Ryan Coogler’s magnificent “Fruitvale Station” opens with a shaky cellphone video of a now-infamous event—the fatal shooting of Oscar Grant, a black, unarmed 22-year-old, by a white transit cop at a BART station in Oakland, Calif., in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2009. In other hands, the video might have been the starting point of a documentary about the victim, the disputed facts of the event and the community outrage that the shooting provoked. But Mr. Coogler chose another approach, a dramatized account of the day in Oscar’s life that preceded his death, and the film celebrates that life in all its beauty, contradiction and thwarted promise.
“Fruitvale Station” is a directorial debut of limitless promise; as a first feature it’s almost miraculous. At the age of 27 Mr. Coogler seems to have it all, and have it firmly in place—a clearsighted take on his subject (no airbrushing of flaws or foibles here, just confident brush strokes by a mature artist); a spare, spontaneous style that can go beyond naturalism into a state of poetic grace, and a gift for getting, or allowing, superb actors to give flawless performances.
Oscar Grant is played by Michael B. Jordan, who gives a performance that can break your heart or fill it with joy, sometimes simultaneously. Oscar is not a model citizen. He’s casually unfaithful, dangerously impulsive and adrift in vague dreams of getting his act together. But he’s a charmer, and a lover. He loves the erratic, often anxiety-charged life he’s living, even though he’d prefer less anxiety and more stability. He loves his sorely tried mother, Wanda (an exquisite performance by Octavia Spencer), his girlfriend, Sophina, (Melonie Diaz) and, most of all, their young daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal), who can lift up his soul with an impish smile. It’s a measure of our involvement in this man’s fate that when he confesses to having done stupid things and Sophina says, angrily, “I could slap you,” we hope against hope that she takes him in her arms instead.
All too seldom in today’s movie business can a filmmaker be accused of wisdom, but Mr. Coogler has done something here that needs to be celebrated in its own turn. Like his subject, he’s a black man, and lives in the Bay Area, where Oscar lived. It would have been perfectly logical if he’d gone the documentary route, if only to highlight the appalling circumstances of Oscar’s death. (The cop who shot him claimed he’d mistakenly used a gun instead of a Taser, and received a two-year prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter.) We live, after all, in a golden age of documentaries, when low-cost digital equipment allows filmmakers to explore a vast range of complex subjects. But it’s a tarnished age for independently produced dramatic films that explore the essence and texture of American life, and “Fruitvale Station” fills that bill with dazzling distinction.
Instead of advancing arguments, it captures the mercurial flashes, the protean shape of daily experience. (I do wish Mr. Coogler hadn’t portrayed the lethal cop as such a brute, but his reasons for doing so are hardly mysterious.) Instead of employing a straight-line narrative to make points, it pauses for moments of unstressed sweetness, silliness or shock: Oscar’s happy participation in a crab-cracking ritual for the family gumbo; his genial encounter with a pretty white shopper (Ahna O’Reilly) who’s at sea over what fish to buy; the toothbrushing ritual that he shares with Tatiana; the exuberant partying that turns deadly on a BART train filled with New Year’s Eve revelers; the anticipatory terror of Wanda and Sophina when a doctor emerges from surgery. And through it all, Mr. Coogler uses on-screen displays of the texts and phone calls that punctuate Oscar’s moment-to-moment life; they’re an analog of the impulsivity that plays a role in his death.
It’s tempting to think that “Fruitvale Station” simply erupted from the spirit and skill of a singular filmmaker. Though Mr. Coogler is certainly that, the story of this feature’s evolution is more complicated, and instructive; it takes a filmmaking village to raise a production to the lofty level of this one. The script was developed at the Sundance Institute, and the film was produced by Forest Whitaker’s production company. Giving additional credit where it’s deserved, the cinematographer was Rachel Morrison, the editors were Claudia Castello and Michael P. Shawver, Ludwig Göransson wrote the original music and Hannah Beachler designed the production; the costumes were designed by the eminent veteran Aggie Guerard Rodgers. (Another hat tip to BART officials who were wise enough to allow filming on their premises.) At a time when the multiplexes are crowded with coarse comedy and inept spectacle, here’s a homegrown movie that honors its subject and the medium.
The power of Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Hunt” flows in part from its inevitability and, paradoxically, its familiarity. A little girl’s random remark raises troubling questions about Lucas, a blameless kindergarten teacher, and the residents of a pleasant Danish town leap to the conclusion that he’s a serial child-molester. In other words, it’s a witch hunt, one that replays some of the classic elements of “The Crucible” (or transplants to Denmark the real-life events of the McMartin preschool trial that gripped Los Angeles a quarter-century ago.)
The all-too-familiar spread of hysteria retains its fascination because those infected by it are, as always, ignorant of the drama they’re re-enacting; because the setting in this case is an area of the world where hysteria comes in muted tones; and, most of all, because Lucas is played by the great Mads Mikkelsen (“After the Wedding,” “Casino Royale,” “A Royal Affair”), putting his intelligence and formidable intensity in the service of an already wounded, passive hero who may not be able to rise to his own defense.
This is filmmaking of a high order, even though the production’s scale is modest and the climax is not without its facile contrivances. (Tobias Lindholm, whose brilliant “A Hijacking” opened last month, wrote the script with Mr. Vinterberg. Charlotte Bruus Christensen did the quietly elegant cinematography.) Well before the child, Klara (Annika Wedderkop), utters the fateful words that will shatter Lucas’s life, we see the tender friendship that binds them. On her side, Klara is fearful and obsessive, yet happy to have the teacher as a refuge from the turmoil that besets her at home. For Lucas, living a solitary life after a nasty divorce, the child is a cherished surrogate for his own son, who’s been living with his mother.
Watching the nuanced performance at the center of the film, you may experience another paradox, wanting the character to be as strong as you may know the actor to be. Why doesn’t Lucas get a lawyer? Why is he so slow to recognize the dangerous situation he’s in? Some of that can be explained by postdivorce depression; at the age of 42 he’s working in a kindergarten and just beginning to put his life back together. But the screenplay skillfully deprives him of crucial information—that Klara’s words have sent local authorities rushing into the dismal swamp of so-called recovered memories, where they encourage other children to invent sexual encounters with Lucas that had no more basis in fact than Klara’s fabrication. There’s another, literal hunt in “The Hunt,” an annual ritual in which the town’s boys supposedly become men by going out and shooting deer. The deer never know what happened to them either.
“Could be worse” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of “Pacific Rim,” but my head is still ringing, and hurting, from long stretches of this aliens vs. robots extravaganza that are no better than the worst brain-pounders of the genre. The director and co-writer, with Travis Beacham, was Guillermo del Toro, not Michael Bay. Unlike Mr. Bay, the untrammeled technologist of the “Transformers” franchise, Mr. del Toro is an imagist, a fantasist and, at his best, a cinema poet of highly charged horror. He gets to do some impressive stuff in “Pacific Rim,” in 3-D IMAX, but it’s a megabudget enterprise that wants desperately to compete in the Michael Bay mode. All too often in that respect the film succeeds, i.e. fails. What’s more, the good stuff succeeds elegantly and the bad stuff falls dismally flat for reasons that are painfully obvious—painfully because the budget, and the commercial ambitions attached to it, have prevented the filmmaker from working comfortably in his own mode.
The towering robots, called Jaegers, are more intriguing than the gigantic aliens, known as Kaiju, who’ve emerged to terrorize our planet from a fissure in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Where the Kaiju are just your standard-issue monsters, with redundant dentition and innards seemingly lighted by blue LEDs, the Jaegers have more or less human shapes, and their running, punching, shooting or stabbing is controlled by the balletic movements of two-pilot crews inside them.
One of those crews provides the human center of a film that comes up short in humanity—a washed-up pilot, Raleigh Becket, who just possibly will redeem himself (he’s played by Charlie Hunnam), and a beautiful, mysterious rookie, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, the Japanese deaf-mute teen in “Babel”). Idris Elba is impressive, as always, as Stacker Pentacost, a last-ditch military commander, while Charlie Day and Burn Gorman, as not-so-mad scientists, provide a kind of “Back to the Future” comedy that seeks to inoculate the production against rampant Bayism.
Raleigh and Mako have an exceedingly intimate relationship; they synchronize their brains before each mission to share the neural load of guiding their machines. And the noncombat sequences are set in gorgeously retro, bronze-hued environments—think the leather, wax and tubing of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”—where a sense of immense scale is validated by human presence. (And by the immense clanking of machines, gates and doors.) Yet the battle scenes seem to be populated by digital versions of Ray Harryhausen puppets, and since there’s no humanity to measure them against. My neural load wasn’t a match for these tedious combatants, though earplugs reduced the aural assault.
Charles Burnett was a UCLA graduate student in the 1970s when he shot his remarkable debut feature, in 16mm black-and-white, as a thesis film. Declared a national treasure by the Library of Congress, the movie was rarely shown in public because of poor print quality and problems with music rights. Eventually Milestone Film & Video made it possible for movie lovers to see this meticulously restored, delicately poetic and essentially plotless vision of life in the Los Angeles area of Watts, where, a decade after the riots, little had changed but the ghetto’s name recognition.
A girl’s misunderstanding of adult behavior sets the plot in motion, changing the course of three lives. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are the star-crossed lovers of Joe Wright’s film, adapted by Christopher Hampton from the Ian McEwan novel. Ms. Knightley’s Cecilia is quick-tongued and beautifully pensive. Mr. McAvoy’s Robbie combines working-class buoyancy with understated intellectuality. Saoirse Ronan is Cecilia’s young sister, Briony, who jumps to a conclusion that isn’t just wrong but perverse. In the last part of her life Briony is played, as a spectral presence, by Vanessa Redgrave.
Guillermo del Toro is best known for “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), a dark and unforgettable fantasy, set in Spain during the Civil War, that won three Oscars—for art direction, cinematography and makeup. At least as extraordinary, and perhaps superior as an allegory of that war, is his horror film “The Devil’s Backbone.” The time is the late 1930s, and the setting is a Spanish orphanage, a place of shelter and learning that’s haunted by more than standard spooks. The orphanage, and its school, are emblematic of civilized Spain, menaced from within by fascist violence.