By Jon Kissel

Famous psychological experiments invaded Sundance in 2015.  Experimenter was a biopic about Stanley Milgram and his work with obedience and authority, and Stanford Prison Experiment chronicles Phillip Zimbardo's demonstration of how quickly power differentials lead to abuse.  Where Experimenter takes a wider, cerebral view of Milgram's career, Stanford Prison Experiment lives in the few days the test was carried out, giving it a much more intense and claustrophobic feel.

Taking place in the early 70's, Dr. Zimbardo (Billy Crudup) and his subjects are the last students on the Stanford campus, as everyone else has left for the summer.  In their solitude, the young men are divided into guards and prisoners, and for $15 a day, they are told to buy as much into their surroundings as they are able. Forced to wear emasculating uniforms and referred to only by numbers, the prisoners' discomfort and close quarters makes it easy for them to surrender to the illusion.  The guards, dressed to look like something out of Cool Hand Luke and mildly agitated that the prisoners get to earn their money by just laying around, see the opportunity to spice up everyone's day.  One guard (Michael Angarano) dives into the opportunity to play a role, adopting a cartoonish Southern accent and arbitrarily withholding necessary items from the prisoners.  The other guards admire his gusto, and form a desire to top him, and a cycle of abuse and degradation is begun under the watchful eye of Zimbardo and his grad student assistants.

In response to the guards' abuse, prisoner 8612 (Ezra Miller) takes the lead in resisting.  Fed up with the guards' behavior, he rallies other prisoners to fight back, organizing barricades in cells and escape attempts.  While most of the prisoners are on his side, others just want to sit in their beds and earn their money.  Both types of prisoners present more chances for mishandling, as the challenging prisoners invite more drastic punishment while the compliance of the docile prisoners invites the guards to try and find their internal line.  Zimbardo is enamored with the results he's getting, and is unwilling to stop the experiment despite the protestations of his assistants, his girlfriend (Olivia Thirlby), and ex-con friend Jesse Fletcher (Nelsan Ellis), who he's brought in for verisimilitude.  The stress of the situation makes all parties, including Zimbardo and his staff acting as wardens, blur the line between their continued discomfort and the fact that they can leave at any time. 

Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez casts his film with seemingly every credible up-and-coming young male actor.  In addition to The Knick's Anganaro and We Need to Talk About Kevin's Miller, Mud's Tye Sheridan, Parenthood's Miles Heizer, Animal Kingdom's James Frecheville, Palo Alto's Jack Kilmer, It Follows' Keir Gilchrist, and other veterans of coming-of-age indies have roles to play.  The fraternal aspect that likely broke out on set amongst all these college-aged men lends a sense of realism to the guard-prisoner interactions, which bear striking resemblance to fraternity hazing.  Memorization under duress, repetitive chants, forced physical activity, and a little sexual humiliation for good measure all make appearances.  The dignity of the prisoners is never taken into consideration, including by some of the compliant prisoners themselves who assure their fathers that they are man enough to take the abuse while never wondering about the abuse's existence.

Of the adults in the room, Crudup and Ellis form a strong team.  After Glass Chin and Spotlight, Crudup is cornering the market on Faustian characters, and his Zimbardo is yet another.  He's acting in the part of Zimbardo who is also acting as the cold warden of the experimental prison, and Crudup is able to vacillate between these roles effortlessly.  The concentrated masculinity of his experiment makes Zimbardo more aggressive, at one point looming over a professor who has some concerns.  Ellis's Fletcher is a complicated character, a man affected by his stint in prison but willing to recreate the experience from the opposite side.  The point of the experiment becomes lost as the subjects get further into it, but its value becomes harsh and cruel for Fletcher.  Ellis gets at the pain of the character and steals the film from the deep cast.
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Alvarez captures a feeling and transmits it to the viewer, a vital part of any successful film.  Shooting in close-ups as much as possible, it becomes possible to feel the Stanford Prison Experiment invade the viewer's space. It pushes one back into their seat with its stomach-churning cruelty, and the empathetic performances serve to further amplify that feeling.  The film is not a pleasant experience, but it is certainly a resonant one.  B

By Jon Kissel

Batman Begins signaled the start of something in the mid-2000's.  It broke director Christopher Nolan into his blockbuster, master-of-Hollywood phase, eventually allowing him to make two expensive and films out of original properties, a rarity when everything is based on something.  It provided a gray contrast to the lighter Spiderman films that were dominating the comic-book box office, and also lit the joyless path that DC comic films would spend the next decade skulking down.  With its themes of resilience in the face of fear and societal collapse, Batman Begins also overtly tries to merge the heightened comic-book world with the post-9/11 real world, something that would continue throughout the Dark Knight trilogy.  With all the cultural weight on its shoulders, it mostly holds up as a solid origin story, if one that takes itself a bit too seriously. 

Batman Begins tells the story of Gotham City's Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), the heir to the billion-dollar Wayne fortune.  After his parents are murdered in front of him at a young age, Wayne grows up to be an aimless and seething young man, desperate for meaning and focus.  Nolan tracks Wayne's rise as he casts off the trappings of his life and immerses himself in the criminal underworld.  He eventually lands on the radar of Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), who is essentially a ninja, and Wayne learns how to use fear, theatricality, and deception to disarm and bewilder his foes.  He and Ducard are separated after Wayne balks at his mentor's harsh methods, and Wayne returns to Gotham ready to use his newly-acquired skills to try and push his city back towards law and order.  Enlisting the support of butler and confidant Alfred (Michael Caine) and the high-tech contraptions of ignored Wayne Enterprises employee Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Wayne takes on the identity of the Batman, so named after his childhood fear of bats.  He gathers information and breaks up drug rings, presenting the collars in a nice bow to Gotham's only honest cop, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and childhood friend and current assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes).  The trio eventually catches the big fish in mafia boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson), but he's just a pawn in a larger game, as sinister prison warden Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) has bigger plans for Gotham than simple extortion and drug-running.

Nolan and co-writer David Goyer have a strong grasp of origin stories, and Batman Begins has the added benefit of not being the seventeenth one in a long line of tales about people becoming superheroes.  Instead, this is only the fifth or sixth, and it benefits from unique pacing and Wally Pfister's excellent cinematography.  The first half of the film is jumbled between Wayne's training, his childhood, and his phase as a petulant young man, forgoing a blow-by-blow account for something more interesting.  Nolan and Goyer also stuff their script with characters that speak in life lessons.  While Papa Wayne annoyingly spouts of a constant stream of aphorisms, Falcone's gives a biting and necessary commentary about how difficult it must have been for young Bruce to mourn in a mansion with servants to take care of his every need, inspiring Wayne's descent into criminality and his eventual tutelage under Ducard.  Once Wayne gets back to Gotham, Nolan and Goyer remember that the first attempts shouldn't necessarily go perfectly, and novice Batman is given the opportunity to clumsily jump through windows or fall down fire escapes.  These are the only jokes in the film, and though humor's never been a card in Nolan's deck, it's appreciated that there are at least some shreds.

Nolan falls down when it's time for Batman to kick some butt.  For all Nolan's gifts for world-building and setting a mood, he is not good at filming action.  While Batman is stalking thugs, the film works, but when it's time for him to engage, the combat is lost in a mess of quick cuts and blocked angles.  Nolan would improve on this in later films, but on the list of reasons to see Batman Begins, fight choreography or general bad-assery doesn't make the list.

Of the reasons to see it, the cast is hit and miss.  Bale is solid in the lead, especially when he's channeling American Psycho and acting the part of a spoiled rich douche eager to throw people off his alter ego's trail.  Of the older stalwarts, Oldman is having the most fun, Caine is the most affecting, while Neeson, Freeman, and Wilkinson are providing more of a general presence than memorable scenes.  As the only female presence in the film, Holmes is wooden and hectoring.  The clear winner is the smarmy Murphy, so committed to the role that it's impossible to take one's eyes off him.  Excepting Heath Ledger's future performance as the unforgettable Joker, Murphy's Crane reigns as the best of the Dark Knight trilogy.

Nolan's attempt to merge the foundational silliness of the Batman story with something approaching contemporary reality is a solid, if joyless, effort.  I've preferred most everything Marvel Studios has done in the preceding years, as there's a fundamental gap between the Dark Knight trilogy's grasping for cinematic weight and the actual product onscreen.  For all its trenchant post-9/11 allegory, it's still about a billionaire playboy who spends his nights wearing pointy bat ears on his cowl.  This film, and the ones that followed it, should have plenty of characters that grasp the absurdity of it all, and stop being so serious.  C+

By Jon Kissel

As far as putting out his particular brand of stylish genre films, Ridley Scott's eighth decade has been one of his most productive.  In the last ten years, he's split his time between a California winery, 70's Harlem, feudal England, and deep space.  Despite the quantity, the quality hasn't been up to the standard set by his earlier works.  The venerable Scott returns to form with The Martian, easily his best film since the full version of Kingdom of Heaven.  It finds him once again off the earth's surface, but he shirks the cold and claustrophobic space of Alien for the warmth of Thelma and Louise.  Scott isn't known for capturing joy onscreen, but with The Martian, it's a welcome color on his palette.
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The Martian spares no time getting straight into the action, as the film opens with a team of astronauts doing tests and taking readings on the Martian surface.  The team, led by Captain Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain), has to suddenly take off in the midst of an encroaching windstorm, but in the attempt, some debris collides with team botanist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) and he is knocked unconscious.  The blow disables his suit's telemetry, leading Lewis to conclude that Watney is dead and they are forced to leave him behind.  However, thanks to a happy accident in which a scrap of metal kept Watney's suit sealed, the now-stranded astronaut wakes up on Mars and must solve a series of problems if he wants to stay alive.

Those problems on Watney's end, on the team's end, and on the relevant earthbound players' end, is what The Martian is primarily concerned with.  This is a film devoted to the practical uses of science and engineering.  Every problem has a solution, and it is highly entertaining watching smart people reason their way through.  Mishaps occur, sometimes involving flammable or explosive or radioactive materials, but nobody's perfect.  Back on earth, more smart people are devising ways to get Watney back home, and while these technical concerns are more opaque than Watney's elemental ones, Scott and writer Drew Goddard are able to communicate the long hours that go into the high-level math necessary to plot flight plans while not dwelling on the equations themselves.  There's also the more sociological problems of how to tell the public about all this, or what NASA should tell Watney or the crew.  A part of science is that every answer opens up two new questions, and The Martian never rests on one big solution.  Everything has a contingency, and people always ask about the next step.

The obvious comparison to The Martian is Ron Howard's Apollo 13, and the usually colder Scott is at a much greater advantage in telling this story.  Where Howard spent overlong chunks of time with the principals' families, Scott and Goddard only make allusions.  He understands that this scenario is inherently dramatic and doesn't need goosing with spouses staring out at space or some personal demon for Watney to grapple with a la Gravity.  The camera is always splitting between a space agency or a lab, Lewis's crew, or Watney on Mars.  In keeping the focus on solving the next problem, the pace of the film never lets up. 

The Martian also shares with Apollo 13 a deep cast.  In addition to Damon and Chastain, the crew is made up of Kate Mara, Michael Pena, Sebastian Stan, and Aksel Hennie.  The NASA team is led by Jeff Daniels, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, and Sean Bean, and they give orders to Donald Glover, Benedict Wong, and Mackenzie Davis.  All are able to differentiate themselves and carve out a defining moment.  No one is given a false moment, and everyone is able to exude some kind of competence, whether it's Daniels' firm hand on the tiller or Mara's no-nonsense mien on the spacecraft.

Damon is given the most time, and he ably carries the action on Mars.  His Watney is a lived-in character, a guy who loves what he does and appreciates the challenge of seeing if he can do this.  Like all characters, he never blurts out his backstory or resume like in an Aaron Sorkin script.  The viewer understands that he's up to the task first by his mere presence on the mission, and then by his calm ability.  He keeps his sanity by talking to the video recorder, and by making plenty of nerdy dad-jokes for his benefit and the viewer's.  Scott and Goddard lean heavily on the technical, but don't forget the power of the visceral.  In one of his best roles, Damon is also asked to do the most emotional heavy-lifting, and he comes through here as well.  Watney maintains control of his emotions while he has control of his actions.  In an affecting sequence, Watney has to give up control of his actions and surrender to the laws of physics, and he is finally able to let go of his emotions.

The Martian is a thrilling and entertaining film that will hopefully inspire thousands to STEM careers, but it's not without its faults.  With big-budget filmmaking like this, Scott is in his wheelhouse, though some seams are showing.  The Chinese, instead of the Russians, are eventually brought in, and I'm sure that was a completely organic decision by all involved and not an attempt to rope in the Chinese markets.  The ending is fumbled, too, though a perfect one takes place a few minutes before the actual one.  These small wrinkles don't detract from the overall experience of The Martian, a film that eschews sentimentality for the can-do optimism of bright people, and marks Scott's return to great filmmaking.  A-

by Bryan Hartman
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I happened to catch a trailer for “The Revenant” before watching “The Martian” in theaters. Those of you who know me, will understand the rarity of both going to the theater and not shutting my eyes during a trailer. The trailer was good and I’m a fan of gritty westerns, True Grit is one of my few movie purchases in the last five years.

I’ll do this whole review spoiler free outside of a mention of fighting a bear.

A holiday Monday, when your mother-in-law has the kids makes for a perfect movie watching experience. Nothing out now, sans Star Wars, is a “theater” movie. I don’t go to the theater for a comedy or drama - I want an audio and visual spectacle. The Revenant excels in these two areas - especially the audio. The video spectacle comes in two forms - intensity of the characters and the cinematography of the American west. The visual closeness of the characters is well done, and the best quality of “The Revanant” is the squirmy feeling one has during the fight scenes. When the main character is attacked by a bear, I was physically uncomfortable, literally squirming in my seat. This feeling repeated itself a couple other times. To me, “The Revenant” doesn’t cross the line into gore just to be gory, every splatter or pool of blood seems to fit the brutal narrative. The vast visual experience of America’s west is nice the first and maybe the second time, but halfway through the movie I couldn’t help but think this was like viewing a family’s series of vacation pictures where there are entirely too many scenery or windshield wiper pictures. The audio aspect of the movie was incredibly well done. It was engrossing with its accuracy.

It’s baseball “comp” season where you look at current players and who their doppelganger from year’s past would be. The feeling of, “I’ve seen this before” came over me frequently throughout “The Revenant.” It was a harsher version of “Cast Away.” Both have similar IMDB and RT scores. It’s a shame the director focused so much on Leonardo DiCaprio’s role when the supporting cast was incredible.

Was “The Revenant” worth seeing? Yes. Was it worth seeing in theaters? Yes. Did I want to stick around for a second showing like I did with “Mad Max: Fury Road?” Not even close.

I’m at a B for this one. That’s probably as low as I’ll go. 

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I sat on this review for a day and watched Star Wars: Episode IV. I had SW at B before heading down, and thought, “Revenant was much more amusing. I’ll go up to B+ there.” I think it fits some MMC rating systems as follows for B+...
“Formally very strong, but lacking in strong emotional resonance. The big emotional boost is necessary to get to A range. No bad scenes allowed.”
“Might have bad scenes, can get by on strength of great scenes”
“I'd watch this without checking my phone”

By Jon Kissel

The James Bond franchise (officially) reaches 24 entries in Spectre, which is also Daniel Craig's fourth time in the iconic role.  The Craig era has been marked by a darker tone and a willingness to move away from the franchise tropes that the first 20 Bond films defined for multiple generations.  Now that Craig's Bond is more comfortable in the role, those tropes are starting to come back.  Combined with an interest in Bond's backstory and personal history, there seems to be an attempt to make the character darker, while still allowing him to make plenty of droll quips.  Roger Moore crossed with Jason Bourne.  Spectre has the benefit of excellent direction and choreography, but the seams in this multi-film arc are starting to show. 
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This transition in tone from the darker Casino Royale towards the silliness that had always been a part of the franchise was heralded at the end of previous Bond film, Skyfall, in which Bond teamed up with his boss and his childhood groundskeeper to booby-trap his ancestral home, dropping in a sassy line or a theatrical eye-roll at every opportunity.  The jokiness of it marred what had been up to that point one of the more successful Bond entries.  Spectre never gets as cartoonish as those final Skyfall scenes, but it does indulge in another Bond staple; the impossibly dumb villain.  The Craig Bond's have been building on each other towards Spectre, in which he faces off with the head of a vast criminal organization that has its tentacles in everything.  The struggle should be at its highest here, but instead, due to the absurd lengths the villain goes to trap Bond, it seems to have never been easier.

That villain, Franz Oberhauser, has had his eye on Bond for decades.  He had a hand in the action of all the prior Craig entries, though that's only revealed in Spectre and I don't remember the groundwork being laid in those films.  Bond finally gets on Oberhauser's tail after the previous M's (Judi Dench) death in Skyfall.  At the film's outset, Bond is completing an assassination mission, which was posthumously assigned to him by Dench's M.  While attending the target's funeral in Rome, in hopes of turning up more leads, Bond eventually finds himself in a board meeting of Spectre, where Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) reveals himself to Bond.  Bond escapes, and tracks down an old enemy who Oberhauser also now counts as an enemy, Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), last seen in Quantum of Solace.  The near-death Mr. White gives Bond more information and asks him to look after his daughter Madeleine (Lea Seydoux) as she is also now a Spectre target.  Bond finds her in a clinic in the Swiss mountains, and the two set out to track down Oberhauser and dismantle Spectre.

The above is all typical Bond and in some ways, a direct rehash of Sean Connery's time in the tuxedo, but Spectre feels a need to get topical.  The double-O program is being dismantled, and will be replaced with drones and broad-scope intelligence-gathering and data mining, much to the current M's (Ralph Fiennes) chagrin.  He is being shown the door by the high-hatted C (Andrew Scott), who will run the new, larger organization.  While Bond is globe-trotting, the action often returns to London to check in with this bureaucratic matter, and it's only tangentially related to Oberhauser and Spectre at large.  Anyone who's seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier will see how this plot is playing out, and while it does give M, Q (Ben Whishaw), and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) more to do, plenty of other Bond films have succeeded without spending too much time back at the home office.

The story problems, from the Oberhauser's general incompetence to the added MI6 plot to the insistence on tying everything into Bond's backstory, are de riguer for a Bond film, as few fans would admit that this is a franchise known for airtight plots.  The settings and the action are what puts butts in seats, and with Sam Mendes at the helm after the beautiful Skyfall, Spectre is much stronger in these areas.  The opening scenes in Mexico City, filmed during Day of the Dead celebrations, are a high-water mark for the franchise.  Mendes starts with a long tracking shot that establishes the surroundings and follows Bond to his quarry, and the lack of a cut, plus the unsettling and macabre nature of costumes and the parade floats, build significant amounts of tension.  There's the requisite car chase and hand-to-hand combat, both involving Spectre strongman Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista), with the fight being particularly thrilling and reminiscent of Bond's close-quarters rumble with Red Grant, one of the franchise's marquee scenes.  However, it was only after viewing that I realized that the chase and the fight, plus several other scenes, were strikingly devoid of extras or traffic.  It's possible Mendes blew his budget for those things in the Mexico City scenes, as the difference is huge crowds of people on the one hand, and barren streets on the other. 

After four films, Craig seems quite comfortable in the role.  Spectre is possibly the funniest of Craig's entries, and it's all due to his timing and witticisms, which never get anywhere near the worst the franchise has had to offer (poor Pierce Brosnan).  A key aspect of any Bond film is the chemistry between Bond and his female counterparts (at best) or accessories (at worst).  With Seydoux, and Monica Belluci as an earlier source of, uh, information, Mendes has two exceptional actresses to work with.  Belluci isn't treated well by the script, but she does make a graceful and stoic impression in her limited screentime.  Seydoux is more fiery, and is allowed to warm up to Bond on her own time, though she gets a truly corny moment in one of the film's low points.  As a Bond villain, Waltz is perfectly cast.  His penchant for eccentricity is on full-blast, giggling inappropriately or making bird noises, but he also is the unquestioned leader of his organization, speaking to nervous underlings in clipped and curt sentences.  He's 90% iron-fisted and 10% unhinged, a classic Bond ratio that is again undercut by the script as the limits of his efficacy and competence are gradually exposed.

Spectre is deeply frustrating, as it works in the moment and falls apart after deeper rumination.  It contains some superlative sequences, but also manages to be overstuffed with some puzzling choices.  Excepting the Craig films, I've seen around 75% of the Bond franchise, and I don't think I knew anything about the character's life outside of the professional side of it.  Why Craig's turn in the big seat has been marked by all this stuff about his childhood and his upbringing escapes me, nor do I see the advantage in stringing all his films together.  Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace were about Craig's Bond becoming the classic Bond.  Once he got there, that's all the character development the character ever needed.  My hope for Craig's fifth and potentially last turn as Bond is that there's some plot that must be foiled, involving several beautiful people and locales, and that he's able to do so using Craig's suave brutality and dry wit.  I don't feel like I'm asking for a lot.  C

By Jon Kissel

While nerds have taken over much of the entertainment world, Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope finds a place where they still occupy their prototypical place on the social ladder.  His high school comedy set in Inglewood follows three teens whose interests put them outside of the mainstream, particularly their preference for what’s perceived as white shit like Donald Glover.  Their outsider status, however, isn’t enough to keep them out of the high-stakes world around them, where random encounters have the potential to negatively and permanently impact their lives.  Dope balance the absurdity of teenage life with the drama of poverty and crime, replicating the success of more serious films about disadvantaged teens like Boyz N the Hood or the Basketball Diaries while never surrendering to misery.
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The threesome at the center of Dope is led by Shameik Moore’s Malcolm.  His two comrades, Jib (Tony Revolori) and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), share a love of 90’s hip hop, comics, and their burgeoning punk band, Awreeoh.  They daily navigate obstacles that all teens face, from bullies to college applications, as well as obstacles specific to their environment like drug dealers and gangs.  The latter has forced them to adopt a dark sense of humor and opportunism, as Jib is trying to get the comic collection of a recently-murdered peer, while also adding urgency to the former.  All are quick-witted and intelligent and talented, which gives them the very real chance of improving their lot in life. 

While trying unsuccessfully to keep their heads down on the walks to and from school, Malcolm is drawn into being the go-between for drug dealer Dom (A$SP Rocky) and his love interest Nakia (Zoe Kravitz).  Despite his misgivings about being a romantic competitor to Dom, Malcolm’s innate charm leads him to hit it off with Nakia, and she invites him to Dom’s birthday party at a club.  The crew attends and has a great time, but when the party is busted, Malcolm picks up the wrong backpack and suddenly finds himself in possession of a large amount of Molly and a gun.  Disposing of them becomes a multi-faceted problem, as it’s unclear who’s a well-dressed distributor and who’s a cop informant.  Using the crew’s of-the-moment knowledge of the deep web and bitcoin, and an acquaintance with a white dealer they know from band camp (Blake Anderson), they become dealers themselves.

Dope never lets the viewer forget how easy it would be for a kid like Malcolm to fall into a bad situation.  Before the actual disaster he lands in, random missteps could have placed him in scenarios just as unfortunate or worse.  It’s slightly miraculous that he’s managed to avoid crime or serious injury thus far.  The arbitrary nature of the environment is a key cruelty that the characters are always aware of, and the ability of different characters to deal with it is often in flux.  The distance between image and reality comes up repeatedly, as those that appear hard are in over their heads and those that appear weak are more adept than they seem.  That adaptability would make a lot of the characters ideal citizens and contributors, if only they can make it to their adult years alive or out of jail.

The environment is deadly serious, but the tone of Famuyiwa’s film is anything but.  Despite the stakes, Dope is simply fun from the introductory character montages to the ending dance sequence.  Famuyiwa uses all the expected cinematic tricks to communicate the ecstasy of youth, taking the baton from Sofia Coppola’s Bling Ring and Harmony Korrine’s Spring Breakers and applying dub-step and speed ramping to party scenes to communicate their breathlessness and intensity.  The long process that Malcolm et al embark on to unload the drugs involves plenty of stops and starts, turning Dope into a heightened comedy of errors.  Malcolm’s affinity for 90’s hip hop means the soundtrack is populated with staples from the era, from Nas to Digital Underground, and is also filled out with bouncy tracks produced by Pharell.  It all conspires to successfully keep Dope’s energy level high and buoyant.

The greatest asset of Dope is the young cast, likely to break out from Dope into bigger roles after their success here.  Revolori is playing the opposite of his buttoned-up Grand Budapest Hotel character to solid effect, and Clemons is a riot as the defiant Diggy.  Moore is an excellent find as Malcolm, transitioning from deer-in-headlights vulnerability to a more hardened version of himself, still retaining some innocence but with more confidence in his abilities.  He’s a believable dork, and a believable mastermind.  The central threesome share significant chemistry with each other, easily throwing off the vibe of longtime friends.

As a film about teenagers, albeit ones with real and not just perceived problems, Dope treads familiar ground in some ways, but in others, the cast and the directorial flair means that it never approaches boring.  It manages to balance the fluffy and the weighty.  Famuyiwa notches a success here, if only for an extended sequence of Moore dancing to the Humpty Dance.  That alone earns Dope my admiration.  B

By Jon Kissel

Films released in 2015 had their share of eye-catching and cinematic moments, from the fiery sandstorm of Mad Max: Fury Road to the natural beauty of Clouds of Sils Maria.  For all its numerous gifts and assets, Tom McCarthy's Spotlight wouldn't join that list.  It's a thorough expose of a great crime, but it's not a cinematographer's film, as exemplified by what I found to be the key recurring image in the film; a stack of files.  A bunch of papers contained in manila folders and held together by a rubber band doesn't exactly leap off screen, but the repeated shots of stacks and libraries of these folders indicate the vastness of the horrific crimes and cover-ups exposed by the heroic journalists that make up the cast, as well as makes the viewer wonder what other injustices are languishing in dark basements and lament the dwindling workforce necessary to shine a light on them.  To watch Spotlight is to be morally exhausted, to be absolutely wrung out by the lengths humans will go to do nothing. 
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A clinical but enthralling and painstakingly depiction of the Boston priest sex abuse epidemic, McCarthy begins his film with the aftermath of one such crime.  In the presence of the violated children, a church official speaks soft words of contrition to the mother, the cops look the other way, and the offender leaves free.  Many years later, this scenario, having already played out hundreds of times, continues to play out hundreds of times more until, at the turn of the century, the Boston Globe hires a new editor. 

Marty Baron (Liev Schrieber), a never-married Jewish man from Miami, joins the Globe in 2000.  His outsider status is interpreted by the other journalists as the first sign of layoffs and buyouts, and Baron's cold manner doesn't allay anyone's concerns.  Robby Robinson, lead of the investigative Spotlight team, has plenty to worry about, as his team consumes vast resources in months-long stories.  However, Baron proves to be an ally, and the new editor is curious why a recent story on serial rapist and priest John Goeghan warranted so little paper space.  The Spotlight team, consisting of Robinson, Michael Renzedes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian d'Arcy James) thus begin uncovering a scandal that would rock the city to its core.

That process, of digging up leads and following up with them and making phone calls and poring over records, is meticulously documented by McCarthy.  Doors are knocked, coffee is drank, pavement is pounded.  It's miraculous that all this is never boring for a single second.  The easy comparison is All The President's Men or The Insider, but the desperate moral clarity of Spotlight elevates it above those earlier films.  To that end, McCarthy includes characters that are shouting into a hurricane, exhausted by years of talking to people that don't want to hear what they're saying and skeptical that the Spotlight team is any different.  Stanley Tucci plays Mitch Garabedian, a lawyer for victims besieged by the workload and distrustful of everyone after years of inattention to the cancer at the center of his city.  Neal Huff is achingly sympathetic as Phil Saviano, a representative of Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) interviewed by the Spotlight team.  A former victim and present advocate, Saviano is initially rehearsed and prepared, giving a presentation that he's plainly given many times before, but his professionalism dissolves when the journalists keep asking him if he's sure about this or that detail, unleashing a frustration onto them of someone who is sick of trying to get people to believe him.  Characters like Saviano and Garabedian, as well as other former victims, put a human face on the stakes and spur the team to continue pressing forward.

Spotlight is interested in more than the trail of human misery the church left in its wake.  It also wants to know how this could've happened.  The crimes themselves, thoroughly documented by dozens of now-adult victims ready to share their story, are serious and newsworthy enough.  What made, and makes, the Catholic church sex abuse so distinctive is the extent to which it was covered up and enabled by the entire Boston community.  Here, Spotlight again proves itself worthy to ask these kinds of questions, providing no easy answers and no institution free of corruption.  Big law firms, represented by Eric MacLeish (Billy Crudup), leniently settle cases with the church and take their professional ethics, and the promise of reliable payouts, more seriously than protecting children from rapists.  Schools and youth charities unknowingly provide victims and then ignore rumors.  The Globe itself is not spared from complicity, as it repeatedly had the chance to investigate and chose not to for its own reasons.  The community is happy to look the other way, primarily parents and relatives overwhelmed by the church's grandeur and happy to trade their child's innocence for a friendly meeting with the bishop.  At the rotten center is the church, an institution depicted as having a say over all parts of Boston, one that wants its sexually ashamed subjects to focus on the church's good works, and not its shuffling of child rapists from parish to parish, punishment-free.  McCarthy gets a complete picture of the city, ticking off all the boxes that would allow this endemic crime to be perpetrated.

The penalty for not playing along might have served as a cheap attempt to generate tension, but McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer are simply operating on a higher plane.  No ominous cars are parked on streets, no suspicious characters are shown walking down sidewalks, and no albino monks are hiding in backseats.  The power differential between those who look the other way and those who will not accept the status quo is brilliantly juxtaposed throughout the film, mostly revolving around Garabedian.  Before his first appearance, he's derided by characters as a kook, and upon Renzedes' first meeting with him, the general shabbiness of his office doesn't allay suspicion.  It soon becomes apparent that he earned that reputation by not going along, especially in scenes that take place in MacLeish's sparkling law firm.  Scenes at a swanky Catholic charity gala shift back-and-forth between Garabedian and Renzedes eating thin soup in a drafty diner.  Garabedian has paid a real economical price by not bowing before the Boston power structure, but he can at least know that he hasn't let a child rapist off the hook.  Something as self-evidently right somehow makes him the outlier.

Thankfully, tension is also not generated by that tired conflict of the hard-working character being torn between their families and their jobs.  Renzedes makes oblique mention of his fractured personal life, but other than that very small exception, it just doesn't come up for anyone.  No spouses or significant others are even cast.  No poor actor is given the impossible task of portraying a complaining character who wants someone to spend less time uncovering a crime against humanity and more time at home. McCarthy and Singer must have realized that would've cheapened the seriousness of their film's content, and any sops to home life are blessedly omitted.  Character is revealed through action and not human set dressing.

Spotlight's actors are all superbly cast as the various real-life principals, doing honest, low-key work in a dialogue-heavy film.  Tucci and Huff are excellent as lights shining in the dark, finally paid attention to by the Spotlight team.  McAdams and Keaton separate themselves amongst the Spotlight team characters, with the latter demonstrating an unflappable resolve in the face of repeated entreaties to slow down or pull the trigger too early, and the former full of empathy as the team member tasked with interviewing victim after victim.  As the catalyst, Schrieber's Baron never raises his voice, and he is portrayed as a man who never has to.  John Slattery is perfectly acerbic in the role of Robinson's boss Ben Bradlee Jr, injecting needed doses of levity.  Crudup has been on a tear lately, and he continues on it here, keeping MacLeish from being a well-clad villain but instead is someone captured by the system and mournful of how he got there.  Ruffalo was born to play a dogged investigative journalist in Boston, but he's a bit of a weak link, incorporating a facial tic that was distracting at best.  Around the edges, Spotlight is packed with fully-realized smaller parts, each one suggesting an alternate film that could've focused on them instead.

As a lapsed Catholic, Spotlight was deeply personal.  At one point, Renzedes discusses how he's moved away from the church, but prior to breaking the story, he was sure he would one day go back, if not to believe all the dogma but to be part of the community again.  I wrote those exact words seven years ago in one of those banal Facebook chain notes, but like Renzedes, I can't imagine even thinking them again.  Forget the amount of faith required to believe in something fundamentally unknowable, an amount I no longer possess.  I just don't understand how someone could educate themselves about the sex abuse that plagues the church, and still show up every week and put my envelope in the collection basket.  Even with my knowledge of this monstrous crime, I was unprepared for a truly devastating epilogue, and the number of cities like Boston where endemic sex abuse had been uncovered.  It left me a sobbing mess in my theater seat.  Even with the ostensibly-humanitarian Pope Francis now in the big chair, what has he done about the man at the head of the Boston church during all this, Bernard Law, who now comfortably spends his retirement in a Roman palazzo?  The Catholic church repeated this across the globe, and to pretend that it hasn't been going on for at least as long as it's been a central hub of power is pure blindness. 

Spotlight is a masterpiece.  As a tribute to journalism, it succeeds.  As a historical document, it succeeds.  As a clarion call to institutional distrust and critical thinking, it succeeds.  McCarthy solidifies his status as a quintessentially-American director.  His Station Agent captured a misfit's transformation into a neighbor, his Visitor depicted a lonely man discovering the best part of America's promise, and his Win Win embodied the Churchill quote about America doing the right thing, eventually.  Spotlight finds the country at its worst and at its best, an enabler of injustice and a righter of wrongs.  After masochistically watching McCarthy's earlier 2015 film The Cobbler, I was sure he was deep in the weeds, possibly never to return.  After Spotlight, all is forgiven, and then some.  A