Nebraska (2013)

Bruce Dern (left) and Will Forte in "Nebraska."

In "Nebraska," Bruce Dern—in his Oscar-nominated performance—plays a curmudgeonly septuagenarian named Woody Grant who journeys from Billings, Montana to the capital of Nebraska convinced he has won a million dollar sweepstakes prize. Will Forte plays his youngest son, David, who after several unsuccessful attempts to dissuade his dad reluctantly agrees to take a few days off from his job at an electronics store in order to drive the old man, all the while knowing the whole thing is a scam and there is no money waiting in Lincoln.

On hand as Woody’s petulant, long-suffering yet good-hearted wife is June Squibb, stealing scenes with sarcastic barbs aimed mostly at her husband but also anyone else who manages to rattle her irascible sensibility; Bob Odenkirk is older son, Ross, an ambitious television news anchor; and Stacy Keach is Woody’s duplicitous old friend and business partner, who before realizing the truth—like several other bumbling characters that turn up—swoops in to negotiate for a chunk of Woody’s fortune.

Director Alexander Payne’s odd, funny road movie is a surprisingly touching and sensitive story of a father and son coming together as the older generation nears the end of life. It's also a strange comedy, playing a lot of the oldster's absent-minded behavior for laughs, but with a sense of dignity and humanity. The movie, from a script by Bob Nelson, gets a little uneven when trending toward absurd farce, but still works.

The performances are all top-notch. Ironically, while Dern took most of the credit with his Oscar nod, it’s Forte here who really stands out. The former SNL alum proves unexpectedly adept at playing it straight; his turn as the infinitely patient and generous son is given to moments of subtlety and reserve that are quite moving.

Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of “Nebraska” is that it was photographed in black and white, lending it even more of an air of curiosity. The crisp, muted visuals effectively capture a dusty landscape full of seemingly endless swaths of emptiness, a sleepy look that seems to suggest fading memories and time slipping away.

Ultimately, “Nebraska” isn’t quite as memorable as Payne’s best work—the standard is pretty high with past entries like “Election” and “The Descendants”—but it has special moments and he remains one the best and most interesting of American comedy filmmakers.

If I Stay (2014)

Teen Love on Life Support: Jamie Blackley
and Chloe Grace Moretz in "If I Stay."

The world of a gifted young musician is turned upside down after a car accident claims the lives of her parents and little brother in "If I Stay," an initially likable but increasingly manipulative drama directed by R.J. Cutler, written by Shauna Cross and based on a novel of the same name by Gayle Forman.

Chloe Grace Moretz takes the lead as Mia, a teenager born to a couple of hipsters including a dad who used to be part of a rock band. Music runs in the family and Mia goes the classical route, preferring Beethoven over Debbie Harry and picking the cello as her favorite instrument. The move flummoxes her parents, two long time punk fans, but they come around and Dad even parts with some of his cherished old equipment to bankroll Mia’s first fiddle.

Mia’s life seems pretty good—she’s got an offer to study at a prestigious music school in New York and things are getting serious with a new boyfriend, a handsome singer named Adam (Jamie Blackley)—until the family decides to take a road trip in the middle of winter in Oregon. No matter how good the characters drive, the minute you see a car traveling down one of those winding, two-lane country roads where the trees are blanketed idyllically in fresh snow, you know something awful is about to happen.

It does, but thankfully the movie spares us bloody details. What we do see in the aftermath of the crash is Mia, her face ashen with fright but otherwise remarkably unharmed. That’s because this Mia is a spirit, or something to that effect, and the real one is badly banged up and clinging to life. Fortunately, Mia’s doppelganger keeps things moving by guiding us through important flashbacks—most of them having to do with how music interrupts Mia’s blossoming teenage romance—as well as standing by in the hospital when teary-eyed visitors stop in and choke their way through florid bedside pep talks to the comatose Mia.

Moretz, a splendid talent with a wide range of expression, is very engaging here as a gifted young artist just beginning to find a voice through her instrument. The movie might have worked had it stuck with exploring her life rather than settling into its cold and morbid rhythm of tediously ruminating on the possibility of death. Instead, clichéd and maudlin, “If I Stay” plays like shuffling a deck of tearjerker cards—no matter how they are dealt, you still end up getting the same hand.

Stories We Tell (2013)

Canadian writer/director Sarah Polley
in her documentary, "Stories We Tell."

Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” uses recollections and memory flashbacks to peel back the layers of a family, getting to know a little about the characters before deep secrets are slowly revealed. The movie, written and directed and also featuring the Canadian filmmaker herself, is a documentary that really surprises by sometimes working like a thriller.

The highly personal project—reportedly five years in the making—is an ambitious, inventive blend of documentary and filmed footage detailing Polley's quest to get to know her late mother, who died when she was 11, through a series of family interviews.

Polley’s father, Michael, plays a key role; also a writer, he provides a great deal of exposition and also some thoughtful voice-over narration during the film—sometimes appearing in a studio sound booth while Polley directs outside—reading from memoirs he later explains he was inspired to write during the making of the movie.

Along with accounts from two sisters and two brothers from a previous marriage, Polley reconstructs the tale of her mother, Diane, an actress, turned housewife, turned actress again, living in Toronto, who at one point leaves home for Montreal to act in a play. At a time when married life had grown stale, the opportunity to perform again was exciting.

It’s around this time when Diane becomes pregnant with Sarah (who was the youngest of the brood) and questions later surface as to whether Michael is the biological father. Still beautiful and vibrant at age 42, Diane attracted many friends in Montreal and there were affairs and secrets that she carried to the grave. One man in particular, the producer Harry Gulkin, emerges as possibly Sarah’s real father. This becomes the central mystery of the film. The director interviews Harry and they eventually develop a close friendship, as Polley continues to trace the strands of her past.

“Stories We Tell” functions like great investigative journalism—looking for leads, asking tough questions, checking facts, researching and relentlessly pursuing truth—combing through memories, painting a vivid portrait of the intricate stages of a family.

Out of pages from her own life, Polley has crafted a creative, intimate, enthralling piece of work. Moving and sometimes funny—with a great, jazzy score featuring standards like Fats Waller’s “Aint Misbehavin’”—the movie is a grand celebration of memories and human curiosity.

Hugo (2011)

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) and Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz)
in Martin Scorsese's masterful valentine to the movies.

From some of its opening shots—in which the camera looms sky high over the sprawling streets of a picturesque downtown Paris in the 1930s, swooping down into a railway and roaring like a jetliner through the terminal, picking up speed until people and objects are reduced to a dizzying blur—Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” looks every bit a polished example of modern entertainment, complete with all the digital tricks and technical flourishes.

And it is. But the movie, a masterpiece that examines the very history of movies, is all that and a great deal more.

Desperate to solve the puzzle of his late father’s prized automaton—a small, robot-like device with an innocent, child-like countenance—shy wiz-kid Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), embarks on an exciting journey that takes him out of his secret home in the giant clock tower of a Parisian train station and back, metaphorically, to the birth of the movies. He’s joined by Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a bright, insatiably curious bookworm with an appetite for adventure as well as clues to the mystery. Pursuing them is a clumsy inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, very funny) with a squeaky, metal leg brace and a growling, obsequious dog.

Restoring the damaged automaton to working condition, Hugo and Isabelle watch the gleaming mechanical man draw a picture of rocket crashing into the moon. The illustration— inspired by an iconic image in the landmark 1902 silent film, “A Trip to the Moon”—is meaningful to both characters. For Hugo, it reminds him of the first picture his father took him to see; and for Isabelle, it’s an insight into the background of her godfather, the influential director Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley, marvelously compelling as usual), who now runs a modest toy shop at the train station and never talks about the movies.

“Hugo” is rapturous in visual beauty, like a magical fantasy, but also has moments that recall haunting reality. Unlike the clocks in Hugo’s majestic tower—a vast network of whirring gears, springs and levers—the specter of World War II is a grim recurring motif, leaving some characters physically and emotionally wounded. For Melies, whose films lost their audience after the war, it marked the end of a career, leaving him feeling worn-out and broken. With Hugo’s help, the aging filmmaker discovers that his art still resonates.

Big in budget and slickness yet small and personal at its heart, Scorsese has created a profoundly moving love letter to some of the earliest filmmakers of the silent era. Not only a tribute to Melies, “Hugo” pays subtle homage to the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, credited with making some of the earliest films ever in the 1890s; and a cheerful nod is given to Harold Lloyed, first when Hugo and Isabelle cast themselves up at a screening of “Safety Last,” and again later when the young hero duplicates the silent comedian’s famous scene dangling from the hand of a huge, outdoor clock.

Also figuring in the exposition is Melies’ history as a magician and the way he later carefully mingled the two mediums in his visually inventive, surreal movies. Like Melies, Scorsese has always been a highly personal filmmaker. With the immensely memorable “Hugo”—a richly literate mix of old and new and a visually splendid piece of work—he has engineered one of the all-time great magic tricks of cinema.

Perfect Sisters (2014)

Georgie Henley (left) and Abigail Breslin
in "Perfect Sisters."

Fed up with lousy parenting by their alcoholic mother, two teenagers hatch a brazen but cockamamie plan to commit matricide in “Perfect Sisters,” a stunningly bad offering from director Stan Brooks and screenwriters Fab Filippo and Adam Till.

The two sisters are Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), both high school students receiving good grades and with seemingly bright futures. But the family is perpetually behind on rent payments and repeatedly forced to pack up and move thanks to the chronically inebriated, frequently unemployed single mom played by Mira Sorvino. To make matters worse, she begins dating a new guy who turns out to be a creepy, violent sex-predator who targets Beth, leading to unnecessary scenes of increasing misogyny and unpleasantness.

Frustration boils over into madness for the young girls, who eventually reason that the only way to escape their domestic maelstrom is to kill mom (apparently overlooking the fact that they are both sixteen and free to leave). The crime, not surprisingly, turns out to be the easy part, but covering up is tricky—especially when they tell their friends everything and leave a trail of evidence on various electronic devices. Texting and murder, like driving, doesn’t mix.

The movie is a mess, never settling on whether it wants to be a dark comedy or serious crime drama. The shaky, uneven tone results in chortles of derisive laughter when the film tries to play it straight, and eye-rolling moans of disbelief when it aims for comedy. Direction is pitched at desperate, MTV-level crass—unmotivated camera movements, jagged cuts and pretentious split-screens—and the performances are a brutal strain for conviction throughout. Done with a sure hand, say David Lynch or the Coens, and there might have been something.

Believe it or not, the whole thing is based on a true story out of Canada (the picture was filmed in Manitoba), proving that just because something is fact-based doesn’t automatically mean it’s worthy of being turned into a movie.

Ida (2014)

Agata Trzebuchowska gives a remarkable performance in "Ida."

Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida,” won top honors during its European run and was an Oscar nominee for best foreign film in 2013. Its US release didn’t come until this year and now the movie—an austere, mesmerizing coming of age story about a sheltered young woman discovering haunting secrets about her past—is justifiably appearing on the best ten lists of many critics and fans alike.

Agata Trzebuchowska is remarkable in the lead role as Anna, a young nun living in Poland during the 1960s. Nearing the day to take her vows, the superior sends Anna away to finally meet her aunt and only living relative. Both of her parents died during the war and Anna grew up as an orphan.

Anna meets her aunt, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza, in a brave and devastating performance), a former respected judge and prosecuter, turned world-weary and bitterly cynical, chain-smoking and regularly dousing her demons with hard liquor. Wanda reveals that Anna’s real name is Ida, that her parents were murdered during the war, and that despite living at a Catholic convent as a nun, she is actually Jewish.

The two women begin a journey to find the remains of Anna’s parents, so that they can be brought elsewhere to a proper grave. The pursuit is cold and emotionally painful, across a desolate, snow-covered Poland, made more effective by Pawlikowski’s brilliant use of black and white photography.

The differences between the spiritual Anna and the faithless Wanda are stark, but the grave circumstances bring them closer. In Anna, Wanda sees signs of the sister she misses and is comforted; in Wanda, Anna sees a glimpse of the family she never knew.

Along the way, dark secrets are uncovered. Anna meets the man who first gave her parents sanctuary during the war before murdering them, perhaps because the Nazis were closing in; he is old, frail and hospital-bound, with sins having seemingly caught up to him.

An exuberant adventure begins when Anna befriends a handsome young musician, a fascination that leads to a subtle, yet surprising twist that questions her convictions and celebrates her awareness. “You have no idea the effect you have,” he tells her. The scene when Anna, in private, quietly removes her headdress and reveals the beautiful young woman underneath plays like a wonderful moment of self-discovery.

The power of the film lies in Trzebuchowska’s great performance and Pawlikowski’s stirring imagery. The director photographs with long shots to emphasize deep pools of space, giving the impression that his characters are isolated in a world full of ghosts and suffering.  Sometimes the camera is positioned away from them, as if unable to bear the look on their anguished faces. Amidst this solemnity is Anna, praying that the long-buried evils of the past do not destroy her faith in the future.

Happy Christmas (2014)

Anna Kendrick stars in "Happy Christmas"

Before Anna Kendrick dons princess slippers and sings in the big-budget holiday blockbuster “Into the Woods” coming soon, she played Jenny, a pretty but aimless 27-year-old prone to bouts of drug and alcohol-soaked impetuousness in the decidedly low-budget “Happy Christmas,” a likeable but slight comedy written and directed by Joe Swanberg and now playing over the Netflix platform.

Swanberg also costars as Jeff, a filmmaker living with novelist wife Kelly (Melanie Lynskey of TV’s “Two and a Half Men”), in an upper-middle class house in Chicago. Jenny is Jeff’s sister and arrives fresh from a breakup ostensibly to spend the holidays. The seemingly wholesome but mischievous sibling, barely more mature than the fawning couple’s toddler son, quickly makes waves by getting drunk and passing out at a party, and soon is getting into more trouble smoking weed and sleeping with the couple’s babysitter.

Such reckless behavior rattles Jeff and Kelly out of their too-perfect lifestyle, but not enough to make any sweeping changes. For the most part, they let Jenny navigate her own troublesome pitfalls without any sanctimonious preaching—a refreshingly adult strategy even if it nearly backfires at the end.

Swanberg photographs “Happy Christmas” with a hand-held camera and uses long takes to lend authenticity which is effective. Moreover, the dialogue is largely improvised, peppered with staples (like, you know, whatever) of Gen Y speak, for better or worse.

Fans will recognize the style to be consistent with the rules of mumblecore—an interesting subgenre of independent cinema that “Happy Christmas” belongs—but it’s not quite enough to fill puddles of emptiness in story and character development. Not enough is revealed about the people here for them to be compelling, and background info to flesh out personalities is absent.

Not all films in this movement are as wispy and wafer-thin—another entry, “The Exploding Girl,” was an expressive masterpiece of long pauses and thoughtful moments of contemplation—but if there’s a secret to the mumblecore movies, it’s that the better ones are enhanced by the minimalist techniques they follow, rather than limited by them.

In Your Eyes (2014)

Zoe Kazan is hearing voices. Could it be love?

It’s pretty rare in a romantic comedy when the two lovebirds don’t actually meet face-to-face until the last scene, but that’s the payoff in “In Your Eyes,” an oddly original yet ultimately dull and unsatisfying film directed by Brin Hill from a script by Joss Whedon.

The two main characters aren’t even in the same time zone for long. The movie begins with a crash of drama, literally, when a young girl named Rebecca pilots her sled down a hill and straight into a tree. She survives. But meanwhile, somewhere else, a young boy named Dylan suffers similar injuries when he suddenly belly flops to the floor in front of befuddled classmates.

After a fast-forward, we catch up with Dylan (Michael Stahl-David), living in a dusty mobile home in the middle-of-nowhere desert of New Mexico. Thanks to bad choices and even worse friends, he’s currently on parole and working at a car wash, now a reformed safecracker, naïve and lonely. Conversely, Rebecca (Zoe Kazan) lives in snowy New Hampshire and is married to a successful but boring doctor. The couple seems happy, but things grow weird between them when she flops on the floor during a dinner party, the result of a punch Dylan takes from a thug back in the southwest.

Pretty soon, this unspoken interconnectedness between Dylan and Rebecca becomes spoken. After all, as long as they are living in each other’s heads, they might as well talk to one another. The conversations, of course, grow steadily from friendly chitchat to flirtatious innuendo and finally to serious romance.

All of this is occasionally amusing and flecked with moments of genuine warmth, but where the movie really goes wrong has to do with its visuals – or lack thereof. The crosscutting between Rebecca and Dylan is so woefully uninspired it might as well be two characters talking to each other on the phone. And when they are caught, it’s played for easy laughs or heavy-handed melodrama.

The film spoils a fresh concept by running through stop signs for creative modes of expression. For instance, secondary characters are assembled chiefly when the protagonist’s soliloquies look like schizophrenic ramblings, even though most of the audience will realize that, thanks to technologies like Bluetooth and smaller-than-ever cell phones, lots of people seem to be talking to themselves these days. Why can’t the supporting characters be more curious instead of reactionary? What if either Rebecca or Dylan met someone else with similar gifts? Why not use more voiceovers and let the camera linger awhile on one character to introduce visual patterns?

Ironic that a movie called “In Your Eyes” ultimately lacks vision. Whedon is the popular comic book writer behind successful television shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and recently penned and directed Marvel’s “The Avengers.” His work here is promising but Hill’s artless direction – except for some lovely shots of chilly New Hampshire – largely doesn’t meet the ambition of the script. The actors are similarly pigeonholed, especially Zoe Kazan, so good before in “The Exploding Girl” and “Ruby Sparks.”

It’s interesting to note that “In Your Eyes” premiered this year at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City and then began playing (for five bucks) online. It’s one of those movies that, thanks to the digital revolution, survived without a conventional theatrical exhibition and remains available to the masses. Pity it wasn’t better.