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Director Lee Daniels (“Precious”) offers a poignant look at black American life in “The Butler,” a movie inspired by Eugene Allen, a real-life White House butler who served eight presidents. As good as the film is, too much has been made of its ties to reality. Although the onscreen protagonist – Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) – serves at the White House for decades, most of the movie’s dramatic arc is fiction.
With this “battle of images” so resonant, to relegate this film as only an award-winning depiction of the on-going fight for social justice and freedom across Egypt would be an act of missing the point. This film is a tangible action, an expressive continuation of this endeavor towards democracy just as important as the raw material of which Noujaim’s narrative is composed. The underlying thesis that makes The Square so unique is that it eschews both the construct of a conclusion and the notion of a singular authorship, as the film chronologically traces the relationships of its six disparate characters.
Llewyn Davis is the Coen Brothers’ 16th full-length film, and their first in three years, since 2010’s True Grit – the latter a work that earned a whopping 10 Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture, but won none. Though they directed two segments and contributed as writers to other projects in between, Joel and Ethan Coen’s body of work as directors started with 1984’s Blood Simple and has included 14 other works between that and Llewyn Davis, among them such works as: Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man.
Director Brad Furman’s “Runner Runner” never pretends to be more than lightweight entertainment, and the lack of pretense makes it better. The story centers on Richie Furst (Justin Timberlake), a graduate student promoting a gambling website in order to pay his way through Princeton. Viewers are supposed to see him as a genius because he has a knack for numbers. That doesn’t, however, prevent him from losing his entire bankroll to the very site that he promotes.
In an age where cell phones are our constant companions, where an operating system can respond to voice-activated prompts and mobile Internet access provides us with instant information at any given moment, our relationships with technology and with each other are rapidly evolving. Writer-director Spike Jonze’s latest film, “Her,” an original and surprisingly emotional story about a lonely writer who develops feelings for his cell phone operating system, serves as a commentary on our society’s increasing reliance on technology.
In recent years, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has proven himself to be one of the film industry’s most talented young actors. With “Don Jon” he demonstrates that his skills extend beyond performance. Gordon-Levitt wrote and directed the movie, and he also plays the title role, proving capable in every capacity. The picture focuses on Jon Martello (Gordon-Levitt), a good-hearted, New Jersey player whose friends call him Don Jon as a nod to the legendary Spanish libertine Don Juan.
Writer-director James Wan may have made his name with the ultra-gory “Saw” franchise, but he is just as comfortable with old-fashioned suspense. In fact, it seems that Wan now favors movies that are built on slow-burning psychological horror. Wan’s first film of 2013, “The Conjuring,” was the best horror movie of the year. His second, “Insidious: Chapter 2,” is less striking, but still intense and entertaining.
Director Dennis Villeneuve moves the 153-minute film with precision, leading viewers through a thriller that bolsters its clever, surface-level twists with deep thematic roots that force viewers to identify with multiple characters. This should stimulate debate about everything from vigilantism to torture, and it allows the movie to live in one’s mind long after it has played out. “Prisoners” could have been even better if Villeneuve had addressed a few underplayed plot points, but focusing on minor flaws in an otherwise masterful film is neither fair nor productive.