There have been a number of excellent science fiction films of late – Gravity, The Martian, Annihilation among them. But Ad Astra may be the most complete and profound addition to the genre since 2001: A Space Odyssey.
While it makes for a moderately amusing evening out, this World War Two espionage-romance caper doesn't stand up to a lot of scrutiny (I'm trying to work out where they managed to find the "Best Film of the Year!" quote used in the TV ad). Stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard will guarantee some ticket-shifting action, but the apparent intention of director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight to recreate Hollywood's vintage wartime melodramas never quite comes off.
Still, it's quite fun to see them trying. The opening scene is a shot of sun-scorched desert sands carrying the caption "French Morocco, 1942", and into the top of the frame descends a pair of boots belonging to Canadian agent Max Vatan (Pitt), as he arrives by parachute. He's heading to – where else? – Casablanca to meet French Resistance veteran Marianne Beauséjour (that would be Ms Cotillard). She has inveigled her way into the local beau monde, where she rubs shoulders in the treacherous Vichy air with both French and Germans. Brad, posing as a phosphate engineer, purports to have come from Paris to reunite with his fictional wife.
Of course, they're really on an assassination mission, though there's some time to soak up the sultry North African night and hang out at the updated version of Rick's cafe. Marianne isn't too happy about Max's Parisian accent though, which is fair enough because Brad's mumbling French is little better than his music-hall Italian in Inglourious Basterds (and how Allied could do with some of the latter's deranged inventiveness and ferocious black humour!).
Nonetheless the Casablanca job is doubly successful, since the couple not only zap their target but also fall in love (they seal the deal in the back seat of a car, as it rocks in a tempestuous sandstorm). Suddenly it's a year later, and Max and Marianne are happily married and living in Hampstead, NW3. Mysteriously detached from the war, they're enjoying a riotous life, with their gaggle of bohemian, cocaine-snorting (really, in 1943?) friends. Their cup of happiness runneth over when Marianne gives birth to their daughter while being frantically wheeled around on a hospital bed in the middle of a spectacular CGI air raid.
But just when it was all going so well, a bitter chill blows through in the shape of a baleful senior SOE officer (Simon McBurney). He describes himself as a "rat-catcher", and he has reason to believe that there's a Nazi informer operating in the immediate vicinity (I'm doing my no-spoilers best here, though I can reveal that Anton Lesser's shifty Hampstead jeweller needs to be carefully watched). Max refuses to believe it, but the mole must be caught and Max goes into spy-hunting overdrive, even hijacking an RAF plane and taking a wildly improbable awayday to occupied France to quiz a possible witness who's languishing in a French prison. There's also a macabre walk-on by a barely recognisable Matthew Goode, gothically disfigured in aerial combat.
If only Marianne had played "La Marseillaise" to Max, everything could have been so very different. As it is, Cotillard's ability to suggest latent melancholy and a secret inner life allows her to march imperiously off with most of the acting plaudits, while Brad was probably better suited to that tank-commander's job in Fury. The Royal Navy next time, perhaps?
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball
The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.
The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial industry was perpetrating a fraud of historic proportions based on bullshit and sleight of hand. Some of the names have been changed, but one which hasn't is Dr Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a former neurologist with a glass eye, a passion for playing heavy metal drums, and Asperger's syndrome. Subsequently running his own Scion Capital hedge fund, Burry had the monomaniacal tenacity required to sit down and read through all the individual mortgage agreements which had been bundled together to create the "mortgage-backed securities" which became a critical component of the banking Armageddon. He discovered that many of them were worth much less than the paper they were printed on, and thus the financial instruments derived from them were doomed to crash.
But that was only the start. In order to exploit his startling insight, Burry had to persuade the bankers to create the credit default swap, whereby he could bet large on the collapse of the US housing market. Since everybody had convinced themselves that the housing business, anchored on the personal investments of millions of honest Americans, could never go wrong, they were delighted to oblige.
The rest is history, but McKay has transformed it into a rollercoaster of big characters, moral hazard and blackly comic digressions. He's hugely assisted by a powerful cast. Bale, ever the method fanatic, was a shoo-in for the charm-free, obsessive Burry. Brad Pitt (also one of the producers, pictured above) does a senior statesman turn as veteran finance-Einstein Steve Rickert.
Steve Carell is superb as Mark Baum, a bull-headed, bad-tempered hedge fund manager who gets wind of Burrell's activities and leads his team of wisecracking whippersnappers (including a sparky Rafe Spall) through their own personal investigation into the looming financial tsunami. Down in Florida, they find insanely overstretched buyers being fed lavish mortgages by lenders who haven't a clue what they're selling. In a scarily comic climactic scene, Baum shares a debating platform with a senior banker who's blithely declaring his faith in his company's shares while assembled financial journalists are watching the price plummet to oblivion on their Blackberrys.
Rude and crude as he is, Baum does at least feel shock and remorse as the full extent of the crisis becomes clear, with its crushing impact on millions of fellow-citizens. McKay sprays moral outrage over the bankers, but his protagonists aren't much better as they rejoice in being clever enough to create a personal jackpot out of this collective purgatory. Particularly smarmy is Jared Vennett, played by Ryan Gosling like a weasel dipped in Brylcreem, and the most eminently punchable banker on Wall Street (Gosling and Carell pictured below). McKay also uses him as narrator, letting him break the fourth wall with asides to the audience ("yes, this meeting really did happen").
That's just one of several devices the director shuffles to fend off glazed-eye syndrome. On-screen text might pop up helpfully, while spliced-in flashes of pop-culture imagery add a subliminal timeline. A deadpan sequence of how staid and boring banking used to be before the 1980s evokes a sleepy world of sludge-green and taupe, where bankers were mostly at lunch and two per cent was considered a handsome profit. The best trick is the unashamedly gratuitous introduction of celebrities to explain thorny plot points – "to tell you about subprime mortgages, here's Margot Robbie in a bubble-bath", or svelte popstrel Selena Gomez teaming up with economist Richard Thaler to give y'all the lowdown on "Synthetic CDOs".
Smart and sharp as the movie is, turning arcane financial activities into mass entertainment is like Splitting the Atom II, and on top of that there's no avoiding the fact that this is a movie all about men, most of them not very pleasant. Marisa Tomei gets a bit of room to shine as Baum's wife Cynthia, but Melissa Leo's Georgia Hale is little more than a stick with which to beat the corrupt ratings agencies which played a contemptible role in the crash. Nonetheless, as an investigation of a bout of collective insanity which almost destroyed the civilised world, this is a ride worth taking.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
OVERLEAF: RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY
As the bald title suggests, Fury is a work of righteous, focussed rage. It's a combat film which swaps preaching and profundity for pure anger at the brutalising, destructive war machine, and still manages to be illuminating. For, even at its most thrillingly Hollywood, Fury retains a keen sense of the waste of life. Director David Ayer's fifth film features explicit, immersive and impactful violence and works best when it's pummelling the audience and Nazis alike, with deafening, meticulously executed action that threatens to punch a hole through both the screen and your ear-drum.
Set in April 1945 in the dying days of World War II, Fury finds the American forces exhausted, diminished, bested by superior weaponry and deep in the heart of enemy territory. With Hitler having declared "total war" and the Germans defending their own soil, the fight is at its most terrifying, desperate and bitter. Brad Pitt (pictured below right) plays Don "Wardaddy" Collier, a tough, seemingly invulnerable tank commander who's made acting sergeant as the Allied numbers dwindle. His devoted, dishevelled team consist of Boyd "Bible" Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Grady "Coon-Ass" Travis (Jon Bernthal) and Trini "Gordo" Garcia (Michael Peña).
Don's replacement for his fifth man, decapitated by enemy fire, is the baby-faced Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who can type 60 words a minute - not terribly useful given the context - and no-one disguises their disappointment at the new addition to the crew. Told not to get too close to anyone, Norman's ominous and unbelievably disgusting first assignment is to clean his predecessor's blood and bodily fragments from inside the armoured vehicle. Fury is set significantly in the Sherman tank these men call home; snapshots and girly pictures are displayed alongside the Nazi trophies they've ripped from corpses.
With its macho camaraderie and sense that the men are hopelessly and relentlessly outnumbered and outgunned Fury resembles nothing more than a western (The Wild Bunch springs most to mind). It occasionally threatens to tip over into "The Little Tank That Could" territory, and is saved from doing so by its strong handle on not just the colossal, continuous loss of life (with blood and bodies everywhere and danger around each corner), but what is lost in these men, perhaps forever. The animalistic Grady (excellent work from Bernthal) is the prime example of what war does to a man, but even the more sympathetic Don is frequently forced to hide his humanity, adopting a savagely-cruel-to-be-kind approach in order to save them all.
It's much more powerful during scenes of combat
Tight-jawed and thick-skinned with his baby blues twinkling from a battle-scorched face, Pitt is a picture of holding-it-together heroism. The heavy losses see him continuously promoted and there's the slightly hyperbolic sense that the burden of the Allies' success lies solely on his shoulders - but that's perhaps how many in his situation felt. It's a committed and restrained performance, which may even bag him his fourth Oscar nomination. And it's rather a case of Pitt the older and younger here with the similar-looking Lerman establishing his acting chops, and showing a firm grasp of a tough character arc.
Fury is far from perfect - the grim predicament of German women is squeamishly skirted around despite an awkward attempt to address this, and it's much more powerful during scenes of combat than during scenes of (relative) quiet. Filmed in 2012, Ayer's last film Sabotage was released earlier this year and in its wasted cast and messy execution it had all the hallmarks of a film that had been slung together. With the release of the considerably more polished Fury so hot on its heels, we can now see where Ayer's heart was.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball
The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
Some films quite rightly have awards glory etched into their DNA, and when the admirably uncompromising Steve McQueen announced that his next project, focussing on the subject of slavery, would feature that cast, only a fool would have bet against it collecting armfuls of prizes. Moreover, the brutality and societal impact of slavery has seldom been seen on screen; thus in the words of its director, 12 Years a Slave fills "a hole in the canvass of cinema".
Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup (as told to David Wilson) and adapted for the screen by John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave sees an affluent black American – a violinist and family man born free in New York state - pitched into a waking nightmare when he's kidnapped by slavers in 1841. After a night of indulgence during which he's seemingly courted by admirers of his musicianship, Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) awakens screaming in bondage before he's shipped to the south, as mere cargo, and sold to the first of several masters.
Most memorably and extensively, the film documents Solomon's suffering at the hands of Edwin Epps, a drunken brute played with extraordinary ferocity by Michael Fassbender. Epps is a vile but utterly credible beast: a man riddled with self-hate whose explosive lust for the enslaved Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o, pictured above right) leads to him sideline his wife (Sarah Paulson). Patsey is the reluctant object of his affection and, as a result of the conflict this stirs up in him, she's also the victim of his worst cruelty.
The London-born McQueen (a former Turner Prize winning artist) has an exemplary directorial track record, having brought his talent strikingly to bear on the story of IRA martyr Bobby Sands in Hunger and on the subject of sex addiction in Shame - both of which were huge critical smashes and both of which starred Fassbender (McQueen and his muse Fassbender are pictured together below left). Whereas previously his films have been defiantly, dynamically art-house - sometimes so quietly contemplative they border on the spare - 12 Years a Slave is passionate and direct: there's no room for ambiguity here. And yet there's commonality: a marriage of sensitivity to character with fearlessness regarding controversial content; and, all three of McQueen's films have dealt in incarceration of a kind - the inhabitants of the Maze in Hunger, a man imprisoned by his own addiction in Shame and now a man caught in the shackles of slavery.
12 Years a Slave is a true horror story which rages at the obvious injustice of slavery and the horrendous hardships suffered by slaves themselves but, perhaps most remarkably, through Epps and those like him, McQueen draws out the complex reactions of white plantation owners and workers. It shows the detrimental impact of slavery on all those it touches, not just the people it subjugates. It illustrates how society at large is poisoned, how those who keep slaves are rendered crueller and lesser, tortured by both their own capacity for sadism and their inescapable humanity, and how few had the courage to challenge the miserable status quo.
As Epps, Fassbender does the near-impossible by making a man of such brutality not sympathetic exactly but certainly painfully human, laying bare his internal torture. He's an actor who seems to give himself over entirely to his roles and while Ejiofor is remarkable, holding us close on his horrifying journey, what Fassbender does with his character is nothing short of miraculous. And while 12 Years a Slave provides ample meat for its established actors (Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Paul Giamatti and Brad Pitt feature memorably), it also helps shape a star in Nyong'o (making her film debut) who is heart-wrenchingly real as the terrorised Patsey.
12 Years a Slave isn't just expertly executed; its source material was shrewdly selected (by McQueen's partner, the cultural critic Bianca Stigter). By choosing to focus on a true story, what unfolds is rendered all the more powerful. Furthermore, Solomon's previous status as a free man, seemingly oblivious to life's worst cruelties, will make it easier for modern, affluent audiences to project themselves onto his character. That's not to play down the film's less commercial achievements, as this could hardly be described as slavery-lite. 12 Years a Slave is a film of searing sincerity and insight, whose central characters are drawn with real complexity. McQueen's third film doesn't just slide slavery under the microscope, it holds it there.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for 12 Years a Slave
The Counsellor is a cinematic room divider: some people will like it, saying it is stylish and daring. Others will find it truncated, slick and pretentious. Whichever room you end up in, The Counsellor has a tang of its own. This violent, colorful thriller overflows with bravado and, like matching collars and cuffs, identical foreboding. The motto here is that bad things happen to bad people but when they're bad people we sort of like, it's different.
Ridley Scott’s latest thriller is the first original screenplay written by novelist Cormac McCarthy. The author, responsible for No Country For Old Men among many others, had the original screenplay published in October and it differs from the finished film in several ways, as most screenplays will. (Hardly anyone locks down a script these days.) What is interesting about this is that it stresses the difference between the media – books are not films nor vice versa. The story can be enjoyed, differently, either way.
The audience know they're in trouble. But as this is McCarthy, we'll hang on
The plot is easy to follow even if there is little explanation for those not paying attention. Counsellor is the handsome and successful lawyer (Michael Fassbender) at the centre of this crime thriller. About to wed his beautiful, understanding girlfriend (Penélope Cruz), he becomes embroiled in an enormous drug deal. Meanwhile, his pro bono work brings him into contact with a female convict (Rosie Perez) whose son is put in jail for speeding. He's carrying $12K on an expensive bike and he's in jail for a $400 fine? The audience can smell the heady stink of “get the heck out of there”. Counsellor cannot. After all, he just bought an enormous diamond for his lady from Bruno Ganz, who explains how diamonds are rated. In many ways, it's the happiest part of the film.
Meanwhile, peculiar gangster type Reiner (Javier Bardem) and his even stranger girlfriend, Malkina (Cameron Diaz, pictured with Cruz), have so much money to burn that she has silver fingernails and they spend the whole day watching a pair of tame cheetahs chase hares over the plains. A deeper discussion includes the line, "I think truth has no temperature." Hearing this, the audience know they're in trouble. But as this is McCarthy, we're attempting art, so we'll hang on. Oh, that “car scene” – Diaz’s character rubs herself against a windscreen - is not as shocking as it sounds. Reiner’s reaction, however, is worth the ticket price. The whole sequence is sexy, off-putting and hilarious.
Enter Nudie-wearing drug dealer Brad Pitt who is testing out that "know when to fold ‘em" quote from the song The Gambler. He decides, after telling Counsellor how much trouble he’s in, to escape his life of crime and, presumably, go straight. But when there’s $20 million worth of cocaine from Juárez, this is not so easy.
Cold and calculating and too deft for the cheap seats, The Counsellor starts out with a stellar cast and a lot of class – from its production design to its cinematography. But it is a hard sell: a cold story with cold people in it, in a world that is ruthless, harsh and cruel. To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, some may think The Counsellor is nasty, brutish and short - clearly edited down to 117 minutes. But it could also be called mysterious, upsetting and alluring. The jury’s still out. It may be for some time.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
Moneyball. How Billy Beane created a revolution in Major League baseball
The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
The most interesting thing about this movie is what it says about the changing relationship between film and television. It's becoming commonplace to hear actors, writers and directors claiming that TV is now the place to be for powerful drama with narrative scope and rounded characters.
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray.
It's a problem many a cash-strapped Premier League football manager is familiar with. The über-teams like Chelsea and Manchester United have loads more money than you, and can simply spend you out of contention. Over in California, this was what was happening to the Oakland A's baseball team as they headed into the 2002 season, as their top players were picked off by wealthier squads and they couldn't afford to replace them with stars of equal quality. "We're organ donors for the rich," as Oakland's general manager Billy Beane puts it.
A true story based on the bestselling book by bond-trader-turned-author Michael Lewis, Moneyball is a baseball movie that breaks the mould of baseball movies, just as Beane himself upended ingrained precepts of baseball management as he set about dragging his team out of the low-rent mire. Instead of the starry-eyed wish fulfilment of The Rookie or the nostalgia of Field of Dreams (even if Beane is fond of wondering ironically, "How can you not be romantic about baseball?"), it's a hard-boiled account of how he realised that tradition wasn't going to save him, and so pioneered a radical new system for building success. It's baseball's own Winning Ugly.
Among the joys the film affords is the way it gives Brad Pitt an opportunity to stretch out and display a battle-hardened maturity previously not associated with the telegenic star. As Beane, he combines laconic pragmatism and bloody-minded determination, while deriving buckets of motivational fuel from his frustrated past as a hotly tipped baseball star who never delivered on his potential. Maybe there's an implicit wry contrast between Pitt's role here and his sometime mentor Robert Redford's portrayal of baseball hero Roy Hobbs in The Natural.
On a visit to the Cleveland Indians to try to buy players (pictured above), Beane is treated with contempt, but with brilliant intuition he snatches away the Indians' geeky theoretician Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). He's an economist with a degree from Yale who has developed a new method of assessing the value of baseball players by using computerised analysis of their performances. He hadn't convinced Cleveland, but Beane perceives that this could be his lifeline. The clinching evidence is when Brand's assessment of Beane's past abilities as a player corresponds with the deflating reality rather than the hopeful hype he was fed.
Using Brand's calculations, he recruits a seemingly motley crew of lame, over-the-hill or temperamental players written off by other teams, and sets about proving that they can become match-winners when deployed in ways that maximise their overlooked strengths. "We are card counters at the blackjack table," is how Beane sums up their audacious plan to subvert the supposed natural order of things. And, crucially, his unfancied squad comes cheap.
Director Bennett Miller gives the film ballast and guts with his unsparing depiction of the decrepit male gerontocracy running Major League baseball (pictured above), its authenticity enhanced by the casting of several real-life professional scouts. Beane's outlandish new theories are treated like Satanists at a prayer meeting, and no one is more hostile than Oakland's field manager Art Howe (played like a dour, thick-necked old Marine colonel by Philip Seymour Hoffman [pictured below]). The story of how the underdogs battled this ossified hierarchy with a mixture of brains and bravado is a sure-fire winner, and the physical contrast between the still dashing Brad and Hill's bespectacled swot lends an unlikely-lads charm to the proceedings. Scenes where Beane nonchalantly sends the flabbergasted Brand to sack failing Oakland players lob some enjoyable black comedy into the mix, while Beane's motormouth, take-it-or-leave-it phone calls as he hustles rival team managers are a recurring motif.
However, although screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian have done their persuasive best to put characterisation and the long climb against the odds centre stage, at some point the fact has to be faced that at its core this is a story about the analysis of reams of baseball statistics. I had the vague notion that there was some similarity between baseball and cricket - they both have batters, fielders and pitchers, for instance, if we make allowances for transatlantic nomenclature - but baseball's fixation with blizzards of stats and averages might tax even the intellectual resources of Stephen Hawking. The game's terminology (walk, bunt, top of the ninth etc) may also present a few problems to the European viewer, since you can lose sight of the keen edge of the action.
But such caveats aside, what carries Moneyball triumphantly to the tape is Miller's refusal to lapse into rose-tinted melodrama, a stance exemplified by his use (with one prominent exception) of real game footage instead of the usual sports movie re-enactments. Even when the A's have won a historic 20 matches on the trot and it looks like there's a Seabiscuit-style climax looming, Miller still has an ace and a couple of jokers up his sleeve. Despite its Academy-pleasing cast, this manages to be film-making a little bit outside the Hollywood box.
BRAD PITT’S BIG MOMENTS
Allied. Doomed but entertaining attempt to revive 1940s Hollywood
Fury. David Ayer and Brad Pitt take the war film by the scruff of the neck
Inglorious Basterds. Pitt is gloriously absurd in Tarantino WW2 alternative history
Killing Them Softly. Brad Pitt cleans up an almighty mess in Andrew Dominik’s high-calibre crime ensemble
The Big Short. Pitt’s on the money as director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Counsellor. Ridley Scott ensemble thriller is nasty, brutish and short or mysterious, upsetting and alluring
The Tree of Life. Terrence Malick’s elliptical epic leads us through time, space and one family’s story
PLUS ONE TURKEY
World War Z. It's World War with a Zee as Brad Pitt battles the undead and a zombie script
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Moneyball
At the end of last week it was reported that a Connecticut cinema, besieged with requests for refunds, had posted up a sign warning punters that The Tree of Life “does not follow a traditional, linear narrative approach to storytelling”. And so what? Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or winner is certainly elliptical and impressionistic, but it’s also spellbinding, and as lofty and luminous as the stars in the sky. Above all, it’s a film which is buoyed – and which sometimes threatens to be sunk - by its own formidable ambition.