Movie Review: The Lost City Of Z (2016)

Genre: Biographical Drama  

Director: James Gray  

Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson  

Running Time: 141 minutes  

Synopsis: In Britain of the early 1900s, the Royal Geographic Society assigns Army Major Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) to map the disputed border between Brazil and Bolivia. He leaves his pregnant wife Nina (Sienna Miller) behind, and is joined on his adventure by Corporal Costin (Robert Pattinson). The expedition is arduous, but exposes Fawcett to the potential for hidden tribal civilizations in the jungle. Intent on finding a mythical city covered with gold, over the years Fawcett embarks on several more dangerous expeditions into the Amazon region, straining his family relationships.

What Works Well: The cinematography and settings are often visually impressive, and some moments of tension are found in the encounters with various tribes. Fawcett's troubled heritage (his father's shortcomings hampered his career) contain the promise of an interesting character, and hiding somewhere in the jungle is the unexpanded theme of men choosing wild adventures to justify a sense of self, oblivious to family damage. 

What Does Not Work As Well: This is a ponderous, meandering, Quixotic, over-long, and ultimately dubious biography that never overcomes a sense of self-inflated importance. Director and writer James Gray finds little drama in repetitive scenes of Amazonian trudging, and errs on the side of excessive padding and distractions, including interludes of anachronistic feminism, a detour to the World War One trenches, a deer hunt, and uninspired family tension. Fawcett starts as a stoic Englishman attached to career responsibility, and 141 minutes later, ends the exact same way.

Key Quote:

Fawcett: If we may find a city, where one was considered impossible to exist, it may well write a whole new chapter in human history.

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Movie Review: Factory Girl (2006)

Genre: Biographical Drama  

Director: George Hickenlooper  

Starring: Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Hayden Christensen  

Running Time: 99 minutes  

Synopsis: Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) comes from a wealthy but troubled family, and in the mid-1960s she relocates from the Boston area to New York. Edie befriends underground artist Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce), who finds her alluring and features her in several of his short independent movies. She achieves celebrity status as a fashion icon despite living beyond her means and developing a drug addiction. An affair with a folk singer (based on Bob Dylan, played by Hayden Christensen) threatens her bond with Warhol.

What Works Well: Edie Sedgwick's fleeting flirtation with stardom as a generational "it" girl is captured in a fever dream of gonzo art, parties, fashion, drugs, and flashing lightbulbs. Captain Mauzner's brisk script recreates 1960s New York as fertile cultural territory for a new wave of icons, but still finds space to contextualize Edie's background and the demons driving her into a destructive lifestyle. In a masterful performance, Sienna Miller finds a seam of vulnerability folding into fame and bedazzlement, and is well supported by Guy Pearce and Hayden Christensen as two legends parlaying notoriety into power.

What Does Not Work As Well: With Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan supplying the jet fuel for Edie's flight to the sun, her story can only exist in their shadow.

 

Conclusion: Dream factories are also full of danger.

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Movie Review: American Woman (2018)

Genre: Drama

Director: Jake Scott

Starring: Sienna Miller, Christina Hendricks, Amy Madigan, Aaron Paul
Running Time: 112 minutes

Synopsis: In rural Pennsylvania, the anarchic Debra (Sienna Miller) is a single mom to teenager Bridget (Sky Ferreira), who herself is a single mom to infant Jesse. They live across the street from Debra's more settled sister Katherine (Christina Hendricks) and her family. When Bridget goes missing without a trace, Debra's life is upended. 

What Works Well: Director Jake Scott (Ridley's son) and writer Brad Ingelsby construct a teasing story of one woman's scrappy life in the working class shadows. Economic survival depends on snaring a man, and the threats of abuse, unplanned pregnancy, and personal ruin are always close. The narrative circumvents convention: Bridget's disappearance is only one chapter in Debra's life, and the plot adopts a stubborn and ultimately rewarding commitment to the climb from the depths. Sienna Miller registers a career highlight with a realistically slow evolution of emotional maturity, and is well supported by Christina Hendricks as the responsible sister.

What Does Not Work As Well: By design, the structure settles into episodic rhythms, including some forward lurches that skip ahead several years. 

Conclusion: A soulful portrayal of the arduous journey towards individual betterment.



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Movie Review: 21 Bridges (2019)

A crime thriller, 21 Bridges is a relatively routine action flick enhanced by a good cast and slick production values.

In Brooklyn, hardened criminal Ray Jackson (Taylor Kitsch) and his more circumspect accomplice Michael Trujillo (Stephan James) stumble into a large haul of pure cocaine stashed in the basement of a bar. Police officers unexpectedly interrupt the robbery, and in the ensuing shootout Ray kills seven officers. Police Captain McKenna (J.K. Simmons) is furious at the loss of life in his precinct, while Ray and Michael flee with the drugs into Manhattan. 

Detective Andre Davis (Chadwick Boseman) and narcotics agent Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller) are assigned to the case. Andre is the son of a slain police officer and has a trigger-happy reputation. He now orders all the bridges connecting Manhattan to the outside world closed and floods the borough with police officers. Meanwhile Ray and Michael are desperate to convert their cocaine haul into cash, and connect with money launderer Adi (Alexander Siddig). As Andre closes in on the fugitives, he starts to sense a large-scale corruption conspiracy.

The 21 bridges of the title are little more than an extraneous headline. This is a standard hunt-the-dangerous-bandits plot featuring good guys and bad guys, with a few shades of grey and hidden agendas thrown in to spice up motivations. The action takes place over one long night, the imperative of reopening the bridges by dawn for the city to function creating the time-constrained framework.

Director Brian Kirk has a robust cast to animate the running and gunning. Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller and J.K. Simmons never need to move out of their comfortable gears, but add plenty of quality. The criminals are also provided with welcome texture. Taylor Kitsch as the highly strung but still methodical killer is well-matched by Stephan James as his more hesitant accomplice, and their contrasting dynamic opens intriguing avenues for Boseman's detective to exploit.

Cinematographer Paul Cameron makes good use of the nighttime aesthetic, and as one breathless chase follows another, Tim Murrell's editing finds balance between frantic and coherent. The opening shootout is an exhilarating demonstration of advantages afforded by weaponry and military training, while a couple of guns-drawn showdowns between Michael and Andre allow intellect to compete with instinct.

What starts as a robbery-gone-bad morphs into something much more nefarious, and as the night turns to dawn the dead body count rivals the bridge count. If nothing else, 21 Bridges is always happy to run up the score.



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Movie Review: The Catcher Was A Spy (2018)

A World War Two drama and adventure, The Catcher Was A Spy captures wartime cloak-and-dagger antics in Europe, but the plot substance is mediocre at best.

During the war former professional baseball catcher Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) is working with the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as the Allies try to gauge Germany's progress in developing an atomic bomb. In flashback, Berg's history is sketched in. As a ball player Moe enjoyed a long career but was a misfit in the locker room. Highly educated, well-traveled and fluent in numerous languages, he maintains a relationship with Estella (Sienna Miller) and may also be a bisexual.

Once the war starts he lands an OSS position working with commander Bill Donovan (Jeff Daniels). He is assigned to the team tasked with investigating and possibly assassinating German scientist Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong), who is suspected of leading the German atomic bomb development efforts. Moe joins the army's Robert Furman (Guy Pearce) and Dutch scientist Samuel Goudsmit (Paul Giamatti) as they connect first with Italian Professor Amaldi (Giancarlo Giannini) then Swiss Professor Scherrer (Tom Wilkinson) to try and determine Heisenberg's role and intentions.

Based on true events, The Catcher Was A Spy is reasonably intriguing as an almost old-fashioned military spy yarn, but never reaches any emotional or cerebral heights. Director Ben Lewin succeeds on the vintage look and feel elements, bathing the action in warm yellows and browns and finding dark but glistening and handsome European settings for the shadow games. An interlude on the front lines of the Italian campaign offers suitably thrilling combat action.

But the content and characters are less interesting. Berg is presented as smart and capable but also an impenetrable enigma, and in the hands of Paul Rudd he remains an aloof and distant central character. Robert Rodat's screenplay, adapting the book by Nicholas Dawidoff, is confined to superficial notes, unable to round Berg into a properly defined person or break through to his motivations. Meanwhile, Nobel Prize winner Heisenberg's real-world career and achievements are fairly well known, compromising the tension in the core mission of Berg's spy career.

The cast is rich in talent, but the many famous names are given relatively little to do. Sienna Miller is stuck in the thankless neglected woman role, while Jeff Daniels and Guy Pearce stay close to stereotypical military men. No fewer than four scientists are brought to life by Mark Strong, Paul Giamatti, Giancarlo Giannini and Tom Wilkinson, and Strong's interpretation of Heisenberg emerges as the physicist most deserving of more screen time. Connie Neilsen appears in one scene as a haranguing dinner party guest, perhaps for the sole purpose of adding another female role.

Lewin tidies up the drama in an efficient 98 minutes, a case of decent panache hustling in search of essence.



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The Movies Of Sienna Miller

All movies starring Sienna Miller and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Factory Girl (2006)

Foxcatcher (2014)



American Sniper (2014)



Mississippi Grind (2015)



Burnt (2015)



The Lost City Of Z (2016)

Live By Night (2016)



The Catcher Was A Spy (2018)

American Woman (2018)

21 Bridges (2019)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Burnt (2015)

A drama set in the world of haute cuisine, Burnt is an overcooked attempt to stage a high-stakes thriller in the kitchen.

Adam Jones (Bradley Cooper) was once a top chef in Paris, but lost everything due to a life of excess and addictions. After three years of self-imposed exile to clean up his life, he heads to London to reestablish his reputation. He conspires with food critic Simone (Uma Thurman) to secure the chef role at the prestigious hotel restaurant of his former partner Tony Balerdi (Daniel Brühl), although Tony ensures Adam stays clean through weekly check-ups with Dr. Rosshilde (Emma Thompson).

Adam hires a kitchen team from among his former associates, including Michel (Omar Sy) and Max (Riccardo Scamarcio). And after some effort he convinces the promising Helene Sweeney (Sienna Miller) to join his crew. Adam renews his rivalry with chef Montgomery Reece (Matthew Rhys) and obsessively drives his staff in pursuit of the elusive three-star Michelin Guide rating.

Almost everything about Burnt is overdone. Adam Jones is an unlikeable character ripped from cheap action thrillers, leather-jacketed and obsessive about getting his revenge on a world that chewed him up and spit him out. Whether he does or does not achieve his third Michelin star means everything to him, but director John Wells, filming a Steven Knight script, is very far from making anyone else care.

A large part of the problem is the unironic setting within the tony world of unaffordable uppity restaurants where food critics opine about the minutiae of whether the scallops stayed on the fire for seven seconds too long. And Wells does not help his cause by overheating all the emotions to child tantrum levels, then plastering the film from start to end with kitchen staff shouting at each other and close-up shots of food being prepared and served. To suit the milieu Cooper does his best foul-mouthed impression of Gordon Ramsey on a gnarly day.

Jones' background and intriguing sexual preferences, including a complex relationship with Tony, are promising topics when touched upon, and the film would have greatly benefited by better exploring the man outside the kitchen.

Instead, Burnt loudly smashes the promising dishes against the wall and settles for 100 minutes of food porn.

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Movie Review: Mississippi Grind (2015)

A road movie delving into the psyche of two gamblers, Mississippi Grind is a study of addiction as a way of life.

In Dubuque, Iowa, stressed-out gambling addict Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) meets lighthearted professional gambler Curtis (Ryan Reynolds) at the poker table, and the two men strike a friendship. Curtis is an expert at darts, will gamble on anything, has a good natured winning attitude and adopts "the journey is the destination" as his mantra. Always on the move, he wins more often than he loses but does not care either way. Gerry is a divorced real estate agent, deep in debt, does not know enough to quit when he's ahead and is resorting to petty theft to feed his gambling habit.

Gerry decides that Curtis is his lucky charm and the two men team up on a road trip with a big stakes poker game in New Orleans as the ultimate destination. Curtis introduces Gerry to his friends, hookers Simone (Sienna Miller) and Vanessa (Analeigh Tipton). On the trip Gerry encounters wins and losses, and Curtis learns more about himself and continuously weighs how far he can tolerate the erratic behaviour of his deeply troubled new friend.

Co-directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Mississippi Grind is an unofficial remake of 1974's California Split. A two-person character study, the film draws out the contrasts between two men with the same habit but completely different attitudes. Less messy and more focused in comparison to the Robert Altman film, Mississippi Grind sharply defines two well-rounded men within a classic road trip format but nevertheless suffers from a lack of originality.

The strength of the film resides in teasing out the dramatically different consequences of the same obsession. Gerry's life is on a downward spiral. He may not know it, but gambling has taken over his life, his relationships and of course his finances. He will experience some wins but no longer has control over what it takes to actually win at life, and every big windfall is an overture for a bigger loss.

Curtis is equally living the life of a gambler, but has his immediate priorities balanced. His loose attitude exudes the confidence to know when to stop, and his real enjoyment comes from befriending different people. Curtis' journey is to ask the question about the meaning of it all, and whether his carefree on-the-move lifestyle is sacrificing long term happiness for short term thrills.

Ben Mendelsohn is a revelation, injecting the film with the painful needle of potential going to waste. With unblinking intensity Mendelsohn finds the agony of a man living a life he no longer commands. He reaches a devastating depth in a sequence at the home of his ex-wife, the gambler confronting all that he has lost and still unable to stop inflicting more misery upon himself. Ryan Reynolds is more emotive than usual, Curtis a perfect fit for Reynold's often breezy screen persona.

Boden and Fleck accompany the two men through the good and the bad, alternating scenes of gambling (at the poker table, at the track, wherever there is a bet to be made) with character depth sequences providing insight into the power of addiction. Gerry's agony increases the longer he is away from a bet; Curtis' sense of unease increases whenever he is in the same place for too long. Their interests converge for the one trip that could change everything or nothing.

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Movie Review: American Sniper (2014)

An impressive story of war and its brutal impacts, American Sniper celebrates the most lethal sniper in the Unites States military history, but also examines the lasting and far-reaching damage caused by war at the most personal levels.

Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) was brought up in Texas, and demonstrated an aptitude for hunting at a young age. He drifted into adulthood and a potential career as a rodeo cowboy before finding his calling and enlisting in the Navy SEALs. While undergoing the brutal training program and honing his skills as a military sniper, he meets Taya (Sienna Miller), and soon after their wedding Kyle is deployed to Iraq as a sniper in the post September 11, 2001 world.

In the urban carnage created by the US invasion of Iraq, Kyle's mission is to protect on-the-ground troops by eliminating threats from elevated vantage points. He kills and kills again, including enemy combatants and men, women and children readying grenades and improvised explosive devices. Kyle establishes himself as a legend for his sharp-shooting skills, but all the killing takes its toll. Back in Texas, with a growing family, Kyle is detached, unable to cope, and exhibits PTSD symptoms. His only escape is to repeatedly re-enlist and return to the war zone. By the time he embarks on his fourth tour of duty, his home life is in tatters. his emotions are bottled up and his nerves are shattered.

A relentless descent into the battle zone and into the human damage caused by war, American Sniper is a brilliant exploration of the stress and dysfunction spawned in battle and embedded into the sturdiest of souls. Director Clint Eastwood creates unrelenting tension on the streets of Baghdad, and then carries the mental destruction (in the case of Kyle) and the physical disability (suffered by many other veterans) to the heart of the United States. The modern psychological cost of war in individual human terms has rarely been as well conveyed on the screen.

Based on Kyle's autobiographical book of the same name adapted by Jason Hall, American Sniper portrays Kyle as the perfect soldier. Taught to be a "sheepdog" from a young age, Kyle's views of the world are simple, and this allows him to pull the trigger while aiming at anyone who falls into the "wolf" category. Kyle is unconcerned with the complexities of war and its causes and is happy to serve his country by killing hundreds of enemies, and the film derives its power by portraying the horrible mental devastation suffered by the most straightforward of soldiers. If even he can fall victim to battlefield trauma, how high is the cost among more complex men and women who pause to think about the purpose of war and the families of their targets?

American Sniper also addresses the hero-worship culture, and portrays Kyle as a man whose exploits are quick to earn plaudits from fellow soldiers, but whose achievements mean very little back at home. Between his tours of duty Kyle rages that the Unites States appears oblivious to the war going on in Iraq, and in Texas he is just a husband and dad who can't seem to focus on either job. It's back on the dusty streets of Iraq that he is now in his element, and a life of heroically facing danger, violence and death becomes the only life that he can properly function in.

Eastwood relentlessly builds the tension within American Sniper, the film piling on the pressure with expertly executed battle scenes that promise death at any instant, Marines kicking down doors and going house to house to search for insurgents while Kyle keeps watch through his scope, every local Iraqi a potential target. The film is awash with sudden bullet impacts, intense fire fights, and the nervousness that comes with knowing that things are about to go very wrong, but not knowing exactly how, when, and where. Kyle's actions do lead to innocent victims getting hurt and badly, and as many kills as he does register, he is most distressed by the Marines who got hurt on his watch because he was unable to neutralize enough enemy threats.

Bradley Cooper delivers another excellent performance, bulking up into the muscular body of a dedicated SEAL but maintaining the innocent spirit of a soldier serving his country as best as he knows how and unsure how to deal with the distorted aftermath. Sienna Miller anchors the US-based scenes as the young wife and then mother abandoned by a husband who is absent either physically or mentally. Miller's highlight comes early, Taya's initial barroom meeting with Kyle establishing her credentials as a woman who will demand to set the agenda.

Explosive, tense and thoughtful, American Sniper hits all its targets.

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