Pluk de Nacht, Amsterdam 2016

Jutting out over the IJ like a pier of industrial wasteland, Het Stenen Hoofd is all dirt and dry grass. This evening, small marquees line the urban shore, selling bottled beer, pulled pork baps and falafel wraps. From the food trucks, a few benches scatter inwards towards the centre of the island where a mass of deckchairs are lined like mini trebuchets, firing the gaze of a few hundred film fans at a large screen. The screen is a tarpaulin stretched over and fastened to several stacked freight containers. This is Pluk de Nacht, Amsterdam’s annual open-air film festival.

I arrive and do everything in wrong order. Having spent all day tramping around the city (an unstoppable force, walking bicycle-speed) visiting museums and following canals to nowhere in the rain, I’m really hungry. After a quick rotation-on-the-spot, the pulled pork tent wins my tired ‘how much food for how few euros’ calculation and two minutes later, I’m one-handed trying to hire and then assemble my deckchair.

The very best spots have been taken but it’s not a disaster. The crowd is oval-shaped so I can’t pitch as far back as I’d like without being pushed too left-of-centre. I scan the crowd, trying to work out the viewing trajectory from deckchair to screen when set at different angles. I don’t want to be horizontal but perhaps I can sit closer to the front – therefore closer to the centre – but set it up so as to be more lying than sitting and still get a reasonable angle. I pick my spot, sandwich still in hand, and fumble around for far too long before the straw-hatted deckchair master strides over and sets me up in half a second.

Now I’m thirsty. But I’m on my own. Can I risk leaving my seat? I have a bag. Can I risk leaving my bag on my seat? I do. Everything’s fine. I buy two bottles of Vedett (which I’d almost get a taste for in the end) and return.

A game of the arcade classic Frogger is being shown on the screen. No – played on the screen – by at least 20 members of the audience who have signed in on their phones through the URL at the top of the screen. Groans and cheers rise and fall here and there as the gamers make a mad dash through the traffic, over the logs toward the lily pads.

It’s getting darker and, after another strange on-screen event, some kind of virtual reality guessing game, a 60-second countdown appears on the screen and everyone settles in.

Sexy Laundry

The pre-feature short is a Claymation made by Polish director Izabela Plucinska, based on a stage play by Canadian Michele Riml. It is an extended comedy sketch about a middle-aged couple who, bored of each other and each other’s bodies, spend a night in a posh hotel to try and rekindle the fire of their diminishing romance. It’s funny. The hotel room is a Twin Peaks-inspired black, white and red purgatory of absurd stop/start sex. The clay of the couple’s bodies is detailed and grotesque. Plucinska is conservative with the material, remaining mostly on the side of realism so that when it does stray into the absurd (body parts knead and stretched into all kind of shapes), it really draws the laughs.

Interval

The sky is black, the crowd is merry and a new participatory game has popped up on the screen. It’s a genuinely fascinating recreation of Loren Carpenter’s Pong experiment!

Half of the audience controls the left paddle and the other half the right. Somehow, through choosing up and down on their phones, each team has to organize its way to successfully controlling its paddle. While it’s safe to say that this attempt was much less of a triumph than Carpenter’s 1991 version (put that down to either the shorter game length or the questionable level of the sobriety of its participants), a good time, maybe too good a time, was had by all.

Illegitimate

The main feature is a Romanian film about the moral complications surrounding abortion and incest. Obviously, it’s very delicate and intense subject matter and it took a while to wrap my head around the film’s presentation of the cultural history of Romania and its changing norms/taboos. Not being Romanian, it is impossible to judge how successfully this is accomplished but, from a dramatic standpoint, the opening dinner table scene (which breaks out into a fierce family argument revolving around the father’s complicity in some of Ceaușescu’s more draconian policies in communist Romania) is captivating and certainly conjures a palatable atmosphere that I quickly bought into, however truth-skewed it might actually be.

The family tension results from the fact that, during Ceaușescu’s reign, the father (Victor) informed the authorities of women who were seeking abortions, the illegality of which (abortion was against the law before 1989) led many women to die during botched underground operations. The children of the family – living as they do in more enlightened times – are furious when they learn about this and most ostracise Victor, who is baffled at the unsympathetic reaction of the younger generation to his actions during a brutal period of their country’s history.

After the first 20 minutes, a slow trickle of people began folding up their deckchairs, handing them in and wandering off. Were the audience finding this film a bit tricky? I had heard a few sniggers during the awkward sibling sex scene but the night was getting gradually colder and perhaps these leavers were simply as unwilling as me to pay to hire a blanket… It is difficult to know how common an issue this is in Romania and the film doesn’t help in clearing up the confusion. On the one hand, the brother and sister are aware how horrified the rest of the family and their community will be when they learn of their relationship and the resultant pregnancy. On the other, the brother (unfortunately named ‘Romeo’) is convinced that they can build a family together in these liberated times. Is this a country genuinely coming round to the idea of incest? Or is this just a lovesick boy (perhaps ‘Romeo’ is apposite after all) getting confused and carried away?

Happy to admit ignorance, I decided to trust the film at face value and take the ride. I enjoyed it. The performances are generally strong – especially from the two main players, Adrian Titieni and Alina Grigore who play Sasha and her father. The story may be a little too neat for some – the way that the sins of the father are rehashed and then revisited upon him by his children. However, Illegitimate isn’t as far a cry from the hyper-real aesthetic of other contemporary Romanian cinema as it may seem. While its story might unfold like a Greek Tragedy, there is some grit about the dialogue and camerawork. This is largely down to the attitude of its director Adrian Sitaru who enforced a strict one-take-only rule on each scene while allowing his cinematographers to improvise their camera movement and inviting the actors to freeform their dialogue around a rough story structure.

This mishmash of approaches might make its morality a bit of a mess but this probably serves Illegitimate well in the end. Its strange twilight atmosphere leaves an audience without a secure footing from which to condemn or ridicule a dysfunctional family making the best of their own mess.

Pluk De Nacht is excellent (and free). It runs every summer in Amsterdam, with shorter programmes also taking place in Utrecht and Arnhem. Visit http://www.plukdenacht.nl/en/ for more information.

Café Society (2016)

Light and mournful, like the omnipresent jazz piano glued under most scenes, Woody Allen’s latest film revisits many of his favourite concerns: the trappings of class, the neurosis of society, the impossibility of love and the gentle meaninglessness of it all. It doesn’t pang as sharp as Annie Hall nor bite as hard as Blue Jasmine but Café Society is charming from beginning to end.

Jesse Eisenberg excels as the Woody Allen archetype Bobby, a nervy fast-talking New Yorker who moves to Hollywood and takes a job running errands for his powerful-agent uncle, Phil (Steve Carell). As much of his work demonstrates, Eisenberg is most comfortable when acting uncomfortable and he brings Allen’s frantic, self-obsessed chatter to life perfectly here. Cooler and self-assured, Kristen Stewart’s Vonnie falls in line with the kooky-aloof love interests of Allen’s oeuvre. Both Bobby and his Uncle Phil are smitten with Vonnie and the drama unfolds from there in a familiarly satisfying-yet-unsatisfying way.

Shot by Vittorio Storaro, the film has a depth of colour and light that really stands out. Most films with this little shadow seem overlit and washed out whereas this has a genuine richness. The sunlight pours gold through windows, the Hollywood exteriors are an even sepia, the night time pool parties have a pretty warm/cool contrast and the New York café scene has the worn coldness of old folk album covers. It’s great to look at and is one of many ingredients that make the film such an easy watch.

Punctuated by the typically tired philosophy and shrugging wit (“live each day as if it’s your last; one day it will be”) of Woody Allen’s late work, Café Society sits neatly in the canon. It is no masterpiece but it is well put together with solid performances and, at 96 minutes, never threatens to outstay its welcome.

Amy (2015)

Amy is a special example of the art of making yourself scarce; something that director Asif Kapadia is exceptionally good at. He makes a few delicate choices about how to present a story, spends the right amount of patience interviewing the right people, and then simply presents his findings in a smartly edited collage of memory and sentiment.

Amy is a picture of the life of throwback jazz chanteuse Amy Winehouse. It is constructed entirely from archive footage, giving it a very naturally progressing arch which begins with pre-fame home video footage, moves to the TV interviews and concert footage of 2003-2007 and finally ends in the news reports and paparazzi blitz that defined Winehouse’s final years.

The images are anchored by the voices of Winehouse’s family, friends and colleagues, all of whom delivering the honesty and insight that only comes with a microphone and the hours of patience that Kapadia clearly invested in the project. These interviews – and the editing of them – are the gem at the centre of the film. Full of people trying to forgive themselves, they drip with desperation and helplessness.

Gratefully, the film neglects to tell us how great Winehouse’s voice was, instead choosing to show it through studio footage and unheard versions of overplayed hits. Lyrics scrawl themselves across the screen as the songs underscore recollections of the events about which they were written. Kapadia’s prime interest is the words of Winehouse’s songs and he revels in the fact that they are autobiographical enough to use as a contributing narrator of the documentary from beyond the grave.

The skill of the film is founded in pure juxtaposition. Almost every image on screen has been broadcast on television before but place one thing next to another and haze it in an interview with an old friend together with a well-placed lyric and it starts breathing sad truths. As with all documentaries, the brain recalculates what it feels to be accurate by cross-referencing what this person said with that person and how that adds or subtracts to what is seen.

Beyond the veracity of the mish-mash of accounts, what the film evokes is a simple grief at a life lived and lost under the super-surveillance of our age’s voracious media frenzy. That it does this without resorting to any kind of sugarcoating just makes it all the more vibrant.

Jurassic World (2015)

I never fell in love with a Spielberg film. It’s difficult however, not to foster a respect for his filmmaking formula when films like Jurassic World roll around – films that beg to be as cohesive a heartstring tugger as E.T, as expertly manipulative as Indiana Jones but fall way short due to lack of care and imagination. Unluckily for it, Jurassic World suffers from having the $1 billion-grossing classic, Jurassic Park (1993) as its ancestor, a solid, well-organised film that does what it does excellently.

The story here is very much the same. Humans have made a theme park full of genetically engineered dinosaurs, the dinosaurs get out and there’s lots of death while everyone evacuates and the threat is neutralised. Many motifs/scenes from the original film are ruthlessly re-exploited:

• There are two parentless kids. There’s a man, there’s a woman and there’s sexual tension between them as they fall into the roles of surrogate parents for the children.
• There’s a big establishing shot of the park with that brassy 5-note theme.
• There’s a bit where a crazy “chaotician” warns us with glee that any control humans imagine they have over dinosaurs is an illusion.
• There’s a bit of hiding under cars and a bit of cowering in cars and a crunch of teeth on a vehicle roof.
• There’s a bit of “hey, you might’ve pushed science a bit too far.”

Spielberg’s original was all about the tech. There really wasn’t much besides running away from dinosaurs because there wasn’t room for anything else. What makes it a bit of an anomaly in Spielberg’s canon is that it sacrificed satisfying character development for the sake of thrilling animatronic puppets – a strange stroke of genius, a choice that focused its concerns solely on being a thrilling ride. Jurassic World, however, suffers a crisis of confidence, assuming that “Wow! Dinosaurs!” isn’t enough for a 2015 audience. That’s the only explanation for the jarring amount of token storylines ignited and then abandoned or awkwardly under resolved in deference to the main issue of Running Away from Dinosaurs.

The subject most criminally raised and discarded is the impending divorce of the boys’ parents (who we see only in short scenes that bookend the movie). Spielberg loves divorced children in his adventure movies; he loves taking them on a journey towards accepting their situation by learning to look after themselves. They work through their domestic problems by being involved in lots of thrilling stuff and come out stronger as a result.

But here, children run from danger, hide from danger, and have it defeated around them. By adults – by male adults – while the female lead quails with them in a van, sitting in its passenger seat, shielding them from watching dashboard-based battle updates. “Your boyfriend is badass!” they squeal as Owen roars by on a motorbike. She smiles and that’s that – the film has betrayed its young characters. The children end up props. Props for the love story and props for Claire’s lesson: ‘tone down your ambition and make more time in your work schedule for spending time with family’ – a dubious lesson and one more forced than learned anyway.

Jurassic Park earned a bomb, Jurassic Park re-released in 3D earned a bomb and no one who wants more money could argue against re-realising the exact same film but with more people in the way of the dinosaurs and all the latest CGI, 3D and IMAX technologies to animate them (the dinosaurs, not the people.) Jurassic World is pretty terrible but (sigh) pretty entertaining. I do enjoy watching prehistoric beasts wreaking havoc as much as the next person. I’d just rather this film didn’t pretend to care about its characters and their lives when it can’t afford to.

“Wow! Dinosaurs!” gets you a long way, even now.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

The idea of a relentless thrust through 2 hours of near-silent cinema with laconic characters who let the cars do the snarling is an enticing one, one that sets its own challenge. How can a film maintain its momentum when every scene is an explosive set piece, stacked-up against the last and precision-engineered to top whatever came before? The fuel needs to be pure and Mad Max: Fury Road certainly draws its own world with a set of bold visual ideas followed through to their absurd conclusions. It’s a great starting point.

Max is the least capable of the heroes we’re bound to. His initial attempts to escape the clutches of the weird-faced tyrant Immortan Joe are easily thwarted and he is still being used as an unwilling blood donor (strapped to the front of a car) even when the film is well on the road. He can’t shoot straight, nor is he particularly adept a driver as far as we can tell. Agency belongs to the females of the piece, in particular Imperator Furiosa whose journey back to the ‘green land’ of her youth provides the film its narrative arch. However, that Max is the eponym – and not Furiosa – rather highlights his philosophy “hope is a mistake” amid all this elusive struggling towards a better place. The film needs to pretend itself a direction, hence the diversionary storyline of Furiosa and the Wives that we, and Max himself, are riding with. But by having the directionless hero at its centre, the hero whose only drive is survival, its makers have nailed their colours to the darker corner of this dystopian nightmare. Hope is a mistake.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that I liked the film despite sometimes feeling on the wrong end of one of its blood transfusions. Everything about its design is immaculately cohesive, from the ridiculous teal/orange colour grading to the grinding gears and grinning martyrs that populate its fiery dust storms. It is a singular vision and gloriously female-led at times. The only problem, on the first viewing, is pacing. 2 hours 10 minutes of this stuff is too exhausting – it mars the final half hour of the film, which in any case is a kind of journey home that should have begun at its midpoint anyway. The editing of the action is expertly done, but add a little more punctuation here and there and we’re laughing (maniacally into the void). ((With silver spray-painted mouths.))

It Follows (2015)

The way that many teen horror flicks successfully evoke the claustrophobic landscape of adolescence is mostly a happy accident, a natural byproduct of filmmakers needing to kill time waiting for the next big scare and not putting the effort into fleshing out their characters. It’s a strange thing but it accounts entirely for the genre’s success. Who needs three-dimensional characters when whatever big bad thing coming to get a group of teenagers can be relied upon as a metaphor for all their growing-up problems? Outsource all that messy stuff to a ghoul or a demon or an axe-murderer and it’s satisfying enough just to watch them trying to outrun it.

It Follows knows this. And it knows about the sex = death paradigm of these movies. And it knows about keeping adults out of the whole equation. And it has a load of fun with all of it. These are the rules: “it” is a murderous shape-shifting demon thing that never stops hunting its prey at a glacial pace. It can be outrun, if you fancy trying, but the only way to shake it off is to pass the curse on by having sex. Even then, you’ll still be able to see it, it just won’t be after you. Until it has killed everyone else that came after you in the chain. Then it will be after you.

So you see, some tropes are flipped on their head – sex becomes both a way of transmitting a morbid awareness of death from person to person (‘the curse’) but also the only way to keep death at bay. (For the time being anyway.) It’s like the original 80’s conservative slasher film message (“don’t have sex!”) has been updated for a generation of 21^st Century nihilists. Now the message reads: “there are fun things to do while you’re alive. Just don’t forget that one day you will die.”

The absent parent convention is also played with, and to the same end – adults actually do show up in the film, but only as empty vessels, manifestations of the “it” that follows, essentially reminders from the family tree that time is creeping up at walking pace to sweep us all away eventually.

With It Follows, David Robert Mitchell has purposefully made the film that so many writers and directors stumbled upon in the 1980s. It’s not a revolution in teen horror flicks, just a very well made one. But the film knows this, of course it does. Like its characters’ inability to outrun the inevitable, It Follows examines and rearranges all the clichés of its genre, but it can never escape them. And it doesn’t really want to.

Inherent Vice (2015)

It has me going back because I’m after what Doc is after and none of us know what that is.

We must be getting somewhere.

The camera movement is telling us as much. Slow push-ins over minutes-long conversations imply the truth is just around the corner if only we follow the leads that this guy is giving us. And the leads that follow those leads.

1970 LA is the perfect time and place for a noir. Hippiedom is over. What about it that can be used to sell stuff is being rapidly assimilated into popular culture, whether that be a buzzword like groovy, a fashion choice like shoulder-length hair or a recreational drug like the weed that Doc’s nemesis, LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen, quaffs at the film’s coda. Anything else countercultural is disposable as a creeping paranoia sweeps through the Californian beach communities soon to be demolished and replaced by high-rises.

If anything makes sense, it’s that a stoner would be trying to make sense of his place in a world on the cusp of leaving him behind.

Inherent Vice drips and aches nostalgia. That’s where it starts and that’s where it lands. Everything that happens in between is a magic trick, precision-engineered to entice you into a riddle you think you can solve even though one jigsaw piece is always missing. Then at your wit’s end, you’re abandoned, and you’re Doc, and you might walk out of the cinema but Paul Thomas Anderson has you where he wants you. Turns out you weren’t here to work out whodunit but to spend 150 minutes feeling both warm and sad and not knowing why.

And you can break it down technically, if you like. You can examine the direction, cinematography, costume, music and performances and find it flawless, if you like. But once you add it back up again, there’s always something extra, extra and elusive, that wasn’t on the ingredients list.

It has me going back and back because I don’t know what it is.

Into the Woods (2015)

The thing about musicals is that they’re melodramatic. I’m not their biggest fan but, the way I understand it, the conceit is this: emotional things happen and excitement swells until the characters involved just cannot keep from spontaneously exploding with all of their joy and sadness into song. Which is fine. I mean, it’s weird, but every genre has its rules, so fine.

When they work on stage, the best musicals have big characters brimming with melodrama. This is partly so audiences on the back row can see what’s going on (and partly because the songs have to be justified somehow). On film, you don’t need to be so big. You have to find ways of communicating the brash audacity of a stage show with devices particular to the medium. That’s how Les Miserables (2012) worked; that’s how Sweeney Todd (2007) worked. Both of these films feel like films. Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods feels like a filmed musical, a throwaway money-spinner.

Les Mis was big in that its characters maintained the melodrama of the stage and were then knowingly filmed in portrait-style close-ups to give audiences a perspective they could never have even sitting on the front row in a theatre. That’s really smart.

Sweeney Todd was big in that, in the hands of a gothic auteur, it was drenched in the visual language of a silent movie and injected with pace by a man who knows a few things about cutting.

As with adapting novels, so with adapting musicals. You won’t offend anyone by blandly covering all the angles and making sure the actors read the script and sing the songs. But it takes a bolder attitude to make it a worthwhile endeavor. The wit of Sondheim and his distinctively angular vocal lines will always be a pleasant thing to sit through but that’s where the good time ends. As a film, Into the Woods just feels exhausting and unnecessary.

The Imitation Game (2014)

“Normal? The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren’t.”

That is The Imitation Game in a nutshell. The biopic sets out to reaffirm Alan Turing’s key contribution towards solving Germany’s enigma code during World War II as well as his importance in the field of modern computing. This comes in the wake of very recent royal and governmental pardons for Turing’s 1952 conviction for homosexual acts which arguably led to his suicide two years later.

Turing is painted as a man who measured all communication, even human conversation, in mathematical terms. Indeed many early scenes are built around the punchline that Turing cannot understand puns and jokes. Ironically, for a film about the incomprehension of subtextual language, it is incredible how superficial its dialogue is.

The script is hammy and ridden with clanging sentiments, so much so that the first ten minutes are almost funny because of it. But however ridiculous the lines are, it is equally ridiculous how this problem melts away as the film progresses. At first I thought the writing might be improving but eventually became convinced that I was in fact simply settling into the rhythm of the film and its primary focus – story. And most importantly: telling its story through events rather than believable verbal exchanges.

Because actually, from a structural standpoint, the film is simply immaculate. Every dramatic incident is correctly placed, every scene serves the whole. There is no doubt that a careful plotting of its key moments would produce a line graph with a flawlessly symmetrical arch. I suppose this is apposite for a film about a mathematical genius.

Its central themes of man and machine, secrets and revelation, games and codes, intertwine impressively neatly. We are compelled, at all times, to focus on the parallels between Turing’s work and his private life and his anguish in marrying the differences (and similarities) between scientific formulae and social convention.

The film is all about Turing – Utterly All. About. Turing – and reinstating his reputation at the cost of the depth of any other character involved in his story. The more the film admits it – and everything from the voiceover narration of his own life to the subtitles at the film’s end demonstrates how much it understands itself – the less problematic it gets. The true story is juicy and the film squeezes all of that juice out in just the right way as to make it deeply satisfying.

Helping it along its way is the cast. Benedict Cumberbatch is predictably brilliant; we all know he does sociopath extremely well, but he also rises to deliver the overt emotional gestures that a biopic like this asks for. Deserving of as much praise, perhaps more so for effectively masking much of the script’s problems, are the supporting cast. The likes of Keira Knightley (woefully underused and starved of depth), Mark Strong (always reliable) and Matthew Goode inject just enough life into parts written essentially as ornamental caricatures to elevate what the film considers peripheral into the realms of interesting and beneficial.

I’m a huge fan of careful dialogue and an enemy of unnecessary exposition. As such, I was shocked at how much I enjoyed The Imitation Game. While there will always be a niggling unease at a film that eschews the small matter of three-dimensional characters in favour ‘bigger’ concerns, in this case it is as a result of conscious choice rather than sheer incompetence. I wonder if its makers purposefully attempt to make it as difficult for themselves to understand human behavior as it is suggested Turing did.

More than forgiving the film its flaws, I actually marvel at it and still need to mull over exactly how it pulls off its trick. Not to be underestimated, I think, is how enjoyable it is simply to learn about the achievements at Bletchley Park, which had to be kept secret for so long. The story of Enigma is still fairly fresh, and an important part of history that many of us are still eager to learn about.

As for the film’s depiction of its hero – while the amount of conspicuous reverence bestowed upon Turing borders on worship, this is probably the right way to tell his life story at this point in history. This is a man whose royal pardon only came less than a year ago, an apology that can never really make amends for Turing’s abominable treatment at the hands of the country he helped save.

As Turing’s life and work is reassessed, eventually a grittier account of his life will surface and will likely be more nourishing when it arrives. For now, The Imitation Game begins the process admirably.

Nightcrawler (2014)

It’s difficult to find much information about Nightcrawler’s writer/director Dan Gilroy. With only a handful of writing credits to his name during a career spanning over 20 years he appears both a seasoned veteran and a green upstart. Whatever explains his trajectory in the industry, it led to this film – so it can’t be bad.

Utilising the intense nocturnal-ness that made his performances in Donnie Darko and Zodiac so striking, Jake Gyllenhaal stars as sociopath Louis Bloom, a creepy autodidact intent on cashing in on television news’ insatiable lust for bloody stories with which to terrify audiences and therefore drive up ratings. Armed with a police radio and a video camera, Bloom trawls the night, seeking out violent crime and horrific accidents, often arriving on the scene before the emergency services. Once capturing the debris on film (at any cost), he sells the footage to a news broadcaster just in time to make their breakfast show.

Gyllenhaal gives the performance of his career. He makes Bloom a magnetic anti-hero. What he captures best is the drive and ambition of his character, causing us to be awkwardly awestruck at how passionate he pursues his depraved goals. This, along with the narrow-minded subjectivity of the direction (that’s a good thing), invites us to get behind Bloom and – as the stakes get higher – subconsciously wince when the obstacles stack up against him and smirk with guilty glee when he gets his way.

All 3 central characters are drawn well. It was no surprise to me to learn that the first-time director is an experienced writer. Although this is Gyllenhaal’s moment and he’ll be the one touted for awards, it cannot be denied that both Rene Russo, who plays news director Nina, and Riz Ahmed, who plays Bloom’s protégé Rick, match the leading man at every step with skilled and detailed performances. They deliver characters that are designed for us to measure Bloom’s mental state against. Just how abnormal is he in a world that was already amoral before he entered it?

The reason that Russo and Ahmed’s performances might fly under the radar has something to do with how attractive constructed Lou Bloom’s dialogue is. This is a man who doesn’t let the qualms of others get in the way of his own eloquence and quick wit. Bloom is sharp, he never takes his eye of the ball and Gilroy has a field day with his lines, feeding Gyllenhaal consistently tasty paragraphs, all of which he delivers with those unnervingly bright eyes.

The film is shot as nicely as it is written. For a debut director, it can’t have hurt to be telling a story about a man whose life mission is to meticulously frame the subjects he is capturing on camera; it must have kept Gilroy as focused as his main character. Especially impressive is the ebb and flow of pace during the film’s climactic scenes which is what keeps them thrilling for longer. Some of the personal scenes involving Bloom alone might have been handled a little slower but that’s as much my taste as anything.

It’s a really good film, one of the best of the year.