Features

On to Part II of the Executors. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

Fruitvale Station. It’s easy to brand Fruitvale Station as a hyperbolic piece of biased blubber. Ryan Coogler’s debut feature tells the tragic tale of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was murdered by Bay Area police in the early-morning hours of New Year’s Day 2009. (The officer claimed the shooting was accidental. Three guesses what Coogler thinks of that claim.) It’s sad stuff, and Coogler has no qualms with divesting you of your tears, even as he also quietly asks for your outrage. The problem is that, while Fruitvale Station traffics in complicated issues of race, class, and profiling, it fails to adequately grapple with the complexity of those issues. As a result, viewers who approach the movie as a piece of social commentary will find it muddled and hopelessly strained. Read More

Did you know that Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer was called “The Executor”? It’s a cute pun—not only did Vader take care of business, but he also killed a lot of people. But it’s the “taking care of business” side that lends this next batch of 2013 movies its label. In branding these films “Executors”, I’m implying that they served their purpose. Whereas the Intriguers showed promise but fell somewhat short of fulfilling their ambitions, the Executors understood their job and completed it with maximal efficiency and minimal fuss. They may not be the most high-reaching pictures of the year, but there’s something to be said for a movie that follows through on its goals, however modest. The Intriguers may have teased us with potential, but these films turned potential into actual entertainment. They did their job.

On to the list. Read More

Today, the Manifesto wraps up its look at The Intriguers of 2013. You can find Part I here and Part II here.

Lone Survivor. Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor exhibits a blockheaded simplicity that’s both insulting and oddly refreshing. In an era of governmental distrust and uncertainty—one in which even superhero movies such as Man of Steel and Captain America: The Winter Soldier offer glancing criticisms of drone warfare and look dubiously at unchecked military might—Berg has made a throwback. Lone Survivor is an unapologetic paean to the valiant heroism of the American soldier, and it feels like a spiritual cousin to the propagandistic action flicks of the 1980s, those celebrations of masculinity in which Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone slaughtered countless Cold War baddies. Afghanistan has replaced Russia, and the Taliban now stands in for the KGB, but the principle remains the same: We’re the good guys, and our job is to kill the bad guys. Read More

We’re continuing with our review of the Intriguers of 2013. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

Don Jon. Joseph Gordon-Levitt didn’t need to become a director. He’s already one of America’s most talented young performers in front of the camera, and he’s successfully leveraged that talent—a unique combination of movie-star charisma and aw-shucks sincerity—in a variety of ways, appearing equally comfortable in Hollywood blockbusters (Inception, The Dark Knight Rises), mid-level studio productions ((500) Days of Summer, 50/50), and scruffy mind-benders (Mysterious Skin, Brick), not to mention a particularly excellent hybrid of all three (Looper). He could have just kept on acting, and he would’ve kept us happy. Read More

So far in the Manifesto’s continuing Review of 2013, we’ve looked at the worst movies of the year, the least memorable, and the most overreaching. The films highlighted in those posts all fail in different ways, but they share a central theme: They’re all bad. (O.K., some are more innocuous than bad, but that doesn’t make them good.) The good news is that we’ve now reached the point where I can discuss movies that I actually liked. When you boil film criticism down to its essence, it’s really a pursuit designed to respond to one specific question: “Should I see this movie?” Tastes obviously vary, but going forward in our review of 2013, the answer is, happily, “yes”.

First up is what I’m dubbing The Intriguers. All of these films are flawed, not unlike those pictures highlighted in my posts on the year’s Failures. But these movies are sufficiently intriguing—some explore the boundaries of the form, others push back against typical narrative constraints—that their ambition, while not entirely fulfilled, makes them worth seeking out. Read More