The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012)

Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man would be a decent movie if it had nothing to do with comic books. When left to his own devices, Andrew Garfield gives Peter Parker an agreeably sardonic side, at once cocky and anxious as he spits out the quips sorely missing from Sam Raimi's post-9/11-tinged idealism. Garfield even enjoys ample chemistry with his leading lady, Emma Stone, which is a nice change of pace, not merely from Raimi's films but the superhero genre as a whole. Were the film nothing more than a slightly surreal abstraction of pimply and emotional hormone changes, it would make a fine romantic comedy powered by believable actors doing above-average work.


But this is a Spider-Man film, and the hormonal abstract in question concerns Parker's superpowers, which themselves entail a narrative arc of responsibility that generates the greatest tension of Parker's life. A good Spider-Man story is less about the fight between Spidey and the chosen villain than how his constant quest for a normal, happy life must be sacrificed for the greater civic good. That tension is wholly lacking in Webb's version, which recalls Green Lantern in its cynical rewrite of a noble character into a self-absorbed narcissist who always makes sure to hedge his bets on even the most tentative of mature actions so he ultimately emerges the same erratic jackass at the end of the film he was at the top.

Based more off the Ultimate alternate universe of the Spider-Man comic book realm, Webb's film starts with a child Peter watching his secretive parents disappear one evening, stopping their flight just long enough to dump the boy on his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field). Years later, the teenaged Peter happens upon his father's old briefcase and discovers a file of advanced scientific calculations and clues. This should be mysterious, but everyone knows that all roads lead to radioactive, bioengineered spiders. This aspect of the story simply treads water until Peter can finally meet his father's research partner, Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), get himself bit by a lab animal and lose his uncle.

Like all origin stories for wildly popular franchises, and especially for reboots of those franchises, the film's plot is perfunctory and telegraphed. We already know how the hero came to be, and we also know that he will not suffer too heavy a blow until at least the second movie. But despite using a different set of Spider-Man comics as a reference point, Webb adds practically nothing to the material, and he subtracts quite a bit. Sheen is, as always, delightfully affable as Uncle Ben, both a stern parental figure and a trustworthy confidant. But he, like Field, is shoehorned into a movie that has no use for him other to move the plot, and his death therefore lacks any weight or meaning. That Peter so utterly ignores his uncle's most critical advice, even at the end of the movie, only makes Ben more extraneous.

The only time the film truly works is in Peter's relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone). One of the first things the audience sees Peter do is take stalker photos of Gwen, yet Stone and Garfield share such a casual chemistry between them that the film incredibly overcomes its intensely uncomfortable establishment of Peter's attraction. Stone makes the most of an underwritten part, her smoky voice and unbendable resolve giving strength to a character who would otherwise have none. Even later, when Parker is battling his first super-foe, Gwen gets to perform some brave feats of her own that make the dynamic between her and Peter more equal than Mary Jane's perpetual damsel status.

Best of all is the interim between the overtures of their relationship and the true emergence of Spider-Man as a costumed hero. The period where Peter has acquired his powers but does not yet know how to use them and must learn his way around fighting thugs and an even more awkward school life is stretched into a significant chunk of the film, and for good reason. It is here that both Webb and Garfield hit their stride, Webb toying with minor action that he films with vivaciousness, while Garfield gets the chance to actually stretch out the giddiness of a hero discovering his new gifts. Such scenes are always bypassed as quickly as possible in most superhero movies, so to spend some time actually letting the lead sink his toes into the protagonist's upended world is a welcome change. Even if there is a scene where Peter uses his new strength to dunk on the school bully.

Sadly, this spark of originality and competence is all too fleeting compared to the rest of the film and its banal conflict between Spider-Man and The Lizard, created when Dr. Connors' attempt to regrow his amputated arm through transgenesis has unforeseen side effects. The choreography of their fights is amazing, with Parker's "Spidey Senses" informing a quick-response fighting style that stresses an agility and variation of technique. But Webb, who operates far more in his element with the intimate, playful scenes, is not well-versed in action, and he obscures the Lizard's overpowering attacks and Spider-Man's lightning-fast redirects with frantic editing and an awkward, close-up style that rarely lets the camera take in the entire situation. Had Webb allowed the audience to see what was happening in these duels, he would be responsible for some of the most thrilling action sequences in comic book film. As it is, so much of the spectacle of this blockbuster never rises above its considerable potential.

But then, a blockbuster does not appear to be what Webb set out to make. He deserves credit for taking what is normally just another part of the hero's montage of self-discovery, the grasp of one's powers and how to control them, and making it the emotional and narrative crux of the film. But that moment of insight into what makes an origin story worth telling—the emotional, not narrative, foundation—does not carry over to the rest of the film, thanks to a protagonist so half-written one cannot even tell whether he is a gifted nerd or merely a moping, skateboarding loner. This unclear setup and motivation makes The Amazing Spider-Man feel especially unnecessary. That's almost an impressive feat among the already stale crop of superhero films that prop up every summer at the box office these days.

The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Evans, 2012)

It cannot be denied that the fight choreography in Gareth Evans' The Raid: Redemption ranks among the finest ever put to film. A showcase for the Indonesian martial art of Pencak Silat, The Raid plays a attention-deficit version of Die Hard, replicating that film's sense of economic progression through the floors of an enemy-controlled building but cutting out even the slightest pauses. In theory, it's the perfect film, not wasting any time on plot or even characterization before moving into a police raid on an apartment complex serving as a haven for Jakarta's criminals. The film barely even makes time to establish why an elite squad is about to kick in the doors of this building, and it says even less when they start kicking in heads.

In practice, however, this lack of any establishing narrative swiftly turns The Raid into a tedious exercise, a repetitive display of martial arts prowess that gradually changes from thrilling to dull to, finally, vaguely offensive. Never has the case been more clearly made for the necessity of the storytelling that action fans find a hurdle to surmount before getting to the killing. Late in the film, the crime lord (Ray Sahetapy) at the top of complex immediately throws off the imminent threat of a plot emerging by dismissively saying, "I don't give a shit about 'why' anymore." If he ever did, that puts him one up on Evans.

The first act of The Raid flows without much of a hiccup, the irritating shakycam mildly forgiven by Evans' pacing. The first stage of the titular raid of the building is handled beautifully, with a methodical sweep of the lower floors rolling into a tight montage of the cops silently gagging and cuffing residents. Then it all goes wrong with equal deftness: a child spotting the squad and running into the next room to alert a friend before a bullet strikes him in the neck. Evans almost lets a sense of dread build up, with shots of Tama up in his monitor-filled quarters calmly speaking into the building's PA system and matches of speakers on the floors below booming out his elegant, lightly taunting call to arms. It's such a well-handled moment that the resultant carnage feels something of a letdown of this moody potential.

But damned if the fights aren't amazing. With the moving space generally limited to a narrow corridor or cramped apartment, the choreography manages to find a place for the floods of criminal residents who swarm the small squad who cannot hope for reinforcements. The best fighters, naturally, are the two choreographers, Iko Uwais as the fresh-faced, expectant father Rama and Yayan Ruhian as Tama's brutal henchman Mad Dog, a vicious fighter who purposefully avoids guns so that he might relish a bare-handed kill. Their organization of various sequences, including Rama elegantly dispatching thugs with a tactical knife and Mad Dog taking on a tough sergeant removed from the rest of the team, are initially thrilling. They're so good, in fact, that it would be nice if Evans would let us see any of it. Instead, he erratically cuts around each blow, though his long takes may be even more incoherent, with the camera so roughed up it barely catches anything.

After a time, though, even the fights become so absurd that they lose their splendor. The endless parade of kicks, stabs and gunfire turns what would started out as a brilliantly stripped-down effort into a variant of the Simpsons rake gag with internal bleeding. Indeed, the sequences eventually turn downright comical in their interminable length. Nowhere is this more evident than when Uwais and Ruhian, so excellent in their isolated scenes, come together for a climactic fight that drags on for so long I kept expecting a bikini-clad woman to occasionally walk in front of the camera brandishing a round number on a sign. And though the matching concrete floors and walls facilitate some clever axis inversion on Evans' part as his camera bucks and turns, the drab uniformity of the slum building only makes the parade of martial arts moves more repetitive and droning.

But what truly kept nagging me as the film wore on was the question of why I was supposed to be thrilled by the police stomping out these nondescript people in this building. I wouldn't call it fascistic, per se, certainly not in the way that, say, The Elite Squad is (this is perhaps the one area where the film's lack of story works; if it had even a whisper of one it would likely be in support of this police brutality). There is something, though, unsettling about how gleefully the film moves into a brawl, especially given that the first building resident the audience meets is a decent, meek man just trying to get medicine to his wife. How many others like him are caught in the crossfire of this raid?

The film even makes it clear that the authorities should not even be there, yet it continues to glory in their fight to escape. The last straw, though, is when Evans attempts to toss in some plot twists near the end in a pathetic sop to those growing weary of the senseless fighting. Of course, you can't really have plot twists without a plot to begin with; how can you have any pudding if your don't eat your meat, etc., etc. The Raid is such a hollow exercise, one in which the mastery of its choreography is surrounded by the mediocrity of every other aspect of its design and execution. Lamely propelled by Mike Shinoda's score with all the enthusiasm of someone roped into carting a friend's armoire up a flight of stairs, The Raid embodies the perfunctory, meaningless, hyperviolent slog it charts. Who would think that a film of nothing but action could be so utterly boring?

The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Let's get a couple of things out of the way. The Avengers opens on such a hollow note that its entire first act struggles to find any kind of footing at all. Trapped between a need for some basic exposition and a total disregard for anyone foolish enough to wade into this film without having seen its multiple-franchise foundations, The Avengers thus has nothing for anyone as it slowly, ever so slowly, brings together its collection of superheroes. And though I've never previously bought the charge that Joss Whedon is a smug writer, I nearly blushed at the self-satisfaction in some early exchanges and setups, so obvious and fan-massaging that their cynicism threatened to divorce me entirely from what I hoped would be Whedon's big break. Maybe all that trash-talking he'd done over the years for those who "misread" or "mishandled" his early film scripts was just a smokescreen for a writer whose considerable gift for television writing simply didn't translate to the more concise storytelling of cinema.

Then, something happened that has not occurred in any of the Marvel films leading up to this blowout: the movie kept getting better. Most of the previous films started with intriguing concepts and approaches before fizzling out in half-baked, perfunctorily executed action romps that served only to set up the chess pieces for this picture. Even Captain America, easily the best of the Marvel Studios franchise starters, dipped a bit in the middle, though it differs from its peers in that it finished strong where movies like Iron Man, Thor and The Incredible Hulk ended on lame notes. But The Avengers swaps the usual Marvel dynamic, moving out of a dull, lazy setup into something clever, well-observed and, ultimately, thrilling. By the time everything fell into place, my laundry list of complaints evaporated in the pure rush of Whedon's ambition.

The first act suffers for the unavoidably arbitrary nature of the events that bring Marvel's heroes together. When Loki (Tom Hiddleston) materializes out of his deep-space exile in a S.H.I.E.L.D. base on Earth, he instantly starts wreaking havoc and steals the Tesseract, that glowing blue cube that factored so prominently in Thor and Captain America. As MacGuffins go, the Tesseract isn't engaging or broadly explained enough for the severity placed on it to work, and even when Loki possesses S.H.I.E.L.D. agents (including Jeremy Renner's Clint "Hawkeye" Barton) and levels the secret, hi-tech facility, the stakes are so unclear that the worry in Nick Fury's (Samuel L. Jackson) face doesn't register.

But Fury cannot sufficiently stress the danger the world faces and sets about recruiting all the superheroes he met in those post-credits stingers in past Marvel films. Arduously, the film comes to each of these heroes—Tony "Iron Man"Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), Bruce "Hulk" Banner (Mark Ruffalo, replacing Ed Norton), Steve "Captain America" Rogers (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson)—individually, rehashing their personalities and backstories before bringing them together. These scenes drag along with dead weight, giving the impression that Loki could have vaporized the planet in the time it takes the movie to even put these people in the same room, much less in a team.

Once Whedon does put all these larger-than-life personalities in the same shot, however, he displays a canny ability to subvert expectations for immediate, boisterous action. Whedon's television programs are filled with makeshift, uncertainly functioning families brimming with tension and different goals, and he compounds that spiky energy with these superpowered people. The first great action sequence involving the heroes is among each other, Iron Man and Thor trading blows as their target, Loki, looks on with a grin. And when they bring Loki bound to a flying aircraft carrier serving as S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mobile headquarters, the feeling that something horrible is about to happen is omnipresent.

This middle section allows Whedon to stretch out with his actors and, having moved past the flippant, insider-joke-laden dialogue of the start, truly delve into the characters. In a setup reminiscent of the Angelus arc in Angel's fourth season, S.H.I.E.L.D. puts Loki in a cage, limiting his physical movement and maximizing his psychological warfare. Hiddleston lets every jab and uncomfortable insight flick off his tongue on hot spittle, getting into the heroes' heads. My favorite scene of the film pits Loki against Black Widow, inverting Hiddleston's charm into frightening invective until Whedon pulls the rug out from underneath the moment in fantastically funny fashion.

Whedon's sarcastic humor and his gift for writing powerful but flawed characters suits him perfectly to Stark and Banner. Downey coasted in Iron Man 2, lazily delivering arrogant one-liners clearly written to capture the spontaneous, unexpected magic he brought to Stark. Here, though, he has better barbs, and better characters to square off against, bouncing off Captain America's uptight obsolescence and curiously prodding Banner in the hopes of seeing him transform. In Whedon's hands, Stark is no longer celebrated for his stand-offish, cocky nature but rightly seen as the insufferable, popular kid in high school. (Even the recycling of AC/DC's "Shoot to Thrill" from Iron Man 2 feels more like a jab at Stark's predictable egomania than a convenience of rights issues.) Yet it's also Whedon who gets the first true bit of humanity and empathy out of the billionaire genius, first in his kinship with Banner and then in response to an event that galvanizes the whole cast.

Ruffalo wastes no time establishing himself as the greatest Bruce Banner yet. His Banner has a perpetually remorseful, embarrassed look, asking others whether they know about him in the resigned but bashful way of a man who is used to having to admit a terrible secret to strangers but can never get used to the shame of the admission itself. He speaks slowly and deliberately, projecting a neutral energy that finds an anxious middle-ground between calm and angry. Even the animation for the Hulk is superb, using motion-capture and nuanced CGI to capture Ruffalo's sad eyes in the lumbering green behemoth. Thor and Captain America, incorruptible idealists, fare less well, as Whedon would need even more than the film's already-bloated running time to break down their two-dimensional goodness. Still, Evans at least gets to flex his acting chops with a constant, subtle discomfort befitting a man out of his time. I hope the next Captain America film gives Evans a meatier role to explore in the modern era.

The final act is at once irritating thanks to Whedon's clumsy action directing and exhilarating for how well he corrals everyone into the racket of Manhattan being torn apart by the Avengers and Loki's alien army. Spatial geography in the shots is incomprehensible, yet the larger image of the Hulk clobbering soldiers over there, Hawkeye picking off targets with casual precision, Captain America and Black Widow holding down the ground level et al. is easily traceable. The sheer ambition of the climactic sequence also helps, the tearing apart of a city reminiscent of a Michael Bay film but coordinated to give more heft to the characters and, generally speaking, to not delight in the wanton destruction. As thrilling as the sight of the Hulk punching some massive flying beast is, there's an urgency to end this chaos as quickly as possible counter to Bay's basking in pandemonium. Whedon is clearly having fun, but the climax works less as a dumb showcase for (admittedly great) special effects than as the throughline for these characters, their powers and their relationships to each other.

That idiosyncratic touch, a preference for the actual characters over the spectacle, doesn't redeem the film's many flaws of pacing, direction, and the occasional bit of dodgy dialogue. But it does it at least offset them, offering a fresh take on the Marvel formula that already feels set in stone after only a few years of dedicated work in setting up this mega-tent pole. Were I to simply look at the film on an isolate, critical level, I'd have to conclude that it was a failure. It languishes in a first act it does not even attempt to make interesting or coherent, then moves past that vital second-act inner conflict between the heroes too quickly, and finally flirts with mindless action in a way Whedon never has before. But like the Avengers themselves, the film works as a whole in a way it doesn't when contrasting individual elements. In fact, that tension among its unwieldy elements is part of the movie's charm, making it even more exciting when everything somehow comes together in a satisfactory way. Whedon may succumb to the fad of frenetic editing and jumbled close-ups on action, but I can think of few other filmmakers who could have made a film about a collection of Earth's greatest heroes and maintained focus so thoroughly on the way that team operated.

Brave (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, 2012)

Brave is at once the most visually distinctive project Pixar has yet made and their most derivative work. Slightly dimmed as if filmed by natural light, the Celtic realm of stone and forest achieve a new level of realism for the studio's animation; even by their standards, I can think of no other Pixar film that invites such pure pleasure merely in scanning the frame for all its absurdly fine detail. Yet with this new peak of visual sophistication comes a story that mines Disney princess tales and blends it with the style and thematic content of Japanese animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki. But if this setup is less fundamentally "original" than, say, Ratatouille or Up, it nonetheless offers an important opportunity to alter and update a classic form of storytelling. After all, from old elements can come wonderful, new things.

For the first act, at least, Brave demonstrates this in spades. Merida (Kelly Macdonald) instantly establishes herself as an entrancing heroine; the daughter of a king who presides over a group of allied Celtic clans (Billy Connolly), Merida is groomed by her mother, Elinor, (Emma Thompson) to behave like a proper lady but above all cherishes a bow given to her by her father. The precocious child grows up to be an adventurous teenager, strong-willed enough to climb a sheer cliff just because it's there and so skilled in archery that various targets she erects around the castle woods might as well be quivers for how many arrows they hold in their bullseyes. When Elinor announces that the day has finally come for Merida to choose a suitor, the young woman's outrage burns so hotly that the flippant faux-independence of some recent Disney princesses looks even more laughable. When she says she doesn't want to marry right now, she damn well means it, and she goes to unexpectedly drastic lengths to defy her mother's wishes.

Amusingly, Brave portrays its men as brutish, immature fools. King Fergus' hall echoes with the drunken roars of loutish, bragging oafs, none louder than Fergus himself, affable as he is. The sons of clan leaders compete for Merida's hand, but they are all so dim-witted that whomever wins, it's clear that Merida loses. Their broad inanity relentlessly spoofs the idea of winning a lady's hand like a trophy, an idea I would say is self-evidently ridiculous at its most basic level were it not for an Entertainment Weekly article asking whether Merida might be a lesbian for such gender-role-bucking behavior. No, seriously.

Because the men are so shallow and as unworthy of the audience's attention as Merida's, the film devotes most of its time to the conflict between Merida's headstrong behavior and Elinor's adherence to tradition. It is in this generational rift, more so even than Merida's uncompromising behavior, that ties Brave to the best work of Miyazaki. Brave has the intelligence and depth to sympathize with Merida, even to clearly side with her in the issue of betrothal. But that does not preclude the possibility, even the certainty, of her mother being right about many things and, if nothing else, the absolute, unshakeable love a mother has for her child. The delicacy of such a mature evaluation also carries over to the characterization of the disobedient child, and how fine a line can separate righteous indignation from bratty selfishness.

This being a fantasy film, though, this moral is sold less through the striking energy exchanged between Macdonald's and Thompson's animated selves than a magical twist. Such an approach hardly breaks with centuries of fairy tale storytelling, but the plot upheaval here is played more for comedy than pathos. It's not so much a surreal outgrowth of the story so much as a sudden shift that develops the ideas of the first act with only intermittent success. The narrative curveball shatters everyone's arcs: Merida's emotional journey is instantly sidelined into a plot-driven quest, but one that makes irrelevant her foundation of self-sufficiency and strength. Those much-shown archery skills don't even play a role in the climax, or really any moment in the entire second half. Elinor is completely changed, preventing any serious engagement with her character. I wanted to get a sense of whether she walked into her own destined marriage happily or if she sacrificed her own dreams to follow the way of things. An offhand allusion to doubt is dropped at one point, but only as a quick joke that raises frustratingly unanswered questions.

Brave, then, may be most engaging solely as a visual treat, but my God what a treat it is. I've not always warmed to Pixar's quest for realistic animation, feeling that somewhat missed the point of the entire artform. (As beautiful as Ratatouille's Parisian background is, I wish it tried to visualize the city's soul rather than recreate its appearance on Google Earth.) But the detail of Brave's druidic highlands is pristine to the point of tangibility: Scottish fog rolls in so thick it chills the theater with its mist, while the gorgeous but utilitarian stonemasonry of the castle genuinely gives the impression of having been handmade rather than programmed on a computer. Every Pixar builds technically on some specific aspect of a previous film: the reflective sheen of the Cars movies beget the sophistication, astonishing brightness of blazing fires in Toy Story 3 and Wall•E, for example. Here, the animation of Lotso the Bear's fur in Toy Story 3 appears to be the grounding technical element, for the hair and fur of Brave's characters and animals is so tactile I could often focus on nothing else. Whether it's the salt-'n-pepper grain flecking Fergus' steel wool hair and beard or the bristling fur of real, not toy, bears, the animation is breathtaking for its microscopic, almost incidental perfection. Then, of course, there's the case of Merida's curly locks, a feat of virtual gravity-defying the details of which read like NASA-level physical calculations. Yet it also seems indicative of the film's larger issues that I was often so entranced by the female protagonist's hair that I didn't immediately notice how quickly Brave ceases to develop the woman to whom those follicles are attached.

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Christopher Nolan's Batman films have seriously, sometimes ponderously, probed the ramifications of superheroes in the "real" world. Batman Begins used its rusted, humid underworld as a petri dish for urban bacteria into which its hero was injected like a test cure. The Dark Knight followed up on the consequences of that hero's success, replacing the low-level scum with a bigger, badder force that wreaked such havoc as a direct result of Batman's presence that one was left to wonder whether his presence made life for the people better or worse. The Dark Knight Rises inverts that thematic dynamic to explore what happens in the hero's absence.

TDKR picks up eight years to the day after the conclusion of The Dark Knight. On the anniversary of Harvey Dent's death, the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) holds a commemoration that flaunts the aggressive clean-up campaign waged in the late district attorney's name, one that has, apparently, rid the city of organized crime. As the mayor, then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) give their speeches, a shadow watches from above. Not the shadow of a bat, but a man, and a broken one at that, the silhouette of a cane and the bent shadow of the person holding it suggesting not Batman's imposing, fearful, symbolic strength but just a hobbled man. Such has become Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), deteriorated physically from the strain of his days as Batman and mentally from the trauma of losing the friend in whom he believed and the woman he loved. But as another character tells Wayne not too long after, "There's a storm coming," one that will require the man to become a legend once more and handle a greater evil than ever before.

That evil comes in the form of Bane (Tom Hardy), a thick-muscled, gas-masked terrorist who stands in stark contrast to the wiry Scarecrow and Joker of previous films. Bane is as capable of plotting absurdly complex, large-scale destruction as his evil predecessors, but he also has the bulk to go one on one with Batman's own bruising style of combat. His careful calculation does not innately terrify as does the Joker's erratic unpredictability, but Hardy ably works double time as a mastermind and, essentially, his own henchman. Furthermore, Bane's rationality, however severe and intolerant of failure, does prove alluring to the hordes of impoverished average citizens swept under ledgers in this supposed golden age for Gotham, and where Batman once had to contend with nothing more than a handful of devotees, now he must face down an entire army of riled lumpenproletariat.

Nolan's blockbusters are all defined by an inability to trim, and The Dark Knight Rises suffers from more bloat than any of his other, overstuffed features. Before the Bane/Batman conflict even surfaces, Wayne must crawl his way back to fighting form, as well as deal with his ailing company, suffering losses from a mothballed clean energy project. The latter involves the investment of one Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who also doubles as a possible love interest for Wayne. And then there is Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a cat burglar who specializes in ripping off the rich. Nolan dangles Kyle out not only as a potential love interest but a potential villain to boot. Oh, and then, there is a Gotham police officer, Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an orphan who knows that Bruce Wayne is really Batman because of some kind of orphan Shining and wants Batman to come back after Gordon gets shot. Oh I forgot, Gordon gets shot early in the movie. These plot points stretch the narrative as it is, and Nolan eventually expands each of these strands until the film bursts at the seams. Nolan delights in playing chessmaster and trickster with his narratives, but he has so many pieces to move here that, despite the film's hefty runtime, large details fall through the cracks and time in general passes in the blink of an eye, a key flaw for a film that works best when emphasizing both the arduously slow journey of redemption and the breathlessly tight timeframe in which that journey must be undertaken.

Explanations and clarifications of all these plotlines come through atrocious sound mixing, which buries dialogue and only occasionally gives any force to the more grandiose sound effects and score. The muffled dialogue would matter less were Nolan willing to let the images speak for themselves, but expository dialogue rears its head at every turn. When Cotillard's Tate reminds Wayne of their stalled project, she starts offering so many details she threatens to launch into a history lesson of fusion itself at any second. Characters offer up life stories with the slightest provocation, halting an already unwieldy behemoth. In the film's most unintentionally hilarious scene, one character launches into an overexpository description of a nefarious plan (one filled with already known details and sufficiently visualized with intercut shots of the action being related through speech) as the clock literally runs out of a major threat. But with fewer than three minutes to deal with a huge danger, Batman, Kyle and Gordon all stop and listen to this other character monologue.

Yet if The Dark Knight Rises indulges the very worst of Nolan's tendencies as a filmmaker, it also expands upon his most appealing traits until even the flaws are subsumed into some kind of declarative auteur statement, even if Nolan's style is altogether too banal for such a thing to even be possible. Nolan's blockbusters all mistake scale for composition, but here he gets so grandiose he almost bridges the two. The opening sequence, of a mid-air kidnapping continues to stress the director's fetish for realism in ridiculously outsized stunts, yet for once Nolan embraces the sheer lunacy of what he shoots, setting the mood for his most successful fusion of huge spectacle and vague plausibility yet. Greatly aiding matters is a level of action coherence heretofore unseen in Nolan's work. At last, his close-combat filming achieves a genuine visceral effect because the director holds back just enough to let the audience follow along. Nowhere is this better seen than in the first brawl between Batman and Bane, which highlights Bane's strength and speed against the lumbering Bat and adds a level of savagery to each sick thud the villain lands on a formidable icon who suddenly looks so very weak.

Elsewhere, Nolan brings back some of the loopier visual stylings of Batman Begins, especially in a tossed-off mini-sequence of Batman and Catwoman prowling the sewers looking for Bane, Catwoman distracting patrolling thugs as Batman pulls some Bat-tastic moves like upside-down grabs and a zig-zagging run in the dark illuminated only by the flash of gunfire. Late in the film, Wayne spends some time in a literal pit of a prison, its Escherian properties clearly dear to the director's heart. Nolan also has a ball when Bane's plan comes to fruition, plunging Gotham into a social uprising that bypasses Occupy for the French Revolution and makes for some of the best images of the entire trilogy. Indeed, nothing else in the film is so evocative, striking, and wonderfully insane as Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) sitting atop a massive dais passing kangaroo court judgments on Gotham's wealthy. For a series that has only gotten more literal-minded as it has worn on, such brief breaths of ingenuity hint that somewhere in that fussy brain of his, Nolan actually has an imagination.

These rare moments of respite become all the more treasured as the plot wears on and spirals out of control. Yet the ramshackle sequencing of the lugubrious plot is, to this writer anyway, inexplicably charming. Writing in total CYA mode, the Nolan brothers attempt to satisfactorily map out not only the various character and narrative arcs of the film but the muddled politics of this saga. The Dark Knight Rises offers evidence to support any reading. Batman, the billionaire hero, intervenes in a populist revolt and sides openly with the police in a street war. However, Bane's manipulation of Gotham's underclass stands in sharp, vile contrast to whatever disillusionment the people might feel. The most admirable, if wildly inconsistent, quality of Nolan's Batman films has been that of consequence, a rare trait of most comic book movies, with their weightless CGI and flippant bombast. Nolan does not come down on any one side of his many contradictory messages but demonstrates how actions ripple out and mingle until blame and righteousness matter less than simply solving a problem that has gotten out of hand. True, Nolan makes this point less through thoughtful examination than simply throwing everything he can at the screen, but he nevertheless ends up breaking down the simplistic good vs. evil conflict of so many superhero movies, including Nolan's last two.

Nolan's best diversions, however, involve the space he gives to his actors. Bale's entropic performance as Wayne/Batman has always been the least dynamic element of these films, but his withered, defeated entrance in this film (and in the aftermath of a fight with Bane) clarifies that iciness as the mark of a man who has been broken since childhood. His literal shattering in this film is not a horrifying twist; it is the inevitable, physical bookend to the emotional devastation from which a little boy never recovered. Oldman, Freeman and Caine make it look almost too easy, especially Caine, who milks a part specifically written to wring tears from the audience for all it's worth. But once again, it's the antagonists who command attention. Hardy adopts a high, almost cheery voice that conflicts with his thick frame and obscured face. Before he sets in motion his attack on Gotham, he jovially praises a boy's on-the-nose singing of the National Anthem to himself ("What a lovely, lovely voice!") And though his eyes generally look well beyond everyone into a thousand-yard stare of simmering fury and cold thought, Bane reacts to the first sighting of the Batwing with a look of curiosity, nonverbally asking, "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

If the movie belongs to anyone, though, it's Hathaway, who steals the screen along with Martha Wayne's old pearls with a half-turn and backflip out of Wayne Manor and never gives it back. Hathaway plays up Selina's weaponized sensuality and captures the character's irritation with her own morality, so used to self-preservation that she cannot ever do the right thing without a hint of exasperation. Plus, in the morass of the film's politicking pile-on, only Hathaway manages to fully exhibit a clear social perspective as well as a change of heart communicated in a few glances of disgust and contemplation. Hathaway already proved her talent for portraying ambiguous, unpredictable characters in 2008's Rachel Getting Married, but it is no less thrilling to see her show it in a genre (and for a director) that typically has no clue what to do with women.

Unfortunately, The Dark Knight Rises does not address some of the fundamental flaws of this trilogy. For a director who loves intricate mastermind schemes, Nolan does not particularly stress Batman's intelligence and ability to outsmart his foes, choosing rather to highlight Batman's ability to have 280 pounds of muscle and punch people in the solar plexus. And how sad it is that the one example of long-term planning on Wayne's part—the sonar grid of The Dark Knight—is far and away the low point of the entire saga, a sloppily executed and morally dubious setpiece.  Nolan also lets his plots get away from him, and it is not to his credit that The Dark Knight feels like two films crammed into one and The Dark Knight Rises could be its own trilogy. Finally, this closing chapter builds off Inception to suggest that for all Nolan's supposed ambition as a mainstream filmmaker of ideas, his greatest desire is to helm a Bond picture. The Prestige, with its modest scale, perfectly interlocking mechanics and almost accidental profundity, remains his greatest film, indeed one of the greatest of the last decade. Yet The Dark Knight Rises is certainly the "most" Nolan film, a work that blends his talents and faults until distinguishing between the two becomes a pointless exercise. This near-three-hour film splits attention among a handful of major characters, all but two of whom, Wayne and Gordon, are brand new. It ties up every loose end it can even as it leaves major logic gaps unaddressed. It devotes a huge chunk of time to a political subtext that suggests any insight at all only through a barrage of surface-depth ideas. And frankly, this damn thing makes no sense on thematic or narrative grounds. And yet, on this thin foundation Nolan builds a behemoth, and what charm the film has lies in its ability to teeter incessantly without collapsing.

Premium Rush (David Koepp, 2012)

David Koepp's Premium Rush feels like the first posthumous tribute to the work of the late Tony Scott. Unintentional, of course, but beneficial for those of us already missing the British director and wondering if anyone could match, much less exceed, his approach to action filmmaking. Koepp certainly cannot top Scott, but for a time, but it appears he picked up a thing or two while doing uncredited rewrites for The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Stylistically, Premium Rush feels like a throwback to Enemy of the State-era Scott, with its constant zooms in and out of satellite views of New York City as a GPS plots courses for the bike messengers on whom the film focuses. Narratively, though, it calls to mind Scott's fondness for regularly making epic the banal occupations of working-class stiffs. In bike couriers, Koepp nearly manages to surpass Scott in choice of subject. Not only are these men and women paid wretchedly for grueling work, they may be the most hated group in New York City, foe to pedestrian and driver alike.

Premium Rush gets off to a great start, following reckless, brake-less rider Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) barreling nonstop through traffic-gnarled streets as he casually gets into phoned arguments with his girlfriend Vanessa (Dania Ramirez, also playing a bike messenger), pissing matches with ripped colleague Manny (Wolé Parks) and trying to get more work (and cash) from his flippant boss (Aasif Mandvi). Like Scott, Koepp casually employs a multiracial cast not for the sake of commentary but merely as a reflection of an increasingly diverse America. And like Scott, Koepp wastes no time introducing the central, driving conflict, embodied in this case by Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon), a crooked cop who attempts to intercept a letter entrusted to Wilee by a friend (Jamie Chung) in order to pay off some gambling debts he owes to Chinese mobsters.

All of this is communicated in mere minutes, with breakneck speed but visual fluidity that keeps everything coherent even as digital cameras placed low to the ground race feverishly along with Wilee's split-second reroutes around traffic jams (including visualized what-if paths that all lead to crashes until Wilee finds the perfect escape). Time stamps on-screen show a realistic passage of time as these characters pedal miles and miles at a time, but Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt's editing gives the early material, and the first chase between Wilee, Monday and a hapless bike cop who gets drawn into Wilee's dangerous evasive maneuvers is among the most thrilling sequences of the summer.

Then, the pace completely collapses. Koepp starts throwing to flashbacks that begin at the dizzying, slick speed of the what came before that soon turn to plodding, wholly unnecessary backstory. Koepp, a screenwriter by trade, perhaps feels the need to overcompensate as a director, to show Monday getting into debts, or the reason Nima has to send such a valuable package to a mysterious person in Chinatown. But these are matters summed up in single sentences, and to devote minutes to Monday stumbling around Chinatown dropping stacks of cash on games or Nima's issues with authorities back in China saps the momentum from the film with whiplash-quickness. And even when the film gets the thread back, it moves into much duller midpoint sequence that makes Willee race a belligerently irritating Manny for the object now revealed to have deep personal consequences. Manny's incessant boasts and refusal to stop only serve to derail an already sidetracked movie.

At last, though, Koepp and co. live up to the early promise when Manny's insipid chase is cut short by police and Wilee gradually recruits every bike messenger in the city to help his cause. Gordon-Levitt and Shannon even get to share a deliciously ludicrous torture scene that lets Shannon jettison what little restraint he had shown to this point. Compared to the other talky moments of the film, this bit flows into the action rather than interrupting it. A chase out of police impound manages to top even the early promise of the first sequence. In such moments, Premium Rush displays a physicality and ingenuity so sorely missing from most of the bloated blockbusters released this year. A brief outtake during the credits of Gordon-Levitt proudly brandishing an open wound received from a sudden journey through a cab's rear windshield is worth more than all the CGI in the world.

The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)

Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a man so wracked by his carnal urges that he walks in convulsive, post-coital spasms and pants in ragged thrusts when he runs. At the conclusion of World War II, the seaman joins his comrades on a beach in the Pacific, wrestling, copulating with a woman made of sand and masturbating in a grimly violent celebration of peace. Back home, Freddie reports for a military psych evaluation, a farcical conveyor belt that feeds disturbed soldiers through a handful of perfunctory, still-new techniques in a one-size-fits-all approach to mental health. The results clearly show an unwell man, but director Paul Thomas Anderson cuts abruptly to the sailor working as a mall photographer, posing families into the waxy, beaming photos that define the period. Freddie effectively applies mortar to the bricks of postwar conformity, cementing it by turning every family into a false, overlit, eerie perfect image. Eventually, the irony gets to this loner, and he finds himself thrown into the wildernerss to drift.

Unable to fit in with even smaller communities, Freddie eventually stumbles his way to a yacht about to set sail, Anderson follows behind the man and racks the background in and out of focus, signifying Freddie's desire to be a part of the gathering on-board and his knowledge that he would not fit in. (In a less abstract way, it may also just be a visualization of Freddie's perpetual state of drunkenness, brought on by his homemade, paint-thinner-laced hooch.) Soon, Freddie wakes up in a cot on the ship, invited to meet the man in charge. The man (Philip Seymour Hoffman), does not give his name. Instead, he quizzes Freddie with a tone of disappointment, like a father whose boy has come home late. This puts Freddie at ease as much as it fills him with an embarrassment he does not typically feel as a freely fighting and fucking scoundrel. The man invites Freddie to remain with him, and the spastic, vulgar seaman soon finds himself the right-hand man in a burgeoning cult movement.

Hoffman brilliantly lays out the appeal of such a man. His booming, clear oratory stands in sharp contrast to Phoenix's jagged mumbling, and his paternalistic warmth gives outcasts all the love they never received from their actual authority figures. To divert attention from his tyrannical thought control, Hoffman's Master even lets his believers feel as if they get to contribute to the truth that he sells: when Freddie confides that he does not know what the Master is saying at one point, Hoffman responds that neither does he, which is why he needs everyone's help. But this man also relies on the unbending loyalty of others, and he can barely start a debate with a skeptic before his logical fallacies leap into full aggression. At the halfway mark, his name, Lancaster Dodd, is finally spoken by a police officer serving a warrant. The mere mention of his name momentarily breaks the spell of his omniscience as much as the fact he is being charged with a crime.

The extent of Dodd's thirst for control reveals itself in his "processing" of Freddie, a method of interrogation that crosses a psychiatric evaluation with a confessional. The processing starts benignly, with Dodd principally making Freddie repeat yes/no answers to innocuous questions with a game Freddie amiably playing along. After Freddie asks him to continue, Dodd does, and the close-ups that merely relayed a shot/reverse-shot relationship between the two men suddenly pulls back to show Dodd's head in the foreground looking at Freddie as he asks the man much more personal, penetrative questions. The shot holds on Freddie for extended lengths of time as it watches him, per Dodd's instruction, not blink as he answers. Dodd uses the exercise to strip away Freddie's boundaries, but it unmasks the Master as well, laying out plainly the manner in which he sucks in those who cannot conform to society into a life that will demand even more conformity. This agonizing scene shatters for Freddie but also cleanses him in a way the impersonal psychiatric care did not, making him feel as if he finally found a place where he belongs even as he is visibly enslaved by this new master.

From such patches of gripping material, Anderson makes...what? Rather than develop these teasingly strands of setup into a focused narrative or theme, The Master stalls out. Phoenix, so captivating as an outwardly imploding animal, does not turn his performance inward so much as he completely shuts down for periods at a time until he unleashes violence as his old self tugs at the community he feels around others for the first time. Anderson simply repeats a basic formula—Freddie acts as Dodd's most fiercely loyal follower, threatens to apostatize out of his inability to behave, then slowly comes back in with renewed faith—to the point of tedium. The metronomic wood block of Johnny Greenwood's score comes to represent the flow of the film: initially off-beat and jarring, but ultimately repetitive and directionless. Dodd gives this method purpose, the unmaking and rebuilding of converts, but he has the advantage of not ultimately caring about the meaning of his words, while Anderson seems to search for a point to all this at every turn.

The Master is a film of close-ups and almost relentlessly centered compositions, set within postwar interiors that lack the satirical claustrophobia of the decade's melodramas. Nicholas Ray, for example, used CinemaScope more for his domestic dramas than his expansive, exterior pictures, using the extra width to probe the confined bourgeois space around the actors, finding emotional voids in consumerist milieux that only drove those who resided in them to dizzying heights of uncontrollable feelings. Nothing exists in Anderson's close-ups outside the faces, initially captivating (especially Phoenix's, with one side slack and the whole of it criss-crossed with lines and a cleft-lip scar), but eventually powerless through overuse. The detail of the shots is undeniably gorgeous, but compositionally, this is easily Anderson's weakest outing, as well as that of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., who previously brought formal dazzle to Francis Ford Coppola's digital comeback films.

But perhaps the static, centered frames and languid pace of the film serve to reflect the nature of Dodd's approach, seemingly ordered by logic and rationality but, as Dodd's son would say of his father, "making it up as he goes along." The Master itself operates like a cult, introducing tantalizing tidbits of information presented in an aesthetically pleasing manner. When it comes time to link these pieces together under a cogent, unified philosophy, however, the film leaves only blanks. All the better to lure in the sufficiently intrigued to fill in those blanks with whatever they please, strengthening their bond to the material by making them think what they brought to the movie was there all along. A scene in The Master actually illustrates this: Dodd, in a literal song-and-dance moment to hook his assembled followers, soft shoes around a parlor singing to his guests before the camera cuts to Freddie watching. Cut back to Dodd, and now all the women in the room are stark naked, standing around the Master in a carnal, if still banal, paradise. Constantly cautioned away from his base, "animal" instincts by Dodd, Freddie nevertheless sees the perfect fulfillment of the Cause as Dodd, merry and warm, speaking to a whole room and yet just to him, and a bevy of female flesh to sate his hunger. Similarly, the directionless drift of Anderson's film can be ignored and indeed even repurposed to suit the needs and observations of any viewer who chooses to project into its void.

The muddled themes of the film recall There Will Be Blood in the manner in which it presents two main interpretations: one social, one intimate, both half-baked. The Master both is an isn't a critique of cults and the manner in which this country and its social orchestration facilitates such organizations. Hoffman's subtle snake-oil salesman touches (the constant greasing of his hair into place, his close relationship with Freddie, who effectively makes his own snake oil) hint at a nuanced skewering of such a figure, but Anderson focuses on Dodd's fickle servant so completely that Freddie's constant temptation away from the Cause undermines its foundation as an infectious, consuming idea for social outliers, making the fanatical loyalty of Amy Adams' Mrs. Dodd and Laura Dern's devotee seem airdropped into the film for effect rather than a developed. As a much simpler story of a father-son/master-pupil/Platonic lover relationship, The Master treads such predictable ground that that the "insert profundity here" gulfs it leaves amid Phoenix and Hoffman's most focused scenes serve only to destroy the film's already shaky momentum.

Anderson's work constantly tugs between the juvenile and frenetic and the mature and analytical. The Master makes this split the foundation of its narrative. But by separating out these elements so fully into each lead, the director leaves a hole between these attitudes that only widens and widens as the film wears on. Not until the end do the two fully join for a tossed-off but wickedly brilliant dénouement in which Freddie uses Dodd's processing method as foreplay, debasing the mind control exercise even as he inadvertently reveals that is all the process ever was from the start. It is the most devilishly clever moment of the entire film and, placed of the film, almost gives the impression that The Master was building it all along. But then, it's easy to write to a punchline, less so to craft the setup to get to it.

Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2012)

Ron Fricke's latest tone poem, Samsara, takes its name from a concept shared among Indian religions pertaining to life, death and rebirth. Its root in the constant change of the world fits the film's structure, which trades the focus of Fricke's own Baraka or Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy for a more free-associative collage of world imagery. Opening on jarring close-ups of a ritualistic dance performed by three little people, Samsara only gets more bewildering when it moves from this show to the eruption of a volcano and the cooling of lava.

Yet the titular idea also connotes a cyclical movement of life and rebirth, giving order to its vastness, and Samsara soon reveals its unifying theme to be that of various ordering properties. That opening dance, so bewildering as an introduction, soon becomes part of a larger tapestry of ritual, organization and routine of humanity in nature and urban development alike, and even those of the Earth. This explain the footage of the exploding magma and solidifying lava flows, a miniature cycle of destruction and reformation the planet has seen across hundreds of millions of years. Fricke even includes a near-bookend of Tibetan monks playing horns to wake their village, a sort of invocation and benediction that reflects the cycle of the film's loose subject matter and the organizing properties at work on all cultures.

Films like Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka tended to frame their key juxtapositions in the imbalance between "primitive life," with its proximity to (and, therefore, its respect for) nature and urban soullessness, in which people severed their bonds to the Earth but constructed giant, false jungles in a subconscious attempt to remake that which they had lost. Why, as seen in this film, man now makes its own mountains and islands, creating nature for our convenience. Samsara still compares the tribal to the globalized, but rather that show them as diametrically opposed, it positions them as like creatures differentiated only by scale. Rituals for the former may have more individualistic, artful expression than the time-lapsed gridlock and ultra-processed artificiality of the latter, but they serve the same purpose. Besides, the world now has modernized to such an extent that even those in the remote regions of the world have not escaped aspects of change. Near the end of the film, several Africans are seen holding AK-47s incongruous to their tribal tattoos and lip disks until one considers how long such a sight has been (sadly) all too common on the continent and how new weaponry merely marks a new era in centuries-old conflict, not the breaking of long-standing peace.

True, Samsara does have its montages filled with disturbing images of post-industrial life, in which seemingly everything can be manufactured on an assembly line. One shot of what appears to be the entrance to an amusement park gradually fills with hundreds of people all wearing the same color shirt. Just as I began to wonder why people waiting to get into a theme park would have the same outfit, I realized with horror that this was the infamous EUPA factory city in China, and the long line of like-clothed people were the workers. One shot inside a vast factory in this compound (with assembly lines making everything from George Foreman Grills to clothes irons) stretches into the vanishing point. More shocking is the similarity of the developed world's food preparation to this mechanized assembly. Some kind of combine harvester sucks up chickens and propels them into boxes, while pugs are strung up and gutted on a conveyer. Meat gets processed back in an enormous plant in China, and the journey ends at a Sam's Club in America. To drive the point home, Fricke throws in a time-lapse shot of fat Americans wolfing down Burger King in a food court, the sped-up factory work reflected in the unthinking rote of our consumption of cheap, fast crap.

Yet if Samsara suggests, as usual, that modernized humans have gone too far in claiming the Earth, it also implies that the Earth has always claimed us right back. Winds blow desert sands into an abandoned house; eventually it will be completely swallowed into a dune. A library hit by Katrina has its wares soaked and scattered, with a book spine reading "The Village That Allah Forgot" highlighted among the refuse. An Aborigine's hair is formed into dreadlocks by what appears to be red clay, making the human being seem like the dirt and dust all humans eventually become. The recurring image of a Buddhist sand mandala being carefully crafted and, ultimately, destroyed serves as an obvious visualization of this idea.

In such moments, Samsara may be more didactic than its forbears. Fricke's attempts at levity—Muslim women in niqabs standing beside a men's underwear ad with stripped-down models; a montage linking the manufacture of sex dolls, eerily emotionless androids and bikini-clad women with plastered-on smiles in a dance competition—leave as sour a taste in the mouth as that which he documents. At its best, Samsara signals a bold new direction for this film format, one that breaks from the already loose, evocative style to explore an interlinking network of ideas, to make these films about the breadth of life more resemble the chaotic but connected structure of it. At its worst, this is a ham-fisted number that trades a visually sumptuous lesson on one theme for a visually sumptuous lecture on many. Samsara's greatest strength is its occasional ambiguity, seen best in the level of beauty afforded to its silent appraisals of the developed world that always seemed so ugly in the film's predecessors. Having failed to beat this encroaching modernity back, Fricke finally gives it its due. Those aforementioned factory shots have a beauty to them as much as the hand-crafted temples and monuments that make for such breathtaking views elsewhere. Besides, those who made those astonishing wonders of the ancient world were even more hopelessly shackled to their task than the criminally underpaid workers in EUPA today.

Resident Evil: Retribution (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2012)

The Resident Evil movies have elevated the "It was all a dream" conceit into the longest-running Simpsons rake gag in cinema. In the series' expansion ever outward, continuity bends and narratives repeat themselves with minor variations that culminate in massive, butterfly effect divergencies. Afterlife, the previous film in the franchise and the first since the original film to feature Paul W.S. Anderson back behind the camera, gave this tendency an extra push by incorporating some of the distinct styles of the preceding three films. It brought back the claustrophobia of the first film's haunted-mansion setup, Apocalypse's street war congestion of bodies, and Extinction's sense of sheer scale and devastation (taken one further by going from a national backdrop to a global one). In folding back the series into this new film, Afterlife revealed itself to be more concerned with the self-reflexive, and video-game-like, aspects of this franchise than its straightforward upheavals with each film.

Nothing in Afterlife, however, can compare with Retribution. In a defiantly metacinematic opening, Retibution plays a sequence in reverse, instantly calling attention to the falsity of the image even before it zooms into into a black void filled with screens dotted with scenes of the Resident Evil films to this point. Alice (Milla Jovovich) pops up on one of the screens and directly addresses the audience, providing a recap of what has happened so far. I'm not one for lengthy exposition, but in a series filled with convoluted repetitions, incessant reversals and an increasing amount of clones, every little bit helps. Yet Alice's clarifications become amusingly irrelevant mere moments after she concludes her spiel, as Anderson soon plunges into constantly shifting levels of false reality that render moot an awareness of the story from sequence to sequence, much less across films.

Following the gorgeous opening and extended narration, Retribution dissonantly cuts to suburban placidity, with Alice waking to a comfortable life with a loving husband (Oded Fehr) and a deaf daughter, Becky (Aryana Engineer). All is well, until someone turns around and comes face to face with a zombie invasion. Alice frantically fights off the hordes of undead as long as possible, and just when all seems lost, she wakes up in a facility run by the Umbrella Corporation, Resident Evil's own Weyland-Yutani. Or is the Alice in suburbia the same one in a prison cell? This is bewildering stuff, made yet more confusing by the fact that this information, and a rescue attempt, is helpfully conveyed by Alice's overseeing nemesis, Umbrella head Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) and his operative Ada Wong (Li Bingbing). What's more, Wesker sends a team to extract Alice, featuring a character from a previous film thought dead. Other characters return as well, such as Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), only to find themselves the villain thanks to mind-control devices.

But to worry about the plot of Resident Evil: Retribution or even how the larger pieces fit together is to focus on the precisely wrong aspect of the film and the franchise as a whole under Anderson's guidance. The hows and whys of Alice's unlikely partnership with her enemy and how some characters can return from the dead (to say nothing of Michelle Rodriguez returning as two characters, a "good Rain" and "bad Rain") hardly matter compared to the grandiose funhouse in which Anderson places these characters. True to Umbrella's outsized corporate greed and unlimited resources, Retribution takes place in a remote underwater facility that houses several zones that recreate major cities as a means of running test scenarios for the companies biological weaponry. As such, Retribution operates less through a linear plot than a routine reset of setting and even character as some figures change between the vast rooms. Having started with a tonally faithful adaptation of one of the most cinematic video game franchises, Anderson at last pulls back so far that his camera captures the conventions of video games themselves. Every room is its own game level, with the only sense of linearity in the arrangement of baddies in increasing threat levels. Where the New York mock-up is in relation to the Tokyo recreation is not immediately apparent, but the presence of massive, weapon-brandishing creatures in the former and merely the average zombies in the latter suggests a path of progression toward the intended escape.

Yet for a series already marked by an overwhelming sense of nihilism, this casual use of false environments and a cloned populace to fill them finds new areas of troubling implication. Overseen by the organizing artificial intelligence program known as the Red Queen, this collection of simulation hubs serves only as a killing field for clones programmed with just enough intelligence to react to their own slaughter. In video-game terms, they are NPCs, there to interact superficially in an environment before inevitably dying. This grim revelation could be seen as a commentary on action film as well, in which the same basic character types are reused time after time, occasionally altered as a means of adding "originality" to stale formulas while still keep ing all the components basically unchanged. Anderson even adds a wisp of melancholy to this human recycling, regularly placing Alice with someone she recognizes but who, as a clone of that deceased person, does not remember her.

Elsewhere, there is something darkly amusing about the largest location hub of this testing floor, and the central passage that links all, is not the fake Moscow or New York or what have you but merely Suburbia. It makes a strange kind of sense: suburbia contains all the oblivious, bourgeois contentment that makes a military-industrial complex possible. Suburbia built Umbrella more than all the national governments represented by their replicated cultural centers, just as idyllic suburbia is where bored, inactive children pass their time playing the sort of hyperviolent, vicariously energetic video games that spawned this franchise.

Take away these clever, insidious ideas, however, and Resident Evil: Retribution still works as a crackerjack action film. If the plot is so deliberately convoluted that it makes next to no sense on a surface level, Anderson's direction has a fluidity and coherence to it that makes following along to the spectacle simple. Anderson's love affair with slow motion, not quite at Zack Snyder-levels of obnoxiousness but close on Afterlife, is not so much reduced here but refined, made less into an awkward crutch than a part of the visual rhythm of the shots. Those shots are also frequently breathtaking, such as the holding cell in which Alice awakens early in the film, a geometrically precise, seemingly endless tower that dwarfs the heroine as the director looks down from far away. Light and color within Umbrella's artificial microcosm is used with audacious control, whether in the rush of red lasers down a brilliant white corridor as the hall turns to darkness behind the wall of beams or in the literal blackening of the "sky" when a massive explosion tears through one of the zones. Perhaps the most self-consciously beautiful shot in the film shows zombies underwater floating up to their prey, the frenzied, feeding mass around the poor soul growing so dense it sinks into the pyramidical rise of fresh feeders below.

Nevertheless, even that moment, lit and framed like a demented but magnificent painting, does not distract from the crowd-pleasing momentum. If Anderson brings auteurist tics to his work, he never allows the immaculate framing and self-reflexive cheek to distract from the simple pleasures of putting together a good sequence. He dots Retribution with homages—Becky being drawn into a sort of Newt-Ripley relationship with Alice, a short burst of spaghetti western music played during the confrontation between Alice and Jill, perhaps a vague nod to Extinction's style but also a fun placement of an arid desert duel in the Siberian tundra—but these are all just one more part of the show, metatextual winks to those who spot them but also valid plot directions and stylistic flourishes in their own right. Retribution, like its predecessors, suffers from stodgy dialogue that locks the actors into wooden deliveries. As a simultaneously unpretentious and surprisingly analytical work of popular art, however, this is one of the most fascinating pictures of the year, and Anderson's finest work to date. Given the manner that these films always find new levels of spectacle, thematic darkness and gloriously shot sets, however, perhaps that designation should be reserved until Anderson finally puts a shotgun blast of quarters through the head of this franchise.

The Hole (Joe Dante, 2009/2012)

At last getting any form of non-festival domestic distribution, Joe Dante's family-oriented (family-friendly may be a stretch) horror film The Hole can be seen this weekend in 3D in Los Angeles and, surprise of surprises, metro Atlanta. A minor Dante work, it nevertheless shows off the director's capable horror chops with a reference-heavy but straightforward film about children forced to confront their darkest fears. But rather than chuck in every scare he can think of, Dante focuses on the fears based on traumas rather than the irrational phobias (barring that of the youngest child, too young to have internalized the real horrors of the world). The result is surprisingly moving, and part of the welcome handful of recent, all-ages horror movies that challenge kids, particularly the stop-motion work out of Laika. That The Hole, Coraline and ParaNorman have morals to them in many ways makes them some of the best mature horror films in years.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Robot &

Befitting a movie about a man losing his memory, Frank Langella's character in Robot & Frank is also named Frank to keep things simple. And true to the title, his companion is a robot, assigned to care for the old man. Afflicted with not-explicitly-stated-but-obviously Alzheimer's disease, Frank gradually reveals himself to be a retired thief, still capable of pulling off small grabs and even intricate break-ins but less able to remember what it is he wants to steal, or why it is an awful idea in the first place. Initially resistant to the idea of having his diet and activity controlled by an eerily pleasant, vaguely humanoid being, Frank soon relents when he learns that he can convince his caretaker to assist in burglaries.

That Frank's children (James Marsden and Liv Tyler) did not think to program the robot to prevent their once-incarcerated father from committing further crimes speak to how little they think the addled man can do, an unwitting admission of their perfunctory sense of filial duty. As Frank slowly bonds with his personal trainer and eventual accomplice, the robot becomes a complex repository for the emotionally (and, often, physically) absent parent to both vent his frustration with his kids and to vicariously attempt to make amends with them. So effortlessly does Langella invest these feelings into the emotional void of his "co-star" that Robot & Frank works best when its thin commitment to a narrative evaporates and lets the actor simply inhabit his odd role.

Only for a brief window, in fact, does the storyline truly mesh with the film's emotional content in such a way that neither is sacrificed for the sake of the other. This synergy owes to the emotional investment Langella gives Frank's lingering need to steal, possibly the only thing that makes him feel like himself as so much slips away to dementia. Occasionally, he confides in his robot pal how he wishes he could have planned jobs with his children, his inability to share his greatest happiness with his greatest loves a regret he cannot forget.

As for the "heists" themselves, however, these setpieces serve only to insert story into a film working just fine with its less propulsive, more insular conflicts. Whether the initial break-in of a library on the cusp of conversion into a social museum for hipsters or the spiteful plan to steal from the hipster-in-chief (Jeremy Strong) in charge of this travesty of art and knowledge, Frank's heists do not follow through on the sense of irony and buried affection in the preparation the old thief puts into these jobs. When training the robot to use its super-human mechanical abilities for crime or reinvigorating his own brain with a focus and determination it has not had in years, Frank injects deadpan humor and life into the picture. But the big shows lack the lackadaisical charm and subtle insights of the rehearsals, and they gradually lead to an overactive story that reaches for big emotions and shameless plays on Frank's mental condition (which affects short- and long-term memory at the convenience of the plot), culminating in a twist so offensive in its casual manipulation of mental illness that the already eroding goodwill I had for the film evaporated.

Nevertheless,Nevertheless, Robot & Frank often manages to be quirky without all the tedium that term now entails. Langella's mixture of irascibility and regret gives the moments with Frank's children extra bite, even tragedy. Tyler's Madison rails at the notion of her brother pawning off their dad on a robot, but she decries Hunter from the convenient safe zone of her constant world travel, something even Frank, who pushes his son away, directly notes. When she finally does shows up in a fit of Luddite self-righteousness, she interrupts her father's scheme and prompts Frank to go to darkly amusing lengths to alienate his daughter and get his partner in crime reactivated. Marsden, on the other hand, gets to share some of Langella's pathos as the son who, despite rarely seeing his father as a child, tries his hardest to care for his dad, sacrificing his free time to drive hours at a time to tend to a man who does not want his help. And true to Frank's complex, mordantly funny/painful views of his children, the best moment of the busy climax concerns the old man playing on his son's strained affections one last time, using Hunter's desire for reciprocated acceptance to make the poor man an accessory. That Langella can play this almost sadistic exploitation for laughs without diving into caustic irony is a testament to the easy humanity and puckishness of his performance. That the film relegates this moment to but one minor moment within a distracting, clumsy, caper story is a testament to its wasted potential.

Dragon Eyes

If there is any justice in this world, John Hyams will not have to suffer in his direct-to-DVD or VOD-first-release purgatory for much longer. Dragon Eyes, which creeped onto VOD without fanfare earlier this year, lacks the same physical and emotional grace as Hyams' last film, Universal Soldier: Regeneration. Made in-between that film and its upcoming sequel (due on VOD in October, though with a theatrical release of some sort(!) planned later), Dragon Eyes feels altogether rougher around the edges, with more brutish direction, stodgier writing and a few flashy visual gimmicks that Hyams himself says were not his doing.

Even so, Hyams' filler is a high-concept piece, a loose retelling of Yojimbo set among American gangs that trades samurai skills for MMA combat. MMA fighter Cung Le stars as Hong, a mysterious individual who shows up in the gang-run town of St. Jude and promptly begins kicking everyone's ass until he manages to anger even the corrupt police chief who controls everything, Mr. V (Peter Weller). Flashbacks to Hong's training in prison under mentor Tiano (Jean-Claude Van Damme) break up Hong's rampages with martial arts philosophizing, and a few extra kicks for good measure. Other flashbacks providing Hong's backstory manage to be even more clichéd, mostly silent interludes that gradually piece together what sent the man to jail in the first place.

So, yes, nothing in Dragon Eyes has the unexpected gravitas of Dolph Lundgren's grasping regret in Regeneration, but as a straight-ahead action movie, Hyams is still a director to watch. He loves his big, open spaces, making even Tiano's cell back in the prison large enough to almost seem cozy. The confrontation that closes the second act occurs in a darkened warehouse that seems to stretch into inky blackness so deep the area almost recalls the matte-painted infinity of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Over time, even the excessive color grading—which washes sunny exteriors in spray-tanned bronze and Mr. V's seedy deals in avaricious green—come to fit their settings.

But the real draw is, of course, the action, which Hyams continues to film in such a way as to elicit thoughts of the genre's 1980s heyday even as he puts his own imprint on the genre. Hyams' sequences do not lack the rapid-fire editing and hand-held, close-up framing that defines so much action filmmaking today. He merely uses the technique as punctuation, not the whole damn sentence. This allows Hyams to use "chaos cinema" flourishes as they are intended, to provide real-time flow between thought, action and result that can actually make a fight more fluid, not less. One slick movie—Hong disarming one thug, ejecting the clip and throwing the empty gun at another—is performed so swiftly that its comic principles take an additional second to catch up to what happened, yet the smaller movements performed in his maneuver are clearly shot enough to give the joke the clarity it needs to be funny at all. On the flip side, Hyams also includes an extended take Steadicam sequence that serves as a reminder of his capable skills as a choreographer.

Dragon Eyes betrays its DTV financing and lowered expectations in a way that Regeneration never did, yet such phenomenal action staging continues to stretch the boundaries and assumed worth of that format. In fact, though this is the lesser film of Hyams' last two efforts, it may be better at demonstrating the kind of spontaneity and low-scale creative freedom DTV, VOD and the like could afford genre filmmakers who don't need $100 million worth of effects to cover up their mediocrity. Nevertheless, it is hard not to imagine what Hyams might do if he actually got his hands on a $50 million budget, rather than making movies that look like he received $50 million instead of 10-15.

Dredd

Of the many pleasures to be found in Dredd, Pete Travis' lean, nasty bottle episode of a film, perhaps the greatest is the lack of cumbersome setup that so dreadfully weighs down many comic book films. The only backstory for the protagonist and the world he inhabits is delivered by the main character himself in a terse voiceover that condense the hour of setting and character establishment that has become de rigeur for franchise starters to a mere minute or two. The Earth is an irradiated wasteland, and the only inhabitable area in the remnants of the United States is a vast, concrete-walled region known as Mega City One. Keeping the 800 million boxed-in residents of this massive slum in order are a group of peacekeepers known as Judges, authorized to pass and execute judgment on the street. Oh, and one of these Judges is named Dredd.

And that's all she wrote. Cut from this sparest of setups straight into a fracas, Dredd (Karl Urban) chasing down a car full of drug addicts as they fire wildly at the Judge on their trail. Set aside but a few more minutes after this swift action sequence to lay out the film's plot: assigned to take a rookie made psychic by radiation exposure (Olivia Thirlby) on patrol, the two head to a towering slum block to investigate a gang message killing. What they find is a 200-story building entirely under the control of a savage gang leader, Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) looking to protect her manufacturing plant for Mega City One's hottest new drug, Slo-Mo. Literally locking the building down, Ma-Ma forces Dredd and Anderson to fight scores of bad guys tasked with collecting their heads.

The resulting film recalls The Raid, another film about elite police forced to clear a hostile complex floor by floor in the hunt for a drug manufacturer. But where The Raid took its pared down premise with distracting severity even as it treated its latent fascism as the elephant in the room, Dredd confronts its endorsement for desperate measures in desperate times with a brutish wit and a clear pleasure in its gory delights. Urban channels laconic, grizzled stars of action films past, the top of his face always hidden behind Dredd's impenetrably tinted helmet visor and his chin always locked into place as it occasionally lets words his through the cracks in his clinched teeth. Urban captures the perverse Platonic ideal Dredd represents as a lawman: he has killed so many in the name of martial justice that he has attained the kind of detached emotional response that is, in theory, the embodiment of what justice should stand for. When the Peach Trees complex thugs fire upon him, he expresses no rage or fear, instead noting simply that they have just committed an offense punishable by death and that he shall now carry out judgment.

Also worth noting is Travis and writer Alex Garland's superb grasp of pacing and flow. A film of nothing but action can be as tedious as an action overburdened with plot. But Garland's script, as punchy and direct as Dredd's occasional dialogue, does not mask the absurdity of its simplicity nor the Manichaean properties of this world. Even when corruption is shown, this serves less to complicate the film's moral absolutism than to reinforce it: if a Judge breaks the law, that Judge will be treated as any other criminal. This deliberately undercuts the impact any twist might have, ensuring that all focus remains on the staging of the action, which is kept fresh enough that it avoids becoming repetitive and dull from desensitization.

But it is Travis' direction that makes the biggest impression in Dredd. The framing and editing of the action occasionally disorients, but Travis makes intelligent of the confining borders of corridors and the open ring of air in the center of each floor. Spatial clarity across a sequence generally holds up even when it disappears a few shots at a time in a hail of tracer rounds. The real achievement, however, concerns Travis' use of 3D to visualize the effects of the Slo-Mo drug, which also passes on its namesake to these shots. Filmed on Phantom Flex high-speed cameras, these sequences slow time to such a crawl that drops of water separate and coagulate in midair, and smoke does not so much get exhaled from the lungs as crawl from mouths like a butterfly worming its way from a cocoon. Travis compensates for 3D's dimming effect by cranking up the brightness for these segments, an ingenious solution that factors in the technology's weakness even as it adds another layer of hallucination to the filmed effect of the drug. Coming hot off the heels of Paul W.S. Anderson's sumptuous use of bright color schemes and slow-motion in Resident Evil: Retribution to get the most dimension out of his three dimensions, Travis furthers the argument that clever B-movie makers continue to use the format in a more inventive, pleasing way than the self-serious filmmakers who look upon 3D as the next major artistic leap.

Dredd also continues the trend of 2012's mid-budget blockbusters vastly outclassing the tentpole features in terms of filmmaking panache and focus of aesthetic and thematic ideas, and all with shorter running times. Hell, Anderson's psychic interrogation with a particularly uncooperative and nasty piece of work, one that turns into a frenetic and surreal battle of mental wills inside the perp's mind, handles the fractured, carnal nightmare of a mental invasion with more visual probability than anything in Inception. Witty but never winking, Dredd is so refreshingly un-postmodern that it may well become one of the few films of recent years to earn a legitimate cult following without being specifically designed to be a cult film. Who knew a work of reactionary fascism would be such a breath of fresh air?