THE NICE GUYS: Black Is the New Black

Director: Shane Black
Writers: Shane Black, Anthony Bagarozzi
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice, Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley
Runtime: 116 mins.
2016

The worst thing I can say about The Nice Guys is that it's no Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, writer/director Shane Black's other neo-noir comedy. That film, one of my favorite meta-narrative movies, may upstage Black's latest directorial effort, but by any other reasonable metric The Nice Guys is a rousing success.

Beginning with a hauntingly beautiful scene of a child discovering a dead porn star in the wreckage of a mangled car, The Nice Guys firmly establishes itself in the seventies. Our heroes are Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), a bruiser for hire who gets embroiled in detective work despite his better judgment, and Holland March (Ryan Gosling), an inept P.I. who mostly coasts by on alcohol and exploiting the elderly. The other major player is Holly March (Angourie Rice), Holland's hypercompetent daughter, only the most recent in the storied line of child actors in Shane Black action movies who manage not to be annoying at all, but are in fact quite charming. I'm going to cut off the plot summary hardly before it's even started, as I cannot remember much about the twisty narrative details. Though in this case, that's no detriment; the joy of The Nice Guys has little to do with its plot intrigue, instead putting all the eggs in the bounteous basket of how delightful Crowe and Gosling are to watch bounce off each other for an hour and a half.

They both bring their A+ game. Between this and Noah, it's great to see Crowe in the midst of a career resurgence. He's cribbing from John Goodman here, playing Healy as paunchy but vivacious. Plus, Crowe is capable of selling the hell out of the movie's isolated moments of tragedy. Meanwhile, I have been a Gosling advocate for years (Drive, Only God Forgives, Crazy, Stupid, Love, Half Nelson, Lars and the Real Girl, etc. etc.), but he manages to shift into a new tier of talent in The Nice Guys, at least comedically. His physical comedy is far more committed than anything we could reasonably expect from a Hollywood A-lister. Black likes to beat the hell out of his characters, and Gosling sells every painful mishap.

All things considered, The Nice Guys is an exemplary if somewhat traditional noir. It may not transcend its own structure like the aforementioned Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but The Nice Guys sees a cavalcade of tremendous talents at the top of their game, knocking it out of the park as if it were routine to do so.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS

JASON BOURNE: ReTreadstone

Director: Paul Greengrass
Writers: Paul Greengrass, Christopher Rouse
Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Ato Essandoh
Runtime: 123 mins.
2016

You were the best of friends with this guy. Over the course of the half-decade-plus when you were in direct contact with him, he always proved a reliable companion, and your bond only grew stronger as you shared new experiences over the years. Eventually you had to part ways. You both knew that no matter how much you intended to keep in touch with each other, life was dragging both of you down separate paths--and that was for the best! You revisited his memory every so often, remembered the good times, but that's it. You've met people like him since, but without the exact balance of charisma and savvy that made him special. You've moved on.

But lo and behold, you'll be in the same area as each other this summer, so of course you plan a visit. You know it won't be like it was, but at the very least you expect to fall into some old nostalgic patterns that would not be sustainable long term, but are gratifying, pleasant, and perhaps even healthy in the moment. Although you have other things more prominent on your mind, you look forward to this meeting. Then you see him, and he's kind of... a shell of his former self. In the intervening years, life has run your old friend ragged. His signature personality quirks are muted to the point of banality, and all of his mediocre traits have spread and taken over. The worst thing that could have happened to this kind of friend has happened. He has become dull.

Such is the experience of watching Jason Bourne, most recent in Hollywood's current Sisyphean trend of perpetual reboots. Having earned the ill will of fans with their 2012 Jeremy Renner-helmed sequel The Bourne Legacy, Universal has desperately scrambled to get the band back together. In this case the band consists of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Paul Greengrass directing, John Powell* scoring, and Christopher Rouse editing (plus picking up a screenwriting credit this time), among others. One must be dubious of naked cash grab reboots, but that's a lot of talent. Besides, a movie like this can survive a less than great reboot so long as it delivers on the basic promises of the series in a somewhat satisfying way.

*As best I can tell, Powell is the only individual who contributes really good work to this film.

THE NEON DEMON: Skin Deep

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Writers: Nicolas Winding Refn, Mary Laws, Polly Stenham
Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Keanu Reeves, Karl Glusman, Desmond Harrington, Christina Hendricks
Runtime: 118 mins.
2016

Nicolas Winding Refn broke into mainstream consciousness with 2011's Drive, the Ryan Gosling action vehicle. If you've never seen Drive, the phrase "Ryan Gosling action vehicle" probably conjures all sorts of expectations, few of which would sync up with the experience of watching Drive. Audiences were so distraught, in fact, that one Michigan woman brought a class action lawsuit against the film's distributor for releasing a deliberately misleading trailer, as the end product bore little resemblance to something in the vein of The Fast and the Furious. The critics, meanwhile, by and large heralded Drive as a brooding thriller, and a fascinating deconstruction of the masculine hero figure.

Two years later, Refn released Only God Forgives, and this time neither audiences nor critics were on board. Sitting at a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, some excoriated the film for being laborious and impenetrable, while some lambasted it for being too on the nose. For my part, Only God Forgives was one of my favorite movies of 2013. It went even deeper down the rabbit hole of deconstructing Ryan Gosling's persona as part of its critique of the violence and perversion inherent in toxic masculinity. The central visual motif of the film is that of the hand: unclenched in supplication, clenched in violence. This commentary develops in glacier-slow sequences underpinned by Cliff Martinez's infectious score.

So it is to my absolute pleasure, and the distress of many others, that The Neon Demon is the perfect counterpart film to Only God Forgives. Whereas the latter follows violent gangs and the sex trade in Thailand to immerse us in toxic masculine culture, the former thrusts us into the Los Angeles modeling scene in order to put a lens on toxic femininity. The Neon Demon is Only God Forgives refracted through the prism of gender.

GREEN ROOM: Got a Little Fight in You

Earlier this week, a freak accident took the life of twenty-seven year old actor Anton Yelchin. This review was written before the accident, but I have since edited it to put more of a spotlight on Yelchin's incredible contributions. His career was about to explode, and it would have undoubtedly been long and accomplished. Unfortunately, we are relegated to looking back for his greatest artistic achievements, and Green Room is certainly one of them.

Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Writer: Jeremy Saulnier
Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart, Joe Cole, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, Mark Webber, Macon Blair
95 mins.
2016

Thusfar Jeremy Saulnier's career consists of tense slow burn ruminations on the way that violence begets violence that also have a color in their title. He kicked this off with the 2014 film Blue Ruin. First films rarely conduct themselves with such swagger, but Blue Ruin lives up to the mellifluousness of its title. With Green Room, his sophomore effort, Saulnier makes it clear that he is a talent who will continue to demand attention. I am certain there are those who prefer the melancholy of Blue Ruin, but for my money Saulnier has topped himself here.

The story can be boiled down as follows: a punk band accidentally witnesses something they shouldn't witness at a backwoods venue--a venue that is actually a front for a cabal of neo-nazis led by the incomparable Patrick Stewart as Darcy. As a result, they are locked in the green room as both our heroes and their relentlessly pragmatic and levelheaded antagonists try to figure out how best to handle the situation.

The term "thriller" often gets bandied about without a second glance, but Green Room truly thrills. Or at least thralls. From about half an hour in, the film had its tendrils firmly wound around my gut. Not once does it let go until the credits roll. Blue Ruin is the essentialized version of the sentiment: "What is going to happen next??" I cannot remember experiencing quite this brand of continually ratcheted stakes since Breaking Bad went off the air.

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE: A Goodman Is Hard to Find

Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Writers: Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, Damien Chazelle
Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr.
Runtime: 103 mins.
2016

10 Cloverfield Lane is a great movie with a mediocre movie tacked onto the end of it. The script is tight and the performances are excellent. John Goodman in particular is incredible as the ambiguous savior/abductor about whom our thoughts and feelings are in perpetual flux. It's too bad the ending tries too hard to deliver some incongruous spectacle, and it's too bad this tight little thriller got branded with the Cloverfield moniker.

That's my review in brief. From hereon out, expect SPOILERS aplenty, because I'd rather not talk about this secretive little movie in the vaguest of terms.

AMERICAN PSYCHO: Cutthroat Businessman

March is Women's History Month, which Post-Credit Coda will take as an opportunity for weekly reviews of films by female directors. Of all the reviews I've written in 2+ years, only four and a half of the movies have been directed by women. Women are slooooowly starting to receive better on camera roles in Hollywood, yet the lack of female directors is a continuous blight on the industry. Unskilled and inexperienced men are typically given far grander opportunities while proven, talented women are ignored. Despite the adversity, some women still manage to bring their projects to fruition. Let's hope that in the future this becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Mary Harron
Writers: Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner
Cast: Christian Bale, Justin Theroux, Josh Lucas, Bill Sage, Chloe Sevigny, Reese Witherspoon, Samantha Mathis, Matt Ross, Jared Leto, Willem Dafoe
Runtime: 102 mins.
2000

I was surprised to find out, in preparation for my second viewing of the film, that American Psycho was directed by a woman. By all appearances it has the hallmarks of hypermasculine filmmaking: A psycho-thriller about the powerful male id brutalizing (primarily) female bodies, in which the only speaking roles for women go to prostitutes, secretaries, and girlfriends. Yet, the fact that it was helmed by a woman makes sense of why American Psycho succeeds as pitch perfect satire despite all the potential pitfalls of such a gratuitous story. In fact, Harron pulls off the neat trick of avoiding gratuitousness on the story level by seating that gratuitousness firmly at the level of character.

American Psycho features Christian Bale's career defining role as Patrick Bateman, a high-ranking executive at a large corporation that apparently does very little of anything useful, as we only see its employees lunching or snorting coke, never working. Of course, this is part and parcel of the all too real satire. Work isn't about work for Patrick or his colleagues. It's about power, status, and style.

But that isn't enough for Patrick, or perhaps it is too much. He is driven by an uncontrollable bloodlust that pushes him to brutally murder other human beings. He has no feelings of empathy, and he is so alienated that he thrives on destroying humanity. We watch him as he tears through a corporate chic lifestyle in public, and tears through flesh in private. As the bodies pile up and the murders becomes more elaborate, we begin to wonder how this obviously imbalanced high status businessman doesn't get caught.

MAN ON WIRE: The Greatest of Ease

Director: James Marsh
Writer: Philippe Petit (book)
Cast: Philippe Petit, Paul McGill
Runtime: 94 mins.
2008

In preparation for this weekend's release of The Walk, a fictional dramatization of Philippe Petit's dangerous and illegal highwire performance between the two towers of the World Trade Center, I took a look at the 2008 documentary about this very subject. This marks the first time I've reviewed a documentary on Post-Credit Coda. I don't watch very many documentaries, and I tend to shy away from nonfiction in general. The tang of "truthfulness" that documentaries advertise has little appeal for me. I understand the draw of finding out about things that historically happened in the world, but the way I see it all stories are based in truth, whether they historically happened or not. Fiction only resonates with us because on some level it could have happened, so fiction can share the same types of truths about reality that nonfiction can.

That being said, nonfiction affords us an opportunity to share in a cultural legacy, and in my previous paragraph I vastly underplay the importance of memorializing human accomplishments. The tricky thing about documentaries, though, is that we need to adjust our critical and ethical standards. Rather than simply reviewing the quality of the narrative and craft, must we also be critical of the veracity and evenhandedness with which the film treats its material? On the other side of the spectrum, need we be more allowing for plot holes and imperfect arcs since that is often the way real life events play out?

Luckily, Man on Wire throws me a softball for my first nonfiction review; the film is structured like a heist movie. The narrative lens zips back and forth between interviews with Philippe + co., and dramatized reenactments featuring actors playing younger versions. The interviews are compelling, and the dramatizations are so convincing that your first impulse will be to wonder how they got all this old footage. I can see people getting through the entire movie without realizing they're watching actors instead of old videos.

THE VISIT: Va-ca-tion Had to Get Away

Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn
Runtime: 94 mins.
2015

This is truly a momentous day.

M. Night Shyamalan has made a new movie. Already this sounds like a very bad idea. I don't like to dogpile on easy targets, but I feel uniquely qualified to do so in this case. M. Night Shyamalan was my first ever favorite director. In the budding years of my cinephilia, I discovered the value of choosing a "favorite director" at the same time I was discovering Shyamalan's body of work. The Village was the first scary movie I'd ever seen, and the shocking moments of blood red imagery are still imprinted on my memory. From there I worked through The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable, and I loved them all. Shyamalan's deliberate pacing, eye for the unsettling, and twisty plots all had significant appeal to my adolescent brain.

Then came the downfall. I eagerly awaited Lady in the Water, only to be a bit baffled and disappointed by the circlejerking peculiarity of the narrative. After that The Happening was announced. M. Night finally makes an R-rated horror movie! It's about mass suicide! My interest was piqued and I was rooting for it so hard.

We all know how that story goes.

THE GIFT: That Keeps on Giving

Director: Joel Edgerton
Writer: Joel Edgerton
Cast: Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton
Runtime: 108 mins.
2015

The Gift is an incredibly functional movie, accomplishing everything it set out to accomplish by using every tool at its disposal. Edgerton's directorial debut sees him attempting the triple crown--writing, directing, starring--and he nails each of those three roles. The Gift is lean and mean, with no wasted moment. So I can't say it's the movie's fault that it doesn't contain the spark necessary to vault into the pantheon of Instant Classic the way Nightcrawler did for me last year. I'm not the first to make that comparison, but it's a fruitful one; Nightcrawler may be messier than The Gift, but that movie's frequent high points court transcendence. The Gift is just more subdued, which is a choice rather than a flaw.

Perhaps a more generous comparison to establish is that The Gift is a far more subtle version of Fatal Attraction. The movie follows a loving couple who have just moved to a gorgeous hillside home in California. While out and about they encounter one of the husband's childhood acquaintances, Gordo (Joel Edgerton). Simon (Jason Bateman) doesn't recognize him right away, but later informs his wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) that Gordo was something of a weirdo back in school. Thus it's no surprise that Simon rapidly becomes uneasy when Gordo keeps showing up at their house unprompted, butting in on meals and leaving gifts that eventually take a sinister turn.

JAWS: Ocean Craft

Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Actors: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Runtime: 124 mins.
1975

Spielberg was the Trojan Horse through which the studios began to reassert their power.
-Peter Biskind

Scene: a watercraft, floating in the ocean. Despite Brody's warnings, Hooper dons his scuba equipment and dives into the water to investigate an abandoned fishing boat. This vessel without a captain must have been attacked by the great white shark that has been causing trouble in the small island community of Amity. As Hooper sinks beneath the waves and approaches the boat, the audience also has a sinking feeling. Surely this would be the ideal time for the shark to attack? Hooper is totally vulnerable in the water. We mentally berate him for attempting this investigation while the boat's hull comes into view. A large chunk twice as big as a human head is missing. Hooper stares into the blackness for a while, sees nothing... but discovers an enormous tooth lodged at the edge of the hole. He examines this tooth and begins spinning about in the water, looking over both shoulders, making sure nothing unsavory is approaching. We become nervous, but we see nothing. Nothing but a close-up of that black gaping hole, the only place from which the shark surely cannot emerge. We hold the shot for a few moments... and a waterlogged human head bursts into frame, accompanied by a drastic musical sting. Hooper panics and lets the tooth drop into the depths of the ocean.

I've just described one of the most sublime jump scares I have ever encountered. If you haven't seen the movie, I hope That doesn't ruin anything for you, but the truth is even folks who have seen Jaws countless times can't help but jump out of their shoes when they see this part. I describe it so minutely not because I think I can recreate the experience in any meaningful way, but because I wanted to illustrate all of the tiny details that contribute to making this scare work. Everything in this scene is constructed to play our expectations like a fiddle. We know something scary is going to happen in the water. We have a precise series of expectations during the scene, each of which is foiled in turn. We think the shark will show up? It doesn't. We think something will pop out of the hole? It doesn't... yet. The discovery of the tooth puts us off the scent. Hooper's flailing puts us off the scent. The pacing puts us off the scent. Then, finally, much like the cold-blooded titular menace itself, the film pounces on us when we are most vulnerable. This is superb genre filmmaking at its crackling best. This is vintage Spielberg.

JURASSIC PARK III: Cheerful Disrespect

Director: Joe Johnston
Writers: Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
Cast: Sam Neill, William H. Macy, Tea Leoni, Alessandro Nivola, Mark Harelik, Laura Dern
Runtime: 92 mins.
2001

Other reviews in this series:

Jurassic Park
The Lost World
Jurassic World

Having not seen the movie in years, I fully expected Jurassic Park III to be the low point of the franchise. After all, this is the first Jurassic Park film not directed by the legendary Steven Spielberg. How could it possibly stack up?

Imagine my surprise when I had a blast with Jurassic Park III. It's streamlined and willfully stupid--the perfect antidote for The Lost World's cynical gloom. Not only that, but the film fits beautifully with my ongoing theory about the franchise's self-awareness.

NIGHTCRAWLER: It's a Game Where They Crawl Around in the Night Like Worms

In which Jake Gyllenhaal finally makes his X-Men debut.

Director: Dan Gilroy
Writer: Dan Gilroy
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton
Runtime: 117 mins.
2014

The brilliant feat of Nightcrawler is that it manages to be scathingly political without ever emphasizing that that's what it has on its mind. I tend to be suspicious of art that brands itself as "political" because it's often obvious... on the nose... self-important. At any rate, I've found that every work of art is political in its own way, consciously or no, and the most effective art is frequently covert or subtle when it comes to that affiliation.

Nightcrawler is a savage takedown of capitalism and news journalism, without pretending to be anything more or less than a crackling thriller. Maybe movies like these are the most politically important, since the plot and premise are enough to get them greenlit by the studios, and the themes and motifs are enough to make the audience question established moneymaking systems like the studios that approved them. It's a neat trick, one that I noticed recently in The Lego Movie, of all things.

The catalyst for all the action that unfolds is Lewis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal): sociopath, fence-stealer, smooth talker, professional miscreant. The lurid fluorescent setting of Los Angeles does not surround Lewis Bloom--Lewis Bloom penetrates Los Angeles. Nothing happens outside of his desire for it to happen, a desire that is at once monstrous and coolly efficient. The machine of his will encounters resistance, to be sure; the world does not bend to accommodate Lewis, nor does Lewis bend to accommodate the world. He reaches out and forcibly twists the world into the shape of his choosing. He is a god to those around him, and this god in turn prays to the sacred altar of the television.

GONE GIRL: Gone in 149 Minutes

In which Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry are both cast in a thriller for the first and last time ever.

Director: David Fincher
Writer: Gillian Flynn
Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry
Runtime: 149 mins.
2014

David Fincher feeds on twisty structures and mind games. It's his lifeforce. His body of work is one sinister game after another: Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, House of Cards, and the most cheekily named The Game. He thrives on these house-of-mirror thriller structures, generally at the expense of real, convincing, or meaningful characters. Go ahead and try to name one truly memorable character from Fincher's filmography--and before you say Tyler Durden, Frank Underwood, or Mark Zuckerberg, let me add one more caveat: a memorable character who isn't a sociopath. The list runs thin, doesn't it?

Fincher has made a career of taking trashy source materials/ideas and elevating them to the level of Serious Cinema. To be clear, I love trashy stories. They don't have to be mere entertainment, although they can be. They can also be fodder for all sorts of interesting intellectual interpretations. Fincher clearly believes this, and he has always walked the fine line between giving genre fiction the attention of craft that he feels it deserves, and taking it all rather too seriously to the point of losing perspective. His best work tends to be the former, and if it can be said that any of his films have "failed," they belong to the latter category.

Lucky for us, Gone Girl features both a twisty-turny thriller structure, and characters who are designed more to be avatars than believable people--a Fincher special! Double lucky for us, Gone Girl may be a serious affair, but it never mistakes itself for what it's not. This movie is a thriller all the way down.

PRISONERS: Scares and Scars and Cares and Cars

In which we have fun watching twitchy Jake Gyllenhaal twitch.

 

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Writer: Aaron Guzikowski
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Melissa Leo, Maria Bello, David Dastmalchian
Runtime: 153 mins.
2013

Before seeing the movie, there was nothing in particular that enticed me about Prisoners. The promotional posters were dour, the trailers forgettable. The title didn't inspire. Jackman and Gyllenhaal can be strong actors, but have an equal propensity for coasting. Even the premise itself, a dark gritty child abduction thriller, feels been-there-done-that.

It took a very direct and specific recommendation for me to seek the movie out, and I'm glad because most of my preconceptions were askew. As far as thrillers go Prisoners manages to be thrilling for most of its bloated 153 minutes, which is high praise for a genre subject to more cliches than most.

PROXY: A Dead Baby Joke

In which our protagonists turn out to be antagonists and our antagonists turn out to be antagonists.

Director: Zack Parker
Writers: Kevin Donner, Zack Parker
Cast: Alexia Rasmussen, Alexa Havins, Kristina Klebe, Joe Swanberg
Runtime: 120 mins.
2013

Proxy is fundamentally deceptive. It's the kind of movie that makes you hate everybody, then tricks you into hating them for all new reasons that subsequently turn out not to be true. It tries to be high-minded and succeeds in being low-brow. It's a massive crock of M. Night Shyamalan plot twists, if Shyamalan turned out to be a teenager and also a sadist. It's like wandering through a winding maze full of cupboards, and behind each cupboard is a punch in the face. Proxy is deliberately designed to be a face-punching labyrinth.

So why, instead of just being hateful, is it also boring?

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES: The Cone Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree

In which we still don't learn how to spell Synecdoteeodcee, New York.

Director: Derek Cianfrance
Writers: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, and Darius Marder
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Dane DeHaan, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn, Ray Liotta, Emory Cohen
Runtime: 140 mins.
2012

The Place Beyond the Pines strives to be epic with every fiber of its being. In a lot of ways, it fails. Yet it remains a textbook case of how much mileage a movie can gain from a strong start. In fact, I have to admit that I was sold from the very first shot:

We open to blackness, with an undercurrent of indistinct noise. As the title cards pass before us, we hear a new sound: a crisp, repetitive clinking noise that is vaguely reminiscent of the clanking of train cars steadily passing by. When we finally cut to our first image, we see the tattooed torso of Luke (Ryan Gosling), his hands expertly snapping a butterfly knife as he paces back and forth in a small trailer. His body language is restless, the click-clacking of the knife metronomic. He suddenly embeds the knife in a wall and leaves the trailer. The continuous shot... continues... as we follow him, a colorful fairground opening out before us, the previously dulled sounds of carnivalesque carousing now raucous and all-encompassing. The camera trails behind Luke, in a manner familiar to anybody who watched The Wrestler, or Breaking Bad. Luke passes fluorescent rides and games, pink and blue lights illuminating the night. He takes a turn into a darker, more subdued part of the fairground and heads for a tent. When he enters the tent, we are met with the sounds of revving engines, cheering fans, and an incomprehensible announcer. He heads for two other motorcyclists, and joins them on a third cycle of his own. The mounting of the cycle is the first moment we see Luke's face, a brief glimpse before he dons his helmet. Then the cyclists enter the steel cage, a metal sphere barely big enough to accommodate the three of them. The crowd erupts as the cyclists each begin circumnavigating the inside of the sphere, weaving in and out of each other's paths in daredevil fashion. The first shot ends.

Everything that is good and right about The Place Beyond the Pines is encompassed in that first shot, from the cycle of violence as represented by the click-clacking butterfly knife, to the visual coupling of Luke's identity with his motorcycle, to the long trailer-to-tent trudge that evokes an inevitable symbolic march towards danger and destruction. It's all there, and it's beautiful.

The movie never stops being beautiful, but it never recaptures the precision and economy of storytelling that the first shot offers.