Manchester By The Sea (*****)

One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is in 1980's "Ordinary People." The story follows Conrad, a high school student who is dealing with the sudden death of his brother and living with two parents who have no idea how to cope. Behind a picturesque middle-class facade, things are slowly unraveling. The final moments of the film, after we learn that Conrad's parents have decided to separate, shows him and his father in a quiet and cold backyard. Even though these two have rarely seen eye-to-eye, and in a conclusion where everything seems hopeless, Conrad simply tells his father "I love you," and in response his father breaks down and says the same. I think the reason I love this scene so much is because it offers a movie so full of darkness the slightest suggestion of hope. It suggests that the love of family is still stronger and cannot be overcome.

I only mention this scene and "Ordinary People" in particular because almost 40 years later here is a movie that is a spiritual equal. "Manchester By The Sea" is a massive undertaking that deals with loss in such an intimate way that it would be hard to call it anything but profound. There is something entirely universal everyone can grasp and yet watching this movie feels like a peek into a very real life of a family.

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is a man whose life is stagnant. He works as a handyman in a series of apartment buildings, fixing leaking pipes and whatnot. He lives in a basement studio apartment that is sparsely decorated and lifeless. He drinks by himself, and he is rude to those around him. In the first half of this film, Lee is not a character we understand or even like. In fact, he is oftentimes despicable. He gets into bar fights and swears at women. When he takes a phone call to learn of his brother's sudden death, he calmly says he will get there within the hour.

Manchester-by-the-Sea (the town's actual name) is where Lee seemingly grew up, raised a family, as evidence by many flashbacks that pepper the film with glimpses into his memory. We recall the moment when his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler) was first diagnosed with congenital heart disease, or when he took his nephew Patrick on a fishing boat. Now in the present time, Patrick is a high school student with no mother and only Lee as his seeming guardian.

The movie becomes an evaluation of the stages of grief and we focus on the relationship between uncle and nephew. Lee, who remains shut off from the community, and Patrick, who invites friends over for pizza and stories on the very day his father died. No one is to say which way is the preferred method for mourning, and of course the emotions begin a series of highs and lows as the two men begin the process of moving on with life. Lee, who is adamant about living in Boston, faces pushback from Patrick who is adamant about finishing high school in Manchester among friends. Here, he has a boat, friends, a band, and two girlfriends (I know). In Boston, all Lee has is a sad apartment. There's no arguing there.

What is surprising about the film (where can I start) is the stark humor that comes amidst moments of such melancholy. This is easily a story that could have sunk into our hearts and left us feeling cold, but there is a joy that comes from the way these characters talk to each other and interact. There is an established history that is evidence in the writing. What else is mesmerizing is a score that incorporates classical pieces as opposed to an original soundtrack. There is something so powerful about the contrast between the New England setting and such complex music. Maybe more impressive still is the tight structure of the script, which weaves back and forth through time and gives us such a sense of depth and backstory. Kenneth Lonergan (the director and screenwriter) has surely written the favorite for an Oscar nomination.

Casey Affleck, an actor of considerable talent, seems to have finally become his own person outside the shadow of his brother. His performance is quite simply jaw-dropping. Closed in and reclusive and yet with hints of a broken heart, there are glances and gestures that are so nuanced that you can't help but think that this could be the best performance of the year. As with Michelle Williams playing his wife, this could very easily be her best role to date. Her brief screen time in all but 4 or 5 scenes encompasses the themes of the film and reveal the deeper heartbreak just below the surface of their relationship. The same can be said of Lucas Hedges playing Patrick, a young actor full of promise and grace.

There were several scenes when I found myself genuinely moved, mouth agape at how honest this movie actually was. When Patrick finally comes to term with his father's loss while looking for a snack... When Lee and his wife exchange a hug at the funeral and a surge of emotion sweeps through both of them... A scene where Lee picks up a gun... These are candid moments that are so real, so perfect, I can't help but think that "Manchester by the Sea" is the year's best film.

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (**)

Fantastic Beasts is easily one of the most misguided films of the year. Following on the global success of Harry Potter, it made sense that studio heads would seek to milk this cash cow for everything it had to offer. Even with JK Rowling penning the screenplay (which would seem to be promising as a pure extension of the wizarding world) this is a story that a) didn't need to be told, and b) is a chore to sit through.

The story is of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, who plays this role with the personality of a thumb tack), a famed Hogwarts dropout who penned the title book; a guide to the care of magical creatures found throughout the world. The story begins with Scamander arriving in New York City in 1926 with a trunk full of animals, hoping to catch a rare specimen from a trader in the city. The story begins when one of his animals escapes and he must try to find it. In the world's largest city, this will prove to be quite the chore.

As you recall from the original Harry Potter films, the set up was the marvel of the stories - introducing us to the world of magic, learning spells, understanding the world.. In fact, the first few films were remarkably cheery and innocent in a way, only getting darker as the evil forces developed over time. With Beasts there are two distinct stories happening: the innocent Scamander trying to find his lost animals, and a dark wizard named Grindelwald terrorizing Europe, all the while the American wizarding community fearing exposure with the arrival of a dark force that is ripping the city apart. It's a contrast of two extremes, and the story can't really decide what kind of tone it should take: one that is family-friendly, and one that is not.

We get to know a bit more about the American side of witchcraft which proves to be an interesting concept but delivers very little on what different cultures would look like. We see their head government office concealed behind an office's revolving door, very much like the Ministry of Magic only everyone has a Brooklyn accent. We meet the President of their community (of America or just New York we can't be sure) whose only focus is to make sure that magical-born people and "no-maj" (the American equivalent of "muggles," which definitely doesn't roll off the tongue as sweetly) remain separate.

For Rowling to have penned this screenplay (and this being her first, no less) it's an admirable attempt and yet completely overwhelming. There are countless scenes that appear to add depth and yet do little more than muddle the story. A prominent subplot features the political campaign of a newspaper head's son, and yet by the end it's inclusion is a puzzle (especially since they cast John Voight in such a throwaway role, no less). Another subplot shows the a woman (Samantha Morton) who preaches "end-of-times" sermons about the presence of witchcraft in the community, and behind the scenes she adopts and occasionally abuses orphans. Even further, a mysterious being ravages entire buildings around the city, chalked up to gas explosions by police, but investigated by wizards as some mysterious dark being. When the title of the movie is "Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them," these beasts ultimately felt like they had been pushed to the back burner in favor of a Harry Potter prequel and NOT a free-standing movie about magical animals.

The good parts come with the cast, especially the character of Jacob (Dan Fogler) who, like Harry Potter in the first film, acts as the outsider to guide the audience through this new world with a questioning and funny persona. He plays a nomaj who gets tied up with Scamander after an unsuccessful loan application at a bank. Exposed to magic for the first time, he acts as comic relief to the ridiculousness of situations at hand. He slowly falls in love with the Auror's sister, Queenie (Alison Sudol) who is both a skilled mindreader and whimsical cook.

This is the first of a 5-part series. I shudder to comprehend the reasoning of studio head honchos who put up so much money on such a gamble (the same can be said about Avatar and the 4 upcoming sequels planned for the near future). It was such a pleasant time when Hollywood valued originality and not a quick cash grab. There is such a fascination with sequels and prequels and reboots (oh, my!) that to find a truly original piece of cinema is becoming harder and harder. For the average movie-goer faced with only these options, the current selection sure looks boring.

The Edge of Seventeen (*****)

If I could only shower enough praise on this film I would. I don't think such volumes are possible. Few films I have seen began with more tepid anticipation and finish with such wonder. As the credits rolled I realized I had a wide grin on my face that I wore the entire 90 minutes while watching. Such is the wonder of "Edge of Seventeen," a directorial debut by Kelly Fremon Craig that joins the ranks of "Juno" and "Breakfast Club" to become a quintessential high school flick. More so than that, this movie rises above the tropes to become something I'm sure many people will be talking about for a while.

For such high praise I will tell you that this is a predictable movie. It follows many of the conventions we would come to expect about an awkward girl navigating her Junior year of high school. Our heroine, Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) is an awkward, confrontational girl who has always lived in the shadow of her popular brother, Darian (Blake Jenner, who also starred in "Everybody Wants Some!" earlier this year). Her one friend, Krista, is a source of strength throughout her education, and they grow up as the closest friends. One weekend with their mother out of town, Krista and Darian meet up and soon begin dating. Nadine sees this as an ultimatum: her best friend must choose either her or her brother. There can be no compromise. She chooses the boy.

What follows is a descent into the awkward stages of high school that so many films in the past have glossed over. In the years before college, social status is what makes or breaks you. If you don't have friends you have nothing, and with Nadine losing all her chips in one fell swoop, she is forced to analyze her life and what little meaning is left in it. Her mother, a control freak with a few shining moments but little knowledge of how to raise a girl, is oftentimes absent and unhelpful in her advice to her young daughter. Her father, who passed away when Nadine was 13, was the one source of solace in her life, and now it would appear that she is unhinged.

So begins a fiery relationship with her teacher, Mr Bruner (Woody Harrelson as one of the great teachers in movies). She criticizes his lectures and only seeks to belittle his efforts. Bruner, in turn, dishes it back to Nadine and makes fun of her lack of friends and social status. It's a complicated dynamic that eventually shapes itself into one of respect as Mr Bruner slowly fills that gap left in the absence of her father. Along with the professor, Nadine begins chatting with a classmate, Erwin, who is clearly infatuated with her in the most lovingly-awkward portrayal. Nadine only has eyes for Nick, the hottie rebel who spent time in juvie and works at the local pet store.

There is a strong identity I felt with Nadine, a girl who hides behind a rough facade to protect a more fragile heart. Hailee Steinfeld (herself an Oscar nominee for "True Grit") hits all the right notes and with any luck would return to the Oscar ceremony for a richly-deserved nomination playing a young girl simply navigating the hardships of maturation. Her delivery of the dialogue presents some of the funniest moments, and her timing is impeccable. Kelly Fremon Craig, a first-time director no less, dazzles with a thought-provoking script that has all the workings and understandings of a tenured filmmaker.

There's something very special about "Edge of Seventeen" that isn't blatantly apparent when I rethink it. It's a straightforward comedy with the expected rising action, an emotional climax, and a happy ending with a bow on top. Predictable, yes, but boring, not in a million years. I think there is a lot that audiences could identify with, and I'm sure that accounts for it's enormous success among critics and audiences so far. This isn't a story that sugarcoats childhood and youth and makes it something inconsequential. This is a story where we understand the full weight of any given situation and find ourselves utterly invested in the outcome. That's all thanks to a great cast and talented writer/director. What an achievement.

Arrival (****1/2)

"Arrival" is the kind of movie I wanted to watch with as little information as possible. The trailer intrigued me and roused my interest: a story of aliens finally making first contact, and our inability to understand them. How that could sustain itself for a 2-hour run time was beyond me, but this (I'm thrilled to say) is a movie full of beauty that just about left me spellbound.

Our heroine is Louise (Amy Adams in what has got to be one of her best roles), a linguist who teaches at a college and lives alone in a glass house overlooking a lake. We learn about her daughter, a smart young girl who died of cancer at a young age. It's a heartbreaking opening to the film, a set up to a story that has more emotion than the sci-fi genre would have you believe. Suddenly, large orbs appear all over the world. It makes the news and interrupts the class with a barrage of phone calls and texts. No one can verify them as man-made, and the locations around the planet seem strategic. This is indeed first contact. People are glued to the TV and buildings are evacuated. I wonder what would happen if aliens ever were to touch down on earth. I would assume this is as accurate as I would imagine.

Louise is contacted almost immediately by a Colonel (Forest Whitaker), who confirms contact has been made with the alien beings, and yet no promising communication can be made. He asks her to decipher an audio clip that sounds as much like a language as a whale's call. It's impossible. Louise confirms that the only way to actually learn would be to have a face-to-face encounter; to teach them the rudimentary words and go from there... You start with the word for "human" and end with the answer to the complex question "what are your intentions here on earth?"

The spaceship is one of the many striking aspects of the film, first revealed in a grand shot in the wilderness of Montana. Fog spills over green hills, and there on the horizon is a black mass 1,000 feet in the air, hovering just above the ground. A military base is set up nearby, and work is quickly underway. The entrance to the ship is a 10-foot hole that opens at the base every 18 hours. A cherry picker raises the crew inside the chasm, and a change in gravity allows them to literally walk up the walls to a meeting chamber. I wonder how they first made this discovery, or who was the first to agree to venture inside the menacing ship.

There is a twist of sorts at the climax of the film that leaves you reeling over the images and moments leading up to it. It still has me scratching my head by the complexity of it, and left me somber at it's implications. This is a deus ex machina to end all deus ex machinas, and yet I was moved by the way it worked out (rather than feeling cheated). The climax ends in a way that could only happen through specific series of events, and if you think too hard about what is happening you will only hurt yourself. How badly I want to ask you questions about the movie, the ending, the aliens (10-foot tall beings that look like upright squid), and the expansive questions of fate and choice. This is a brilliant movie directed by Denis Villeneuve (he made one of the decade's best movies last year with 'Sicario') and the talent displayed is bar-none some of the best filmmaking around right now. The score by Jóhann Jóhannsson is surely an Oscar-contender for it's ease in slipping back and forth between sounds of horror and orchestral moments of harmony. For a film this complex, giving a concise review is hard. It's better to just advise you to see this movie as soon as possible, and perhaps plan ahead to see it twice.

Tower (*****)

TOWER is an important movie for all the right reasons. It is an artistic feast; a cinematic marvel that recreates a tragedy with a simple beauty without falling into the tropes of documentary filmmaking. This is not a documentary, rather it's more of a non-fiction retelling that casts actors to read lines in place of the real people. It recounts a school shooting that happened long before memories of Columbine - on a sprawling Texas campus where a sniper took a town hostage and murdered a total of 17 victims (including an unborn child) and shooting a total of 49 people. In a time when mass shootings have become a standard scroll on the nightly news, this was a new kind of crime. It only seems fitting that the movie uses a new form of craft to tell it.

It was the summer of 1966 on the sweltering campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Summer courses were just beginning, and the college town surrounding the buildings were bustling with excited youth and students. It was just after noon. From nowhere, people recall hearing "pops" and suddenly the air was filled with targeted bullets, first striking down a pregnant woman and her boyfriend in the stone plaza outside the central clock tower. Soon after, a boy on his bike was shot several blocks away. Chaos ensued.

On a day when the top news was going to be little more than the heat, here was suddenly a national emergency that gripped the country. A local news director hopped in his car and broadcast the scene from a portable radio. His voice was heard all over America. From the clock tower, the rumors that a sniper was preying on those below with no regard and no sense. Why don't more people talk about this tragedy today?

The film is designed to be a documentary (although I would argue it doesn't fall into that specific genre for a variety of reasons) with talking heads of students and police officers explaining what happened. We know they are actors, and their accounts strike us as surprisingly modern in expression and tone. The rotoscoped faces keep the past at a safe distance, and it's almost easy for the audience to distance themselves from the horror that actually happened here. Through black and white recreations and grainy archival footage, the film crafts a landscape of southern comfort and familiarity with those living nearby.

There is a moment like a bombshell midway through the film, when we suddenly cut from the illustrated actor to an actual aged woman, continuing her story without a moment's hesitation. This woman (now in her 60's or so) is one of the survivors: the woman who lost her unborn child at the hand of the gunman. It's a revelation - splicing the animation with the real, creating a moment that is all the more impactful by bridging that historical and visual gap. Now we understand that these actors are not reading from a script... They are telling the actual words by those who survived it.

There are beautiful moments that are beyond words - like when a red-headed woman rushed to the aid of this pregnant woman even though she remained completely vulnerable to the shooter. They begin a conversation to keep their minds off the terror and carnage. Another moment when a couple of students act heroically in order to save victims from the slow death that awaited them. They run out in the face of danger and carry victims to safety. This was a time that separated the heroes amongst us, and there were unbelievably brave people that were caught in the midst of it all.

By the end, "Tower" became a movie that commented on the string of recent shootings, the prevalence of violence in our culture, our unwillingness to stop it... There have been several movies made about the ideas of school violence and mass shootings. I recently rewatched "Elephant" which is a great Gus Van Sant film that recreates a Columbine-like shooting and yet does nothing to answer the simple question of "why?" "Tower" is great not because deals with the same question, rather it adds to it: why can't we stop this from happening?

Moonlight (*****)

There's a tender beauty in MOONLIGHT that, despite an oftentimes glacial pace, surprises as one of the more artistic endeavors of 2016. Oftentimes a movie will follow a character through life, hitting the high and low points, and come out on the other end with little more to say than "this person existed." Here, the ultimate message touched me to the core. Regardless of where we were born and raised, "Moonlight" somehow captured humanity in a perfect way.

We follow the story of Chiron, a meek boy who is raised in the rougher parts of Miami. His mother a drug addict and his classmates a constant source of bullying. The story is broken down into three concise chapters that tell specific stories pertaining to his identity. Chapter 1 is titled "little," where young Chiron is discovered in an abandoned building by a local drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali, a great performance). For the first time in his life, Chiron has a father-figure who he can look up to and seek guidance amidst the lack of support from his mother. Chapter 2 is "chiron," where we find a lanky Chiron navigating a solitary life of high school. One night, he has an intimate encounter with his friend Kevin, an act that boils to a breaking point the next day in class. Chapter 3 ("black") concludes the tale with a hardened Chiron, muscular and menacing as a front, works as a drug dealer and reuniting with Kevin after years apart.

The movie is wonderfully-written and these characters become people we can identify with if only because they have dealt with pain and loss in their lives. There is truth in their words. Chiron, a young boy who keeps his head down and speaks little, finds a voice through Juan and his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe). Contrasted to his life at home with his mom (Naomie Harris in a surefire Oscar nomination), Chiron begins to see that life is not only a place of torment. There are people out there who can make life worth living.

The craft on this film is exceptional. The camera is in a constant state of motion and tightly-focuses on our characters with so much out of focus that their worlds become a state of confusion and disorientation. The first shot of the film is a simple scene, where Juan meets with a dealer and finds out how things are going. He soon leaves. A simple shot would have sufficed, framing both characters in medium. The camera instead whirls around these two men, floating through the street and immersing us in a the scene that is unexpected and memorable. It's the little things that count. The music, a combination of classical and choral, contrasts the images we see on screen and somehow heightens the emotions.

The story, amidst characters and interactions, ultimately boils down to the relationship between Chiron and Kevin. In part one he is little more than a childhood friend (and in fact I had to check to make sure it was the same character in all three instances), and by the end we see him as an adult with just as many bottled emotions as Chiron. Though the two boys start off relatively similar, the finale shows the way that paths of life can diverge and flow. One of the final scenes is a simple scene where Chiron seeks Kevin out at his diner, where Kevin has promised to cook dinner. The exchanging of glances and the way the camera idly drifts in and out of the conversation is simply beautiful. Chiron has worked to build up his body and physique to appear intimidating, maybe threatening, but when he speaks with Kevin we catch glimpses of the shy little boy from the top of the story. For having 3 separate actors, the consistency of Chiron's personality is a crowning achievement in a film so full of great aspects.

It's hard to put into words a movie that is so good that nothing can accurately describe. The perfect words have already been written in the script, and talking about the movie simply does nothing to improve on the fact. All I can say, wholeheartedly, is that you must make time to see "Moonlight" sooner rather than later. It's that good.