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.

Oppenheimer

  Oppenheimer is a prestige biopic from Christopher Nolan about the 'father of the atom bomb'. It tracks Robert Oppenheimer's life (played by Cillian Murphy) from his youth at European universities to his fall from grace at the hands of politicians, going through his political experimentation, romantic misadventures, the creation of the A-bomb, and any other number of things besides in a tightly packed, breakneck three hours. It's kind of a mess.

 A lavish mess. Nolan directs with his usual verve, eye for experimentation and lush visuals, and keeps digital effects to a minimum. Nolan regular DP Hoyte Van Hoytemna is in place too, so you know it's going to look great, complete with very crisp black and white segments for one of the storylines.
 The acting is phenomenal, with a ridiculously stacked cast that besides Murphy includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Macon Blair in a pretty significant role (he does great!), Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett... I mean, any movie that has Niels Bohr as a character is going to be worth watching, and it's pleasure to see him played by Kenneth Branagh. My main disappointment in that department was that Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) barely gets a couple of lines and is mostly just a weirdo in the background playing the bongos. They also have to don some dodgy-looking old-people makeup later on, but that's a minor complaint.

 The movie's got a few more significant issues that (I feel) work against it. One is that Nolan, in adapting the source novel, took the maximalist approach and tries to put everything in there. While I really respect that, maybe a (very) Hollywood film is not the best medium for a non-fiction novel. The film does try to tie its disparate elements thematically by adding some small flourishes in its depiction of Oppenheimer's internal life and, say, private conversations with Einstein (Tom Conti) and other luminaries, but it still comes across as a jumble of disparate events and throughlines.

 None of these is worse than the film's focus on Lewis Strauss (Downey Jr.), whose beef with Oppenheimer caused his downfall (spoilers!). Here he's given his own villain arc, complete with evil monologues, pinning the beef on extremely petty concerns, a voice of conscience in a fictional character played by Alden Ehrenreich, and a crowd-pleasing comeuppance complete with a mention of JFK. It is, as the Irish would say, cat altogether. Cat melodion, even.

 And that takes up a whole fucking hour. The film has other moments of pure Hollywood bullshit, such as giving the 'I am become death...' line its own cheesy origin story, but if I'm to be honest that involves Florence Pugh in the buff... so I'll allow that. There's also a bit where they compare mathematics to reading/feeling music, and the (gorgeous!) score by Ludwig Göransson goes into a symphonic overdrive as beautiful landscapes pass by, intercut with shots of Oppenheimer looking awestruck and jolts of abstract sub-atomic visualizations. It's a great scene, expertly directed, but... let's just say I don't really rate Nolan much as a scriptwriter these days.

 The editing of the film also exhausted me. It's kind of a thing of beauty (editor: Jennifer Lame), every shot consisting of no more than three seconds or so- it gives the movie an incredible sense of momentum, but after a while it becomes a bit punishing, especially as this is a film built out of conversations and quiet moments artificially jacked up (the soundtrack is particularly guilty of this) to build a sense of excitement.
 Nolan's usual timeline switching is more successful. There's a lot of effort and technical skill behind keeping a script that features so many characters and events presented in a non-linear way so relatively easy to parse. It still feels like it's there to make the movie sexier, to keep viewers engaged by making them work to figure things out, but that aspect felt to me well-made. 

 I sometimes I think I'd prefer Nolan would make smaller, less blockbustery films; That way we'd have an Inception without shitty, unnecessary action, and maybe he wouldn't feel the need to fill this one with all this nonsense. But that'd mean we wouldn't get Dunkirk, either, so what are you going to do. He's just not the best fit for a sprawling biopic, at least not one without a crystal-clear throughline.
 As it stands, Oppenheimer is two thirds of a good, not great, movie, and it's got some huge marks against it. But the amount of craft behind it cannot be denied, either.

I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore

 I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore opens with barrage of low key, quotidian assholishness heaped on poor Ruth (Melanie Lynskey) by random people. You know the type: people cutting in line,  not picking up their dog poop, littering - not giving a fuck about others and just being generally shitty. The first of these incidents gets the biggest laugh in the movie: a dying woman dies in the middle of a horrible tirade right in front of Ruth at the hospice she works in as a nurse... later, surrounded by her grieving family, she's asked if there were any last words.
 She doesn't have the heart to tell them the last words were "Keep your gigantic monkey dick out of my good pussy."

 Linskey is aways good, but especially so here playing a quiet, decent person who feels increasingly out of step with the rest of humankind.

 When she gets back home after this particularly shitty day, she finds someone's broken in and stolen her laptop, some silver that belonged to a late, favorite family member, and meds. It's a shitty thing to happen to anyone, and Ruth's reaction to it all - a sort of resigned heartbreak mixed with impotent rage -  is spot on and like so much of the rest of the movie, very relatable.

 When the police get there they basically brush her off and give her a hard time for not locking her front door. Cold.

 After stewing over it for a couple of days, Ruth starts sleuthing around and is able to track down some of her missing stuff; So she enlists the aid of one of her neighbours for backup - Tony (Elijah Wood, in a pseudo-mullet with a rattail and a Saxon T-shirt), an introverted weirdo who seems to be less of a dick than everyone else. And off they go, on an initially successful quest across their little Texan suburb to get Ruth's shit back.

 As their crusade goes on, Ruth gets a little too much into it. Not that it turns into a proper vigilante movie or anything - her plan is simply to confront people and maybe get them to, at most, explain themselves. Get them to be at least a little ashamed. But unfortunately for Ruth and Tony, part by skill and part by dumb luck, they do eventually manage to catch the attention of the people that originally robbed her place - a trio of strung-out petty thieves (led by David Yow!) who'd barely register as mooks in your standard vigilante movie, but drip with menace here.

 Writer/Director Macon Blair became known after playing the lead in Blue Ruin, and this, his first movie, is definitely in tune with that film's sensibilities. Describing it as Blue Ruin but played as a comedy is a bit glib, but fair - at least if we're thinking of comedy more in the ancient Greek sense; There are some good jokes here and a pervasive bleak sense of humour, but it's undercut by a nasty intensity, a queasy sense of danger that seems to promise things will not go well. And.. well, they don't. Should anyone make it through alive, you can be sure they'll have earned getting to the finish  line.

 There is some action, and it is suitably brutal, deflating any glamour or the more vicarious thrills this sort of movie might offer. The film doesn't stay pinned on Ruth's viewpoint, either; other characters get a chance to expand on theirs too, and a lot of these make a lot of sense. The script remains sympathetic to Ruth and Tony to the end, but it never completely romanticizes the action or loses sight of how fucked up, dangerous, and just plain stupid some of the stuff they get up to is.

 Some of the events towards the end get a little far-fetched, but it's easy to forgive a little silliness given how grounded most of the movie feels at that point. It's a good one.