Blue Ruin

 Dwight (Macon Blair) is a very hirsute beach bum* who lives in his car (the titular blue ruin). An evidently damaged soul, one good day he's brought in by a sympathetic cop to the station to learn that someone called Wade Cleland is being let out of prison on parole.

 The particulars of the situation are gently revealed throughout the next twenty minutes or so - I'll leave them unspoiled, as letting us work things out is one of the many pleasures the movie offers, but the news of the parole electrify Dwight and send him on a revenge quest as he contemplates premeditated murder... with a couple of twists. One: he's just a schlub who's extremely ill-suited to violence. And two: The revenge is successfully consummated within the first twenty minutes, thanks in no small part to dumb luck.

 So we haven't even finished the first act and the deed is done. The rest of the film then becomes a light dramedy as Dwight, his trauma cleanly resolved, attempts to shake off more than a decade of being a hermit to reintegrate as a productive member of society.

 Or maybe not. Maybe it's one of those consequences of revenge/cycles of violence-type stories as the rest of the Cleland clan goes after Dwight and his innocent sister (Amy Hargreaves) gets dragged into the whole sorry mess. You'll need to watch it to find out.

 Grim, understated, and shot clean through with a nasty vein of gallows humour, Blue Ruin is a masterclass in sustained tone and thoughtful scripting. That shouldn't be a surprise if you've watched anything by writer/director Jeremy Saulnier, but this is only his second movie; it's impressive to see just how fully-formed he burst out into the scene.

 Saulnier worked as a cinematographer on other indie films while figuring out this project, and he shoots this with an incredible eye for atmosphere - it is a gorgeous-looking film. A lot of attention is also spent on its violence, which provides messy, graphic and suitably horrifying capstones to the script's carefully built up tension.
 The acting is phenomenal; Blair makes for a very compelling, very soulful weirdo. His ability to emote his pain (both spiritual and very very physical) gets a serious workout here. Everyone around him does a great job, especially Amy Hargreaves, but it's essentially a one-man show.

 It's one of those films where everything is... just so. Saulnier and his crew put it together with some Kickstarter money, personal savings and a lot of hustling after their first microbudget movie, Murder Party (which is definitely worth a watch) failed to get them any further opportunities. They figured they'd give it one more try, which luckily worked out for everyone.

*: Beach Bum, incidentally, was at one point the movie's working title.

Rebel Ridge

 Iron Maiden kicks off writer/director/editor Jeremy Saulnier's long-delayed Rebel Ridge, the rising harmony carefully timed so that the title card coincides with Bruce Dickinson's iconic scream.

 The music is revealed to come from a man's headphones as he rides down a country road on his bike. He can't hear the police chasing him, and they elect to end the pursuit by running him off the road. It's an immediately tense situation, one that's complicated by the fact that it's two armed, white cops standing over a downed black man (Aaron Pierre).

  The police shake the man - Terry - down at gunpoint, and seize a sizeable amount of cash he was carrying in a carrier bag to make bail for his cousin over at town hall; A 'lawful' seizure, as they make up a spurious claim to have reasonable suspicion that it's drug money.

 By the time the police head out leaving a quietly enraged - and conspicuously not shaken - Terry behind to pick up the pieces, the Iron Maiden song has long ended. It's been replaced by the much harsher riff of March of the S.O.D., promising things are going to get a lot darker.

 Once Terry makes it to town hall Summer, a sympathetic clerk (Anna Sophia Robb), takes pity on him and explains that he's likely never going to see his money again; The seizure, while unethical, seems to be fully legal. Terry starts making alternate arrangements - he fears his cousin will not last long in jail - but those plans also fall through. The situation escalates once Terry has a series of confrontations with the township's crooked chief of police (Don Johnson)... until things tip over to violence despite Terry's best efforts to keep them from boiling over.

 From there it's Summer and Terry reluctantly going up against a complex but credible conspiracy involving all levels of law enforcement in town, an unholy but completely coherent mixture between action, paranoid '70s political thrillers, real-life systematic injustice and social drama. One that never neglects a single one of its threads, backed by the best, most badass script I've seen in years: detail-oriented but lean as all hell, one that carefully grounds each and every one of its elements, and that gives us to everything we need to put things together without ever devolving into exposition dumps.

 It's got a palpable, entirely justified sense of moral rage fuelling it - one small detail, a $9k margarita machine bought with seized police money - was popularized by a real-life case featured in a John Oliver show about police corruption; You can tell a lot of research went into the making of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if many other plot points are also ripped from the headlines.

 But while circumstances give Terry every excuse to paint the town red all over, he's no Rambo; he's a true pacifist, ever looking for ways to de-escalate situations even when he's willingly stirring shit up. He's backed up by the film, which doesn't excuse anyone involved in its central conspiracy, but complicates things by humanizing almost every character and hinting at how things got to be that way. Seriously - the script in this thing... it's a fucking marvel.

 Some people might balk at the protagonist's superhuman morality and his preternatural ability to keep cool under fire - and I can sympathize a little with that; He's an action hero dropped in a much grittier mix of genres. But as an action lover and a fan of all things awesome that criticism won't ever hold any water with me. As for those annoyed by the politics of the film... well, fuck them.

 In any fair world, this would be a star-making turn for Pierre; he sells his veteran protagonist with ease, exuding charisma, moral fortitude and both physical and mental menace. Robb is also great, and so is Johnson and a host of dependable character actors, all well served with meaty, complex roles. 

 Saulnier's filming is, as ever, top-notch. His style is unshowy but crisply shot and carefully staged; At several points I found myself thinking "wait, that whole thing was an unbroken take!". The action is brilliantly choreographed; Mostly gritty and naturalistic, but full of cool moves (mostly jujitsu) and vehicular mayhem, all clearly captured. There's surprisingly little of it and, pointedly, very little of the ultraviolence of Saulnier's past films. 

 This is, by far, the best new movie I've seen in a very, very long time - and I don't say this lightly in face of a year that's had two outstanding Mad Max and Dune movies. My only complaint is that its Netflix origins robbed us of the chance to see it on a big screen, and more people the chance of even finding out it even exists (it's been dumped alongside all their other usual shit with minimal fanfare).

Green Room

 It begins as a road movie: The Ain't Right's are on tour, living hand to mouth as they perform live shows throughout the pacific northwest, crashing on fan's couches, siphoning gas to make it to the next venue.

 Not the best way to do business, as they discover when a show falls through. Finances almost down to zero, they're faced with cancelling the tour, but the dipshit that had them come to town for nothing offers an option - play out in the boonies for a 'boots and braces' crowd - skinheads. What could possibly go wrong?

 Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and cinematographer Sean Porter film this prologue with a beautiful naturalistic flair and a very firm handle on the day-to-day business of a tiny punk band trying to string some shows together. The band is Tiger (Callum Turner), Sam (Alia Shakwat), Pat (Anton Yelchin) and Reece (Joe Cole) - a really likeable bunch of kids even when they're (very believably) posturing about how legit they are. Their relatability is a great asset in a nasty horror movie like this.

 Once they make it to the venue things... they look all right, actually. Tense, but manageable. And their show goes well - despite the gang hilariously choosing to go with Nazi Punks Fuck Off as their opening number; "It's a cover" the lead mutters as bottles fly around him.

 They get paid and are on their way out when Pat realizes he left his phone behind on the green room - and when he gets there, there's a girl with a knife buried to the hilt in her skull. Fuck.

 So begins a standoff between the Ain't Right's and a rotating cast of heavies initially led by Gabe (Macon Blair). The film's scope narrows to just the green room initially, where the band is locked in with an armed, unfriendly brute and a fellow doomed witness (Imogen Poots), and slowly expands as the owner of the venue arrives and - Oh shit, it's Ben Kingsley Patrick Stewart! Ahem. Anyhow, he arrives to 'negotiate', and the band slowly starts realizing that their odds of survival are close to null even as they keep trying to reason with them.

 Things go even south-er almost immediately as the locals make their intentions clear with one incredibly fucked up instance of ultraviolence, and from there we follow both the punks as they try to find a way out and the skinheads as they make plans to kill them and dispose of the bodies in a way that won't get them in trouble.
 I've watched this a couple times over the years, and it always strikes me how complex the script actually is, and how well it communicates subtleties; besides the ripping horror/survival main plot, enough details are crammed in the margins to explain why that initial girl was murdered, we get a lot of character moments on both sides, funny bits of dialog and some horrifying ones as the venue management discuss the band's ultimate fate. It's a gem.

 And when things get going, they really get going. It's not a hugely gory movie, but the carnage still looms large thanks to some unusually terrifying brutality, which the camera lingers on unflinchingly. Survival of common people against hardened criminals is a common escapist movie trope, but this is no fantasy - good people get chopped up with little warning and extreme prejudice, and any reprieve is gained at horrible cost.

 The acting is great (most of the cast is British for some reason, not that you could tell), the music's excellent and the filmmaking is propulsive and even lyrical at multiple points, leading up to one very moving shot right near the end, followed by a pretty funny, silly gag. Damn near perfect little movie.