Legend (Brian Helgeland, 2015)

Tom Hardy in Legend

Reggie Kray / Ronnie Kray: Tom Hardy
Frances Shea: Emily Browning
"Nipper" Read: Christopher Eccleston
Leslie Payne: David Thewlis
Mad Teddy Smith: Taron Edgerton
Angelo Bruno: Chazz Palminteri
Charlie Richardson: Paul Bettany
Frank Shea: Colin Morgan
Mrs. Shea: Tara Fitzgerald
Albert Donoghue: Paul Anderson
Jack MacVitie: Sam Spruell
Violet Kray: Jane Wood

Director: Brian Helgeland
Screenplay: Brian Helgeland
Based on a book by John Pearson
Cinematography: Dick Pope
Production design: Tom Conroy
Music: Carter Burwell

Perhaps if Brian Helgeland's screenplay and direction had been stronger, Tom Hardy's performance as the Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, might have made more impact. Hardy is an always watchable actor, and he makes a sharp delineation between the two brothers, one psychotic and the other more charmingly deadly. But Helgeland has missed an opportunity to put the Krays in the context of their era: the "swinging London" of the 1960s. There are some superficial name-dropping attempts: Reggie's girlfriend, Frances Shea, spots Joan Collins in a nightclub, and there are some other pop notables on the scene. But the script is too preoccupied with Reggie's affair with and marriage to Frances to give the Krays' kind of gangsterism any larger significance, the way Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather films (1972, 1974, 1980) integrated the relationship of Michael and Kay Corleone into the greater social and political context. Helgeland also makes a serious misstep with a voiceover narration -- often a sign of weakness in screenplays, a suggestion that the writer hasn't worked out a way to provide exposition dramatically. That the narrator is Frances, who dies three-quarters of the way into the film, only compounds the error: Narrative by a dead person rarely works, except in fantasy films or in the sardonic context of Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950). The device loses its point after Frances's death: Her function in the screenplay is first to humanize Reggie Kray -- the film lays on Carter Burwell's score a little too thickly in their love scenes -- and then to suggest that he has suddenly somehow lost his soul when he rapes and beats her. Ronnie is a one-note character throughout, with his retinue of lethal boyfriends, including a standout Taron Edgerton as the giggling "Mad Teddy" Smith. Hardy fills him with silent menace, but he's a good enough actor to make the decision to give him a false nose and to stuff his cheeks like Marlon Brando's in The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) all the more regrettable.

Life Is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1990)

Alison Steadman and Timothy Spall in Life Is Sweet

Wendy: Alison Steadman
Andy: Jim Broadbent
Natalie: Claire Skinner
Nicola: Jane Horrocks
Patsy: Stephen Rea
Aubrey: Timothy Spall
Nicola's Lover: David Thewlis
Paula: Moya Brady

Director: Mike Leigh
Screenplay: Mike Leigh
Cinematography: Dick Pope
Production design: Alison Chitty
Music: Rachel Portman

In Life Is Sweet Mike Leigh switches his focus from the angry working class and soulless yuppies of High Hopes (1988) to the muddling-through lower middle class, coping with a world they never made but doggedly trying to make the best of it. Andy hates his work as a chef in an institutional kitchen, but he keeps on at it. Wendy, his wife, holds a couple of part-time jobs, one as a children's dancercise teacher, the other as a salesclerk in a children's clothing store. Her cheerful laugh hides disappointment and pain, some of it generated by their twin daughters. Natalie has short hair and works as a plumber, and we sense that there has been some concern from the parents about her lifestyle, though everyone maintains a façade of contentment. But Nicola has unkempt long hair and does nothing but lie about the house, snarling and smoking and mouthing left-wing slogans, and having slightly kinky sex with her boyfriend. Nicola is also bulimic, a disorder she hides from her parents, though her twin hears the vomiting through the thin row-house wall that separates their bedrooms, and Nicola has been hospitalized before. Despite this, the film is decidedly comic, partly because Andy and Wendy have friends who aren't always as helpful as they could be. Patsy persuades Andy to buy a rundown trailer that has been converted into a hamburger stand, with the idea that Andy can make enough money on weekends to eventually quit his job. Aubrey is trying to open a French restaurant with an Edith Piaf theme, the Regret Rien, and when his waitress decamps just before the opening he persuades Wendy to take her place. Disasters ensue, leaving the characters teetering on the line between hilarity and tragedy, as life in Leigh's film so often does. The "sweetness" in the film lies in the fact that Andy and Wendy are genuinely nice people who suffer fools gladly, even if they're their own daughters and friends (or each other). Leigh is never content to stick to formula, however, no matter how much the conventional logic of film comedy seems to demand it, so every moment of Life Is Sweet is likely to hold a surprise: The characters do and say things we wouldn't necessarily expect of them. The performances are uniformly brilliant, as we might expect of this particular roster of British actors, and Rachel Portman's lovely, almost subliminal score backs them up well.

The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1998)

Jeff Bridges and Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski

The Dude: Jeff Bridges
Walter Sobchak: John Goodman
Maude Lebowski: Julianne Moore
Donny Kerabatsos: Steve Buscemi
The Big Lebowski: David Huddleston
Brandt: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Bunny Lebowski: Tara Reid
Jesus Quintana: John Turturro
Knox Harrington: David Thewlis
The Stranger: Sam Elliott

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Production design: Rick Heinrichs
Film editing: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
Music: Carter Burwell

The Coen brothers' movies are usually more in the vein of Billy Wilder's acerbic satire than the affectionately loopy take on the varieties of human eccentricity you find in Preston Sturges's films. But The Big Lebowski somehow manages to have touches of both Wilder and Sturges, with the latter, I think, finally predominating. Or maybe it's just that I find that Sam Elliott's appearance, mustache in full bloom, at the end of the film casts the entire movie in a benign light. (Elliott is one of those actors who can make almost any movie better just by showing up in it.) But what also brings Sturges to mind is the special texture he gave to his films with the use of his stock company of character actors like William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Jimmy Conlin, and the rest. And the Coens have done something similar by bringing in their usual gang: John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, among others. They also make use of such great actors as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore in supporting roles, and how can you not love a film that gives David Thewlis a bit part in which he does almost nothing but giggle? Still, The Big Lebowski would be nothing without Jeff Bridges, our least appreciated great actor, finding the right note for the stoned and indomitable Dude. He takes a licking -- gets beat up, has his rug pissed on, gets beat up again and has his replacement rug snatched from him, has his car stolen, is threatened by German nihilists, finds his car but its windows get smashed, has a mickey slipped into his White Russian, gets arrested and beaten by the Malibu police, gets thrown out of a cab because he objects to the driver's playing the Eagles, goes home to find his apartment trashed, and finally sees what's left of his car set fire to -- but the Dude abides. And somehow in the middle of all this he finds time to go bowling with Walter and Donny and perform something like Three Stooges routines (only funny) with them. It has been labeled a "cult film," but it transcends that label. Everyone who loves it has their own favorite lines: Mine happen to be "That's the stress talking" and "Hey, careful, man, there's a beverage here!" I suppose I also have to mention the contributions of Roger Deakins's cinematography and Carter Burwell's score augmented by T Bone Burnett's invaluable work as "musical archivist," but then everyone covered themselves with glory by working on The Big Lebowski.

Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

Midway through the film, Johnny (David Thewlis) happens upon a parked limousine whose driver is dozing at the wheel. Waking up, the driver mistakes Johnny for his client and invites him into the limo, only to realize his mistake suddenly and order Johnny out. He's one of the few lucky ones in Naked: Lots of other people invite Johnny in, only to realize their mistake after he's wrought chaos in their lives. For Johnny is less a realistic character than a symbolic force: the spirit of anarchy loose in a world that's trying to impose something like order. Johnny is something of a Shakespearean fool, licensed to deflate pomposity, to expose absurdities like the meaningless job of Brian (Peter Wight), the security guard for an empty building: "You're guarding space? That's stupid, innit? Because someone could break in there and steal all the fuckin' space and you wouldn't know it's gone, would you?" Writer-director Mike Leigh typically begins his filmmaking in disorder -- sessions in which the actors improvise what their characters are like, what they might do or say in a given situation, and how their interrelationships might work out -- and ends in order -- a scripted film in which the actors are not allowed to deviate from what's on the page. He is fortunate in Naked to have had a brilliant company, headed by Thewlis, to find out what's in their characters. In Naked, Johnny is reading James Gleick's Chaos, which posits an underlying pattern to what appears random and chaotic. Johnny is the butterfly flapping its wings that causes a storm to sweep through the lives of flatmates Louise (Lesley Sharp), Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), and Sandra (Claire Skinner) -- not that they don't already lead lives of quiet (and sometimes noisy) desperation. It can be argued, however, that Johnny, for all his sponging amorality and his sexual aggression, represents something of a life force in the film, especially when contrasted with the rich and predatory Jeremy (Greg Crutwell), a character Leigh introduces I think intentionally to serve as a foil for Johnny, who at least has a measure of self-awareness even if sometimes it has to be beaten into him. Never let it be said that Leigh uses nudity gratuitously: It's gym-toned Jeremy who stays snugly encased in his designer briefs but scrawny Johnny who strides boldly toward the camera, genitals aflop.  Viciously funny, tonically brutal, Naked is one of those wake-up-call films we need to subject ourselves to now and then.

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2015)

Michael Stone: David Thewlis
Lisa Helleman: Jennifer Jason Leigh
Everybody Else: Tom Noonan

Director: Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Based on a play by Charlie Kaufman (as Francis Fregoli)
Cinematography: Joe Passarelli
Production design: John Joyce, Huy Vu
Music: Carter Burwell

Of all forms of animation, stop-motion has for me the greatest creep factor, which Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplay, and Duke Johnson, who supervised the animation, deliberately play on in Anomalisa. Traditional cel animation works with the charm of seeing hand-drawn pictures come to life, and computer animation has overcome the gee-whiz element of technological innovation to bring about a simulacrum of real life. But to my mind, only Nick Park and the geniuses at Aardman have managed to overcome the flickery stiffness of stop-motion, and that mainly by telling genuinely funny stories. Anomalisa succeeds too, but it isn't funny -- except in parts. It begins with Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), an expert in the manipulative field of "customer service," arriving in Cincinnati to deliver an address to a convention. Soon we begin to notice something odd: All of the people he meets, male and female, sound the same. They all speak with the voice of Tom Noonan, with only a few variations of accent and pitch to distinguish them from one another. So it's a shock when we -- and Stone -- hear a female voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh's) outside his hotel room. Stone immediately pursues the voice and finds its owner, Lisa Hesselman, who is bowled over to be meeting the Michael Stone, famous in customer-service circles for his book on the topic. Stone invites Lisa and her roommate for a drink, then rather rudely throws over the roommate and asks Lisa back to his room. Kaufman's creation of shy, awkward Lisa, who is deeply self-conscious because of a facial scar that she hides with her hair and who talks constantly and nervously, is a masterstroke. (Anomalisa was originally a play in which Thewlis and Leigh sat on opposite sides of the stage with Noonan in the middle.) Stone calls Lisa an anomaly, a word that he morphs into "anomalisa," and after persuading her to sing Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," they have sex. (The film is rated R and there is full-frontal male puppet nudity.) But the next morning, after a beautifully staged nightmare sequence that plays on Stone's guilt and paranoia, he finds his infatuation with Lisa beginning to fade: When she speaks, he begins to hear Noonan's voice echoing everything she says. He has a breakdown during his convention address, and returns home to his family, now uncertain about his sanity. It's a devastating tale, based in part on a neuropsychological phenomenon known as the Fregoli delusion -- the hotel Stone stays in is called the Fregoli, which is also the pseudonym Kaufman used on the play -- but more largely on the universal conundrum of personal identity. It gets into your head and stays there like an unsettling dream.

Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, 2015)

Translating a play from its theatrical mode into a cinematic one is never easy, but Justin Kurzel and his screenwriters, Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso, do several smart things in their adaptation of Macbeth. They open the film with a scene not in Shakespeare's play, the funeral of a small child presumably born to Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard), an extrapolation from Lady Macbeth's later claim that she has "given suck" to an infant. It establishes the sense of unsettling loss and grave disorientation that feeds the Macbeths' ambition. The film also scraps the witches' cauldron scene, its "double, double, toil and trouble" and "eye of newt" incantations, which can become ludicrous even in a well-done modern production, turning the witches into Halloween hags instead of the eerie prophets Shakespeare portrayed. In their place, the witches become three peasant women, one of whom has a baby in her arms, accompanied by another child. They seem indigenous, gifted with the air of prophecy attributed to those close to the land. Another problematic element of the play, the movement of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, which can look silly on stage, with soldiers carrying branches in their hands, is resolved into something terrifying: Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane in the form of ashes and sparks, after the forest is set fire to by the troops of Macduff (Sean Harris) and Malcolm (Jack Reynor). This also creates a hellish landscape for the final duel of Macbeth and Macduff. There are some other touches that, though cinematic, don't work quite so well. Lady Macbeth's line, "screw your courage to the sticking place," is turned into a kind of dirty joke: an encouragement for Macbeth to penetrate her sexually. The banquet scene and the appearance of Banquo's ghost (Paddy Considine) is awkwardly staged. The lady's sleepwalking scene is shorn of its witnesses, and despite Cotillard's fine performance, it becomes a disjointed monologue in which she returns to the scene of the original crime, the murder of Duncan (David Thewlis). And worst of all, I think, the fear that speaking Shakespeare's verse aloud could become "stagey," leads Kurzel to reduce much of the dialogue and soliloquies to murmurs and whispers. The "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech is barely coherent when Macbeth mutters it as he hauls Lady Macbeth from her deathbed. Fassbender and Cotillard are formidable actors, but they have been done a severe disservice by not allowing them to use their voices to full effect.