By Jon Kissel

The central metaphor at the heart of The Imitation Game is so perfect and tidy that it beggars belief.  Socially inept, on-the-spectrum Alan Turing is great at cryptography because his whole life has been about decoding simple human behavior.  Lacking in the emotional intelligence to decipher a smile or a shrug, he's instead blessed with the raw brainpower necessary to be one of the most important components of the Allied victory over the Nazis.  The additional irony of a man dedicated to breaking secrets keeping several of his own makes Morten Tyldum's film a tidy, easily digestible package.  The biopic form compressed into a diamond, The Imitation Game keeps things as straightforward as possible, eliding the man who was for the man most accessible.

The Imitation Game covers three sections of Alan Turing's (Benedict Cumberbatch) life.  The earliest involves Turing (played as a teenager by Alex Lawther) enduring an isolated life at a posh boarding school.  The latest involves his post-war run-ins with the law and the British government after being exposed as a homosexual.  The middle section, featuring his work at Bletchley Park during WWII, makes up the bulk of the film, though Tyldum hops frequently between periods.  At Bletchley Park, Turing is hired to lead the attempt to decipher the Nazi Enigma code, a code that, in addition to its complexity, resets itself every midnight, making the prior day's work useless.  Turing is uninterested in the work by hand that consumes his comrades' time, and instead, sets to build a machine that can do many different combinations at a much faster rate.  His superiors, represented by Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) are skeptical of his methods and frustrated by Turing's disrespect for the chain of command, pestering him to get results or be kicked off the project.

Aiding Turing are the debonair Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode) and the brilliant Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), among others.  Alexander is baffled that this spaz has supplanted him as project lead, though he's eventually won over by Turing's plainly superior skills.  Clarke is the closest thing to a romantic foil for wartime Turing, as he enters into a relationship with her, less out of an emotional impulse and more out of the practical need for her to remain on the project.  His actual romantic career is left to the school days, a sensitive teen romance subplot that somehow manages to be the most affecting part of the film.  The shaky resolve and tentative hopefulness an excellently-cast Lawther demonstrates is the equal of anything Cumberbatch is doing as the adult Turing.

The wartime scenes that make up the bulk of the film are also the most formulaic.  Substitute 'breaking Enigma' with any other achievement, from 'winning championship' to 'inventing something,' and the same beats are there.  Initial scoffing at a new way of doing things, getting to know the team, ingratiating the team to the lead, possible romantic subplot, breakthrough, celebration, victory snatched from team, ultimate victory awarded.  What saves it from being interminable are the performances.  Cumberbatch is predictably strong in the lead, as he's in control of every tic and twitch at every moment.  Goode and Knightley play off of him well, with Alexander's back-slapping throwing Turing off his game and a perceptive Clarke as the only person Turing can be trust.  The realities of spycraft at this high a level also add a new wrinkle to the formula.  The catharsis of ultimately breaking Enigma once and for all is immediately undercut, as the new problem becomes deciding exactly how many attacks can be stopped without tipping the Nazis.  That calculus is the most interesting thing in the film, though it's short-changed with two scenes and a montage.  Someone will eventually make a movie about Robert McNamara and Curtis LeMay, and Imitation Game is a nice appetizer to that future film.

While the subpar script somehow managed to win an Oscar despite its banal tautologies and fixed beats, the man at the center of The Imitation Game makes it worthy of existence.  A secular martyr whose name isn't known by enough people, Turing at least gets a performance worthy of him.  The post-war period of the film, in which Turing is arrested and chemically castrated, deserved more time, especially his supposed suicide that may very well have been an accident, though the film openly declares it a suicide in a postscript.  That is the man I most wanted to know about, the one that (possibly) decided to withhold his genius from society if society would deign to treat him so poorly.  In lieu of the fiery-to-the-end Turing, Tyldum depicts him as a neutered, blabbering hermit.  That desire to make Turing a victim is disappointing, but just one more form of dramatic license that The Imitation Game liberally indulges in.  C+

By Jon Kissel

A seamless mix of Noah Baumbach and Adam McKay, The Overnight grapples with middle-class white people and their mid-life crises while also fundamentally understanding what small-potatoes those problems are.  Writer/director Patrick Brice expertly weaves in the characters' internal struggles amongst a raucously funny house party.  Going forward, the tone of his film may be the standard by which other films like it are judged, whether they're trying for comedy or not.  It'll be hard to take the insecurities of the comfortable and privileged seriously after seeing them so sent up here.

Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling) are newly transplanted to LA, and have yet to make any new friends.  While watching their young son at the playground, the boy begins playing with another boy, and dad Kurt (Jason Schwartzman) comes over to introduce himself.  Sympathetic to their loneliness and aggressively hospitable, Kurt insists that Alex and Emily come over for dinner and drinks.  They agree, and spend a delightful evening with Kurt and his wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche).  After the boys go to sleep, out comes more alcohol and weed, and the party moves from the living room to the pool to the art studio to a massage parlor, before culminating in the bedroom.

Alex and Emily are the viewers' eyes and ears into Kurt and Charlotte's strange world, and Brice parcels out information about them one little bit at a time.  They seem like a cosmopolitan, if eccentric, couple at first, and their large home implies they must be successful.  An interlude spent putting the kids to bed gives the impression that Kurt is some kind of magician, as he's able to create a soundscape and atmosphere that immediately knocks them out.  Thoroughly impressed with their home and their family, other eccentricities emerge to put a dent in Alex's and Emily's high opinion, most of which are too strange to spoil.  That Brice keeps the viewer guessing up until the final moments spent at Kurt and Charlotte's home is immensely impressive, keeping the Overnight surprising much longer it needed to be. 

In the Baumbach/Duplass/Shelton/insert-mumblecore-director fashion, The Overnight forces each character to confront something inside of themselves.  Alex and Emily have a frustrated sex life, compounded by their son's no-knocking habit.  He is also self-conscious about his masculinity, as the couple moved to LA for Emily's job, and he's stuck as the house husband for the time being.  This has been a constant source of stress for both, and further developments imply that it's not purely a recent thing.  Kurt and Charlotte are both revealed to be less put together than the image they put out into the world, and their marriage is based on a fundamental compromise.  That Brice is able to effectively diagnose all these characters in an organic way, while also keeping the tone of the film reliably absurd and undercutting every serious moment, is a genre-exploding mixture.

The actors are mostly doing an iteration of a previous role, which doesn't diminish the comic timing on display.  Each actor is able to elevate already-funny lines with their particular inflections and emphases.  Scott is channeling his Parks and Recreation character, a man capable of great joy but plagued by shame.  That combination of innate personal discomfort and willingness to put it away is right in Scott's wheel-house.  Schilling is a more grounded version of her character in Orange is the New Black, an observer who has to voice her opinion on everything happening around her.  As the night's longest holdout, she steals the film with reaction shot after reaction shot.  Schwartzman isn't reaching very far for the role of worldly, effete hipster, but very few people can do that as well as he can.  As this was my first impression of Godreche's work, she seemed slightly clenched at first, which I chalked up to a less-than performance, but the film eventually gives her a reason for it.  As the character with the least opportunities for laughs, she made the least impression, but to come in last among these competitors is no defeat.

The Overnight is a wild success, down its winking poster.  Unpredictable and hilarious, Brice is a man to watch, as this could've easily emerged from the mind of Judd Apatow.  Brice actually has a leg up, as Apatow would've added an unnecessary half hour.  B+

By Phil Crone


Each year tends to produce one critical darling in the horror genre.  2012 brought us Cabin in the Woods, then we got The Conjuring in 2013, The Babadook in 2014, and it’s looking like the 2015 edition will be It Follows, the sophomore effort from wirter/director David Robert Mitchell.  It Follows has a concept as good if not better than such recent horror movies as this and is very well executed, but a handful of imperfections keep It Follows just outside the pantheon of great horror movies.

It Follows has an A+ setup.  Early on we are introduced to Jay, who is pretty much a hot 19 year old and that’s about all you need to know early on.  Early on, she is essentially raped by her new boyfriend Hugh.  It seems pretty pointless given that she was a more than willing partner, but regardless, she is knocked out, then she wakes up tied to a wheelchair in an old parking garage.  Hugh is there, standing guard, and when Jay comes to, Hugh profusely apologizes for what he “had to” do.  He explains that “It” is going to come for her now, and she has to avoid it, because if it kills her, it will come back for Hugh.  Still bound, Hugh wheels Jay to the ledge of building they are in to see a girl slowly walking toward the building and up the floor they are on.  Hugh & Jay escape, Hugh explaining that she needed to see It to believe it.  Furthermore, we learn It is a shapeshifter, being able to take the form of any person It chooses, and even though It is slow, It is also relentless, chasing Jay wherever she goes.  Oh, and it’s smart.

A sexually transmitted shapeshifting clever shambling monster?!  I’m in!  I felt like Mitchell drew quite a bit of inspiration from Slender Man, both of which are great concepts for a low-budget horror movie b/c your monster is just a person acting creepy.  No worries on reliance of cheesy CGI, a minor issue The Babadook had.  A couple of the people get some makeup as well, but for the most part, the scares come from the dread of the unknown moreso than your typical over-CGI’ed jump scare that permeates the genre.

All in all, it makes for a jarring viewing experience, one which is very well-directed by Mitchell.  Several wide shots are used, and while you should be focusing on the actors, a part of you can’t help staring into the background, just looking for some random person to slooooowly creep up on our protagonists.  There are also a couple well done long takes used to heighten the tension throughout.  It absolutely passes the “creeped out” test for me.  No audible screams, but Mitchell does a great job unnerving the audience.  Beyond the cinematography though, I felt like the monster could have been used better.  There are for sure some great uses that I won’t spoil, but there’s definitely some missed opportunities.

Now, personal taste does not detract from a movie much, but It Follows flirts with committing a cardinal sin in the horror genre: poor establishment of the rules of the world.  Several actors play the monster since it is a shapeshifter, but each uses very different “shambling speeds,” which made it difficult to understand the level of danger at times.  The monster is left a mystery for the most part and is given a handful of opportunities to go for the kill that it does not take.  One scene in particular is very logic-breaking in this regard – I audibly scoffed when I saw it, and there wasn’t enough of a plot device to warrant the event.  Does it just like the hunt?  I’m not sure, but I think you could safely infer that.  

There is certainly some deeper analysis that could go on here, but not nearly as deep as something like The Babadook or Cabin in the Woods.  It Follows is a solid entry into the horror genre and is definitely worth a watch if you like a good horror movie.

Grade: B+

By Jon Kissel

Gus Van Sant's merges the femme fatale with the mockumentary style to great success in the darkly funny To Die For.  Having seen two thirds of his Death Trilogy and the equally languid Paranoid Park, this tightly wound, expertly paced crime story was not what I expected from the artistic-verging-on-pretentious indie director of the mid-2000's.  Early Van Sant is a surprising amount of fun, though Drugstore Cowboy probably begs to differ.

To Die For begins with its anti-heroine Suzanne Stone-Maretto (Nicole Kidman, rarely better) in the center of a murder trial that has ballooned into a tabloid circus.  She is the first to directly address the camera in confessional-style interviews, but the other principles will all get their turn.  Van Sant flits back and forth between the aftermath of the crime and the media interest it generates, and the events leading up to it. 

Several years earlier, Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon) first lays eyes on Suzanne while he's playing drums for his band at his family's bar.  Everyone else is watching the band, dancing and cheering, except for her.  Her disinterest, along with her beauty and small-town glamour, draws Larry to her, and they strike up a relationship that progresses into marriage.  Now married to a man with a steady job who's willing to completely change himself for her, Suzanne can enact the next phase of her plan.  Her dream is, and always has been, to be a national news anchor, not so much out of a passion for current events but a desire to be looked at and watched and admired.  She plans her honeymoon to coincide with a conference for anchormen, where she's promptly hit on by a drunk George Segal.  To her credit, that is not how she plans to ascend to the top.  If anyone's going to be doing the manipulating or exploiting, it's going to be her.  That assertion comes in handy when, to her disgust, Larry begins to pressure her about starting a family.  Utterly uninterested, Suzanne instead spends an increasing amount of time filming a broad human interest piece about teenagers, which puts her in contact with the dull Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), the destructive Russell (Casey Affleck), and the self-loathing Lydia (Allison Folland).  As the teen trio fall increasingly under Suzanne's sway, she sees a way out of the mere presumption of child-bearing, and the two halves of the film meet in the middle.

Kidman is fantastic in the lead.  Suzanne Stone-Moretto is one of her better performances, and possibly the one that marked her as a seriously-talented actress.  She plays the character as a mediocre actress, able to fool most but not everyone.  The kind of attention hog that will pass off a catered meal as one she prepared personally, Suzanne has a picture in her head of what her life will be and she will live it no matter what.  Van Sant never shows her with a hair out of place, even keeping her guard up in the interview segments that are ostensibly her directly addressing the viewer.  Lance falls at her feet, as do the high schooler's.  Of those three, Phoenix's Jimmy, sub-verbal and dog-like, and Folland's Lydia spar for her attention.  Where Jimmy sees a love interest, Lydia sees someone who can make her feel important.  Both young actors invest their roles with a healthy dose of pathos, signaling big things to come in Phoenix's future and a disappointingly short resume for Folland.  The only person to see through Suzanne is Lance's sister Janice, played with eye-rolling cynicism by Illeana Douglas.  As the film's truth-teller, Janice gets plenty of great moments, including a show-stopping final scene that continues over the credits.

As a herald of Nancy Grace-style crime TV and general fame-seeking behavior, To Die For is fairly prescient.  Adapted from a book that was inspired by the first trial to be televised, it does an excellent job satirizing the kind of talk shows the that would be interested in every sordid detail of the plot.  The film also came out in the middle of the OJ Simpson trial, though its meager box office implies that the public was either too enraptured by a real trial-of-the-century to entertain itself with a fake one, or were just exhausted by it.  On the other hand, if the movie took place 15 years later, Suzanne would've felt right at home on reality television, though whether or not she would auction her dignity off in that fashion is an open question.  At one point in the film, Suzanne says, " What's the point of doing anything worthwhile if people aren't watching?"  A motto for Bachelor and Bachelorette alike if there ever was one, the selfie-stick toting public might also nod in agreement.  B+