The Gift

Here's one scary movie that has no creaking doors, no ghosts, no supernatural forces. The evil man can do needs no special effects; it is destructive enough to warp reality for a lifetime. This excellent psychological thriller from the multi-talented writer, director, producer and actor Joel Edgerton delivers several jolts that make the audience jump in their seats, and, better yet, some very disturbing twists firmly rooted in complicated, believable characters.
Jason Bateman plays Simon, a charming achiever who moves from Chicago with his lovely wife Robin (the excellent Rebecca Hall) to a beautiful mid-century house in LA, an exposed house seemingly made of endless glass windows, delicate like an eggshell. Simon and Robin are a lovely couple trying to start a family, and Hall and Bateman have an effortless, lived-in intimacy which is rare in movies.
Bateman is perfectly cast as an ambitious corporate climber with a casual sense of humor and an easy-going charm. He is one of the best straight men in comedy, who specializes in smug all-American jocks. He brings his deadpan humor to this dramatic role. We root for Simon, we are seduced by his pluck, his good looks, and how he charms everyone who crosses his path: such a nice, successful man.  He is so suave that he has somehow talked Robin into moving away and quitting her job as a successful interior designer. Getting his way comes effortlessly to him.
As they shop for new furniture, they run into an old classmate of Simon's, a guy called Gordon (Edgerton). Soon Gordon, formerly nicknamed Gordo, is welcoming the couple to the neighborhood with a zeal bordering on the creepy. He leaves gifts on their doorstep, shows up unannounced, too full of good intentions. However, there is something about Gordo that seems both cowed and aggressive, weak and persistent. He is hateful, as all stalkers.
This movie delivers surprising twists that catch the audience off-guard, and change our perception of the characters, which feels as shocking to us as it does to Robin. The fortuitous encounter with her husband's old schoolmate unravels a web of secrets she had no clue about. It is a terrifying feeling to find out that you don't really know the person you think you know best.
Edgerton creates an atmosphere of tension from the moment Gordo appears at the furniture store, out of focus, on the edge of the frame. The sense of class tension helps, as Simon's golden boy seems to have thrived while everything about Gordo is undefined, and clearly not as successful. Robin is willing to give Gordo's neediness the benefit of the doubt. He has been in the Army, his life has unraveled, and he keeps showering them with gifts. But Simon is mean about him and a little wary.
Unsettling things happen. Simon asks Gordo to stop pestering them. As he explains himself to his wife, he sounds like a mouthpiece for the Republican party. He has little sympathy for Gordo's travails; he claims he had a rough childhood but got up by his bootstraps and made something of himself. His smug charm is that of any garden-variety sociopath, of those people who don't need guns or violence to crush others. In this country, their getting ahead by any means tends to be celebrated. Exuberant admiration for enterprising bullies (from Steve Jobs to Donald Trump, to name just two) is a quintessentially American thing. Edgerton is from Australia. Perhaps his vantage point allows him to see this with unusual clarity.
Although The Gift becomes more conventional towards the end, it establishes its premise and its characters deftly enough that certain exaggerated twists still make sense within the story. It's a small quibble for the rare thriller that uses reality to give us a good scare.

The East

This movie by Zal Batmanglij, co-written by his frequent collaborator and star Brit Marling, is completely preposterous but it has a great premise. A group of disaffected  rich kids decide to give evil corporations a taste of their own medicine, by using their poisonous drugs and chemicals on them. A fabulous revenge fantasy, ain't it?
Except that revenge is never as clean.
Sarah (Marling), works for a corporate spying law firm, headed by the awesome Patricia Clarkson, and is sent to infiltrate an anarchist group, which threatens some of her firm's clients. Though she is loyal to her work, dutifully ratting out the group, she can't help but be affected by their insular hippy-dippy lifestyle, by the injustices the group tries to right and by the charms of the über-cute group leader, Alexander Skarsgård, who even with a horrifying head of hippie hair, is irresistible to the female eye. If all revolutionaries were this hot, we would live in a different world. Skarsgård is a subtle, resourceful actor, but he lacks the manic charisma that tends to be typical of revolutionary leaders. He is the nicest anarchist ever.
Marling is really good at playing steely dames, and she is very compelling here. This is a thriller starring a woman, who has a fearsome female boss, and neither of them make you miss the guys who usually star in these types of movies. Meaning: it is possible. It's great to have a female spy hero for a change. It is great to see women in powerful roles, including a very good Julia Ormond as a corporate P.R. person.
As they showed in their previous outing, Sound of My Voice, Marling and Batmanglij are interested in exploring underground movements. Last time around it was a creepy cult, now it's a revolutionary cooperative, for which they have more sympathy (therefore making the movie less creepy).
How can you deal with state-sanctioned evil? Revenge seems to unleash more evil, but sometimes the available legal options are not sufficient, particularly when the laws are there to protect corporate villains. Credit is due to the writers for not over-simplifying the thorny issue. Revenge on the corporations sounds good until it becomes a childish, unhinged prank. I had issues with the story lines of rich kids feeling shame for their parents' sins. Yes, the personal is political, but it would also be nice if the characters were just outraged, as we all are, at corporate malfeasance without a personal trauma to boost them to action. At times, the device of making everything personal risks making it borderline ridiculous.
Batmanglij is an economical, effective director and he delivers a taut, suspenseful thriller, if you overlook its hanging threads and strained plot points. But since siding 100% with the revolutionaries is not really possible for a commercial film backed by a corporation like Fox, the movie hedges its bets. The welcome ambivalence it portrays in the ideological allegiances of the characters, in whether what they are doing is righteous or infantile, leads to an equally ambivalent, unconvincing ending that robs the movie of power. Still, Batmanglij and Marling are making small, contrary movies that are well worth following.

In The House

In The House is a very enjoyable movie that is being marketed squarely like a thriller, but is a whimsical, entertaining divertissement by François Ozon on the nature of storytelling and how hooked we humans are on stories. The great Fabrice Luchini stars as Germain, a frustrated novelist and now teacher of literature in a French high school (the Lycee Gustave Flaubert, no less). Among the exasperating mediocrity and indifference of most students, he finds talent in the continuing stories of a young pupil, Claude Garcia, which are supposedly based on his real life experiences. Germain and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) soon become hooked on Claude's storytelling prowess and on his "to be continued" cliffhangers. Young Claude (the handsome and chilling Ernst Umhauer) writes about insinuating himself in the life of Rapha, a fellow student, who lives in a better house, with a better family and a very desirable mother (Emanuelle Seigner). His story becomes increasingly brazen and perverse, but Germain is so enthralled by the possibility of fashioning this kid into a potential novelist, that he neglects to see how his literary advice is making Claude take more dangerous risks, which if  true, could spell real drama in the lives of the real characters. Ozon keeps the surprises coming, as the story of Claude and Rapha gets entwined on the page with Germain and his wife. All is fair game, as far as the writer is concerned.
This could have been a thriller about a sociopath with literary talent, but it's something more unwieldy, more messy, yet quite delightful.  If it sounds like an insufferably intellectual conceit, rest assured that Ozon keeps it breezy and fun. Soon Claude's stories consume Germain and his wife, and it is as hard for the audience to know what is fiction and what is real as it is for the couple. This is indeed true to fiction, which borrows from real life, sometimes literally, sometimes with invention and exaggeration, and only the writer knows which is which (if they can keep them apart).
Ozon has explored these fiction/reality themes before in movies like Swimming Pool, but here he goes for a light, comedic touch, not devoid of class satire, a gentle ribbing of classisist snobs like Germain and of rich grand dames who own art galleries (where Jeanne works) that show facile art meant to shock their own ilk.
Luchini is dry, deadpan and funny, touchingly distraught by the tale he is helping his student spin. As a curt, distant professor, he comes alive as he takes the sinister Claude under his wing. He is not a drooling, warmly encouraging teacher. He's critical and tough, which makes the kid write with a vengeance. The movie is smart and nimble, but there are a couple of plot points that strain credulity. Having established that all is fair in the telling of a story, Ozon cheekily demands we believe that the otherwise straight arrow Germain is willing to get into major trouble in order just to continue reading. Some of the darker aspects of the story are tonally at odds with the frothy atmosphere. Still, Ozon sustains the fun, intellectual hi-jinks with seamless grace, and a gossamer touch. He seems to enjoy the endless possibilities that the very act of telling the story gives him: shall he land the story into farce or tragedy?  Shall he keep it realistic, or indulge in whimsy? He somehow tries it all, and it works.

Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh's swan song is an interesting thriller that, as the Magnificent Arepa so tersely put it, is overwritten by screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who wrote the very fine The Informant!, among other things). It's a byzantine plot; in short, a young woman, the excellent Rooney Mara, is prescribed a new anti-depressant. Then there's trouble. And then there are so many twists, some great, some cheesy, that your brain ends up feeling a bit like a pretzel. It works for about three fourths of the way and then it gets a bit sleazy, as it tries to tie all the loose ends while piling up twist after twist, as prescribed, it seems to me, by those screenwriting gurus who tell you how many twists there have to be per act. Instead of a movie, Side Effects feels like you are playing Twister™, to the detriment of some potentially interesting character issues.
The best thing about Side Effects is definitely Rooney Mara, who gets to do a whole bunch of acting with great restraint. She is convincingly depressed, as she is creepy and vulnerable, a shape shifting tabula rasa. She is very impressive. Jude Law is quite good as her psychiatrist, a well-meaning doctor with excellent bedside manner, who is pressured to increase his income by collaborating with pharma companies on drug trials and being an expert witness in trial cases (it gets muddy). In a fresh twist, he becomes a victim as he barely grapples with the issue of a doctor's responsibility when a prescription goes very wrong. But more could have been made of his reluctance to accept responsibility. Instead he becomes a classic hero searching for the truth, which is a bit of a cliche. And then there is Catherine Zeta-Jones, vamping it with relish as the sexiest shrink in history. So there is much to enjoy in the performers. Soderbergh has some good, classy moments. Problem is in the writing. The screenwriter is working harder in coming up with bizarre twists than in exploring some of his more interesting themes. For instance, the uneasy and borderline unethical way in which big pharma is in bed with doctors, among other things. This seems to be the main topic of the movie (Big Pharma is Evil) until it gets derailed by a potboiler twist that seems to belong to a completely different class of movie altogether (Vampire Lesbians of Sodom). The movie is driven by plot, not character, and it kind of falls off a cliff. It is not the best movie to cap a prolific, if uneven career, but it is quite entertaining and certainly better than Che.
Here are the best Soderbergh movies, in my opinion:

Sex, Lies and Videotape
The Informant!
The Limey
Out Of Sight
King Of The Hill
Ocean's Eleven

Headhunters

The most thrilling movie currently showing at theaters is this exhilarating, brazen Norwegian thriller, based on a novel by Jo Nesbø. Outrageously over the top but in complete command of pacing, plot and story, Headhunters is a masterful thriller. I would be surprised if the rights have not been bought yet for an American remake. I will be surprised if the remake retains what makes this film so compelling: it is driven by a most charming anti-hero. At least he already comes with an Anglo name. Roger Brown (one suspects this is not his real name), is a headhunter at a top executive search company. But he is short, and not very handsome (he certainly seems more attractive as the movie goes along). He is married to a gorgeous woman who towers over him, and he is convinced, in his massive insecurity, that she only wants him for his money. Hence, to retain her and the status she gives him, he gives her a lavish lifestyle he can't possibly afford, which makes him steal art masterpieces in order to pay the bills. Roger is all about arrogance, which is the default mask for insecurity.
To him, it's all about how he appears to others, and boy does he overcompensate.
Aksel Hennie, the extraordinary actor who plays Roger, is a complete discovery. Roger is a skillful, cocky prick. In a rare instance of actually welcome voice over narration, he explains how to rob fine art successfully and why he is who he is. In short, he's short, but what he lacks in stature, he has in spades in spunk. He is always on in public, a mini alpha male, too proud of his ridiculous head of hair, a blond James Brown coif, he is horrible to his mousy, clingy lover, horrible to prospects at job interviews, a nasty piece of work. But we also see the true side of him. He walks into a room already factoring in who's smarter, taller, more handsome than him (most everybody), and the fact that he allows us to see who he really is makes him utterly endearing. This is what makes the movie exciting. It is about a despicable character you end up loving.
It's already suspenseful fun to watch him do his job at stealing art with great precision and panache. But then, the noose around his neck gets tighter: the police are sniffing around, he owes zillions of krone in debt, the wife seems to be looking for attention elsewhere and he realizes someone very dangerous is out to get him. He is put through a series of can you beat this plot twists that are so over the top you can barely believe you are still buying the premise, but you are, on the strength that everything has been meticulously set up and that Roger will do anything to survive. At first it seems that he will do anything to not get caught and be unmasked for the fraud he is, but as he gets literally stripped to the core of his being, he understands  what is really important, and manages to change dramatically, while still being his mischievous, manipulative self.  I have rarely seen an actor deliver such a rounded, brilliant performance. You root for Roger, because he is brazen, and he is brave and takes on the wrath of the gods by being who he is.
Director Morten Tyldum delivers a perfect thriller. The pacing is fast but always clear,  everything works like a charm without feeling mechanical, the movie has amazing swing. The super contrived, fun plot is always driven by character and by the end you almost want to stand up and cheer for awful, arrogant, short, bug eyed Roger Brown, a most unlikely hero. If you want to spend two really fun, exciting hours at the movies, this is the one you should see.