By Jon Kissel

Body horror master David Cronenberg transitions into a more restrained phase of his career with Dead Ringers, despite having the perfect Cronenbergian premise.  In Dead Ringers, Jeremy Irons plays both Elliot and Beverly Mantle, a pair of virtuoso gynecologist twins that often impersonate each other in romantic situations.  The medical setting is ideal for Cronenberg’s penchant for dissection and transformation, and while there is certainly some of that in Dead Ringers, the emphasis is more on psychological decay, another Cronenberg staple.  Though Dead Ringers could’ve showcased some truly nauseating and shocking imagery, its most memorable images are of its once-suave and professional protagonists devolving into shells of their former selves.

The Mantle twins are destined for medicine.  Introduced as kids, they play ‘doctor’ not as curious children but with medical books and diagrams and accurate models.  During medical school, they devise tools which invite the skepticism of their instructors, who are left to eat crow when the twins are rewarded for their ingenuity by the broad medical community.  As adults, they run a successful boutique clinic as renowned experts in their field.  Though they share a talent for gynecology and obstetrics, their personalities are drastically different, though complementary.  Elliot is the public face of the practice, schmoozing with colleagues and accepting awards, while Beverly is the scholar, poring through journals at their shared home.  Outside of work, Elliot’s sexual appetite is so voracious that there’s plenty left over for Beverly.  As his brother’s sexual scavenger, Beverly pretends to be Elliot and sleeps with women that Elliot has grown tired of, always at his brother's urging. 

This subterfuge is a regular routine for them, with Beverly getting sexual gratification without the time investment that is dating and Elliot gets to feel magnanimous towards his shy brother and spare himself difficult break-ups.  Things change when actress Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold) enters the fray.  First encountering the Mantles during a checkup that reveals a rare anatomical defect, Claire is quickly seduced by Elliot.  After Elliot is done with her, Beverly sidles in and gets emotionally attached, complicating the Mantles’ dynamic.  Not only is Claire eventually going to find out that they’re twins and blow the charade, but a relationship with a third person disrupts the communitarian norm of two brothers that share everything, while also introducing dishonesty where before there was only truth (at least between the Mantles).  Beverly gets something that Elliot can’t have, which drives a wedge, which distances Beverly from his brother, which makes them both unstable.

Irons is masterful in a role that has a high degree of difficulty.  Not only is he playing two distinct characters, but those characters also regularly impersonate each other.  The role contains layers on top of layers.  When things are fine in the early going, Irons ably differentiates the two in bearing and wardrobe.  Elliot stands straighter and has a lower neckline on his shirts while Beverly is hunched and buttoned-up and avoids eye contact.  In scenes that the two characters share, Irons conveys a lived-in chemistry with himself, immersing the viewer in the Mantles’ close relationship while blinding them to the cinematic trickery.  As things start to turn, Irons ably goes for breakdowns both tearful and angry, while also blurring the lines between which Mantle is which.  The disruption in their relationship makes Beverly more like Elliot and vice versa, a result that is part head-scratcher and all superb acting.

While Dead Ringers features, for my money, the best performance Cronenberg's ever captured, it also contains some of the more chilling imagery.  With one exception, however, the camera doesn’t rub the viewer’s senses in gore and squishes, relying instead on imagination.  The surgical scenes in particular are iconic, with the simple choice to clothe the staff and the patient in red scrubs paying off huge dividends.  The color, plus the appearance of hoods, give these scenes the feel of a medieval torture chamber and set the viewer on edge for what is about to happen.  That pump has already been primed by a montage of antiquated surgical tools and anatomical drawings over the opening credits, so when the film ventures into the operating room, anything can happen.  As Beverly’s composure dissolves, he becomes obsessed with gynecological tools that can be used specifically for mutant women, and when those tools, which look like metallic insect appendages, are brought into the red-saturated environment of the operating room, the film is at peak Cronenberg.  Where a film like History of Violence shows everything, Dead Ringers is just as effective in its withholding.  All Cronenberg has to do is dream up the costuming and the props, and the viewer can do the rest.

Dead Ringers is a serious accomplishment.  Cronenberg is trying something moderately different here, and the result is a more polished film.  Between the druggy doctors and the mutant women, the temptation to dive into the body horror must have been irresistible, but he sticks with the decision to leave the focus on the characters.  While not quite the perfectly calibrated craziness/tragedy of the Fly, Dead Ringers is firmly in the upper echelon of the Canadian auteur’s filmography.  B+

By Jon Kissel

The title of Alex Garland's sci-fi film is notable for what it leaves out.  Ex Machina is missing the Deus that typically leads that phrase, meaning God of the Machine.  A Deus Ex Machina is a dramatic device in which a powerful solution is presented to a difficult problem.  Ex Machina doesn't resort to this often-cheap device, but by cutting God out of the title, it does invite the question of who in the film might fill that role.  Is it the inventor, the vastly-powerful invented, or the mediator between the two that drives the action?  As the writer of top-notch sci-fi films like Sunshine, 28 Days Later, and Never Let Me Go, Garland has long interrogated the relationship between creator and created, as well as the distance between cold rationality and empathetic feeling.  In his directorial debut, Ex Machina is of a kind with his previous work, as artificial intelligence is subbed in for contagion, cloning, or space travel while the themes remain the same. 

With only three serious speaking roles and a fourth non-verbal performance, Ex Machina is a compact film that traffics in big ideas.  Beginning with search engine employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) winning a contest, his prize is the chance to spend a week with the company's mysterious founder, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac).  Upon Caleb's arrival at Nathan's isolated, rustic on the outside/futuristic on the inside retreat, Nathan informs him that he believes he has cracked artificial intelligence, and needs Caleb to help him prove it by performing a Turing test on the model.  That model, named Ava (Alicia Vikander), is a sleek humanoid with a female face whose wry sense of humor and coquettish flirting entrances Caleb.

Once the three players are established, Caleb grapples with how Ava, plainly independent and sentient, should be treated by Nathan.  Aside from the ethical concerns, it's also apparent that Nathan and Ava are not telling him the whole truth.  The retreat is stuffed with surveillance equipment, so it's impossible for Caleb to get a true response from Ava, except when the power occasionally goes out and Ava is given a few seconds of honesty.  This Heisenbergian aspect of observer and observed proves itself as a vital part of the film.  On the flip side, Nathan is vast levels of hierarchy above Caleb and treats him like the employee he is, utilizing a need-to-know back-and-forth with him despite the draconian NDA Caleb is made to sign.  He brushes off Caleb's interest in the technical and tells him to focus on the emotional.  When he does venture into the technical, Nathan tells Caleb that Ava is the natural end result of a search engine, as her software is constructed from search entries and camera phones, a level of intrusiveness way above Caleb's pay grade.  That kind of consolidation into the single entity of Ava is a giant unspoken risk, forcing Caleb to weigh Ava's freedom against Nathan's precautions.  He has made this thing because he can.  What is the next step?

In this sci-fi chamber drama, Garland is meticulous with detail.  Simple, spare images fill the movie.  Nathan's dimly lit bedroom wall is covered in yellow post-its, alternate Ava faces adorn otherwise blank hallway walls, and power outages are accompanied by a bath of red light.  There's symmetry in every shot, with no mess cluttering up the frame.  Smooth lines turn into sharp corners.  Conversely, Jackson Pollock's famous painting plays a role, a seemingly random squiggle of color made free-form and without a plan, the only thing like it the retreat.  It's an appealing, if cold, look that makes frames stand out even while it makes interest flag somewhat during the runtime.

As Ex Machina's two sources of mystery, Isaac and Vikander exhibit vast depths.  Both exude an unknowable quality demonstrative of their characters' genius.  Isaac seemingly can't miss, and this is another excellent role from him.  His Nathan has an earned arrogance and unsentimentality beneath his friendly bro exterior. He withholds information while also demanding that nothing goes unsaid from his counterparts.  An alpha so natural that he doesn't have to do anything overtly masculine, Isaac plays Nathan as both rational and unpredictable, particularly in a tense scene that builds to a choreographed disco dance.  Nathan filled Ava's brain with the combined Vines and selfies of billions of people, so she should have complete control over her face.  Vikander is up to the task in an even-keeled and interesting performance.  Her sessions with Caleb vacillate between courtesy, curiosity, frustration, and fear, and though her voice retains a level of otherworldly calm, her subtle facial changes completely sell the human within the robot.  In the audience surrogate role, Gleeson has the least to hide in a film where everyone else is holding something back, and therefore makes the least impression.  He ably communicates his gratitude and wonderment at this opportunity of a lifetime, but he is outshone by Isaac's and Vikander's ambiguity.

Ex Machina is a thought provoking entry into Garland's impressive resume, even if it's colder and more sterile than his work with Danny Boyle or Mark Romanek.  The script contains much to unpack, as the complex topic of AI is one that might inform the next chapter of human existence.  A creator assuming god-like powers to make something with god-like power is fertile ground for drama, and Garland has produced an entry worthy of cousins like 2001 and Her.  B

By Jon Kissel

The Troubles has always been a historical period that interests me, though I feel like I have the flimsiest of grasps on it.  The kind of sectarian conflict that is presently tearing apart the Middle East has only recently been quieted in the Western world, and there must be deep parallels that unite history with current events.  Yann Demange's excellent thriller '71 revisits a tumultuous period of Irish history, thoroughly capturing a mood and atmosphere of upheaval and unrest while also attempting to untangle the various conflicts of interests and shifting allegiances.  Over the course of one night, '71 reduces the humans on its chessboard to mere pawns in a game that swallows them whole and cares little for their suffering.

​At the center of '71 is untested British army recruit Gary Hook (Jack O'Connell), an orphan with a much younger brother under his care.  Hook's first deployment is to Belfast in the titular year, shortly after the Troubles have enveloped the city and the whole of Northern Ireland.  His platoon's assignment is to provide cover for the Ulster police and the secret military police that are ruthlessly attempting to pacify the Irish Catholic parts of the city.  During one of these excursions, a riot breaks out, and the under-equipped soldiers are overwhelmed by a surging and furious mob.  In the bedlam, Hook and another soldier chase after a kid who grabs a dropped rifle, and in the confusion, are left behind by their platoon.  While his comrade is shot at point-blank range by a young IRA member, Hook is able to evade capture and hides out in the city, desperate for rescue as night closes in.

Once Hook is on his own, '71 fills out the other players.  The IRA is represented by small squads, divided into a young, aggressive faction and an older, calculating faction.  The young are led by hot-headed James Quinn (Killian Scott), who would solve every problem with a bullet to the head.  The older Boyle (David Wilmot) sees the futility of an eye-for-an-eye approach, but cannot deny the appeal of Quinn's message to teenagers like Sean (Barry Keoghan), a local youth eager to prove himself.  Catholics that are just trying to live their lives get caught between the police and the IRA, both of whom can make their lives miserable, or outright end them.  The Ulster Protestants have a part to play, represented by a profane gamin whose ties to the Ulster higher-ups allow him to push older combatants around.  The military are in over their heads in an insurgent war, unable to discern friend from foe.  Playing all sides against each other are the secret police.  Led by Captain Browning (Sean Harris), their goal is not peace as much as it is a war of attrition driven by a constant stream of reprisals.  They take a policy of chillingly effective realpolitik, sure that deaths can be made more useful than lives.  Amidst these tangled allegiances, Hook is simply trying to get back to his baby brother.

Demange proves himself to be an excellent director throughout with an eye for action and a knack for detail that feels true to an outsider.  His Belfast is covered in graffiti and uncleared rubble.  The Catholic citizenry have their own built-in alarm system, as the trash can lids come out when APC's roll through town.  When chases kick off, and there are several, he films the action like something from the Bourne franchise, frantic and shaky and tight through secret corridors between homes.   During mob scenes, Demange puts his camera right in the face of rioters, recreating the soldiers' POV and simulating their creeping panic for the viewer.  In a central set piece, Demange captures a mind-boggling unbroken shot that leaves a building right before it explodes and then reenters the now-burning and destroyed edifice.  The frequent and sudden use of violence keeps the tension racheted up at all times, rarely giving the viewer a chance to breathe.  In his feature debut, Demange has already made a serious name for himself.

On top of the technical aspects, Demange capably guides his actors through the gauntlet he's constructed for them.  O'Connell is a rising star and avoids a misstep here.  His Hook is purely reactive throughout, always adjusting to circumstances and never creating them for himself.  It's an honest depiction of an average soldier in extraordinary conditions, scraping by on luck and mercy.  O'Connell doesn't play it as an action hero, either, as he finds himself hiding in an outhouse in tears as the stress bleed off him.  Wilmot strikes a sympathetic figure, torn between his cause and survival.  Harris has to convey a willingness to kill anyone at any moment, and he ably does that as the reptilian Captain Browning.  In the most affecting role, Keoghan does excellent work as the tentative IRA initiate Sean.  Seen at home warmly helping his younger sister with her homework, Keoghan draws an impassive mask when the younger IRA squad comes calling.  A large part of the film hinges on his decision process and Keoghan carries it well.

Beneath its thriller exterior, '71 has a beating humanist heart.  The Protestant kid has plenty of slurs for Catholics, and vice versa.  In a quiet moment, Hook talks about his native Derbyshire's rivalry with Nottingham, though he has no idea why it exists.  These regional conflicts and the organizations that sprout up to perpetuate them are revealed to be meat grinders with no line drawn between bystander and participant, where cynicism reigns and the loudest proponents of violence are doing their enemies' work for them.  For futility-of-war films, '71 is a welcome comrade.  B+

By Jon Kissel

World War II films have captured the efforts of Rangers, paratroopers, fighter pilots, and the navy, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen tank combat depicted in the fashion that Fury captures it.  Sure, Patton featured tank combat, but from a distance through the famous general’s binoculars.  David Ayer puts the viewer inside the tank in the final push towards Berlin.  Fury uses its novel vantage point extremely well, with the grit and brutality of the combat informing the characters that drive these war machines. 

With only a few weeks to go before Hitler’s suicide and VE Day, the fighting remains intense as the Nazi war machine enters its child soldier, suicide party death throes.  In the world of armored combat, the Nazi’s are still better equipped even at this late date, with their Tiger tanks vastly superior to the Allies’ Shermans.  One of those Shermans, nicknamed Fury, is operated by a crew that has managed to stay intact since the North African campaign.  Led by Wardaddy (Brad Pitt), Fury has experienced its first casualty after a Pyrrhic victory against a German tank column.  Ayer introduces the viewer to the crew of the Fury at this low moment.  Resigned but religious Bible (Shia LeBeouf) says a prayer, angry Coon-Ass (Jon Bernthal) angrily does spot repairs, and morose Gordo (Michael Pena) holds his headless comrade’s hand.  The writing is plainly on the wall that the war will soon be over, but it’s not over just yet. 

Into the mix is added a completely inexperienced clerk as a replacement.  Young Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) hasn’t fired a gun in combat, but is now responsible for co-piloting and firing Fury’s machine gun.  Wardaddy impresses on him the coldness and harsh decision-making necessary to sit in that spot, but it’s a lesson Ellison finds difficult to learn.  Early mistakes result in terrible deaths, as hesitation leads to disaster.  The journey from green rookie to hardened killer is one many films have trod, but Fury resists that trope.  Ellison mostly retains his discomfort, and his fate revolves less around his deadly competence and more around the mercy of others.  Wardaddy makes him an effective gunner, but not the deadened and broken shells that he and his crew have become.

It’s in that depiction of the tank crew that Fury distinguishes itself.  These are not pleasant people or noble military heroes.  Bernthal is straight out of Deliverance with his rotted teeth and intrusive demeanor.  Gordo and Bible are game for his antics, enabling his worst impulses.  These are soldiers that bed German women in questionable circumstances and have no compunction towards shooting prisoners.  There is minimal to nonexistent talk of home, restricted to uncommented-upon pictures in the tank that Ayer’s camera only flashes past, which get equal time with the confiscated German medals dangling from the machinery.  Wardaddy is unquestionably in command, so every action taken by the crew comes with his implicit permission.  He retains a small sense of civilization, emboldened by Ellison’s naiveté, but his crew disabuses him of that pretension in their present environment.  There’s no room for beauty in a place where women are hung by the roadside for collaboration and ill-equipped child soldiers charge at tanks.  Characters are killed mid-sentence, and die badly.  Fury is completely lacking in sentimentality, a stance that makes the film harder to connect to but also seems more true.

The other asset that Fury brings to the table is its thrilling and exhilarating depiction of tanks in action.  Three major setpieces structure the film, with each decreasing the protagonists’ chances of survival.  The first places an American tank squad against German infantry and the rout that takes place moves from fist-pumping to mouth-covering.  The sheer power on display is a meat-grinder of death of destruction.  The second is a German Tiger tank taking on four Shermans, and this sequence places the Americans at a severe disadvantage despite the greater numbers.  Where the advance against the infantry was a bloody rout, this battle relies more on strategy and timing that is couched in military-speak but is plainly understandable to a civilian.  The final setpiece and climax of the film finds the disabled Fury as a stationary gun against an advancing battalion of SS soldiers.  Essentially a suicide mission, this one removes the mobile aspect in favor of a last-stand type battle, and is the least surprising and impressive of the three, though the certainty of failure brings out the most in the characters.  While the crew contemplates their approaching demise, Ayer makes the excellent choice to not allow Ellison any lines of dialogue, as he is merely a bystander to his comrades’ years of experience.  This was another choice that felt true in a film that completely won over this viewer for its presumed authenticity.

Fury rejects many war movie tropes, though that makes the ones that it does engage in stick out that much more.  An inexperienced lieutenant doesn’t know his sergeants’ names, making Wardaddy that much more likable in relief.  Ellison has a breakdown in the middle of a battle and the film stops to console him, forgetting that bullets are flying outside.  An encounter with a German woman and her niece contains some character-informing palm-reading, one of my most hated tropes in cinema.  After this punishing film that refuses to paint in stark colors, Ayer fills his credits with threatening Nazi imagery and a militaristic score, like a Wolfenstein video game just ended.  Ayer doesn’t quite trust his better instincts and craftsmanship.  The depth of the lows don’t approach the heights of the highs, but they detract from the complete package.

War films are becoming more flag-waving with American Sniper and Lone Survivor, but Fury sticks out as resolutely uninterested in glorification.  For these characters, the world of the tank is all that exists, and the more brutal and ruthless they are, the sooner they can leave that world behind.  Well-acted and directed with a keen eye for detail, Fury reverberates through its genre like a shell from a Tiger turret.  B

 By Jon Kissel

​The Liam Neeson reinvention rages on with A Walk Among the Tombstones, another film in which the aging Irishman kicks ass.  This outing is more mystery than rampage, as Neeson's former cop investigates a series of brutal murders.  He doesn't even throw his first punch until almost an hour in.  His participation is integral to the film's appeal.  Otherwise, it's an above-average episode of Law and Order.   

A Walk Among the Tombstones begins with an exhausted sigh out of Neeson's mouth, and the first scene predates the main events by six years.  In the intervening years, his Matthew Scudder has only gotten more weary.  Formerly a cop and now a private eye, he's recruited to find the men who kidnapped and murdered Kenny Kristo's (Dan Stevens) wife.  Kristo is a wealthy drug distributor, but Scudder no longer cares for those kind of distinctions.  He is interested in bringing the killers to justice, especially after listening to the tape Kristo was sent that documented his wife's death.  In the course of his investigation, Scudder encounters a tech-savvy street urchin named TJ (Brian Bradley), who tags along despite Scudder's insistence that he stay out of it.  While Scudder is hunting for the murderers, the two men scout out their next, younger target.

There's a lurid, exploitative tack to this film that rears its ugly head early and often.  Outside of an 80's slasher film, it's unexpected to see attempts at generating gross titillation out of women in peril.  A Walk Among the Tombstones explicitly engages in this during the opening credits.  Soft-focus, gauzy shots in bright light lovingly capture close-ups of a woman's body.  Led to believe they're watching a love scene, maybe with Neeson's old love interest, the viewer is then horrified to see that by the time Frank's name is flashing across the screen, the nameless woman was being raped all along.  Cool trick, bro.  Equally repulsive scenes are included as the film continues.  Scenes like these are to be expected in a gritty crime drama, but Frank dials up the grotesquerie to eleven.  They become especially unnecessary when Frank devises ways to communicate the kidnappers' detestable nature in more inventive ways.  The manner in which Kristo finds his wife's body says all that needs to be said about the manner of her death without showing the suffering.  The more talkative kidnapper, played by David Harbour, is reptilian in his vileness, a character so repulsive that just his manner of speaking is enough to make the viewer's skin crawl.  The inclusion of him and his partner at 'work' is extra, and detracts mightily.

The rest of A Walk Among the Tombstones is predictable genre work.  The younger, eager sidekick to the jaded protagonist with a checkered past, the refusal to initially sign on, the parceled-out twists and turns, it's all a checklist for noir tropes.  Frank's previous writing credits include Out of Sight and Minority Report, novel takes on cop and sci-fi films.  Maybe he adapted those from better source material, but this lack any of those earlier films' inventiveness.  There's a slim thread of men trying to help women and dooming them to dreadful outcomes, but it's buried beneath the exploitative aspects.  While the script is cribbing from its forebears, Frank does get some impressive sequences on camera.  A home invasion sequence is appropriately terrifying.  The kidnappers project an aura of menace, aided by Frank's use of slow-motion or colored lighting, and they steal the film from Neeson's gravelly vocal cords.  With more experience as a writer, it's surprising that Frank does better behind the camera, but that's absolutely the case.

A Walk Among the Tombstones is aiming low, and accomplishes its goal of being one of the many cat-and-mouse, cop-criminal films.  Those credits, one of the more despicable acts of cinematic misdirection in recent memory, set the tone for the ugliness that's coming.  Neeson can do this kind of role in his sleep, and I doubt more effort on his part would've purged the bad feelings associated with the film.  He'll go on to punch cheetahs in the face, or slum it with Seth MacFarlane, leaving this trial behind.  Hopefully, Frank can write a role for a woman that doesn't involve her being in danger of being assaulted.  C-