Review: Dallas Buyers Club

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Jean-Marc Vallee's "Dallas Buyers Club" is a pretty gripping portrayal of unlikely AIDS activist Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a hard drinking, drug taking, sexually promiscuous and homophobic rodeo cowboy who finds out circa 1985 that he is HIV positive.

The film provides just the sort of material that would typically scream Oscar bait - and while I'm pretty sure the film will garner its share of awards nominations, Vallee and his terrific cast, which includes some great work from Jared Leto and Jennifer Garner, handle it all tastefully.

In fact, it's pretty difficult to like Woodroof for much of the film until he makes the required transformation later in the film. When we first meet him, he doesn't shy away from throwing out offensive comments about gays and Arabs and acts just about how you'd expect someone who drinks as hard and snorts as much cocaine as he does.

But Woodroof eventually becomes the hero of the story, along with his business partner Rayon (Leto), a sensitive and HIV positive drag queen and Garner's sympathetic doctor. The villain of the story is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which attempts to halt Woodroof's enterprise that involves smuggling AIDS treatments into the country from Mexico, Japan, China and the Netherlands that he then sells to the membership of his Dallas Buyers Club.

The thing is, all of the items Woodroof smuggles in are basically vitamins, which prove to be more effective in his case and those of many others than the FDA-approved AZT. "Dallas Buyers Club" ends up juggling two familiar story lines - that of a flawed individual becoming a better person and the little man against big industry - in this case, the FDA and Big Pharma.

McConaughey is in the middle of a career makeover, from his work last year in "Bernie," "Magic Mike" and "Killer Joe" and, in 2013, his great performances in "Mud" and "Dallas Buyers Club." Later this year, he is appearing in Martin Scorsese's "Wolf of Wall Street." But "Dallas" could be his finest work to date, not just because of the obvious physical demands of the role, but the way that the actor gets into Woodroof's trouble psyche. Leto, who has been missing from screens for a while, is similarly terrific in a role that could have a caricature, but ends up being rather poignant.

"Dallas Buyers Club" tells a pretty remarkable story and does it well. The film's visual style and the script are both solid, but this is a picture that is first and foremost an actors' showcase. Here is an example of a cast truly bringing to life its characters.

The Best Movies for Halloween

The Shining. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Today, I posted my list of the 50 or so best horror movies to watch this Halloween or, if you will, what I believe to be the Horror Movie Canon.

I'm sure I missed some titles, but I think the piece does a decent enough job of putting together a list of some of the best and most underrated horror movies.

Anyway, here's the story. Please share your thoughts on the comment section below.

Update, Oct. 28, 2014: Yes, I did miss some great titles. Also, add these to your list: Wes Craven's 1977 original version of "The Hills Have Eyes," Don Coscarelli's eerie "Phantasm" and Bob Clark's "Black Christmas" (the 1974 original) and topical "Deathdream."

Review: All Is Lost

Image courtesy of Lionsgate.

J.C. Chandor's "All Is Lost" is, perhaps, a movie that I admire more than I love, but admire it I do. The picture is a one-man show with Robert Redford at the helm or, arguably, a three-man show if you want to include the pretty incredible cinematography by Frank G. DeMarco and Peter Zuccarini.

All you need to know about the film is that it follows a nameless man (Redford) who is alone at sea on his boat and must deal with an increasingly dire situation after his ship is struck by a floating piece of freight, forcing him to first attempt to keep from sinking and, when that fails, try to survive on a life raft.

However, you'd be wrong to think that "All Is Lost" is another of those tales of survival that celebrate the triumph of human resilience. In fact, the picture shares more in common with Michael Haneke's recent "Amour," which also chronicled a person of a certain age's coming to face with their own mortality.

And Redford pretty much pulls it off, carrying the film with a mostly wordless performance, allowing his emotions and sense of, at first, dread - and then - acceptance of his situation play out on his face.

The film also looks pretty terrific and there are more than a few scenes that I wondered how the filmmakers pulled off, including one in which Redford's boat flips upside down in the water and another involving a rather lengthy storm.

All this being said, I think Chandor's film is a good - but, perhaps, not great - one. I prefer his debut, the critically acclaimed and Oscar nominated financial crisis drama "Margin Call." But I was pretty awed by Redford's performance here, which is one of his best in some time, and the camera work involved. And I like that the filmmakers took a scenario that has been a little played out - the survival against the odds tale - and made it into something you might not expect.

Review: Bastards

Image courtesy of Sundance Selects.

Claire Denis is one of the world's great filmmakers, but she seems to have fallen into a pattern of delivering a great movie or two and then following them with a frustratingly opaque and fragmented one.

For example, she followed the marvelous "Beau Travail" and underrated "Trouble Every Day" with the murky "L'Intrus," which many loved but is among my least favorite of her works. And now, she gives us "Bastards," which follows the elegiac "35 Shots of Rum" and the starkly haunting "White Material."

Those familiar with my taste should know I certainly do not object to the peculiar, the experimental, the occasionally outright nonsensical or what some might refer to as challenging cinema. But Denis' latest is so vague that it's hard to even collect my thoughts on it.

The picture has something to do with a tanker captain named Marco (Vincent London, who might have played a great 1960s Jean Pierre Melville anti-hero) returning home to visit his sister (Julie Bataille), whose husband has died and teenage daughter (Lola Creton) has attempted suicide due to what a doctor describes as severe sexual abuse. When we first meet the young woman, she is walking nude along a deserted Paris street with blood dripping down her leg.

Marco's sister blames her husband's death on a business partner (Michael Subor). Before long, our hero gets entangled with the business partner's wife (Chiara Mastroianni), who has a young boy.

The film looks great, but - as the saying goes - has less filling. Marco goes further and further down a rabbit hole, but it's unclear what he's searching for and even what he finds.

"Bastards" has a throbbing electronica score and some moody sequences that feel as if they were pulled straight out of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" or Olivier Assayas's "Demonlover." But it's a case of - to borrow another cliche - being all dolled up with nowhere to go.

Denis is a wonderful filmmaker with a style and mood all her own. But "Bastards" is a bit too spare to leave much of an impression. Here's to hoping that, in typical fashion, her next few works are great.

Review: The Counselor

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

You'd think that a film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Cormac McCarthy and starring Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt would result in something possibly extraordinary - or, at least, pretty damn good.

Alas, "The Counselor" is not as bad as you might have heard, but that's not saying it's all that good either. The film is alternately thrilling and ludicrous as well as overly violent and, on occasion, a bit jumbled. You may not remember exactly which character double crossed the other or why the titular figure, who is known only as "Counselor," is in the mess he's in, but I doubt you'll ever forget the scene in which Diaz has sex with the windshield of Bardem's car. Seriously.

McCarthy is one of America's greatest writers and the plot of "The Counselor" sounds like something he would cook up - shady characters in the southwest, many of whom will meet violent deaths, wrestling with intrigue and talking about Big Ideas. However, it would appear that adaptations of McCarthy's work - namely, the Coen Brothers' remarkable "No Country for Old Men" - seem to play better than screenplays written directly by the author.

The film has that trademark opacity that mark his novels, but work substantially less on the big screen than they do on the page. It's no wonder that McCarthy's masterpiece, "Blood Meridian," has taken so long to be made into a film. In "The Counselor," characters sit around talking about those aforementioned Big Ideas, such as greed, death, capitalism and the nature of good and evil. But the film's characters are a bit underdeveloped and the film's story, which has something to do with the Counselor getting mixed up with a particularly sadistic Mexican cartel, never quite gels together.

Scott is a fine director and all of the actors here are typically quite good, but the film feels more like a bunch of ideas in search of a narrative, rather than a movie. That's not to say there's not some stuff to chew on. Bardem is likely the standout among the cast, although Rosie Perez makes her bit part as a prisoner count.

And, this being a Ridley Scott film, the cinematography is often beautiful and, this being a Cormac McCarthy screenplay, there are a fair share of zingers and memorable lines. And, like I said, that scene with Diaz gives all new meaning to the term auto erotica. But I'd just hoped for much more. "The Counselor" isn't a bad movie, but it could have been a great one.

Review: Blue is the Warmest Color

Image courtesy of IFC Films.

There's been a lot of talk about "Blue is the Warmest Color" since it went on to win the Palm d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival and, unfortunately, much of the discussion has centered on the picture's semi-graphic sex scenes between the two female leads, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux.

The real story is the intense, naturalistic performances by Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, neither of whom are particularly recognizable to me, despite that they have both been acting in films for the past four or five years. Regardless, I'd bet that their names will become a lot more familiar now following their star making turns in Abdellatif Kechiche's movie.

At the beginning of the film, Adele (Exarchopoulos) is a bright high school student who loves to read. At school, she listens to a lecture about love at first sight and regrets in terms of a French novel that she is reading, even though both themes will come into play in her own life.

Adele appears to be sexually frustrated and her coupling with a young man from her high school does little to ease her tension. But when she spots blue-haired - and older - art student Emma (Seydoux), she becomes fixated, eventually following her to a gay bar, where the two strike up a conversation.

Emma wants Adele to pose for her and Adele agrees. It's not too long before the young women's friendship becomes much more. Yes, there are some fairly graphic - and, in one case, extremely prolonged - sex scenes in "Blue," but the real heart of the story, which runs just a little over three hours, is the relationship between the two women and how it grows and, eventually, changes over a period of several years.

There are some particularly adept juxtapositions in the film, including one in which Emma, who is openly gay with her parents, takes Adele, who is about as closeted as one gets, to meet the parents and the four of them talk about food and culture. Then, Adele takes Emma, posing as her tutor, to meet her own parents, who end up lecturing the both of them about the importance of having a job and a rich husband.

The film's sex scenes may be intimate, but so is the rest of the picture. Kechiche follows Adele through her daily life in the classroom, in which she is, at first, a student and then later a teacher. There is a great sequence during which Adele cooks the food for a party Emma is throwing for her artist friends. Adele appears to feel nervous and out of place, despite that Emma's friends appear to be pretty welcoming toward her. The film perfectly captures the experience of being thrown into a new group of people and all the excitement and nervousness that entails.

I'm not going to give away any of the story, but I can say that two particular scenes late in the film that are emotionally grueling display the many talents of Exarchopoulos and Seydoux. Both actresses have now spoken out against the intense process Kechiche required on the set of his film, but it's clear that this process has led to a movie that feels entirely lived in. A scene in which the two women get into a rather dramatic argument doesn't feel like two actresses playing their parts, but rather two people actually fighting.

"Blue is the Warmest Color" is a pretty amazing film. It takes a series of fairly simple concepts - a first love, a coming of age story, a coming out story - and turns them into something epic, which is likely how any one of these types of stories feels to the person living them. It's a warm, funny, heartbreaking, sexy, brilliantly acted, completely alive movie.

Review: Carrie

Image courtesy of MGM.

Kimberly Peirce's remake of Brian de Palma's classic adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel, "Carrie," is faithful enough to its source material(s), but a bit unnecessary.

First things first: Both Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore provide solid performances as the titular figure and her religious fanatic mother, even though it's difficult to replace Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie.

The remake is set in modern times, so poor Carrie's humiliation not only takes place in the locker room and classrooms, but also on YouTube, where her fellow classmates post a particularly traumatic incident in her life.

Otherwise, Peirce's film is pretty by-the-book: Carrie is the daughter of one Margaret White, a believer of some truly intense fervor who locks her daughter up in the closet to pray and reminds her that she was conceived through what may have been a rape.

Carrie doesn't fare much better at school, where popular girls smirk at her unawareness of menstruation and young men treat her as cruelly as teenage boys can often do. It's only a kindly teacher played by Judy Greer and, eventually, one of the popular girls who gets a conscience who have toward Carrie any kind intentions.

You know the story. Or, if you don't, I won't give it away. Let's just say things don't go well at the prom.

Peirce's previous films also dealt with young characters with difficult situations, including the haunting "Boys Don't Cry" and the pretty solid back-from-Iraq drama "Stop Loss." While I can see why "Carrie" drew her interest, I'd much rather see the director return to her indie roots.

This remake is not a bad film and, in fact, it's much better than remakes of, say, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or "The Last House on the Left." But it doesn't have much of a better reason for existing in the first place.