reason to expect something will snap. Then hunky, Southern good ol’ boy Caleb wanders in from the Nicholas Sparks shoot next door.

Hold up. What was this movie supposed to be about?! You bring up themes of faith vs science, of romance vs cold patriarchal duty, of gnawing racial tensions; you present me with this murky relationship that promises to deepen into something terrifying or beautiful — and now after a half hour of lip-service, you jettison it all for a love triangle? And an imbalanced love triangle at that: we know virtually nothing about Caleb, except that the good Lord blessed him with rugged good looks, baby blues, and fortitude against radiation. It’s a truly bizarre twist, and one that the film created from scratch: even the book, targeted at ADHD-addled young adults, was content with two characters. That The Last Man On Earth mined so many laughs from such similar territory, only makes its lack of a payoff more pronounced.

Normally I’d be forgiving of missteps like this. It’s a small film, it took a risk, and it didn’t work. But like Interstellar, Zachariah unfolds with a sort of self-serious grandeur that practically begs me to nitpick. That ultra-brooding slowburn, those indulgent shots of nature, banal platitudes lobbed with the gravitas of Scripture — everything cries “Trust me, I’m an artist and I’m about to blow your mind.” After 80 minutes of failing to blow my mind, it busts out a shot-by-shot homage to Tarkovsky’s Stalker… and it’s probably the most affecting of the movie. Like Kubrick to Nolan, though, the nod feels less loving than delusional.

Excellent acting and solid ambience keep this from being a bust. But those can only take you so far. At some point, all that mood building needs to actually build something

Alternate title: Black Swan-berg-man?

Alex Ross Perry garners an awkward sort of critical acclaim — the kind that sounds like a coded warning. I’ve learned the euphemisms for similar filmmakers: “acidic wit” = overscripted; “biting comedy” = zero laughs; “like X meets Y” = intellectual masturbation. Like Infinite Jest meets Ulysses, even glowing praise comes across as a sort of backhanded humblebrag. “He’s the literary voice of our generation — oh, and 99% of you won’t finish the book.”

I’m not sure how many pleasant surprises it will take for me to forget Greenberg and learn to trust again. Because what blew me away about Queen of Earth was its sheer immediacy. Absent is the preciousness that made my love of Listen Up Philip come with a disclaimer; if there’s winking irreverence or “comedy” to be had here, it went miles above my lowbrow head. I saw something earnest and visceral, and it stuck.

Queen of Earth is a gnawing psychological thriller about depression and the perils of ego, helmed by some of the best performances of the year. Elisabeth Moss steals the show as mentally-unraveling Catherine-with-a-C, but Katherine-with-a-K Waterston is possibly more heartbreaking in her portrayal of Virginia. There’s a constant struggle between empathy and resentment in her, a tug-of-war between tough love and “tough luck.” When does a frostbitten relationship turn gangrene? When do you give up on warmth and pick up the scalpel?

Catherine’s depression could have been played as grating; here, it simply terrifies. It never needs to do anything terrifying, it only needs to be the right amount of off: this off-kilter word choice, that offbeat smile. The eerie soundtrack and 16mm look only heighten the unease. Loose-scripted naturalism giving way to tight, romantic chaos, like Aronofsky directing a Joe Swanberg movie. It’s haunting because it breaks the rules.

In one memorable scene, the friends trade tales of heartbreak in long, unbroken monologues. Typically this would be an intimate moment, all eyes on the speaker. Instead, the camera lingers on the listener; the wide-eyed stare of a mind to busy rehearsing its response to actually hear you. It’s not a flattering look. Both women feel smothered and, paradoxically, neglected. That’s the trouble with other people’s stories: you’re never the protagonist.

The Shark Fin at Meru isn’t the tallest peak in the world. It isn’t even in the top five, unless years of Jeopardy have totally failed me. And, at least from an outside perspective, it isn’t the most beautiful or obviously daunting — hell, the peak in question is the shortest of three. What it is is technically difficult, extremely dangerous, and as of five years ago, unclimbed. Watching the trailer for this documentary, I couldn’t shake the question: why would anyone risk his life for the (literally) Sisyphean challenge of going up and down a mountain? Why throw yourself at the solution when the problem is only meaningful by virtue of being hard? Why climb this?

I doubt a satisfying answer exists, and Meru certainly doesn’t offer one. Instead, it answers a related question: what sort of person would climb this? Or maybe, what does it look like to need this? While the film was billed as an epic quest, where it really thrives is as an intimate character study. You get to know Conrad, Jimmy, and Renan in the same way they might have met each other: on the mountain. Like any friendship, at first it’s all about a shared goal. They’re staring at route maps, muttering jargon you don’t quite understand; you might learn something in passing, but the peak is the point. Then it moves to shared experience: it’s been raining for days, prospects look bleak, and you’re cooped up in a tiny portaledge, commiserating. Bonding via immersion, even when no one says a thing. The camera is everything here, and it’s amazing how much exhilaration — and bored claustrophobia — it manages to express. Like always, though, things eventually get personal. Conrad opens up about love and loss, Jimmy and Renan share perspective-defining moments. They look you in the eye and try to tell you what it all means. And even if they can’t quite verbalize it, you start to feel a whiff of it too. You can’t put your finger on why; all you know is you want to share in that moment at the top, to see the world from their (irrational?) point of view.

Say what you will, but that view is really something.

An unnamed bodyguard brings a clear cocktail to a politician dressed in wildly generic Asian robes. “We have a saying in my country,” the generic politician utters with a generic bow, “the dragon of fortune has a very long tail.”

From the get go, it’s clear that No Escape has zero interest in realism or specificity. In fact, it avoids both like the plague: where the film could have easily name-dropped its location (Cambodia with a dash of Myanmar?) it instead opts for the hilariously vague. Owen Wilson’s “contracting gig” has moved him to a “fourth world country” some 14 hours away from good-ol’ Texas. “Welcome to Asia” chuckles Pierce Brosnan’s generically British douchebag, “You’re gonna love it here.” Considering just how blatantly racist any alternative would play, that goofy Kingsman-style ambiguity makes sense. When not driving terribly, failing to hold their liquor, or performing cheekily-euphemised sex work, citizens of [UNSTABLE ASIAN COUNTRY] mainly enjoy donning bandanas and brutally murdering white people. The same xenophobic fear that Argo masterfully manipulated, here gets the San Andreas treatment: you’re an alien in a strange land, the people there don’t quite like you, and, oh, also look out for that tank.

So okay, it’s pretty damn stupid. Accepting all that, and taking off any remotely socially-conscious hat, what’s left? A mostly-thrilling collection of chase scenes and checkpoints, with just enough intensity to keep it going. Remember that scene in the trailer, where Wilson throws his daughter off a roof in slow motion? That’s not even the third most ridiculous shot in this movie — hell, it’s not even the most ridiculous daughter-being-thrown-off-a-roof shot in this movie. No Escape’s stakes might be vague, but they’re absurdly high and stretched to the breaking point. So, in accordance with blockbuster tradition, the movie only really loses its steam when it tries to pause and reflect, to glean a “message” from the scorched earth where no good message can grow. Maybe that’s why the eventual ending feels so awkward and lackluster: when the bullets stop flying and an actual country gets involved, there’s literally nothing left to say.

Somewhere around the halfway mark of Mistress America, college freshman Tracy offers notes on her friend’s writing style. [Paraphrased:] “You write about people who are so free and fun. But it’s obvious that you aren’t one of those people, and that’s awkward.”

I’m a pretty enthusiastic Noah Baumbach fan, but if ever there were an apt description of his weakness, Tracy’s might be it. I only truly believe his dialogue when it’s spoken by navel-gazing intellectuals — unhappy, uncomfortable, male. His recent Muse, Greta Gerwig, plays none of those things; the Annie to Baumbach’s Alvy, her characters are energetic, free-spirited, and disarmingly at ease. They’re everything Jesse Eisenberg isn’t. So if Squid and the Whale was an exercise in brutal realism, the overwhelming vibe of Frances Ha was wistful rhapsody, an ode to some unattainable, romantic ideal. Frances talks like nobody actually talks. And we don’t necessarily identify with her, so much as we want to be rescued by her.

In Mistress America, everyone talks the way nobody talks, and it’s clear they can’t rescue a thing. Tracy is an English major struggling to find her feet, lost in a world without a manual. Her older “sister” Brooke is a Platonic Ideal of Manic Pixie Womanhood: she lives in Times Square, sings with the Dirty Projectors, teaches aerobics and tutors algebra and but also is trying to open a restaurant. As Brooke proudly imparts wisdom to Tracy, the dialogue is literally unbelievable — a mess of non sequitors and too-“witty” retorts, interjections so clean you can practically hear the em dashes. Pure, theatrical screwball.

As the film progresses, that “screwball” dial gets cranked to a hilarious 11. Characters consult psychics. An aristocrat gives a performative monologue and fashions an apple bong. Eventually it culminates in an ensemble-bursting argument which feels less like a movie than a zany high school play: if a Duchess had marched in shouting about blintzes, no one would bat an eye. The nature of the massive argument? Tracy has co-opted Brooke’s life for a character in one of her stories. The problem? It’s a one-dimensional caricature. It paints women as shallow and irresponsible. It condescends, even if it means to rhapsodize. Tennessee Williams’ plays were inspired by real people too, but Brooke “isn’t friends with fucking Tennessee Williams.”

She’s not. But I can think of at least one director she is close with, and a film that feels a helluvalot like a play. And while all the mayhem adds up to more of a wink than a thesis, it’s surprisingly fun to watch her caricature explode.

(For more thoughts on Noah Baumbach, see my review of While We’re Young)

When The Act Of Killing came out, it absolutely ruined me, to the point where I refused to rank or critique it as film. I couldn’t separate its cinematic merits from the devastating truths it revealed. This wasn’t a movie, it was something deeper.

Somewhere in the last year, though, I’ve begun to see this distinction as bullshit. Every film is trying to communicate some truth, and “technical merit” is valuable only insofar as it aids communication. In my review of Selma, I wrote that “exposing tragic truths isn’t a narrative cop-out; communal grief and redemption aren’t cheap tricks.” The Act of Killing does exactly what any great film should aspire to do — it holds a mirror up to humanity. And it does so masterfully. Our vantage point is Joshua’s, a blank canvas upon whom Anwar Congo can project whatever self-image he wants. The damningly revealing (and formally thrilling) result, was that Anwar’s freedom eventually led to his own condemnation; the act of telling shifted his story from “Hero” to “Mobster” to “Monster.” Evil collapses under its own weight.

The Look of Silence continues in the same vein. Only this time, it does more than hold a mirror. It points a finger. Rather than see through the eyes of an impartial mediator, we see others as Adi sees them — the man who murdered his brother, the official who reaped the profits, the uncle who guarded his cell. Unlike Congo, they are not given the luxury of six years of self-reflection. Here is the face of a victim, confronting your sins. How will you respond?

At first blush, this struck me as less inventive — “gotchya” journalism has been around for decades, and the revelation is typically the same: people under pressure are defensive, self-absolving liars. For the most part, that is true of Adi’s interview subjects. I’m not sure how they truly feel, how evil truly looks deep down. It will take years for their defenses to crumble; the camera only has ten minutes.

But the brilliance of Silence is that it isn’t about Evil at all: it’s about Adi, his family, and us. Adi’s quest for reconciliation, and the particular questions he chooses to ask, are revelatory. With such noble resolve, it’s heartbreaking to see what breaks his silence: not the description of horrific murders, but minor details that you or I might gloss over. Whether the Communists indeed “had no religion”, whether they were sexually promiscuous or faithful. Death is too enormous to be undone, but the moral character of his brother — that, Adi can honor. He may not inspire remorse in the culprits themselves, but in their daughters and wives, he can at least find shared humanity. “I’m sure your brother was a good man.” No explicit remorse, no Original-Sin-style guilt required. Just acknowledgement.

Adi’s family does not want to reconcile: justice on earth is hopeless, let God punish the damned. In this sense, their coping mechanism isn’t too far removed from that of the guilty parties. “Let God be the judge”, “I was only doing my duty”, and “Let’s not argue about politics” are vastly different causes for the same effect: inertia. Silence — whether borne of apathy, denial, or despair — cannot enact change.

Which is where we come in. If you’re like me, there are times when you’ll feel conflicted watching The Look of Silence. You’re not entirely sure what is meant to be gained from these conversations, and as you watch an 80-year-old woman beg Joshua not to confront her with her husband’s sins, your gut reaction may be to agree. She is, after all, a terribly tragic figure: one wonders how many years of pain lie behind that protective callous, what trauma that unnerving laughter (shared among nearly all women in this documentary) betrays. I felt a little voyeuristic, to be honest. With her, with the near-senile death squad leader, with the man on the poster who doesn’t want to “talk politics”: yes, they’re wrong, but why force discomfort? Why not let them die in numb denial?

“Why” is the thesis of the film. My absurd aversion to conflict in all things; my desire to write off not just this woman’s ignorance, but that of my own friends and relatives as some unalienable right; our collective instinct to be impartial third parties, “aware” and “supportive” in the abstract over drinks but never daring to be seen among the marchers — it isn’t enough. In The Act of Killing Oppenheimer used silence as a tool to let Evil speak. The Look of Silence tells us that listening was the easy part. How will we now respond?