Toward the end of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth, a tough-as-nails Hollywood diva played by Jane Fonda informs Harvey Keitel’s creatively spent director that television has supplanted cinema as the home of screen drama. True or not, this has been the industry consensus for about five years, but Sorrentino demonstrates there’s life in cinema yet by orchestrating a flow of effortless-seeming sequences that combine widescreen grandeur with whimsicality.
film reviews
Matt Wolf
Communities function in different ways depending on their constituencies, to note just one of the many salient points made by the deeply compelling and equally disturbing Spotlight.
Adam Sweeting
Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.
The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial industry was perpetrating a fraud of historic proportions based on bullshit and sleight of hand. Some of the names have been changed, but one which hasn't is Dr Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a former neurologist with a glass eye, a passion for playing heavy metal drums, and Asperger's syndrome. Subsequently running his own Scion Capital hedge fund, Burry had the monomaniacal tenacity required to sit down and read through all the individual mortgage agreements which had been bundled together to create the "mortgage-backed securities" which became a critical component of the banking Armageddon. He discovered that many of them were worth much less than the paper they were printed on, and thus the financial instruments derived from them were doomed to crash.
But that was only the start. In order to exploit his startling insight, Burry had to persuade the bankers to create the credit default swap, whereby he could bet large on the collapse of the US housing market. Since everybody had convinced themselves that the housing business, anchored on the personal investments of millions of honest Americans, could never go wrong, they were delighted to oblige.
The rest is history, but McKay has transformed it into a rollercoaster of big characters, moral hazard and blackly comic digressions. He's hugely assisted by a powerful cast. Bale, ever the method fanatic, was a shoo-in for the charm-free, obsessive Burry. Brad Pitt (also one of the producers, pictured above) does a senior statesman turn as veteran finance-Einstein Steve Rickert.
Steve Carell is superb as Mark Baum, a bull-headed, bad-tempered hedge fund manager who gets wind of Burrell's activities and leads his team of wisecracking whippersnappers (including a sparky Rafe Spall) through their own personal investigation into the looming financial tsunami. Down in Florida, they find insanely overstretched buyers being fed lavish mortgages by lenders who haven't a clue what they're selling. In a scarily comic climactic scene, Baum shares a debating platform with a senior banker who's blithely declaring his faith in his company's shares while assembled financial journalists are watching the price plummet to oblivion on their Blackberrys.
Rude and crude as he is, Baum does at least feel shock and remorse as the full extent of the crisis becomes clear, with its crushing impact on millions of fellow-citizens. McKay sprays moral outrage over the bankers, but his protagonists aren't much better as they rejoice in being clever enough to create a personal jackpot out of this collective purgatory. Particularly smarmy is Jared Vennett, played by Ryan Gosling like a weasel dipped in Brylcreem, and the most eminently punchable banker on Wall Street (Gosling and Carell pictured below). McKay also uses him as narrator, letting him break the fourth wall with asides to the audience ("yes, this meeting really did happen").
That's just one of several devices the director shuffles to fend off glazed-eye syndrome. On-screen text might pop up helpfully, while spliced-in flashes of pop-culture imagery add a subliminal timeline. A deadpan sequence of how staid and boring banking used to be before the 1980s evokes a sleepy world of sludge-green and taupe, where bankers were mostly at lunch and two per cent was considered a handsome profit. The best trick is the unashamedly gratuitous introduction of celebrities to explain thorny plot points – "to tell you about subprime mortgages, here's Margot Robbie in a bubble-bath", or svelte popstrel Selena Gomez teaming up with economist Richard Thaler to give y'all the lowdown on "Synthetic CDOs".
Smart and sharp as the movie is, turning arcane financial activities into mass entertainment is like Splitting the Atom II, and on top of that there's no avoiding the fact that this is a movie all about men, most of them not very pleasant. Marisa Tomei gets a bit of room to shine as Baum's wife Cynthia, but Melissa Leo's Georgia Hale is little more than a stick with which to beat the corrupt ratings agencies which played a contemptible role in the crash. Nonetheless, as an investigation of a bout of collective insanity which almost destroyed the civilised world, this is a ride worth taking.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
OVERLEAF: RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY
Graham Fuller
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, a film of surpassingly exquisite visual beauty, centres on a deadly hit-woman in ninth-century China who for humanistic or sentimental reasons can't bring herself to kill all her designated victims. That the Taiwanese master Hou dispatches the movie’s stylized skirmishes and ambushes bloodlessly, and with uncommon brevity, emphasizes that it wasn’t the chance to depict violence that drew him for the first time to the wuxia martial arts genre. Quentin Tarantino won’t be remaking The Assassin any time soon.
Tom Birchenough
Ah, the fascination of faraway countries of which we know nothing. And of dictators, always a species of interest to filmmakers, because you rarely have to make anything up – Chaplin, of course, wrote the primer on that one. How alluring when reality is already so much weirder than anything that can be invented.
Adam Sweeting
Stories have abounded about the epic bouts of punishing location shooting that went into Alejandro González Iñárittu's frontier saga. Seeing the results on screen, you'd have to say that whatever suffering the cast and crew had to endure, it was worth it, and The Revenant's 12 Oscar nominations will be balm to their bruised and battered limbs.
Matt Wolf
A copy of Lewis Carroll can be glimpsed amongst the otherwise grim, begrimed array of possessions made visible at the start of the extraordinary Room, and small wonder: Lenny Abrahamson's rightly lauded film is about two people who have fallen down a metaphorical rabbit hole – a mother and son whose shared bond sees them through conditions that neither individual would likely have survived on their own.
emma.simmonds
Following in the footsteps of Star Wars: The Force Awakens another popular film series which began in the 70s is passed over to a young, admiring pretender. And just as JJ Abrams succeeded there, Ryan Coogler – who announced his talent unapologetically with the searing Fruitvale Station – does so in emphatic fashion here. This add-on to the Rocky franchise boasts a comparably deft mix of crowd-pleasing familiarity and freshness, particularly in the shape of its canny new casting – a combination that’s set to excite a new generation of fans.
Graham Fuller
Like the seven previous movies written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight is violent, verbose, and self-regardingly funny. It’s also ingeniously structured (in Godardian chapters), as much so as Pulp Fiction. The eagle-eyed will spot a visual clue in the first half of the narrative that anticipates the hairpin bend it takes in the second. The knowledge that Tarantino never staunches blood for long meanwhile augurs the inevitable carnage that likens this slow-burning post-Civil War frontier mystery to Reservoir Dogs especially.
Tom Birchenough
Tobias Lindholm is something of a specialist in exploring the fate of enclosed groups under stress, charting how the dynamics of behaviour between men develop in crisis. I say men, though the Danish director’s name may still be better known in some quarters as a writer on Borgen, the outstanding political series set in another closely defined world where crisis followed crisis, though it's surely the female characters from there who endure more in the memory.