Doug Liman directs Tom Cruise, Sarah Wright and Domnhall Gleeson in this true tale of a pilot who quits his steady commercial airline job and starts working for the CIA, the Contras and eventually the Medellin cartel. 

Now this is much more like it. Cruise’s first serious lead role since Valkyrie and it buzzes with quality. It is an effervescent, propulsive tall tale that grips and makes you giggle. Reviews have unfairly written off American Made as just another Blow or War Dogs. And while it is in love with the domino rally structure of Goodfellas just as much as any of those hollow copycat flicks, it is a more nuanced and entertaining drug smuggling piece. We don’t merely follow the rise and fall of a luxury scumbag. We follow a family man who decides to abandon the safety net he placed himself in, and for a while thrives living on the edge of a razor blade. We are introduced to Barry Seal flying a full airliner, going by the flight plan, all operating lights lit. His co-pilot is asleep, as are all his passengers back there. So he decides to click off the auto pilot and try a little free fall. And we follow him from there on out, one miscalculation away from being terminal wreckage. Each humorously threat laden episode sees a cocksure middle-aged man jerking and plunging his solid existence into more and more dangerous territory. He flies too low over military bases he needs to photograph, taking flack he could avoid from a sensible height. He drags the wife n’ kids away at night to a new rural home, the cops passing them as they turn out of the driveway. We essentially run with a man constantly putting his steady life in peril and watch as the CIA and Pablo Escobar exploit this. American Made is a kind of a suburban 9to5er existence slapstick show plus a bonus Reagan-era satire to boot. And when his downfall comes, his cocksure grin can’t protect him. Hell, he loses some trademark dazzling white teeth by the first act but he keeps on smiling. He crashes his plane in a way that would make Goose and Iceman cry. Cruise’s Top Gun aviator shades and his running shoes have already been stolen off him by freedom fighters he has arrived to “assist.” He turns up again, smile at full beam, with Playboys, a case of Jack and only a baseball bat as protection. How else are you going to give these guys their guns? The joke is clear; everyone (Escobar, the Contras, the Sandinistas) wants to be American, while the American success story wants action and danger and oblivion. He ends up making confessional tapes. He wants someone to talk to. He wants to reveal what the American Dream looks like while your eyes are closed dreaming; what is happening outside the borders to make that myth work. But his co-pilot and all the passengers are still asleep. America does not care what is being done in its name. American Made delivers this message lightly and with deft humour. Liman ably uses Cruise as both an icon and a desperate charm power tool. As the life threatening set pieces and dirty money pummel over us, we are always thoroughly with Golden Tom. We want him to win (still four decades of winning on), to get the girl (even though she is now already his wife) but we want to see him do it clinging by his fingertips, grinning that million dollar smile at us like a deflector shield, as the weight of the real world drags him down.

8

 

William Wyler directs Kirk Douglas, Eleanor Parker and Lee Grant in this day in the life in a police precint thriller. 

A retro NYPD Blue episode with various cases being closed while the personal lives and private demons of the detectives get explored between the desks. So it is essentially a filmed play? Great. Kirk and a magnificent support cast of character faces make it a very watchable filmed play.

6

Roman Polanski directs himself, Isabelle Adjani and Melvyn Douglas in this psychological suspenser about a man who becomes paranoid that his new neighbours are trying to kill him. 

Surreal horror meets slapstick farce ineffectually in this overlong pain. Polanski does the pratfalling cornered prey act suprisingly well and there are flashes of his previous disturbing brilliance. If you want to read into it all some parallels to either his childhood surviving the Holocaust or his fleeing of America on statutory rape charges; then please be my guest. Taken at face value though it is merely a self indulgent puzzle.

4

James Ponsoldt directs Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul and Octavia Spencer in this drama about an alcoholic primary school teacher who attempts to go sober while her partner continues drinking. 

Visually this is Bukowski meets Etsy – all dive bars and floral dresses, vomit flecked chins and master shots dappled in overcranked sunlight. It is wryly amusing and hits believable depths. Winstead is beautiful as ever, even when waking up jonseing on a flytipped sofa. You can see her enjoy being challenged by a role that stretches her after a decade of genre work. Here the monster she has to survive is her addiction and she sails that ship to safety without ever being mawkish.

7

Kathyrn Bigelow directs John Boyega, Will Poulter and Hannah Murray in this visceral docudrama recreation of the 1967 riots and an incident of police brutality covered up during its worst night. 

Let’s get it out of the way, straight off the bat, Detroit is an unmissable act of cinema. Bigelow’s current reportage style gives you a broad history lesson and then also focuses in on a one location, one night elongated set piece of sustained oppressive terror. It is a commendable and breathless recreation, daringly confident and it wounds you as a viewer. But as much as Detroit evokes a turbulent period and let’s you helplessly experience a horrendous sequence of events in an immersive experience parallel to Nolan’s Dunkirk, it is also very frustrating at times. You never really get a satisfying grip on the characters with the possible exception of Poulter’s gracious yet disgustingly racist cop composite. John Boyega’s ostensible lead is a good example of how stunted and obtuse the narrative attention span often feels. Boyega is very impressive early on as the security guard who ingratiates himself with the white cops and National Guard. He charmingly conveys a smart guy with one eye on surviving and another on keeping as many of his neighbourhood out of the crosshairs of the unchecked aggressions. His calm self-controlled interactions and crisp uniform evoke Austin Stoker’s iconic turn in Assault on Precinct 13. As he lingers in the motel annexe, subtly trying his best to stop the white authority figures from boiling over you feel him silently calculating the best outcome with each new escalation. Bigelow uses him as our avatar, we and he can see just how tragic the situation we are thrown into is, yet we have no actual power to be heroic to stop the injustice and violence from unfurling. Then once the long night is over and the cover-up begins, Boyega’s everyman finds himself behind bars, implicated in the crimes he tried to avert. And we just leave him behind there for too much of the final act. We get neither chance to see him save lives (fantasy maybe but…) nor get to stay with him when his own story takes an even more exciting turn. Maybe Bigelow feels we have seen these movies too many times before? Maybe the truth is too fuzzy or too unpalatable to stand scrutiny and she wisely brushes over it? Maybe there are legal implications of looking too deeply into the corruption of the courtcase that followed? Whatever the reason though,  every time our de facto protagonist finds himself in a position of compulsive attention, the movie shoves off away from him. What it moves off to each time is not unworthy, but you cannot help but wish we stayed with Boyega’s powerful hero. Or even Poulter’s reprehensible but complex nasty. Sometimes a bit of centring goes a long way.

7

Annette Haywood-Carter directs Hedy Burress, Angelina Jolie and Jenny Lewis in this Joyce Carol Oates adaptation about a beautiful drifter who a group of small town girls form a gang around. 

A quite watchable teen rebellion pic with a stick of rock exciting cast; from attention grabbing freshman Jolie to old hand cult character actors filling out the parent roll call. The lesbian romance is coy but gritty, the girl gang plot line soapy (in a good way). It stumbles off into histrionic tragedy in the last act but the female empowerment message washes away the unbelievable cliffhangers / neat conclusions that hobble the finale.

5

Spike Lee directs Tracy Camilla Johns, Tommy Redmond Hicks and himself in this romantic drama about a young New York black artist who needs three very different black men to satisfy her. 

I’m quite the fan of the first half of Spike Lee’s career but his feature debut always avoided me. I couldn’t seem to get a chance to watch it if it was projected in the sky. At last, Netflix has the rights and…. meh! It has clear simple ambitions; the visual ones are achieved confidently, the intellectual ones have dated uneasily. The broad central characters no longer connect, some of their more theatrical interactions come across as distasteful. As debuts go though She Gotta Have It is often formally exciting and emotionally satisfying. He went out there and got it made, and his masterful eye for framing and rhythm shines through the cheap origins.

5