Though having only five dramatic feature films under his belt Terence Davies has been dubbed the greatest living British filmmaker. And there’s little argument here. The Long Day Closes, his second film exemplifies the dreamy beauty of his films, a symphony of cinematic elegance whose sole purpose is to bask in the beauty of his inspired marriage of imagery and sound.

The Game (1997) dir. David Fincher
Starring: Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, James Rebhorn, Peter Donat

By Alan Bacchus

Games are at play in both Seven and The Game. In Seven, the reigns are held by a psychopathic serial killer testing the will and unwilling victim played by Brad Pitt. John Doe (Kevin Spacey), upset with the world, forces the perfect-specimen of society to see the evils of the world in the most horrific way possible. In The Game, Nicholas Van Orten is somewhat complicit in his game, but he enters into his harrowing journey under false pretenses. For Van Orten, the problems with his life are visualized elegantly in a beautifully morose opening sequence, shot in earthy and haunting 8mm film, fake home movies which show the wealthy but depressed life of Nicholas’s father. The sequence ends with his father jumping off his balcony to his death,

As a result, Van Orten’s lifestyle is typically cold. His relationship with his co-workers and ex-wife are unemotive two-word sentences at most. And as a ruthless capitalist, he's introduced firing one of his father’s older colleagues (Armin Muehler-Stahl) in order to save some falling stock, but perhaps subconsciously to finally exert his authority of the ghost of his father. If anything, Van Orten is an on-the-nose caricature of Douglas’s Gordon Gekko, the '80s shark, perhaps updated for the '90s – devoid of the enjoyment of the corporate game, now simply numb to everything around him.

Enter Nicholas’s brother (Sean Penn), who gives him a CRS (Consumer Recreation Services) gift card as a birthday present. He’s not interested in any games, but through some cleverly placed covert clues Nicholas is subliminally persuaded to participate.

Fincher takes his time with the mechanics of the game. The initial adventures Van Orten finds himself in are overly telegraphed, feats of physical strength, a chase here and there, or, as Nicholas himself puts it, ‘elaborately staged pranks’. All of this is either an illusion to mask the true and devious goals of CRS to scam Van Orten out of his money, or to gradually put the man into a hallucinogenic daze in order to push him through the other side of consciousness. At all times throughout, in the back of our minds, we know that it's possible that it's all fake, all part of the game. And so the genius of this film is Fincher’s ability, through shear awe-inspiring cinematic skill, to put us in the mind of Van Orten and have us think from his point of view every step of the way.

This was my experience upon first viewing, as malleable as the puppet Van Orten finds on his driveway, pulled and push at will by Fincher into every dark corner he wants us to go. Thus making every twist a surprise or a shock, and in the case of the impressive climax, a complete revelation.

Seven had the same effect, but while that film bludgeoned its audience with a cold hard dose of cynical reality in the climax, The Game subverts these expectations by taking another direction, transforming its main character into a new person, Van Orten free of the lifelong shackles of his father and able to make his life thereafter his own.

***½

The Game is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Rosetta (1999) dir. Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne
Starring: Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Anne Yernaux, Olivier Gourmet

By Alan Bacchus

Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) is a sad case, living in a trailer park, subject to the whims of her irresponsible mother who prostitutes her body to the superintendant to pay for their heating bills. She has everything working against her. But shining through this cloud of poverty and depression is a fierce determination to succeed. The Dardennes, armed with their handheld camera, follow the impressive Émilie Dequenne around the city with the utmost of urgency, a thrilling journey of body and soul.

Émilie sets her sights on a job at a waffles stand – a meager low-paying job but a legitimate occupation which instills pride in her work. That said, her means of achieving this are dubious. Not unlike how her mother sells herself to their landlord, Rosetta ingratiates herself with her friend, Riquet, who works the stand to convince his boss (Dardennes stalwart Olivier Gourmet) to hire her. The job doesn’t last long when she’s let go in favour of the boss’s son. The result is a magnificent scene for Dequenne, a violent and desperate anger-fueled fit of rage.

Rosetta’s next step is even more dubious, as she rats on her boyfriend for skimming the till and stealing from the boss. It’s a devastating turn of events; a heartless betrayal by Rosetta, the anguish of wish is expressed on the quiet intensity of Dequenne’s remarkable face.

When Rosetta’s mother lapses into alcoholism, thus threatening her life, Rosetta’s priorities are in conflict, forcing her to make some even more powerful life decisions. All the while the Dardennes keep their camera tethered to Dequenne’s shoulder for maximum emotional impact.

Rosetta is the second of the Dardennes' continuing series of Social Realism pictures which target the poverty-stricken urban peoples. After La Promesse and Rosetta, Le Fils and L’Enfant impressively furthered their examination of the impoverished. The thrill of the Dardennes' modus operandi is their ability to laser in on their characters so precisely that we become invested and involved in even the most insignificant of activities in their lives, including Rosetta’s fixation on her makeshift fish-trap, which she’s placed in the river and checks every day. It’s slightly pathetic, but it's an indication of her active desire to do anything, however futile, to be self-determining and self-reliant.

The greatness of the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is the profound nature of scenes like this.

****

Rosetta is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

Good Will Hunting (1997) dir. Gus Van Sant
Starring: Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver, Stellan Skarsgård

By Alan Bacchus

In terms of story, perhaps the real triumph of this film is the ability of Damon/Affleck/Van Sant to surmount the ridiculous concept that there exists such a character as Will Hunting, a good-looking charismatic guy's guy who works as a measly janitor but is mind smart enough to be one of the world’s top mathematicians. Not to mention he’s a man who can quote Shakespeare, rattle off passages from obscure American history texts and any other academic study you can think of.

Good Will Hunting does just this by making virtually every scene a memorable one. Sure, the story of two out-of-work actors writing a high priced, in-demand Hollywood screenplay is a great story, one which likely influenced the Academy voters at the time, but Damon's and Affleck’s screenplay is as close to structural perfection as it comes and deserving of its win.

The dialogue exchanges in the film have the same intricacies as the best work of David Mamet or Aaron Sorkin. The scenes with Robin Williams and Matt Damon in particular are the showcase pieces in the film. Williams’ Sean Maguire character is not-so-subtly influenced by Judd Hirsch’s character in Ordinary People, the bearded psychologist who provided warm and comforting therapy to Timothy Hutton’s tortured character.

Here, Sean is hired by his old roommate, math professor Gerald Lambeau (Skarsgård), to counsel Will in the days before his 21st birthday, when he’s free of his juvenile status. The iron will of fellow Southie, Sean, is an unlikely match for Will’s uber-intelligent wit and repartee. Each visit feels like it's crafted with the precision of a set piece. Each of the half-dozen scenes are shot with their own flavour. At first it's a passive aggressive intellectual arm wrestle with Will feeling out the new doctor while testing for weaknesses. Then it's a quiet staring contest followed by Sean's analysis of Will, which completely disarms his intellectual edge. And then it's Will countering Sean, forcing the doctor to look inward at his own social deficiencies. The last scene featuring Will's final catharsis cleverly skirts cliché yet provides us with maximum melodrama and waterworks.

In between this core relationship Matt and Ben craft well-drawn portraits of familiar characters: Will's homeboy buddies from Southie, specifically Chuckie, who seems to have little impact on the story until Ben Affleck's deeply affecting speech to Will about his responsibility to his friends to use his intellectual gifts; and Lambeau, who serves as the only antagonist, has his own rich parallel backstory with Sean, and provides its own share of shouting matches and male vs. male posturing. If anything, it's the only female character that gets the short shrift in Skylar (Driver), Will's girlfriend, a Harvard student from a rich British family who provides the emotional challenge to Will to shape up and take risks in life.

As conventional as Good Will Hunting is, Van Sant admirably retains his indie cred by using staunchly independent singer-songwriter Elliot Smith to provide the musical voice of the film. Though the score is credited to Danny Elfman, it's the haunting melancholy acoustic songs from Smith that set the tone of the film, recalling Mike Nichols' use of Simon and Garfunkel in the seminal coming-of-age film of the 1960s, The Graduate. With adequate time to reflect, Good Will Hunting and The Graduate match surprisingly well.

****

Good Will Hunting is available on Blu-ray from Alliance Films in Canada.

Shallow Grave (1994) dir. Danny Boyle
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccelston

We can’t help but watch Shallow Grave now without viewing it as a sort of testing ground for this filmmaking team’s more popular, successful and pop-culturally memorable second film, Trainspotting. From the opening first person confessionary voiceover to Leftfield's foot-tapping, head-bobbing club music we know we’re in the head of Danny Boyle and his writing partner, John Hodge. Like the four Edinburgh lads in Trainspotting, writer John Hodge introduces his three leads as a group of self-obsessed, slightly annoying Scottish hipsters whom we come to love for their forthright, don’t give a fuck attitude on life.

Here they’re interviewing prospective flatmates to make a foursome in their spacious top floor apartment complex. McGregor plays a lowly tabloid writer, Alex Law; Kerry Fox is a demure but alluring doctor; and Eccelston plays David a workaholic lawyer. However assholish it may be, we can't help but indentify with the obsessive, condescending critique of the roll call of losers and weirdos showing up to be considered as a flatmate. They eventually find their mate in a handsome, mysterious gentleman whose cool demeanor easily breaks through the wall of insecurity of the threesome. However, it doesn't take long before the trio find him dead of an overdose in his bed. Before they can call the cops they find a briefcase full of money, ready for the taking.

It wouldn't be a movie if they didn't take the money, dismember and bury the body in a ‘shallow grave’, and agree to keep quiet before splitting the cash. Eventually, a pair of Scottish hoodlums come looking for the money, resulting in a violent confrontation, which sends the normally meek David into a psychotic downward spiral into oblivion.

Borrowing the same darkly comic tone of, say, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, Shallow Grave revels in the despicable. The dismemberment of the body, for instance, like in Hitchcock’s films, makes for an absurdly humorous set piece, starting with the trio shopping for tools in the local hardware store to the completion of the dirty deed, unfortunately randomly assigned to David.

Danny Boyle’s visual panache is front and centre, laying the groundwork for his distinct visual palette of the pre-28 Days Later period of his career. Wideangle lenses and off kilter, portrait-style compositions expressively place his characters as mere pawns in their environment.

In hindsight, Shallow Grave and its characters are a product of their environment, the post-Thatcher world of decay and extreme capitalist individualism and selfishness, a point articulated by Boyle in The Criterion Collection liner notes. There’s no doubt the cruelty enacted on Alex’s character is a comeuppance for the society’s shameless First World hubris.

But this is all periphery to the delightful plot machinations and youthful filmmaking style of Boyle and the bunch, skewering the expectations of stodgy British cinema as much as anything else.

***½

Shallow Grave is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) dir. Louis Malle
Starring: Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore, Brooke Smith, Larry Pine, Andre Gregory

****

By Greg Klymkiw

"When we come to die, we'll die submissively. Beyond the grave we will testify that we've suffered, that we've wept that we've known bitterness. And God will take pity on us and we will live a life of radiant joy and beauty and we'll look back on this life of our unhappiness with tenderness and we'll smile. And in that new life we shall rest, we shall rest to the songs of the angels in a firmament arrayed in jewels and we'll look down and we'll see evil, all the evil in the world and all our sufferings bathed in a perfect mercy and our lives grown sweet as a caress." - Sonya's final monologue in David Mamet's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's play "Uncle Vanya".

If your idea of a good time is not watching two hours of wasted lives, think again. When those same wasted lives come to the collective realization - almost like a series of epiphanies - of just how much they've failed to fulfill their dreams and/or promise, you'll have been rewarded with a journey that will have enriched your very being.

Vanya on 42nd Street is raw in its emotion and approach. Watching Louis Malle's film of the David Mamet adaptation of the great play "Uncle Vanya" is one of the best ways to experience Anton Chekhov on film.

The final product represents the culmination of Andre Gregory's grand theatrical experiment of taking some of New York's greatest actors and rehearsing Vanya for two years with no intention of ever staging it. Gregory, (the Andre of Malle's My Dinner With Andre) had a dream - to create an ideal opportunity for great actors to intimately dive into the depths of Chekhov's multi-layered work - to get to know the text so deeply that the journey's end would, in fact, never end. The goal was to infuse these actors with Chekhov's genius and, at the same time, for very select audiences - usually in the living rooms of friends' apartments - to experience, from Gregory's vantage point, both the journey of the actors and that of Chekhov's characters.

Malle attended one of these legendary living room performances and immediately decided a film version that captured both Gregory's vision and the truly astounding interpretations of Mamet's adaptation of Chekhov's work was in order. With Malle's unique eye as a cinematic storyteller - blending both his documentary background with his deft and delicate touch for drama, Malle framed a performance of the play as a run-through with the actors - in their street clothes and in the environs of a crumbling old theatre on 42nd Street in New York.

At first, we're quite aware of this conceit, but as the magic of Chekhov overtakes us, it's impossible not to be drawn in by the brilliance of the original play, Mamet's adaptation (more of an edit, or polish - to strip out a few formal tropes of theatre from Chekhov's period), a gorgeously composed, though unobtrusive camera and last, but not least, a cast that includes actors who seem like they were born to evoke Chekhov's universal themes and language.

Vanya (Wallace Shawn, the writer of Malle's My Dinner With Andre and who played the "My" of the title) is the brother-in-law of Serebryakov (George Gaynes), a stuffy academic who acquired an old country estate by marrying his first wife (Vanya's late sister) and has now, left his widowhood behind to marry the unmistakably beautiful Yelena (Julianne Moore). With his niece Sonya (Brooke Smith), Vanya manages the estate and the business affairs of his late sister's blusteringly pretentious husband. The family receives visits from Astrov (Larry Pine), a physician constantly called to tend to Serebryakov's ailments - most of which are of the psychosomatic variety.

Vanya and Yelena are greatly suited to each other in every respect - save for the fact that she finds him physically repulsive. Astrov, along with Vanya, is madly in love with Yelena. She's physically attracted to him, but they clearly do not share the intellect and humour she enjoys with Vanya. Then there's Sonya - who is madly in love with Astrov, who barely notices she's there - hanging on his every move, word and gesture. Serebryakov loves Yelena, but fears he is too old for her. Yelena, clearly has no love for Serebryakov, but she is intent to stay faithful to him.

These roiling passions - all unrequited - come to a head when Serebryakov decides he wishes to sell the estate and move to Finland. This would displace the whole family and housekeeping staff. Vanya is finally, after years of subservience and servitude, forced into action.

Wallace Shawn is a perfect Vanya - a funny, charming, yet occasionally sad-sack nebbish. His lovely performance elicits an equal number of laughs and tears. Julianne Moore is utterly radiant as the object of everyone's affection and Larry Pine as the physician who abandons everything for a love that will never be, is a perfect skewed-reverse-image of Shawn's Vanya. The revelation is the sad, funny and yes, beautiful Charlotte Moore as Sonya - her character creeps about in the background, yet when she exudes a force before unimagined, it instills the overwhelmingly expressive feeling that, "Of course! Her actions and words make total sense!" Moore deliver's Sonya's final speech from the play with such gentle, persuasive force that I can't imagine anyone watching it dry-eyed.

Vanya on 42nd Street is an extraordinary experience. Malle's career was one in which he delivered many great films. This one in particular made me and his numerous admirers wait with baited breath for his next work. Sadly it never came. It was his last film before he died of lymphoma one year after making the picture.

I can't think of a more perfect swan song.

"Vanya on 42nd Street" is currently available on a gorgeous new Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection. In addition to the stunning new transfer, it is accompanied by modest, but at the same time, extremely informative and revealing extra features.

Ratcatcher (1999) dir. by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews and William Eadie

***

By Blair Stewart

Being a child of the '80s I was deprived of first-hand experiences of the previous decade, but one impression left with me from the '70s is garbage. Rotten, stinking, fetid, obese black plastic bags plump with vermin, spilling their messy guts out of city dustbins over every street. That's the imagery I've taken away from Western cinema during the period with Scorsese's 1976 Manhattan buried under trash (both figuratively and literally) in Taxi Driver, and a refuse-strewn London in the grip of public-works strikes and punk anarchy in Julien Temple's ode to the Sex Pistols with The Filth and the Fury.

Scottish writer/director Lynne Ramsay's own turbulent life experiences included a 1973 sanitation strike while growing up in working class Glasgow. And by 'working class' I mean the dwellers of housing estates, the odourless British euphemism for ghettos. Against the backdrop of poverty Ramsay colours her 1999 near-autobiographical roughneck debut with streaks of childhood bewilderment to salve young James's (William Eadie) dire existence atop playground trash piles.

Da (Tommy Flanagan of Sons of Anarchy recognition) is an unrepentant drunkard through-and-through, while Ma (Mandy Matthews) is tenuously holding her family together with the older sister in the micro-skirt sneaking off for carnal knowledge. Just below their eye line wee James will gain an understanding of death as his playmate drowns in the local open sewer - a more terrible form of adult knowledge known than his elder siblings. The guilt spins James away from his family towards the used neighbourhood bike's comforting arms and the empty outskirts of the city where a better life might come with the construction of nicer housing estates for all. Not exactly the stuff of Wonder Years, but an honest take on systemic rot, and despite a false note in the final scenes, often a superb one.

By occasionally using surreal mise-en-scène Ramsay strips away the brutal reality of U.K. kitchen sink/working class drama covered in the works of Loach, Leigh and Clarke from the protagonist's eyes as he grasps onto his innocence. Ramsay's cast is excellent but nearly unintelligible, their Glaswegian brogue impossible to my Canadian ear, which is saying something since my Mom comes from a bunch of thick old Weegies. Regardless of necessary subtitles, the actors are well chosen and appear as suited to their surrounding in front of the camera as desperate Hollywood starlets in search of spiritual enlightenment in India aren't to theirs.

According to the hallowed annals of the IMDB most of the actors in Ratcatcher haven't made another film, which is a damn shame based on the results. Thankfully, after an eight-year hiatus, Lynne Ramsay returned with last year's controversial We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Dead Man (1995) dir. Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Lance Hendrickson, Michael Wincott, Robert Mitchum

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Jim Jarmusch's idiosyncratic western plays like a delirious Coen Bros. movie, which also fits into the auteur stylings of the man whose Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law are two of the best movies in a dismal decade.

In Dead Man it's much the same, but set in the western frontier. Johnny Depp plays an accountant from Cleveland named William Blake, who travels west for a new job but becomes an outlaw on the run from a maniacal trio of desperado hit men.

It's a great cast, with the core relationship being Depp's character and a wandering Indian (Gary Farmer), who combine to form a unique cinematic buddy relationship. It's a great heartwarming performance from Farmer inspiring every other supporting character.

Look out for Robert Mitchum at his grizzled best playing the loose cannon entrepreneur hunting down Blake. The trio of Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop and Jared Harris makes a great sequence in itself. Iggy Pop wearing a dress is weird enough to capture our attention, but look for a then unknown Billy Bob, who steals the scene.

Mixed into the thought provoking Native American mysticism of Gary Farmer are some very bloody death scenes and set pieces of rather shocking violence. Gabriel Byrne's brief appearance is marked by an inspired gunfight and two awesome death scenes.

Robbie Muller's black and white photography is beautiful, evoking the idiosyncratic mood of Jarmusch's early films.

Dead Man is memorable because there's just something not right at every turn in this picture - Eugene Bird playing a black hit man for sure, Crispin Glover playing a batshit crazy train porter, Neil Young's whiny guitar score and even the fade outs, which mark the beginning and ending of each scene.

And yet we wouldn't want anything normal or expected in this film. It's a haunting, beautiful and strange cult classic.

Dead Man is available on Blu-ray from Alliance Films in Canada.

The War Room (1993) dir. Chris Hegedus, D.A. Pennebaker
Documentary

***½

By Alan Bacchus

With film just about gone now, almost certainly in the documentary form, we probably won’t ever see a film like The War Room anymore. Documentary verite features shot on film have the true "fly on the wall" aesthetic pioneered by the co-director of this film, D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop).

Cinema verite represents a style of documentary filmmaking born in the '60s, accompanying the trends of the French New Wave. It's a term traditionally associated with the films of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. But with The War Room, we could be even more specific and call it ‘Direct Cinema’, using a type of filmmaking that is the least intrusive and most observational documentary technique, rendering the camera and filmmakers as invisible as possible to the filmmaking process.

With the prevalence of reality television and the use of talking head interviews or confession-cams, subjects are aware of the camera. But with no sit-down interviews, very little stock footage and voice-overs, and no direct-to-camera discussions, The War Room exerts a style rarely used in such purity.

It’s a supremely entertaining and enlightening film, justly nominated for a Documentary Oscar. It follows Bill Clinton through his immensely dramatic Presidential Campaign in 1991, during which he was labelled the ‘Comeback Kid’. He overcame a tough early loss in the New Hampshire Primary, survived a sex scandal with Gennifer Flowers and managed the GOP onslaught against his controversial draft record in the Vietnam War.

And yet the film is not about Bill Clinton, but rather the youthful, aggressive and passionate campaign staff behind the scenes controlling the action like control room directors of a live television show. Now recognizable political voices James Carville and George Stephanopoulos become the stars of the picture. They are a dynamic duo of sorts - one (Carville) tall, lanky and jovial, the other (Stephanopoulos) short and handsome, but both political dynamos.

Within the nerve centre of activity, Pennebaker and Hegedus capture the improvised spin control against a number of political obstacles with the utmost of naturalism and believability. The subjects seem invisible to the camera, as they go about their work passionately and without inhibition.

Late in the film after his Presidential victory, Clinton thanks his staff for their unconventionality and revolutionizing of how campaigns are run. And before that, in an impassioned speech, Carville describes how campaigns used to be run, with compartmentalized departments working in silos and in strict hierarchy. The film shows us Carville's horizontal approach by empowering each of the workers to innovate and improvise and take their own lead. Unfortunately, if there's anything to fault in the picture, we never get to see the other side, the old guard system as described by Carville.

But this is the filmmakers' medium of choice. By using the language of direct cinema, unless we see stock footage or other manipulative devices, this information can only be implied to us. But The War Room is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of the history of political campaigning. Instead, it's a slice of time in 1991 with these specific people, and the context of history can only be implied to us.

But we get it, and the film doesn't need expository explanations to make its point. The War Room is cinematic observation, the cinema verite form at its finest.

The War Room is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.