A Most Violent Year (15A) ****
Director JC Chardon shows he's a filmmaker to be reckoned with in this super old-school drama. It marks an impressive three out of three for Chardon, who brought us the underrated and under seen Margin Call and last year's sea drama, All is Lost.
Fresh from a fine performance in the Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis, Oscar Isacc is absolutely outstanding here as Abel Morales, a US immigrant who will go to any lengths to realise the American Dream.
But this is New York City in the early 1980s, where crime and violence are rife in a community that’s out of control.
Somebody is carrying out robberies of Morales’ delivery trucks, selling the oil on at a discount and making his basic-wage drivers increasingly jittery.
Others have he and his family under the radar too - a prosecutor (a very good David Oleyowo) charged with cleaning up business dealings in the city is determined to investigate this growing business, suspicious that they’re breaking laws.
He believes otherwise - after all, it’s a small family business, with wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) in charge of the books and his close friend (Albert Brooks) helping seal the business deals.
Like he did in Margin Call, Chandor combines a social commentary with a character-driven drama to terrific effect here.
Sure, many of the dilemmas he encounters have been done on the big screen before and this is very much an old-school drama, a slow burner.
But the tension is gradually built to an impressive and dramatic finale, and the acting throughout is superb.
Ex-Machina (15A) ****
Our own Domhnall Gleeson is doing a good job of developing his career by being consistently good. Here he's at it again in this directorial debut from Alex Garland.
Garland has brought us some great big-screen stories with screenplays for movies like 28 Days Later and Sunshine.
Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a talented, though unremarkable, programmer for an internet search company owned by his reclusive boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac).
Caleb is thrilled to learn he’s won a competition to spend a week at the secluded mountain estate of his boss, but discovers there is a purpose for his visit.
On arrival, Caleb learns that Isaac has built a sophisticated AI in the form of Ava (Vikander) a beautiful machine that is his most intelligent consciousness yet.
Caleb’s job is to partake in the Turing Test, to examine the extent of Ava’s ability to behave, think, and feel as a human being does.
He’s aware from the outset that he’s the human in the experiment - but will Ava’s capacity to convince him of her intelligence prove greater than either man expected?
It takes it’s sweet time to build and it feels like Garland’s pace is deliberately slow. But my, do the payoffs come in the final hour.
