From my 1.17.14 review: “Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.14) is a raging two-hander about a gifted drummer named Andrew (Miles Teller). Enrolled at an elite Manhattan music school and determined to be not just proficient or admired but Buddy Rich-great, Andrew is a Bunsen burner. We can see from the get-go he’s going to be increasingly possessed and manic and single-minded about the skins. (All great musicians are like this to varying degrees.) On top of which he really doesn’t want to be like his kindly, failed-writer dad (Paul Reiser), and he can’t find peace with a pretty girl (Melissa Benoist) because she isn’t as consumed as he is — too uncertain and unexceptional.

“That’s combustible enough, but Chazelle turns it up with the villain/angel of the piece — a snarling, egg-bald, half-mad music instructor named Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). This guy is definitely not sane and yet he knows what it takes to be great. Andrew recognizes this kindred (if dominating) spirit and wham…we’re off to the races. You know these guys are going to butt heads, and that a lot of emotional-psychological blood will be spilt (along with the actual stuff). This is the super-demanding realm of classic jazz. Everyone listening to Rich and Charlie Parker and other legends of that ilk. Playing the hell out of ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Cherokee’ and dreading Fletcher’s wrath. No pikers, whiners or jerkoffs.”

Fatih Akin‘s The Cut is “a big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work…but it’s a little simplistic emotionally, especially in its latter half as the film trudges across America with its hero. It doesn’t have the sophisticated nuance and wit of Akin’s contemporary German-language movies, like Head-On (’04) and The Edge of Heaven (’07). [The title] can mean the brutal act of murder itself; it can mean the division of husbands from wives, parents from children, and it can mean the present from the past, the insidious amputation of memory. Whether The Cut encompasses this last sense is up for debate, but it is a forceful, watchable, strongly presented picture and a courageous, honest gesture.” — from Peter Bradshaw‘s Guardian review, filed from Venice Film Festival on 8.31.14.

If you’re a cultured film cricket or impassioned film hound, there are two ways to go with Scott Frank‘s A Walk Among The Tombstones. You can praise it for being “an uncommonly well-made thriller,” as Village Voice critic Alan Scherstuhl did today, or you can say it’s too venal and misogynist (the bad guys are as animalistic and bloodthirsty as the Islamic State fighters) despite the gritty, well-honed, old-fashioned chops. But you can’t just wave it off. You can’t dismiss it for being retro (there’s nothing wrong with taking a basic ’70s-style approach) or for not being exceptionally well made (a ludicrous thing to say) or because it’s not cartoonishly violent in the rote style of the Taken films. Or because it invests in secondary characters. Or because it has a heart.

“The Taken films invite viewers to cheer violence,” Scherstuhl writes. “A Walk Among the Tombstones, with some moral force, insists that you want nothing to do with it.”

In short, you can say you don’t like Tombstones for whatever peculiar reason you may choose (as I often do), but you can’t fault the obviously high level of craft. You’ve got to at least show proper respect. Theatrical urban thrillers really need this kind of smart, low-key approach. Or…aahh, fuck it, maybe they don’t. Maybe it’s better to just let this level of writing and acting migrate to cable television where it belongs. But this is the kind of good-detective-vs.-maniacal-villain flick that nobody makes any more. It’s composed of well-ordered material and the right kind of instincts. It’s a bit like John Flynn‘s The Outfit, that 1973 Robert Duvall film that finally re-surfaced on DVD a few years ago. One of those tone-it-down, less-is-more exercises. And quite gripping in its own way. It just doesn’t pander to morons.

We know that Chris and Jonathan Nolan‘s Interstellar (Paramount, 11.5) involves an attempt to…you tell me. We know that the earth is dust-filled and polluted beyond hope and less and less capable of sustaining life, and that Matthew McConaughey is part of a team of space voyagers who want to somehow turn things around…but how? It’s a slim thread of a notion of a vague idea of something or other, and it’s been floating around for several months now. Does anyone know what Interstellar is actually about without the dandelion pollen? I’m not trying to be an asshole. I’m just feeling fed up with the vague-itude.

About ten days ago, or dead smack in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival, New Beverly Cinema owner Quentin Tarantino announced that he’s not only renovating the famously grimy, down-at-the-heels repertory theatre (it’s due to re-open sometime next month) but is totally committed to an all-35mm, all-the-time policy. The retro-minded director is not that worried about profitability. What matters to Tarantino (and I totally respect this) is standing by celluloid to the bitter end. “The big thing about what’s going to change now that I’m taking the theater over is, from here on in the New Beverly is only showing film,” Tarantino told Deadline‘s Jen Yamato. “That’s it. No digital. If something’s playing at the New Beverly, if we’re showing it, it’s on film.”

That means getting rid of the digital projector that theatre manager Michael Torgan (son of the late honcho/founder of the New Beverly) had installed. That also means Tarantino is taking over the New Beverly programming for the first three months of the new incarnation and showing many of his own 35mm prints, most of which are presumably in pretty good condition, along with pre-show shorts and cartoons and whatnot. (He basically wants the place to simulate a ’70s grindhouse vibe with a mixture of exploitation and art fare.) This also means that Torgan’s involvement in the new operation is…uhm, uncertain. Yamato wrote that while “terms of the takeover remain vague,” Torgan “might stay on as the New Beverly’s Julia Marchese and Brian Quinn step up as assistant managers.” Tarantino’s actual quote: “I want him to be involved”…hah!

The buzz for the last couple of months has been that David Fincher‘s Gone Girl is a movie that some couples might break up over. A chillingly entertaining, top-notch Fincher drill bit with a startling Rosamund Pike performance. A critic I know has just seen it and says the following: “The movie’s heart is curdled and cynical and black, and Fincher doesn’t pull any punches. I’m not sure it will catch on with mainstream audiences, but I’m really happy he made it. It’s so beautiful. Ben Affleck is aces, perhaps the best he’s ever been. It’s more of a provocative date movie than high art. I wouldn’t call it slamdunk Best Picture material, but watch out for a nomination for Rosamund Pike — she’s that good. Original author and screenwriter Gillian Flynn could get one too. I’m kinda surprised the book caught Fincher’s interest as it’s 95 percent dialogue in living rooms and 5 percent Fincher-style grotesquerie (including an insane bloody murder). Not showy or flashy in any way. I also really liked Patrick Fugit‘s near-silent performance. Fincher is so detailed oriented and specific he reminds me a little of Kubrick. It’s maybe 15 minutes too long, but Tyler Perry can act!”

Southern California Edison informed me today that equipment replacements will cause my particular area of West Hollywood to be without power for as long as 11 hours starting tomorrow around 7 pm. In a heat wave? Thanks, bozos! I’ve never heard of equipment replacements causing an outage lasting a full half-day. I’m presuming that the actual power-less period will be closer to an hour or two, but the SCE robots have been instructed to say it might last as long as 11 hours. So I booked a room for tomorrow night (check-in at 3 pm) at the Beverly Terrace hotel, which is just outside the grid area. It’ll cost over $200 bills but I don’t want to risk being without air conditioning or fans for that long a period. Am I acting like a spoiled nelly? Should I man up and cancel the reservation and just deal with it like the late Steve McQueen would have?

I know who Rob Marshall is. I know what he’s capable of, where his instincts lie, where he’s likely to go. I know what Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha, Nine and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides were. He makes smooth, costly, handsomely designed films. You’re not going to get me to believe that his latest endeavor, a filmed adaptation of Stephen Sondheim‘s Into the Woods (Disney, 12.25), is going to be anything more or less than another Rob Marshall film. What that will finally amount to is, of course, anyone’s guess. But you know what I mean.

At first glance Gabe Ibánez‘s Automata (Green Room/Millenium, 11.18) looks like a blend of Blade Runner and Neil Blomkamp‘s District 9 (particularly the dusty atmosphere and bleachy color scheme) with a shaved-head-sporting Antonio Banderas playing a variation on Harrison Ford‘s Dekker. His character, Jacq Vaucan, is an insurance agent for the ROC Robotics Corporation (which sounds like a branch of the Tyrell Corporation) who’s looking into the case of a robot apparently modifying itself (which is vaguely similar to a replicant named Roy trying to take charge of his own destiny by extending his life). Whatever it is, I feel like I’ve been here before.

It needs to be fully understood that Scott Frank‘s A Walk Among The Tombstones (Universal, 9.19) is at least two or three cuts above your typical Liam Neeson whoop-ass actioner, and that it deals restrained cards all the way through with intelligent dialogue, logical plot progressions and action scenes that are rugged and jarring without being stupidly overwrought. It’s a smart-guy detective film in the vein of Chris McQuarrie‘s Jack Reacher — sensible, pruned down, less is more. Most of it is dialogue- and character-driven, and it all gradually makes sense. The mostly off-screen violence is horribly brutal (the bad guys are like ISIL without Allah) but it doesn’t feature a single under-25 woman using vocal fry patois or uptalk or the sexy baby vocal virus…thank God!

The only passage that doesn’t work happens at the very end — a violent climax that uses occasional freeze-frames as we listen to somebody recite the twelve steps from Alcoholic Anonymous. An industry journalist noted the same thing when I saw him in the parking lot. But when I said, “Okay, I felt that way also but c’mon, that’s not worth getting hung up on…this is a tough, disciplined smart-guy detective thriller,” he frowned and shook his head. My blood ran cold. “You…wait, you’re telling me you prefer the same old Taken-style Neeson whoop-ass shit to this?”,” I asked. “Yeah,” he said. “Oh, my fucking God,” I said.

“In Listen Up Philip, Alex Ross Perry continues his cinematic quest to test the limits of just how far you can take the obnoxious misanthropy of your leading characters,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy. “Explicitly set in the literary world, this ambitious venture focuses on the willfully self-destructive impulses of a talented young novelist who simultaneously sabotages the potential success of his new novel and his love life, partly through his admiring relationship with a venerable older writer whose antisocial behavior is far more evolved than his own. Critics will gather around this indisputably talented work for its risk-taking, dark humor and barbed portraiture of creative individuals, but beyond sophisticates with a masochistic streak, audiences will not take up Perry’s dare to embrace this acridly engaging work.”

Right now there are two critics against Birdman — elite contrarian James Rocchi (here’s his Film.com review) and Film Freak Central‘s Walter Chaw (whose review is instantly dismissable because of his belief that Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim is a more respectable/honorable film than Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s 21 Grams and Babel). No biggie, minor potholes — there’s always an intelligent naysayer or two. No, the real machine-gun fire is going to come from somewhat older women who prefer safe-haven comfort movies. That’s not to say a sizable percentage of the Birdman dissers aren’t (or won’t eventually be revealed as) older males — I’m just confining myself for now to first-hand reactions that have dropped in my lap.

There’s a wife of a friend whose reactions to this or that award-season film have proven to be bellwethers in years past. When I asked her about Birdman she said, “Wild, isn’t it?” That’s code for “not my cup of tea.” But last night I was told she has serious reservations…uh-oh. HE’s own Glenn Zoller, a part-time Telluride resident, says that an older local woman hated it also. This woman and her husband were talking to a couple of middle-aged guys in a downtown Telluride-to-Mountain Village gondola, and she said at one point, “Whatever you do, don’t see Birdman.” And the guy across from her said in a perfect deadpan, “I financed Birdman.”