Godzilla II: King Of The Monsters (2019)

The Low-Down: With Marvel raking in the cash and plaudits after creating the world’s most epic cinematic universe, every studio that can thread movies together – however tenuously – is hopping on the bandwagon. And so we have Godzilla II: King Of The Monsters: the third installment in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse, following Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island (2017). It’s easily the most ambitious film yet, uniting several classic critters straight out of Godzilla lore and finding pretty much any excuse to have them fight one another. The final result is both bold and bonkers – good and bad, often in the very same moment.

The Story: Monsters break stuff, including people. It’s a fact of life that the broken Russell family must deal with after Godzilla’s epic battle leaves downtown San Francisco in ruins. Grieving and newly sober, Mark (Kyle Chandler) stalks wolf packs in another part of the world. Emma (Vera Farmiga), his ex-wife, continues to work on the Orca, a machine they created together that can emit soundwaves capable of calming or infuriating Godzilla-scale monsters. Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), their precocious daughter, is caught in between – especially when Emma’s decision to use the Orca sets off a chain of monstrous events that could lead to the end of the world as we know it.

The Good: The concept at the heart of Godzilla II, quite frankly, is off-the-wall wacky – so bold and audacious and weird that you have to give director/co-screenwriter Michael Dougherty some credit for effort, even if his execution of it is somewhat lacklustre. This is no mere story of monsters raining mayhem down upon mankind. Instead, the film moves its mythology quite firmly into the realm of faith; Godzilla, the film suggests, is as much god as monster. It’s actually quite remarkable to see a mainstream blockbuster movie embrace – rather than shy away from – religious iconography, folding in theologies and environmental philosophies from Greek myth to Thanos. As such, Godzilla and his arch-nemesis, King Ghidorah (a three-headed Hydra-esque dragon beast), aren’t just having their version of a bar-room brawl – their earth-shaking clash is a battle for the survival of humanity.

The Not-So-Good: It’s a shame that the film as a whole can’t keep up with its high-concept ideas. The writing ranges from inspired to insipid, with character motivations dancing ridiculously back and forth – dictated mostly by the rather demented plot. As a director, Dougherty exhibited some skill with subversive comedy in cult horror flick Krampus, but very little of that is evident here. It’s not just about sacrificing soul for scale – Dougherty occasionally struggles with telling such a massive story in visual terms. Some of the film’s action sequences are so choppy as to be downright confusing. It doesn’t help that Dougherty’s preferred aesthetic tends towards the grey and grim, which makes it even harder to figure out just what is going on while monsters are duking it out in frustratingly murky lighting.

The Monster Mash: The first Godzilla film in the franchise suffered for shoving its titular monster into the background, having him play second fiddle to human characters who weren’t all that well-written to begin with. Godzilla II tries to rectify that, somewhat, by flinging so many monsters at the screen that you’d be almost glad to get back to the human drama after a while. Apart from Godzilla and Ghidorah, fans will be glad to see old-school Toho favourites like Mothra and Rodan in action too. (If they could actually see them, that is. Seriously – the monsters are beautifully rendered, but the bruise-toned lighting does them no favours.)

God(zilla)-Level Casting: If Dougherty learned one thing from his predecessor, Gareth Edwards, it’s the importance of casting a bunch of top-notch character actors in an otherwise barmy creature feature. Veteran performers like Oscar nominee Farmiga, West Wing alumnus Whitford and Charles Dance (that’s Tywin Lannister to you) reel off awkward exposition and pseudo-scientific claptrap (“bio-acoustics”, “the Oxygen Destroyer”) like it’s actual real human dialogue. It’s quite remarkable to see Friday Night Lights’ Coach Eric Taylor in action anti-hero mode, but Chandler – just as Bryan Cranston did in the 2014 film – brings an everyman weight to a character whose narrative arc is muddled, to say the least. The MVP here, though, is Brown. She brings to Madison the same soulful blend of toughness and tenderness that made her such a breakout star in Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Recommended? It depends. Godzilla II is a hot mess… but it’s a fascinating hot mess, and surprisingly fun to watch and even think about.

First Man (2018)

There’s no denying that Damien Chazelle is one of the most interesting directors working today. His two most recent credits, which he wrote and directed, were breakout hits. You could practically sense Chazelle himself living and breathing in every frame of Whiplash and La La Land – two films that were, on the surface, quite different, but which married complex character work with intense musicality to quite remarkable effect. With First Man, he turns his hand to the prestige biopic: a rich historical drama inspired by the life and achievements of legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong. The final result is a strange beast: it mostly works well when shooting (quite literally) for the moon, but falls short at getting to the heart of its subject.

We first meet Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) in 1962. Already a renowned test pilot, he and his wife, Janet (Claire Foy) have created a picture-perfect nuclear family, with one son, Eric, and one daughter, Karen. But tragedy strikes: he’s forced to watch, helpless, as his beloved little girl wastes away from an inoperable brain tumour. Although her premature death shakes Armstrong to the core, you would never know it: he returns to work almost immediately, and signs up for America’s space programme. Instead of dealing with the oceans of grief within him, he channels his intense stoicism and iron discipline into his new mission: taking leave of the surface of the Earth.

On this count, the film is a marvel – both in technical terms, and as a resurrection of a relatively distant past. The 1969 moon landing has passed into legend and lore: it’s a fact we learn from history books, its accompanying dangers and follies fading with the passage of time. First Man brings all of that context back to vivid, shuddering, blood-and-guts life, reminding us that we somehow catapulted a man to the moon without any of the computing technology that most of us carry around in our pockets nowadays.

This point is driven home as Armstrong and his compatriots – including Ed White (Jason Clarke) and Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) – take turns being shot into space. Through close-ups tighter than Tom Hooper’s and deliberately shaky camera-work, Chazelle invites us to join these men inside their spacecrafts: glorified tin buckets, held together by a dream and a prayer, that might as easily serve as their coffins as their shuttle to the stars. The human cost of the entire space-faring effort weighs heavily on the film and its title character, forcing Armstrong to grapple with loss every time a mission fails – occasionally, before it even begins.

All the emotional beats that land (and there are quite a few that don’t) come courtesy of Chazelle’s first-rate cast. Gosling has made a career out of playing grimly determined men, whose hearts are beating wildly beneath veneers of impenetrable impassivity. He’s very good as Armstrong, though he’s hamstrung by the very role he’s playing. Foy makes the most of a rather underwritten part, unearthing genuine rage and heartbreak as Janet’s life revolves around the constant possibility of her husband’s death.

Less successful are First Man’s attempts to give us a sense of who Neil Armstrong was. It admirably avoids transforming him into a cliché or a lie: this is no charmingly airbrushed portrait of a genial aw-shucks American hero.

What the film does do, unfortunately, is swing almost too far towards the opposite extreme. At every turn, Armstrong refuses human connection: rebuffing his wife, his friends, his living children, while stewing in his own angst. Josh Singer, who consulted with Armstrong’s first wife and sons in writing the screenplay, stands by the version of the man we meet in the film: so pathologically reticent that he would rather risk his life travelling to the moon than spend one evening talking honestly with his family.

But therein lies the problem. Sure, Armstrong could have been hard and cold and emotionally inaccessible (at least at the time) to those closest to him. It still takes a conscious narrative decision, however, to make one particular interpretation of the man’s inner turmoil the emotional pivot of the entire film. When this Armstrong stares at the moon (which he does a lot), the film practically yells at us that he longs to escape there. Making history is incidental; it’s all about processing his grief.

It’s also why the film’s climax – a scene that should be filled with awe and wonder at the superhuman feat achieved by distinctly unsuper humans – undercuts itself. We barely get to experience the joy that should accompany this remarkable achievement, because Armstrong’s face remains obscured by a reflective visor as he takes his first steps on the moon. We only get to see his face at a moment so nakedly sentimental that it will have you rushing online afterwards to find out how much of it is fact and how much fiction. (Spoiler alert: it’s fiction, which Singer will argue is grounded in fact. But it’s still fiction.)

In effect, First Man ends up trapping itself by its own ambition. It wants desperately to avoid painting Armstrong as a noble, flaw-free hero – but focuses so much on his personal misery that his accomplishments are devalued. The historic moon landing becomes part of the weight of one man’s sorrow, bleeding it of the enormous scientific and cultural significance that Armstrong himself would have fiercely defended. If Armstrong wasn’t a real person, it might have worked. But because he was, First Man’s awkward blend of documentary and melodrama – as relentless as it is reductive – feels tone-deaf. It aims for the stars… but winds up crashing to the ground.

Basically: Shoots for the moon, and misses the heart.

Carol (2015)

These days, it’s hard to be surprised by a love story in a film. We’ve seen endless permutations of romantic relationships – running the gamut from doomed to fated, blissful to tragic, underscored by varying degrees of love, lust and chemistry. There shouldn’t even be much of a surprise to the love story that forms the heart and soul of Carol – anyone who walks into the cinema will know that this is The Movie In Which Cate Blanchett And Rooney Mara Play Lesbians. And yet, Todd Haynes’ masterful, intoxicating film unfolds in a series of small, subtle surprises, culminating in one of the most profoundly affecting romances ever committed to film.

The film opens in New York, in the early 1950s. Christmas is right around the corner, and Therese (Mara) is working as a shopgirl in the toy section of a department store. She meets and serves dozens of people, but only one catches her eye: Carol (Blanchett), a poised, polished and seemingly perfect example of the many wives and mothers who frequent the store. On Therese’s recommendation, Carol buys a model train set for her daughter Rindy: an unusual Christmas present for a little girl that swiftly draws a connection between the two women.

Over the next hour, Carol shades colour and complexity into the world in which Carol and Therese live. When they find each other again through a pair of gloves misplaced by accident (or, perhaps, design), the two women share lunch, and a tune played on a piano. Carol invites Therese to her family home and, eventually, on a road trip that changes everything. Therese confesses her love of photography, and begins to ask awkward questions of Richard (Jake Lacy), her devoted, if somewhat callous, boyfriend. Through it all, Carol’s marriage to Harge (Kyle Chandler) crumbles apart, despite the fierce love they share for their daughter.

For much of its running time, Haynes’ film – an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s groundbreaking second novel, The Price Of Salt – unfolds at a deliberately unhurried pace that might alienate some, and bore others. Dramatic outbursts are kept to a bare minimum, chiefly coming from a raging Harge as he tries ever more desperately to cajole (or bully) Carol into remaining by his side. The growing tenderness between Carol and Therese deepens, not through flowery confessions of undying love, but in the exchanging of tentative glimpses, glances and smiles.

And yet, the heartbreaking magic woven throughout Carol comes from precisely these understated, measured moments. The aching, all-consuming affection between Carol and Therese blossoms in the film’s pockets of silence, as they study each other in a mirror, or share a conspiratorial smile over breakfast. Threats of death and danger surface, but in purely emotional terms, resonating all the more powerfully for never being literal. Indeed, it’s only when the film slips into its devastating final act – which simultaneously manages to warm hearts and shatter souls – that one begins to realise just how bewitching a spell Carol has cast in the silences and in-betweens.

To top it all off, there is so much at work in Phyllis Nagy’s wonderfully spare script that Carol practically begs to be excavated, pored over and studied at length. The love story at its heart works because Carol is a film about two women who are making their way towards each other through a world that often refuses to understand, accept or acknowledge them: not just as potential lovers, but also as people.

While never flaunting its excellent feminist and queer credentials, the film surprises by shining a spotlight so firmly on its women and their relationships, including a powerful supporting turn by Sarah Paulson as Abby, Carol’s best friend and erstwhile paramour. The stories of these women are the backbone, the meat, the heart, the soul and the entire central nervous system of Carol. As characters, they alternate between strong and weak, tough and tender, as they make choices and sacrifices – between heart and home, family and self – that women are still making today.

It seems profoundly unnecessary to say that Carol’s trump card is Blanchett. It should be self-evident, a given – after all, for as long as she has made movies, she has unquestionably been the best thing about any film she’s in. And yet, she is completely transcendent here. In Blanchett’s hands, Carol manages to be unearthly – an exalted goddess on a pedestal – and utterly, completely human at the same time. In a wonderfully layered final scene with Harge, Carol’s controlled composure cracks apart, revealing the punishing depth of the pain she must undergo in order to be true to herself. Blanchett conveys it all with heartbreak to spare, radiating love, joy, misery or despair with barely perceptible changes in expression.

Mara, meanwhile, gives her finest performance to date, as a young woman teetering on the edge of becoming who she perhaps never realised she always wanted to be. Her Therese lingers quietly at the edges of her own life, not so much pushing limits as slipping past them to find her own way. It’s hard to shake the feeling, though, that Mara remains outclassed by her co-star. Unlike Carol, Therese never completely coalesces as a character in her own right. To be fair to Mara, that’s partly due to one of the script’s few flaws. In a film that is otherwise so subtle and considered, we are too often told rather than shown that Carol finds Therese irresistible. (There is no such problem in believing that anyone could fall head over heels for Carol.)

Nevertheless, the chemistry between Blanchett and Mara burns, slowly but brightly. The electricity between them throws off more sparks as the film goes on – to the point that audiences will find their hearts stuttering and stopping at the tiniest of moments: when Carol presses her hand lightly on Therese’s shoulder, or when their eyes meet, finally, across a crowded room.

In all of these elements, and in ways big and small, Carol constantly surprises. It could have been ripely melodramatic (in the style of Far From Heaven, Haynes’ deliberately arch tribute to the films of Douglas Sirk); instead, it lingers in a key of melancholy realism. In another universe, Carol might have been more manipulative, Harge more villainous, Therese more coquettish, the love story less compelling and more titillating. The film’s themes could have overwhelmed its central romance. And yet, in every gorgeous frame (composed with impeccable grace by cinematographer Edward Lachman), Carol sings of its love story: one that is as sweet as it is bitter, as simple as it is complex, and as real as it is magical.

Basically: A masterpiece that’s tough, tender and thoughtful, anchored by a love story for the ages.

 

The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)

It comes as no surprise, of course, that Martin Scorsese has found a new muse. After his career-defining work with Robert De Niro over three decades, Scorsese has turned his camera on Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he’s now made five movies in the space of about ten years. That’s a pretty impressive number, and a statistically unlikely good set of films to boot. The Wolf Of Wall Street is easily the finest of the lot: a high-wire, high-octane corporate comedy that’s as entertaining as it is excoriating – a delicious blast of hellfire distilled into the year’s most outrageous biopic.

Based on a true story, Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) is a clean-cut kid who starts working in one of Wall Street’s top stockbroking firms in 1987. His boss Mark (Matthew McConaughey) is a vision of Jordan’s future: a man corrupted inside and out, marching to his own odd tribal chant, hopelessly hooked on drugs, alcohol, women and money. When Black Monday forces Jordan to take a job selling penny stocks to the gullible lower class, he picks up a few more tricks of the trade. He resolves to set up his own company that will earn him and his buddies untold sums of money. Soon, he is the talk of the financial sector, and his profligate ways earn him the scrutiny of the federal authorities.

Many have cried foul over the moral bankruptcy that purportedly riddles Scorsese’s film. Detractors have argued that The Wolf Of Wall Street seems to be celebrating Jordan’s way of life and the numerous and varied excesses in which he indulges and soon comes to take for granted. Certainly, having it all strung together – constant drug-taking, casual sex, unchecked profanity, dwarf-flinging competitions – can indeed be too much for viewers of a more sensitive or conservative disposition.

But there is no glorification of Jordan’s lifestyle in The Wolf Of Wall Street. It’s placed front and centre, and then mined for a constant stream of bitter, brilliant black comedy. We are not meant to sympathise with Jordan, though we can certainly be charmed by him as many of the people he encounters invariably are. Even while we are kept endlessly amused by his increasingly desperate attempts to stay rich and privileged, there is never a point when we’re asked to emulate or respect this man. In fact, it becomes clearer as the film goes on that we’re not laughing with him – we’re laughing at him, as he sinks into a murky swamp almost entirely of his own making.

It’s exhilarating to watch Scorsese weave a rich and ever thicker tapestry of depravity around Jordan. Despite clocking in at a hefty three hours, the film feels like it’s sprinting throughout: running at full-tilt in the same way that Jordan is living – and no doubt shortening – his life. Pouring copious amounts of drugs and drink into his body, he brings his friend Donnie (Jonah Hill; hilarious) with him, moving from the sticks to the big time. He trades in his first wife, practical brunette Teresa (Cristin Milioti; biting) for blonde bombshell Naomi (Margot Robbie; more than meets the eye). When things start to go south, he charms Naomi’s Aunt Emma (Joanna Lumley; saucy) into fronting a bank account for him in Switzerland.

Along the way, Scorsese has crafted his funniest picture in years. Comedy isn’t a genre that one typically associates with him: he brings to mind brooding gangster epics, boiling with crime, passion and cold hard cash. Well, those three elements are present and accounted for in The Wolf Of Wall Street too, but it’s truly a riotous experience. There are many memorable scenes: from Jordan urgently demanding to sail his fancy yacht through the worst sea squall ever, through to a night when Donnie and Jordan dope themselves up more than even they would consciously dare to.

At the heart of this crazy, crime-ridden maelstrom sits DiCaprio, who delivers what is unquestionably the finest performance of his career. He’s always been reliably good but, as Jordan Belfort, he’s transcendent. Fierce, reckless, dark, bright, charming, foolish, clever, sly, mad, sane, desperate, confident – he slips effortlessly across this entire range of emotions and moods, expertly crafting a character who’s the tragicomic counterpart to the leading man he played so well in The Great Gatsby. It’s because DiCaprio somehow manages to make this selfish monster recognisably human that detractors have fretted so at the film’s alleged glorification of its lead character. However, just because we can spot glimpses of humanity beneath Jordan’s loopy antics doesn’t mean we are meant to condone them.

At the same time, DiCaprio manages to play it all just big enough for the film’s physical comedy to be some of the most committed and self-assured you’ll see this year. The moment when he tries to get into his car while super-duper-mega-high is the comic highlight of the entire film: an extended joke that will bring down the house even as it subtly, skilfully blends slapstick and social commentary.

Could The Wolf Of Wall Street have made the same points with an hour shaved off its running time? Sure. Would it have been as fun? Nope. So, if you can steel yourself for more abject depravity than you have ever seen onscreen (it packs 569 ‘fuck’s into 179 minutes), you’ll be rewarded with a brilliant, blistering character study: one that applies a scalpel-sharp wit and huge helpings of irony to its main character and the world in which he lives.

Beyond that, Scorsese’s tale is a cautionary one. Comedies often make us laugh by allowing us to forget who we are. The Wolf Of Wall Street reminds us of the depths to which humanity can sink: it stares the American Dream right in the face, and suggests that pursuing it can lead straight down a rabbit hole lined with heroin, hookers and hubris. For a Hollywood film, that’s bold. For a comedy – that’s unprecedented.

Basically: A brilliant character study that doubles as razor-sharp social commentary. Unmissable.

Argo (2012)

I’m sure there’ll come a day in the near future when it will no longer be a surprise that Ben Affleck – star of schlocky, pretty terrible movies like Gigli, Daredevil and Pearl Harbour – is actually a pretty great, pretty smart director. Sure, he’s already got The Town and Gone Baby Gone under his belt, both of which were hailed as intelligent, well-crafted if not necessarily revolutionary dramas… but it’s still early enough days to think that those movies might have been flukes. He happened upon a great script twice. Sure, okay. Thing is, it’s likely to keep getting more difficult to think of Affleck in his days as a pretty face for hire – he’s again marking himself out as a directorial talent to watch for with his newest film behind (and in front of) the camera: Argo, a film that quite literally mixes real life and fiction, history and Hollywood, into a smart, sophisticated cocktail that’s probably going to win a bunch of laurels come awards season.

The setting: post-revolution Iran, 1979. Anti-American fervour is boiling on the streets, and the Iranians are demanding the return of their erstwhile leader so they can put him on trial. They take the American embassy hostage – missing only six employees who have escaped to the relative safety of the Canadian ambassador’s house. But, as the days pass, it becomes clear that it’s not tenable to leave them there, and plans at the highest levels of government are being drawn up to extract them safely. Affleck plays Tony Mendez, an expert extractor in the CIA who comes up with the least bad of a bunch of really bad ideas: he’s going to tap the expertise of the Hollywood industry to set himself up as a fake movie producer of a frankly ludicrous fantasy/sci-fi film called Argo. Armed with fake movie script and counterfeit identities, he heads into Iran to pretend to scout locations for the film… with the intention of smuggling the six embassy employees back to America with him.

Only in Hollywood, you might laugh and say, rolling your eyes at the kind of barmy stuff the Hollywood dream factory has cooked up this time to bilk audiences out of their hard-earned cash. Not so: it’s all very meta, you see, because this is based on a true story. Just over thirty years ago now, Hollywood did indeed help Mr Mendez to come up with a fake movie so he could get into Iran on a wing and a prayer… and Hollywood is now making a movie about, well, said fake movie. Sometimes it’s difficult not to be cynical about  the movie-making industry: are we going to wind up with a one-sided, sensationalistic version of events, created to convince Americans of their inherent superiority even when they’re not on their native soil?

Fortunately, Affleck is more intelligent and competent than that as a director. Little-known fact: he has a degree in Middle Eastern Affairs from the University of Vermont – which means that he has an understanding of the issues and politics of the time that, well, a lot of us probably don’t. I like to think that’s why he sets the scene for Argo in the admirably frank way he does. There is no whitewashing of American culpability in the rise of the now-deposed Iranian Shah. Some American bureaucrats are depicted as they no doubt really were – blithely clueless about the region in which they’re planning to operate, thoroughly unfamiliar with the ground realities as they devise terrible plans that would be tantamount to dooming the six embassy employees to ignoble deaths in the wintry wastelands of Iran.

Affleck begins as he means to carry on: Argo is literate and witty, with a certain gallows humour that perfectly complements the sort of life-and-death situations Mendez is dealing with when he starts putting the puzzle pieces in place to execute his scheme. That was probably the most enjoyable part of the film for me: watching Mendez approach Hollywood make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman) and legendary producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), set up the cover story in a credible way with a bizarre publicity launch… and then following him across oceans and continents to where play-acting must needs clash with reality.

In fact, the entire protracted, meticulous set-up is really just a delight to watch – John and Lester good-naturedly bantering with and teasing Mendez, Mendez bumping heads with the understandably grouchy and paranoid embassy employees, the preparations that he makes his six companions-to-be undergo in order to be ready for questioning when they make it to the airport. It’s here that the strength of Argo‘s cast – ’70s mullets and all – really shines through. It’s tough not to reduce the six to quick, easy stereotypes for easy translation to the silver screen, and it’s to the actors’ credit that they make their characters’ fear and worry palpable and distinct. There’s able support too from the suits waiting back in Washington for Mendez to make it through alive, particularly from Bryan Cranston as Mendez’s boss Jack O’Donnell.

Unfortunately, this level of quality and class doesn’t carry all the way through to the film’s end. There’s something more than a little bit wrong and contrived about how everything comes to a head – clearly Affleck had to crank up the tension for dramatic purposes, but it really lets the rest of the film down when it suddenly switches to cheap thriller mode. Everything – and I mean everything (and everyone!) in the film – suddenly funnels down into that One Supremely Dramatic Moment, where it’s literally do-or-die… and sure, it’s gripping stuff, but it’s also… well, not especially realistic or plausible anymore. In fact, it feels almost silly how perfectly everything comes together at that point. This is where the unavoidable Hollywood gloss and glamour is laid on far too thickly, and Argo suffers greatly for it. It felt so off to me that I googled the actual denouement of Mendez’s gambit, just to see how far off the film was, and wound up even more disappointed by just how many creative liberties were really taken by Affleck and his screenwriter Chris Terrio. Suffice it to say that Hollywood took a real story and ran with it – and the ending regrettably (and perhaps predictably) smacks a whole lot more of fiction than fact.

That being said, Argo nevertheless remains a great calling card for Affleck the director – well, aside from the fact that he wasn’t more judicious with fixing the script’s problematic ending. Oh, and the fact that he miscast himself in the movie too. He performs perfectly well within the confines of the fiction of his film, but when he’s juxtaposed against his real-life counterpart, it’s clear that there’s no amount of make-up or magic that will make Affleck look Hispanic. Really, though, he does deliver a really clever, mostly good movie that has quite a bit more to say about real life and politics than the standard thriller. It’s a nice tip of the hat to the men in black as well: more often than not, they’re portrayed as sinister and corrupted hellhounds of the government. In reality, they’re office schlubs who save the day while kitted out in their suits… by buying plane tickets and making fake movies.

Basically: Another solid movie from Affleck that suggests he’s here to stay as a director. Grown-up, intelligent fun, though the ending is a genuine disappointment.