Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007): written by Kelly Masterson; directed by Sidney Lumet; starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (Andy Hanson), Ethan Hawke (Hank Hanson), Marisa Tomei (Gina Hanson), Albert Finney (Charles Hanson), Rosemary Harris (Nanette Hanson), Aleksa Palladino (Chris), Michael Shannon (Dex), Amy Ryan (Martha), and Brian F. O'Byrne (Bobby): 

The great humanist director Sidney Lumet's final film is an acting showcase for everyone in it, as Lumet's films generally were. It feels like a great, lost Jim Thompson novel re-earthed -- a twisted tale of crime, incompetence, chance, and family. Philip Seymour Hoffman has a scene in a car that's an all-time great freak-out. 

Revealing much of the plot actually spoils the plot really quickly. Suffice to say, Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play desperate brothers, Marisa Tomei spends an ultimately unsettling amount of time topless, and Michael Shannon does an early version of his Unsettling Michael Shannon Character. 

Filmed in and around NYC, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is the last addition to Lumet's catalogue of urban, paranoid (melo) drama. The weirdest trivia about this movie is that it reunited Lumet and Albert Finney after more than 30 years. Lumet directed Finney as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in the 1970's all-star film version of Murder on the Orient Express. The two movies -- and two Finney performances -- couldn't be much more different while still sharing a 'detective' arc for Finney's character in both movies. Highly recommended.

The American Stain

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Men Under Pressure

Last Action Hero: written by Shane Black, David Arnott, Zak Penn, and Adam Leff; directed by John McTiernan; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (Jack Slater/ Arnold Schwarzenegger), Austin O'Brien (Danny Madigan), F. Murray Abraham (John Practice), Art Carney (Favourite Second Cousin Frank), Charles Dance (Benedict), Tom Noonan (Ripper/ Tom Noonan), Robert Prosky (Nick the Projectionist), Anthony Quinn (Tony Vivaldi), Mercedes Ruehl (Irene Madigan), Ian McKellan (Death), and Bridgette Wilson (Whitney Slater/Meredith Caprice) (1993): 

Much-maligned action-satire when it came out, hilarious Hollywood satire now (and then). Last Action Hero's main problem was that it bit the hand that fed it. If nothing else, it seems to show that action-movie fans are too sensitive to fully support a movie that savages action movies and their fans, albeit with a certain amount of affection. 

Last Action Hero may be uneven and even ragged at times (some of that seems to come from rewrites and reshoots ordered by a nervous studio), but it's really funny when it's on. And its Mad-magazine approach to crowded humour in foreground and background rewards careful viewing and careful listening. Some of the physical gags are great slapstick or maybe techno-slapstick, as so many of them involve the destruction of cars in hilarious ways, sometimes as throwaway background gags.

The cast is thick with cameos, but much of the heavy lifting is done by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Dance as the villain, and Austin O'Brien as the kid who loves action movies. They're all great, though O'Brien takes awhile to grow on one. That some of the movie's more developed gags involve Hamlet (a parody that seems to be poking Mel Gibson's 'action-Hamlet' of a couple years earlier) and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal may be one indicator of why it bombed. The world inside the movie universe ends up being as complicated and metafictional as Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and almost as fun at times. Whiskers, where the Hell were you? Recommended.

A Most Wanted Man: adapted from the John LeCarre novel by Andrew Bovell and Stephen Cornwell; directed by Anton Corbijn; starring Grigoriy Dobrygin (Issa Karpov), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Gunther Bachmann), Rachel McAdams (Annabel Richter), Willem Dafoe (Tommy Brue), and Robin Wright (Martha Sullivan) (2014): Mournful spy procedural follows a covert German anti-terrorist agency led by Philip Seymour Hoffman in his second-last screen role. 

Hoffman's small group is after a seemingly charitable Muslim leader in present-day Hamburg, Germany who may have as-yet-unproved ties to Al Qaeda. The movie looks great -- worn and lived in -- and the acting is all high-end, though Rachel McAdams struggles a bit with her on-again, off-again German accent. As this is based on a John LeCarre novel, you can expect betrayal and ruthless competition among the various intelligence organizations involved. Hoffman is superb as a man who's seen too much but nonetheless goes on because he genuinely wants to protect people. But whether or not they need to be protected from terrorists or from the anti-terrorist governmental agencies or from both -- well, there's the problem. Recommended.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles: written by H.G. Wells and Lajos Biro; directed by Lothar Mendes and Alexander Korda; starring Roland Young (Fotheringay), Ralph Richardson (Colonel Winstanley), Ernest Thesiger (Maydig), Joan Gardner (Ada), Sophie Stewart (Maggie), and George Zucco (The Butler) (1937): Whimsical, comedic fantasy turns into a socialist polemic at the end. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

An argument about humanity's potential among three gods (or perhaps angels) leads one of them (The Giver of Power, who likes humanity) to give an English store clerk the power to do pretty much anything except control human minds. What follows is a deceptively light-hearted story of escalating stakes, as the clerk initially uses his powers for minor tricks before seeking out others for advice on what do -- and then finally deciding to make his own decisions. I suppose it's the thinking person's Bruce Almighty. 

H.G. Wells adapts his own short story. The performances are all fine, especially those of Roland Young as newly super-powered Fotheringay and Ralph Richardson in heavy make-up as a blustery, upper-class twit of a Colonel. Fotheringay's epiphanic speech toward the end anticipates the concluding speech of Chaplin in The Great Dictator, among others. The visual effects are extremely well done for the time, especially a great bit involving the miraculous destruction of a mansion and subsequent erection of a much larger palace. Recommended.

Beware, Caesar, March 15th!

The Ides of March: adapted by George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon from Willimon's play Farragut North; directed by George Clooney; starring Ryan Gosling (Stephen Meyers), George Clooney (Governor Mike Morris), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Paul Zara), Paul Giamatti (Tom Duffy), Evan Rachel Wood (Molly Stearns), Marisa Tomei (Ida Horowicz), and Jeffrey Wright (Senator Thompson) (2011): I figure George Clooney can just pick up a telephone, call five randomly chosen actors, and sign them to whatever project he's working on by the end of the day. Certainly The Ides of March has an All-Star cast. They've all got something to work with, too, in this smart political thriller.

To a Canadian born and raised in a parliamentary democracy, the Byzantine U.S. federal system will always possess a certain alien charm -- and, frankly, a simmering alien horror. The Ides of March lays out the joys and horrors of this overly moneyed, often paradoxical system of democracy without ever seeming preachy or too laden with politicobabble.

Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, 30-year-old second-in-command of Governor Mike Morris's campaign to win the Democratic primaries. We follow the campaign during a tumultuous week in Ohio, as deals and double-deals and betrayals and potentially career-ending events swirl in and around the campaign. The dialogue is mostly sharp, the performances lived-in and solid. No one here plays a dummy. And the actors are all up to playing smart.

Gosling shines in playing someone who's both savvy and idealistic. Honouring the audience's intelligence, the final scene leaves it to the viewer to decide how much that idealism has been shattered by the events of the film. It's a quiet, subtle, Oscar-quality performance.

Indeed, there isn't a weak performance in the movie. Clooney is utterly believeable as a charismatic candidate promising hope and change; Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti make for crafty and rumpled long-time backroom opponents; even Evan Rachel Wood nails her role as a pretty, connected intern who gets caught up in the undertow of dangerous political depths. Highly recommended.

Jack Goes Boating

Jack Goes Boating, written by Robert Glaudini, based on the play of the same name by Glaudini, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (Jack), Amy Ryan (Connie), John Ortiz (Clyde) and Daphne Rubin-Vega (Lucy) (2010): You put Philip Seymour Hoffman's performances in, say, this film, Capote, Mission Impossible III, and The Big Lebowski side-by-side-by-side-by-side, and you get one hell of an actor. He's won an Oscar for his showy role in Capote, but it would be nice if he (or anyone else, for that matter) could win a Best Actor Oscar playing something more refined and more 'real.'

Yes, I know Truman Capote was real -- but the Academy now almost invariably rewards actors for imitating other people, not for acting per se. Ernest Borgnine would never win an Oscar for Marty now. He'd be beaten by either someone playing Abraham Lincoln, or someone screaming and flailing around the screen for 150 minutes. So it goes!

Hoffman plays Jack, a lonely limosuine driver whose best friends, the married Clyde and Lucy, set him up on a blind date with the shy Connie from Lucy's workplace. We've seen versions of this film a number of times before (including in Marty), so pretty much everything fresh and new comes from the odd little plot twists and turns of character (Jack really loves reggae, for instance, and not in that showy Will-Smith-in-I-Am-Legend sorta way), and even moreso from acting.

Hoffman, directing himself, appears to have no ego -- Jack is dumpy and blotchy; the rest of the cast looks about equally real. Stuff happens, though not much (the climax involves Jack cooking a dinner for Connie; I'm sure some sort of car chase at this point might have goosed the box office). Hoffman and the rest of his cast invest their characters with flawed and idiosyncratic humanity. This certainly isn't a great movie, but it is a good one. Recommended.