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Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal offer up a workmanlike blow-by-blow of the CIA’s efforts to hunt down Osama bin Laden following the September 11th attacks. Purely as cinematic exercise, Zero Dark Thirty is an exhilarating piece of work. But, beyond its for-the-times subject matter, the work does not linger whatsoever. Except for Bigelow’s masterful calibration of suspense throughout, her film has almost no point of view, no thematic underpinnings, and not a single character worth remembering.

Jessica Chastain plays Maya, a CIA operative who becomes obsessed with tracking down bin Landen–the mastermind behind the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Because Bigelow, Boal and Chastain present Maya as essentially a cipher–an absolute blank, a young woman with a shady past, a murky inner life, and absolutely zero human connections (familial, romantic or otherwise)–they risk giving us a two-dimensional protagonist whose zeal to see her goal through must suffice in sustaining our rooting interest. Inasfar as Chastain’s character is concerned, we find a potentially interesting and headstrong individual with nothing for the audience to really cling to. She’s not as obnoxious as Claire Danes as the pathological human train-wreck Carrie in television’s Homeland, but she’s not far behind. Maya’s triumph at the end of Zero Dark Thirty is exactly what Bigelow intends–a Pyrrhic victory, an empty and meaningless futility in the endless fight-fire-with-fire crusade against al-Qaeda–but, because we don’t actually care about Maya, we don’t sympathize with that realization (or perhaps lack thereof). Rather, we just sink back in our seat, exhausted, our nerves strained from the anxiety that Bigelow’s razor-sharp technique manages to conjure up in her viewers. Other than that, we wonder for what purpose, other than as a suspenseful journalistic chronology of well-known events, the film exists.

Zero Dark Thirty is a draining and brutal experience emotionally. The acting is generally solid; the performances are as restrained and unrevealing as the screenplay. And much has been made of the film’s frank depiction of torture as an occupational moral hazard in America’s great fight. Bigelow takes no stance vis-a-vis torture. Representation is not an endorsement, she has said, and she is right. Her aim here is to present the events as they happened. But because the characters are all battle-hardened and morally weary, they aren’t our best guides through this terrain. Zero Dark Thirty is packed wall-to-wall with humans in peril, whether it’s the prisoners at the interrogation sites or the Special Forces soldiers on their fateful mission at film’s end. In terms of individual sequences–the helter-skelter hunt to intercept a cell phone caller in a crowded city market, for instance, or the climactic raid on bin Laden’s compound–there are several in the film that could be used as examples of how to modulate a suspense scene in any cinema class.

Bigelow actually pulls off quite a feat because the events she depicts have all already happened, the outcome of this story is already familiar to all of us, and yet her mastery of the craft still plays us all like a piano. In that sense, her film resembles Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976) with the key difference being that, in the latter, the characters all feel like fully rounded, lived-in human characters rather than connect-the-dots archetypes. Zero Dark Thirty is an expertly made, 157-minute torture mechanism with no real payoff. That’s ultimately the point, I suppose, because there is no payoff in this War on Terror. Everything is relative–how one defines torture, how one defines victory, etc. But, on a strictly old-fashioned narrative level, Bigelow can’t pull back enough from her boiler-room atmosphere of tense meetings, interrogations, fire fights, and terror attacks to give us a truly human chronicle of this latest chapter in our messy geopolitical history.

Grade: B

Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
Written by: Mark Boal
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Reda Kateb, Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, Harold Perrineau

Peter Jackson brings audiences back to the New Zealand-inspired grandeur of Middle Earth — complete with copious aerial panorama shots, snarling orcs and goblins, and picture-book imagery of fantasy landscapes — in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, a somewhat entertaining, entirely unnecessary adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s prequel to The Lord of the Rings. When word of Jackson’s three-part production came out, the whole thing reeked of a money-grab — the product of a coddled, over-zealous filmmaker attempting to cash in on his most successful property. The Hobbit is a children’s book and lacks the majesty and thematic power of The Lord of the Rings, but by delving into Tolkien’s diaries and notes, Jacksons pads out the dramatic stakes (there are story ideas, plot lines and characters non-existent in Tolkien’s novel) of the film as well as the god-forsaken running time. The Hobbit runs about a half-hour too long, stuffs more action set pieces than it needs by half, and the result is a drag-down, mildly diverting entertainment.

Tolkien’s story, in essence, deals with the homebody Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), who’s lured from the coziness of The Shire by Gandalf the Gray (Ian MacKellan) to embark on a mission alongside a twelve-member group of dwarves to reclaim treasure stolen from them by a horrible dragon. The dwarves are led by Thorin (Richard Armitage), the deposed heir-apparent of the dwarf kingdom — a kind of dwarf equivalent to Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings. Armitage is a smoldering, righteous prince, hell-bent not only on reclaiming his land’s treasure but also on seeking revenge against the Pale Orc, the muscular brute who killed his father in a long-ago battle.

There is also a parallel sub-plot about an encroaching necromancer — the foreshadowing of the rise of Sauron. One of The Hobbit’s real pleasures, in fact, is seeing this sub-plot unfold, as the eccentric wizard Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) investigates a dark, secretive force unleashing black magic across Middle Earth. Radagast’s scenes in The Hobbit comprise some of the movie’s most striking moments, ranging from the fearsome sequence in which Radagast tracks down the source of the black magic to a ruined castle to the exhilarating visuals of the wizard, borne along on a sleigh pulled by hyper-kinetic rabbits, being chased by a tribe of orcs astride giant wolves. It’s in these moments that Jackson’s essential pulse as a cinematic storyteller comes alive, and where we feel the director’s vitality for image-making. And delightful as McCoy is as Radagast, Jackson truly lucked out when he cast Freeman as Bilbo. Freeman is the best hobbit ever cast; with his trademark mix of comic nervousness and dramatic sincerity, Freeman ably spins the fussbudget Bilbo into a charming, endearing reluctant hero.

But, alas, The Hobbit is also overloaded with ridiculousness. There are entire sequences here that feel ill-conceived, over-wrought, and fatally drawn-out. A case in point is the entire goblin hall sequence that sags the latter half of the movie. I characterize it as Jackson’s “Jabba the Hutt” moment because of how it trumps dread and danger with silliness and cartoonishness. The goblin king himself — warts, wattle, bug-eyes and all — is just an updated Jabba the Hutt, the bloated baddie in what was the weakest of Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. Jackson wants to make this sequence the movie’s Mines of Moria (from The Fellowship of the Ring) analogue, but it’s a failure: The goblins are cartoons, the chase is as ludicrously manic as any Looney Tunes outing, and the perils are too outlandish to really grab our emotional involvement. Most of The Hobbit functions at this outlandish level, as if the lesson that Jackson took from The Lord of the Rings is that bigger is better. But The Lord of the Rings also boasted sympathetic, dynamic characters — the dwarves in his movie are, again, just cartoons save for Thorin — and sincere storytelling that served a captivating narrative, whereas The Hobbit often feels like a cynic packaging a Happy Meal and calling it magic.

Grade: B-

Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro
Cast: Ian MacKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ken Stott, Graham McTavish, William Kircher, Sylvester McCoy, James Nesbitt, Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee

In adapting Nicholas Winding Refn’s 1996 cult favorite Pusher, director Luis Prieto stays close to the original material. So close, in fact, that his English-language remake is essentially a scene-for-scene—sometimes line-for-line—transplanting of Refn’s story from the underworld of Copenhagen to its counterpart in London.

In terms of style and thematic substance, this Pusher is a by-the-numbers affair, pumped up on quick-cut adrenaline and gangster posturing. Preito has no distinct visual style—not a single shot or edit calls itself out—and his film lacks the sense of brooding, methodical predetermination that made the Refn picture so compelling. Yet, on balance, Prieto’s Pusher is a perfectly serviceable race-against-the-clock thriller thanks to a powerful lead performance from Richard Coyle. Read the full review

Economist Peter Navarro tries his hand at documentary filmmaking with mixed results in the provocative Death by China. As a wake-up call for Americans to pay greater attention to their nation’s corrupt corporate and political policies towards China since that nation’s induction into the World Trade Organization in 2001, Navarro scores points. But to take Death by China’s message seriously—and it is a profoundly serious one—the viewer must overcome Navarro’s less-than-imaginative, bargain basement filmic techniques. That Martin Sheen narrates the documentary lends it credibility, an intelligence that compels Navarro’s audience to sit up and take notice. So it’s a shame that the material that Sheen must put his weight behind is conceived in such a shrill, amateur fashion. Read the full review

Filmmaker Alison Klayman gained an astonishing level of access to the celebrated Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei in the years following the opening of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium in 2008. No sooner was the stadium completed, however, than Ai—a design consultant on the stadium—became both the Games’ and the building’s most vociferous critic, calling them symbols of state propaganda. The criticism immediately made Ai a persona non grata in the eyes of the Chinese state but, to the free world, he was an exciting and shockingly frank artist from a place in sore need of one. Read the full review

Director Parris Patton documents the rock ’n’ roll life, profiling musicians taking part in the 2010 Vans Warped Tour in No Room for Rockstars. While the documentary doesn’t offer any novel or deep revelations about the price of chasing stardom, Patton’s film captures lives at critical crossroads: The musicians portrayed all find themselves negotiating the tightrope between commercial compromise and staying true to oneself, between self-belief and crushing despair. Those themes of struggle are nothing new in studies of artists (especially those in the music business), yet the humanist elements inherent in Patton’s film make its consistently compelling, even profound. Read the full review

As James Toback’s Tyson opens, what hits you first is the technique. The idea behind the project is pretty simple — essentially, this is an extended interview with infamous boxer Mike Tyson as he reminiscences about his roots, and on the highs and lows of his career and private life. But in crafting what is otherwise a straightforward personal testimony by the former (and disgraced) heavyweight, Toback opts for a dynamic, eye-filling presentation: He employs split-screens that balance the interview with archival photos and video footage that together form a mosaic of one man’s recollections. Sometimes the audio behind those recollections is layered together, one track echoing away, then replaced by another that offers a revised version in its place.
Read it here…

Nearing the Christmas holiday, family matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) learns she suffers from a rare cancer that requires an urgent bone marrow transfusion. The terrifying illness prompts a reunion with her four children over the titular holiday, and, soon, Junon’s home — which she shares with her much older husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) who, judging by his high-riding pants and suspenders, still thinks it’s 1933 — is inundated with family members, bearing gifts and baggage, emotional and otherwise.

Turns out, only two members of her family are blood matches and, hence, potential donors for Junon — her eldest son, Henri (Mattheu Amalric), a troubled, failed entrepreneur with whom she has a strained relationship, and Paull (Emile Berling), the mentally disturbed son of Henri’s uptight, domineering older sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny). It doesn’t help that Henri is the black sheep of the family, and that Elizabeth wants nothing to do with him.

Junon and Abel’s younger son, Ivan, is there too with his wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni) and Ivan’s painter-cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto). A weird triangular psycho-sexual dynamic is at play among them, as Sylvia, it seems, harbors both a grudge and an attraction towards Simon that dates back to their more youthful days.

The major drawback, one that constantly distances us from the emotions at the heart of the material, is one of excess. Director Arnaud Desplechin is an adroit and talented craftsman; A Christmas Tale manages to keep us hooked largely on account of its generous style, mashing together classical and modern techniques, shifting gears and moods deftly according to whatever the scene calls for.

Yet you could throw all the style you want into a story and not come up with a decent film if the screenplay is not up to task. And with A Christmas Tale, Desplechin and co-writer Emmanuel Bourdieu try to stuff at at least four films into one — as the above description suggests. As the director, Desplechin seems determined to tell all of them, and, in the process, he does right by not a single one. A Christmas Tale is an endlessly busy and stylish film with a hollow emotional and spiritual core.

Everyone here has some beef with someone in this movie, but everyone in this famoily, it seems, is given to saying or doing ludicrous things. What they say or do may vex and puzzle us, yet Desplechin never unravels these moments, and what they might really mean for his characters and, as a result, for his audience. How are we to respond when, after Simon and Sylvia have slept together, she greets her smiling children with unfazed candor and her husband, Ivan, reacts to the infidelity with a bemused smirk? It’s one of the year’s most exasperating movie moments, because Desplechin’s filmmaking keeps us compulsively at a distance, never searching these moments for their implications, and this lack of curiosity on his part keeps us from sympathizing with characters whose only perceptible quality is self-absorption.

A Christmas Tale exists along its surfaces. It keeps itself preoccupied with the frenetic energy of its style and its characters’ simmering interplay, but Desplechin never succeeds in plumbing deeper. It’s a shame because Deneuve is excellent (as always) and one senses real potential in the storyline depicting her tense bond with the estranged Henri, a volatile failure of a man yet possibly her sole hope for survival.

With a richer and bolder screenplay, one that pared itself down to just one or two of the family’s key struggles, and more heartfelt direction, less devoted to style and more on human beings, we might’ve had a rich and involving family saga. As is, Desplechin’s film is just as dysfunctional as the family he depicts. And the only one who suffers in that scenario is the audience.
Grade: C

Directed by: Arnaud Desplechin
Written by: Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bourdieu
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupoud, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni, Laurent Capelluto
Rated: N/A
Runtime: 150 min.

Race, gender, tradition, politics and sexuality get thrown together into a bright but bland masala mix in Shamim Sarif’s debut feature, The World Unseen. Sarif adapts from her own novel about the simmering attraction that develops between two Indian women in 1950s South Africa. One of these women is demure, compliant Miriam (Lisa Ray), mother of three and housewife to a dull prick of a man, Omar (Parvin Dabas), who runs a grocery business outside Capetown. Like most Indian immigrant settlers in South Africa at the time, Omar marches lockstep to the drum of a ruthlessly racist society, and while he keeps Miriam under his thumb, he carries on an affair with his sister-in-law Farah (Natalie Becker). Slowly yet surely, the emotionally neglected Miriam begins to fancy someone else, but her defiance of the norm is far more taboo-breaking than her husband’s, because the object of her adoration is the carefree Amina (Sheetal Sheth), the owner of a local café, and a woman.
Read it here…