Charlie Lyne’s Beyond Clueless, a Kickstarter-funded film essay about the deeper meaning of post-1990 coming-of-age movies, aspires to be one of those Arena programs that takes a fresh look at a seemingly trivial or minor pop form to reveal deeper truths about the culture at large. Don’t get me wrong – I love teen movies and I think there’s a rich seam here to be mined. Unfortunately, because his analysis lacks rigour and is almost as superficial as the movies themselves, there are few insights here the perceptive viewer won’t have already gleaned for him/herself.
film reviews
Nick Hasted
Alex Garland’s directorial debut is spare, clever s.f. Ever since he began his now abandoned novelist’s career with The Beach, he has known how to drive high-concept narratives home, viscerally fuelling them with human foibles. Ex Machina’s tale of artificial, attractive intelligence rings subtle changes on familiar s.f. ideas, while keeping within the clean lines of a mostly three-hand drama. When callow internet search engine employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a competition to visit his company’s legendary founder Nathan (Oscar Isaac, pictured below right with Gleeson) in his isolated retreat, Nathan says he wants Caleb to put his latest invention, Ava (Alicia Vikander), to the Turing Test: does his prettily human-shaped robot have true consciousness? Has Nathan created Artificial Intelligence?
Mind games and regular injections of intriguing ideas maintain a steady grip, while claustrophobic corridors keep the budget cannily low. The question of who has a soul also exercised Garland in his adaption of his friend Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone dystopia Never Let Me Go. Garland’s Dredd script is a better comparison. Ex Machina has the mix of fizzy intellect, black humour and streamlined thrills Judge Dredd’s comic-book home 2000 AD has always specialised in (as did an early, obvious homage to it, Blade Runner). It’s a glorified yet subdued version of one of that comic’s standbys, the twist-ending Future Shock. Discarded Dredd composers Ben Salisbury and Portishead’s Geoff Barrow's score, suggesting John Williams’ Close Encounters riff when Ava appears, confirms the link.
Ex Machina’s novelty isn’t in its concept, but its social detail. Isaac’s Nathan embodies the internet geek as alpha male. The Mozart of computer coding by the age of 13, he speaks with the post-hippie informality beloved by Apple and Google, but pumps iron, has eyes cold with control, and lives in a Bond villain’s retreat, much as one imagines Bill Gates did. He has replaced Google with his own Bluebook by improving on the philosophy of search engines, tracking why we search, not what. When Caleb asks if Ava’s face was based on his porn profile, and Nathan mentions hacking into every mobile phone on the planet, the crazy dystopia we already live in is alarmingly clear. Nathan seems just the sort to have his hand on the virtual tiller: a mix of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, internet activist and corporate raider (and Bill Gates...).
Garland’s three hands are played by actors he has brought together just before their careers sail beyond his reach. Isaac’s versatile intensity has built through fierce supporting parts in Agora and Drive to Inside Llewyn Davis and the new Star Wars, where he’s joined by Gleeson. Swedish star Vikander, great as an abused Danish queen in A Royal Affair and just making her English-language breakthrough in Testament of Youth, is high-wattage for robot Ava. Like the minor fourth hand here, apparent sex slave Katya (Sonoya Mizura), Ava seems a captive victim, a just-born, android innocent. Ex Machina’s subtlest sleight of hand is that our eventual horror at her treatment only makes sense if she has passed the Turing Test. If Ava didn’t look and emote like Vikander, her plight would seem as tragic as a toaster’s.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Ex Machina
Matt Wolf
JC Chandor is rapidly turning into one of the most fascinating (and gifted) filmmakers out there, as A Most Violent Year proves in almost every way. Shamefully overlooked in this year's Oscar line-up, which neglected the film altogether, this portrait of crime and punishment during New York City's own lawless nadir some 30-odd years ago feels both like the finest film that the late Sidney Lumet never made and also entirely fresh in its portrait of morality trying to keep its head above the murk.
Kieron Tyler
Beyond being a portrait of a day in the life of French national broadcaster Radio France, it is hard to work out what La Maison de la Radio might be about. There is nothing about what the institution is meant to be for, little hinting at the attitudes defining the content aired and a lack of context for the people seen on screen. No one is specifically identified by name or role, and the nature of what is in production or being broadcast is hard to determine.
Matt Wolf
If proof were needed that war exists in some quarters as an excuse for beautiful images, along comes this screen account of Vera Brittain's celebrated 1933 memoir Testament of Youth to offer up prettified pain in abundance alongside some fine performances that do what they can to break through the prevailing gloss. First-time feature director James Kent's film can be seen as the converse to something like, say, the awful Unbroken, which rubs our noses almost fetishistically in suffering and torture.
Matt Wolf
Among the many pleasures of Whiplash, the low-budget indie film that is now up for five Oscar nominations (Best Picture included) and by rights deserved more, is a final sequence so breathlessly exciting that if this were a stage show, the ending would induce an instant ovation.
Matt Wolf
The Brits are back in the Oscar race big-time, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, and Rosamund Pike among the first-time Academy Award hopefuls who will be duking it out in the leading categories.
Nick Hasted
First there’s an “Allahu Akbar”, then an American tank’s rumble and clank. It’s an ominous and wearying start, the sound of Islam and invasion intermingled in the Iraq War, a violent conflict that today simply expands. When director Clint Eastwood lets us see, too, we’re by the treads of the tank, then within seconds we’re on a rooftop with Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who spots a woman in a hijab with her child. They have a grenade, and he lines them in his crosshairs. Cut.
Emma Dibdin
Stream-of-consciousness is a tough thing to pull off in the movies. Voice-over narration has now fallen so far out of favour that no internal monologue survives the journey from page to screen even remotely intact, and having your lead character slavishly deliver chunks of a novel seldom recreates the odd magic of reading those same words in one’s own head.
Jasper Rees
It is 30 years since Shoah. In the filmography of the Holocaust Claude Lanzmann's document is the towering monolith. At nine-and-a-half hours, it consists of no archive footage at all, just interviews with witnesses unburdening themselves of memories. Of all those conversations, there was one in particular which Lanzmann held back. After the three and a half hours of The Last of the Unjust, it is clear why.