My Top 10 Films of 2015

2015 was a particularly strange year for movies. Critics and fanboys lost their minds for George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a movie I thought was laudable as a piece of action filmmaking, but certainly not a new standard for the genre. Likewise, the year’s end brought in a wave of earnest prestige pictures that are sure to be forgotten once the awards campaigns have come to an end--*cough* I’m looking at you “Spotlight.” When looking back at my personal top-10 of last year, I find a strange mix of films that range wildly in genre, size and scope.

10 – Steve Jobs – Aaron Sorkin returns to familiar territory with his screenplay about Macintosh maestro Steve Jobs. For some, this might have come too close to the tone and characterizations depicted in his admittedly stronger screenplay for David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” but Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jeff Daniels and Seth Rogan internalize Sorkin’s dense, walk-and-talk dialogue confidently and Danny Boyle’s serviceable direction showcases this oddly-structured biopic with a sense of urgency.

09 – Tangerine – Sean Baker’s micro-budget indie, shot entirely on a modified iPhone5, is one of the most vital films to come out of the festival circuit in years. This comedy chronicles a wacky night of misadventure between two transgendered prostitutes who work out of a janky donut hut on Hollywood Boulevard. Though the situations and setting of this very-specific world might sound like the usual set-up for a naval-gazing cautionary tale, Baker injects immediacy and levity into the film and refuses to let the characters feel sorry for themselves.

08 – The Martian – This has to be on my list on the basis of that it's the least problematic Ridley Scott movie since 2000’s “Gladiator.” Matt Damon carries this “Call of the Wild” on Mars story with a good sense of comedic timing and relatability. Along with the 70s disco soundtrack, it’s the optimistic celebration of intelligence and science found in Drew Goddard’s adapted screenplay that culminates into an idiosyncratic and likeable sensibility--not often found in much of Scott’s recent work.

07 – Dope – Three nerds who attend a high-school in south-central Los Angeles are on the run from both the police and the gangs, when one of them accidentally gets the group involved in a drug ring while fumbling to impress a girl. This teen comedy/heist-movie highbred is full of contagious energy and an adventurous spirit towards the well-worn tropes it gladly subverts. The familiar teen-movie themes of trying to fit in are translated into interesting discussions of racial identity and class, as this movie depicts the difficulties of wanting to excel and stand-out within  urban communities.

06 – Room – Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room” explores the human condition and the power of childhood imagination through the dark tale of a women who fights for her son’s safety and innocents while forced to raise him within the woodshed of a deranged kidnapper. Abrahamson explores this enclosed space like a science fiction reality, slowly revealing to the audience more devastating truths as we learn the finer details through the perspective of Jacob Tremblay’s child protagonist. Brie Larson also gives a heartbreaking performance as the young mother.

05 – It Follows – This tribute to 80s minimalist horror takes the absurd premise of an evil entity that follows a person after he or she has slept with the last carrier of the curse and shoots it with such competency and atmosphere that the viewer is forced to think about the deeper connotations of its fantasy rules. The film’s soundtrack and the artful use of subject camera infuses every scene with palpable terror.

4 – Sicario – Speaking of subtly brooding thrillers, Denis Villeneuve’s boarder-noir “Sicario” stretches the movie’s narrative tightrope as much as it can and holds the tension in place for it's entire run-time as we descend into the film's criminal hell-scape. Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Benecio Del Toro all give career-best performances and Roger Deakin’s cinematography brings him back to the southwest desolation of 2007’s “No Country for Old Men.”

3 – Ex Machina – Alex Garland’s directorial debut delivers on the promise of his visionary screenwriting on projects such as “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine.” Here he explores the psychology and philosophic ramifications of developing artificial intelligence with a minimal chamber thriller starring Oscar Isaac as a lonely, billionaire tech-genius and Domhnall Gleeson as an unassuming coder, tasked with testing the self-awareness of the world’s first living machine,  who's played wonderfully by Alicia Vikander.

2 – Inside Out – Pixar has a history of breaking hearts with their tender family fare, but it’s difficult to be prepared for just how genuine and vulnerable “Inside Out” is. The mechanics of the narrative, following the anthropomorphized emotions within the mind of a 12 year old girl, are surprisingly complicated and multifaceted, but “Up” writer/director Peat Doctor never loses sight of the raw, emotional core of his story within a story. More importantly, this film reminds us that big-budget Hollywood product can be thoughtful and nuanced and doesn't need to pander to the lowest common denominator to have a wide appeal.

1 – The Tribe – I saw this Ukrainian drama within the first few months of 2015 and knew by its end that it was unlikely that I would see a better film within the remainder of the year. Miroslav Slaboshpitsky depicts a boarding-school for the deaf as a lawless wasteland, where survival of fittest is the only sense of order established between groups of unsupervised teenagers. It’s difficult to describe the power of the wordless apocalyptic world Slaboshpitsky creates, but it’s the nervous tension generated between the shock of what we are seeing and the deliberate patience in which it’s shot that makes for one of the most vital pieces of visceral cinema of 2015.

Honorable Mentions:

Creed, Beasts of No Nation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road, What We Do In The Shadows,  Kingsmen: The Secret Service and Carol 

Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about the best and worst films of the year on this episode of the Jabber and the Drone podcast.

The Hateful Eight review

Quentin Tarantino is a writer/director whose best work finds a harmony between both disciplines. His work is often stylish and idiosyncratic and brings attention to the process of whatever it is that distinguishes his filmmaking from everyone else. His scripts are often talky and verbose, with many extended dialogue sequences and as a director he dresses up his screenplays with quirky music choices, active camera work and shuffled, non-linear editing. In short, he doesn’t mind reminding his audience that they are watching a movie with a capital M. Quentin’s latest film “The Hateful Eight” is an ultra-violent, Agatha Christy-esq mystery masquerading as a western, and while it contains elements of his most patient and deliberate work as a filmmaker, it awkwardly struggles to negotiate between Tarantino the writer and Tarantino the director.

Currently there are two different versions of “The Hateful Eight” playing in theaters, a theatrical cut that plays continuously and a limited version that’s projected from 70 millimeter film stock with a five minute overture and a ten minute intermission. Both versions run pretty close to three hours, and most of the film’s running time is devoted to flowery dialogue set-pieces that build to a blood splattered third act.

Its post-civil war 19^th century America and Hangman John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is transporting a wanted murdurer named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Red Rock where she is to be killed by the state for her crimes. While traveling through the snow-covered mountains of Wyoming, he picks up black bounty hunter named Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and an ex-rebel soldier named Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Both Warren and Mannix have a war-time reputation that precedes them and has followed them into Ruth’s carriage. Together, they seek shelter from an unforgiving blizzard at a remote cabin supply shop known as Minnie’s Haberdashery.  There they meet a another motley crew of character’s that includes a British born hangman named Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a Southern General named Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and an all-too-quiet cowboy named Joe Gage (Michael Madsen).

Many things about this situation seem strange to Ruth and Warren, as Minnie is nowhere to be found, the door is broken from the inside and the man running the haberdashery is an unknown Mexican who goes by the name Bob (Damian Birchir). The two conclude the one or more of these men are secretly working for Daisy Domergue and that an attack on their group is eminent, and because this is a Tarantino film, that’s exactly what happens.

Like his debut feature “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Hateful Eight” is essentially a chamber play in which a small cast of characters are trying to weed out a mole within the group. But this film is twice the length and bejeweled in a number of indulgent cinematic fetishes. The movie was shot by Bob Richardson in an ultra-wide cinemascope frame, and during the opening sequences through the snowy mountains the establishing vistas are magnificent to look at. This choice makes less sense when the other two thirds of the film enclosed in a single interior setting, where close-ups and quick edits are more widely utilized for the storytelling.  Legendary composer Ennio Marconi’s original score for the film is memorable and used to good effect in building tension and creating a mood for the film's sense of snowbound isolation and paranoia, and yet Tarantino still insists on dropping in moments of contemporary rock and pop music, which often clangs against Marconi’s compositions.  There’s a tonally jarring flashback sequence in the middle that could have been cut all together and at one point, for no other reason than he likes to hear himself talk, Quentin provides needless narration that overlays competently shot visual exposition.

Despite these issues, I appreciate the minimal approach to the story and setting and there's a subversive edge to how the narrative eventually escalates into a full-on gore-fest by its end.  The movie mediates Tarantino’s classical influences with his exploitation irony, acting as bridge somewhere between Howard Hawk’s “Rio Bravo” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” The script's many discussions about race and civil war allegiances are fascinating and politically messy in way that other films usually try hard to avoid and they play out within the character arcs in unexpected ways. As you can expect from this filmmaker, the dialogue is well written as pros and contains thorny quotables, but it’s the stagey monologues and constant speechifying that gets in the way of the story, causing the film’s tension as a thriller to relax.

“The Hateful Eight” undeniably entertaining and its by far Tarantino’s darkest and meanest film to date. As a formally experimental piece of pop cinema it’s commendable, but it’s too overwritten and undisciplined to work as the crackling mystery it needs to be.

Grade: C+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Listen to more discussion about "The Hateful Eight" and the films of Tarantino on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.

The Big Short review

Adam McKay, director of silly Will Ferrell vehicles such as “Anchorman” and “The Other Guys,” turned down the opportunity to helm Marvel’s “Ant-Man” in favor of “The Big Short,” a topical satire about a group of mavericks on the margins of Wall-Street who were able accurately predicted the housing collapse against the grain of conventional wisdom. Like 2014’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” this film portrays America’s unhealthy reinforcement of cutthroat capitalism like Greek tragedy, in which the key figured of this morality play are tricked into a game where winning and losing is the exact same thing.

This film is boasts a large cast of heavy-hitters that includes Christian Bale as a an eccentric annalist named Michael Burry who first discovers a way to profit from the eventual bursting of the housing bubble in 2005, long before anyone could see it growing. Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennet, a mercenary banker who catches wind of this prediction and hires a team of low-level Wall Street traders to check the progression of this collapse, with the aims of selling big just before the ground beneath them breaks. This team of foul mouthed number-crunchers is ran by Steve Carrell’s Mark Baum, a noble-to-a-fault day-trader who is caught in a moral quagmire when he quickly learns how far and how deeply in trouble the world economy has become and how it will effect living standards of the middle class. Producer Brad Pitt even makes an appearance as a nihilistic ex-yuppie who lends his expertise to two hapless dorks looking to break into the world of finance.

This movie juggles a lot of big personalities and plays almost like heist film in which the big score is cursed with a moral backfire. Based upon this description, you may assume that the film is a huge bummer, and it kind of is, but where McKay’s history in comedy comes in handy, both with his features and from his time as a writer on SNL, is that he allows for enough appropriate comedic distanced to nervously laugh at the story’s heady subject matter. The screenplay by McKay and Charles Randolph, works hard to break through the seemingly impenetrable amount of necessary exposition and finance jargon one has to recon with to accurately adapt the source text from Michael Lewis’ book of the same name. Lewis’ “Moneyball,” adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, took a much more intimate and human approach to the subject of how the prediction of numbers effects the real lives of which those numbers represent, mostly because of the sober and melancholy style of its director Bennett Miller.

In contrast, McKay simply acknowledges that the Wall Street world is not one that most of the audience lives in and decides to play the tragedy of corporate corruption like a perverse farce of the American dream. One could say that the many stylistic choices used here, including the use of catchy rock music, quick edit and goofy, non-diegetic asides where celebrities explain economic concepts, is a sign of McKay’s lack of confidence with the material—over compensating by dressing up the “grown up talk” in a lot bling and flash—and one is probably correct in that assessment. Nevertheless, when it comes to the fundamentally activist aim of the movie’s themes, McKay’s showy delivery certainly helps to digest and discern the material and to simultaneously entertain and outraged at the same time.

Despite all of the star power involved in the cast the ensemble shines within individual scenes and while Bale’s jittery performance could have used maybe two less acting-ticks, Carell’s hysterical and empathetic portrayal as a man who is hanging on to the last shreds of dignity and morality helps to ground the audience into the movie’s complex emotional truth .

Sometimes “The Big Short” feels a little too eager to impress and you’ll never shake the feeling that McKay is trying to convince you that the movie's vegetables are an airplane, but overall it has enough subversive punk-rock energy and a noble enough purpose to keep the enjoyable style from overwhelming the sobering substance. 

Grade - B

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Jan-2016

Star Wars: The Force Awakens review

When George Lucas sold the rights to “Star Wars” along with his company Lucasfilm to Disney and it was announced that Spielberg’s spiritual successor J.J. Abrams, of “Super 8” and the recent “Star Trek” films, would relaunch the series with an additional numerical installment, devotees were instantly optimistic about the possibility of the series redeeming itself from the dampened legacy of the franchise. “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is as much a soft-reboot as it is the seventh episode of Lucas’ grand saga. Many familiar elements are reintroduced through new characters and the old cast members are brought back to pass the ceremonial lightsaber to a new generation—a younger generation of fans who learned most of what they know about “Star Wars” minutia from online reddit forums, long-winded bloggy take-downs of the much-maligned prequels, as well as various memes, sketches and remix videos.

Forty years of real-time have passed since Luke Skywalker destroyed the Empire, Darth Vader was killed and Han Solo, Princess Leia and the rebels celebrated their victory. Turns out they celebrated too early because the Empire has reformed as an aggressive totalitarian militia known as the First Order and after failing to train a new generation of Jedi, Luke has gone missing. In his absence, a new Darth Vader wannabee named Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has led the hunt for the remaining rebel forces, dead-set on finding Luke before the other rebels can get to him. A small soccer-ball-shaped droid called BB-8 has a piece of the galactic map that leads to Luke’s whereabouts but is separated from the resistance when his master, a fighter pilot named Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), is arrested by the First Order after a battle on a desert planet known as Jakku. It is then up to a resilient scavenger named Rey (Daisy Ridley) and a disgruntled storm trooper in hiding named Fin (John Boyega) to bring the droid back to the rebel base before Kylo Ren and First Order discover the secrets they hold.

Much of the appeal of this film is in its attempts to conjure the aesthetics and nostalgia of the original trilogy. “Empire Strikes Back” writer Lawrence Kasdan helped Abrams pen the screenplay and many of the high-stakes adventuring, the jokey one-liners and the scrappy aerial dog fights that were missing from Lucas’ stoic prequels are restored in this exciting but sometimes frustratingly familiar plot. The younger cast of characters are genuinely likable and interesting. They fit very neatly into previous “Star Wars” archetypes but the actors fill their parts out with a lot of idiosyncratic charm and self-deprecating wit. Likewise, Harrison Ford’s return as Han Solo remains surprisingly fresh and energetic, considering the age of the actor and the grizzled joylessness of his later performances.

The special effects are appropriately updated, using a healthy blend of computer generated visuals along with real sets, real locations and tangible props and creature designs. The movie isn’t exactly short but it moves along quickly and it milks those crowd pleasing close-calls in such a way that even the most jaded of fanboys will be unable to resist a near-constant grin.  And yet, even after thoroughly enjoying myself twice in the theater—yes, I’ve already seen it twice—I can’t help but lament how narratively unoriginal and pandering a lot of this feels. Many plot points directly mirror those of the first three films and many functions of the new and old characters serve to move the story with almost the exact same outcomes. Death Stars, rescue missions, mysterious prophecies and Greek familial tragedy are all tapped again for this installment and carried out without any subversion of those dusty Campbellian tropes. As such, it’s almost impossible to be surprised by this movie (or perhaps the future of this entire franchise) once you realize where it’s headed.

Thee future of creative cinema aside, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is undeniably a good time at the movies. New audiences will have a worthy jumping on point to seed their future obsessions and seasoned fans will likely enjoy the throwbacky glee of Abrams’ childlike warmth towards the mythology. But it is it’s also undeniable that Abrams is as much a fanboy as he is a fan and has a difficult time distancing himself far enough from the source material to update it or add to it in a truly bold or progressive way.

Grade: B

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "The Force Awakens" and "The Big Short" on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.

In the Heart of the Sea review

Ron Howard’s “In the Heart of the Sea” is a 3D, special effects reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” that’s oddly bashful about its source material. The conceit is that this film is based on the true story that “Moby Dick” was inspired by, but given the level of artifice involved in the movie’s production, truth and authenticity hardly feels like the Howard's cinematic goal with this project. It’s also a special effects film in which the last 30 minutes primarily focuses on a group of starving men floating around in still waters.

Perhaps we need a new word for year-end, awards-baiting 3D films like “Gravity” and “Life of Pi”; not quite blockbuster, but not quite prestige film either. They exist somewhere in the middle, attempting to draw people in with the promise of spectacle, boasting a well-regarded cast and director and expressing just enough dramatic oomph to suggest a deeper regard for story than the summer’s brand of overblown toy commercials and comic book properties--or at least that’s the intended impression.

The story here is wrapped around a distracting framing device in which Brendan Gleeson recounts his time at sea as the youngest passenger aboard the movie’s nautical whaling adventure. As he tells this story to a young Herman Melville with writers-block (Ben Wishaw), we go back to the early 19^th century when whale-oil was a huge political and economic commodity.  Gleeson’s character is now played by future-Spider-Man Tom Holland, who looks up to the handsome and masculine Owen Chase, played by Chris Hemsworth. Chase is upset because, though he is more qualified and experienced, he is made second in command of his whaling ship to George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), who was hastily made captain through nepotism. After spending months at sea with little to show for it, the crew is told that there is a stretch of ocean a few thousand miles off the shores of Argentina lousy with whales, so long as they can survive a monstrous, vengeful sea-demon known as…well, not Moby Dick, because this isn’t that story…exactly.

Out of the gate this film is hobbled by the story within a story about a story concept, and with the narrator’s timeline intermittently weaving in and out of the film’s primary narrative, a lot of dramatic tension is broken to serve the movie’s and the tension that exists between it’s want to relish in lush production and its perceived ‘truthiness.’ Besides the whale attack money shots and the occasionally impressive vista, Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is beholden to the 3D moments and blandly color-corrected with an aqua-marine tinge that actually flattens the dynamics of every shot.

That said, I can’t deny that the film eventually wormed its way into my psyche as the third act delved deeper into its characters and raised the stakes of their personal sense of humanity. Though the movie slows down to a crawl and essentially abandon’s its high-concept effects-ride premise, I could appreciate some of the narrative risks it was willing to take. Of course these risks are somewhat undercut by the need to have Wishaw and Gleeson explicate the movie’s themes every time the movie felt the need to cut back to the framing device.

“In the Heart of the Sea” is a gaudy, noble failure that mostly doesn’t work, but it’s also not entirely unentertaining. A lot of the movie is undeniably hokey. The performances are a little over-mannered, even by seasoned pros like Hemsworth and the great Irish actor Cillian Murphy, and with their old-American costumes and warbled accents much of it plays like an expensive episode of Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” Which isn’t to say that there isn’t some inherent fun to be had in that aesthetic. Thematically, the movie struggles to tie together its semi-environmental ideas about the oil industrial complex with its sub-“Jaws” competition of masculinity themes and by the end of the film audiences are likely to feel bait-and-switched by how slow and dark the movie allows itself to get.

Grade: C-

Originally Printed in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "In the Heart of the Sea" on this week's "Jabber and the Drone" Podcast.

Krampus review

The yuletide horror film has long been a tradition of the scary-movie genre, from 1974’s “Black Christmas,” to 1984’s “Silent Night, Deadly Night.” Michael Dougherty’s “Krampus” takes the twisted-fairytale approach to common Christmas movie tropes and perverts them with the same sense of gleeful menace that Joe Dante brought to his staple of the Christmas horror-comedy sub-genre “Gremlins.”

Adam Scott and Toni Collette play Tom and Sarah, two frustrated suburban parents who’re dreading the yearly visit from their backwards extended family. Sarah’s sister Linda (Allison Tolman) and her gun-toting, loud-mouthed husband (David Koechner), along with their drunken matriarch (Conchata Ferrell) and their two brutish children, complete this RV-driving nightmare family that seems hell-bent on ruining the perfect holiday weekend for Tom and Sarah’s youngest boy Max (Emjay Anthony). When Max gives up on the possibility of his family getting along he tears apart his handwritten letter to Santa Claus and, in doing so, inadvertently conjures the dark magic of the Krampus, a massive horned and hooved beast that turns every Christmas tradition into a deadly trap. Having experienced something similar in her youth, Tom’s elderly German mother Omi (Krista Stadler) tries to warn the group against going outside or letting the fireplace stay unlit. 

Dougherty’s previous holiday-themed cult-horror movie “Trick ’r Treat” was a tryptic, portmanteau narrative that brought together different story elements within the same group of characters, shifting from one plot thread to the other. “Krampus” is a much more traditionally structured three-act story, and because of that has more responsibility to its build-up and its pay-off. The movie’s set-up is pretty loose and given enough to air to inform the characters and comedy. Structurally, National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation” certainly played in similar water, as far as the awkward family dynamics go, but Dougherty’s screenplay never seems to penetrate the surface of these character’s one-note identifiers, underselling the potential for anything more than a mild chuckle. The actors do their best with what little they’re given, but before the horror-element kicks in, the movie’s foundation as a story is disappointingly thin.

Where Dougherty excels here is with his visual flair and his wild imagination when it comes to the effects and movie’ atmosphere. The Germanic pagan design of the “Krampus” himself, along with the wooden faces of his demonic elves are delightfully sinister and brings to mind the playful and practical creature effects of 1980s B-movies such as “Troll” and “Pumpkinhead.” Dougherty is clearly having fun within his limitations and plays the story like a director putting on a perverse puppet show for an unsuspecting audience. Unfortunately, the PG-13 rating dampens the levels of violence and shock necessary for the film to be anywhere near as subversive as it often thinks it’s being, forcing the movie to rely too heavily on its hacky and tepid comedy.

As a mostly-silly genre exercise, “Krampus” is acceptable pop-corn fodder and destined to be a cable-television curiosity. The plot mechanics and characterizations are certainly lazy and it’s never fully commits to the sense anarchy it teases throughout, but it’s filmed with visual confidence and it has just enough schlocky exuberance to keep you entertained.


Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal - Dec/2015

Listen to more discussion about "Krampus" on this this week's episode of the Jabber and the Drone Podcast.

Creed review

Ryan Coogler’s unlikely “Rocky” spin-off “Creed” is an uncompromisingly traditional sports drama that works as a piece of pop-entertainment because of its commitment to emotional storytelling. Much like the director’s approach to his debut indie about police violence “Fruitvale Station,” Coogler spends a lot of time getting inside the heads of his characters and building a tangible, and believable world for them to inhabit. The big sports movie moments are present and the familiar beats of the genre are eventually paid off, but Coogler informs these moments with care and precision when it comes to the plight of the characters and the strength of the film’s performances.

This story picks up decades after the death of Rocky mentor and adversary Apollo Creed. Outside of the margins of the sequel’s cannon, it is learned that Creed had an illegitimate son named Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) with a women outside of his marriage. When the young boy’s mother dies and he is left orphaned Creed’s true wife Mary Ann (Phylicia Rashad) finds him in a juvenile detention center for boys and decides to bring him to her home in Los Angeles and raise the child like her own. After he’s grown, though she would like him to focus on his career as a business man, Johnson has a yearning to be a great fighter like the father he never met, secretly training in Mexico and building his natural talent as a boxer.  Soon enough, Adonis decides to quit his suit and tie job and move to Philadelphia to train with the aged and broken Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone).

Cinematically “Creed” distinguishes itself from the other “Rocky” movies with a quiet and grounded sensibility. There’s a loose, handheld style used throughout and a much more somber tone than is usually expressed in the rest of the movies of this franchise. Coogler directs the film as if the other movies were a mythologized version of a real-life figure that we’re meeting for the first time in this iteration. Of course this isn’t the case, but the grit of this movie world is an effective tone-setter and Coogler informs the mentor-mentee clichés of the plot with a documentary style realism that helps the film’s urban setting feel properly lived-in.

The camera work also allows for longer lasting cuts that boarder on virtuoso filmmaking without ever announcing a flashy movie-moment or any post-Scorsese directorial muscle-flexing. Instead, much like the performances, these longer cuts are used to open the scenes up and allows the visual language to breath, especially during the climactic fight sequences.

Michael B. Jordan is terrific here as the young Adonis Johnson. I won’t say that he’s written with a ton of depth or complexity, but Jordan’s interiority and natural screen presence fills in the blanks left of the page. When young Creed moves to Philadelphia he meets a neighbor played by Tessa Thompson, a musician with progressive hearing-loss. This relationship never feels like a superfluous B-plot, mostly because of the real chemistry that exists between the performers and because the attention payed toward the film’s themes of living in the moment before opportunity eventually fades. Stallone is also allowed to play his iconic character with more vulnerability than we have seen from him in some time.

“Creed” is a movie that we’ve seen before. The tropes of the boxing-genre are inescapable and just about every one of those boxes are checked in this somewhat pedestrian screenplay. But cinema should also exist off the page, and that is where Coogler finds his strength as a storyteller, often better at expressing how a scene should feel rather than what it tells.  

Grade - B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "Creed" and "Room" on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.