If you’re still pissed at British Petroleum for the 2010 spill in the Louisiana Bay that notched the worst ecological disaster in history, get ready to have your ire stoked by Peter Berg’s harrowing real-life rewind. You won’t get many of those indelible images of oil-matted pelicans and mounds of dead fish piled along the coastline because, much like“Snowden” and “Sully,” other recent docudramas depicting barely faded news flashpoints, “Deepwater Horizon” steers clear of what we already know and lays out the events and lives leading up to the unthinkable – which it does with meticulous care.
At its core “Deepwater” is a disaster flick, and a nail-biter to boot, but much of what propels it are the human stories, the selfless actions of those caught in the way of harm and the shocking arrogance unfurled by British Petroleum higher-ups wanting to turn a fast buck. The film hangs on two caught at the epicenter of the ordeal: Kurt Russell’s rig commander, Jimmy Harrell, and Mark Wahlberg’s second-in-command, Mike Williams. These are two actors who in recent outings – “The Hateful Eight” and “Lone Survivor” – were left bloodied and beaten, and worse, which in hindsight must have been preparation for what would come: asphyxiation by gushing oil, shrapnel whizzing at every turn and a few ungainly forays into parkour as one incinerating part of the rig lists and crashes downward; and if you think the sea a good exit, it’s nothing but a pool of fire for as far as one can see. Continue reading
It’s been only a few years since the disclosures by former intelligence worker Edward Snowden and subsequent firestorm ripped opened a debate on privacy and security. During it all, documentarian Laura Poitras captured the real-life Snowden holed up in a Hong Kong hotel as he readied exposure of the CIA and NSA for spying on U.S. citizens without cause, hacking and mining private Facebook posts – even accessing computer cameras to look in on citizens of interest, should they care. Her film, “Citizenfour,” went on to win an Academy Award. Poitras makes her way into Stone’s “Snowden” as a character, played by the ever-graceful Melissa Leo, sitting in a room shooting Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and “Guardian” journalist Glenn Greenwald (Spock player Zachary Quinto). Stone wisely doesn’t retrace much of Poitras’ steps, but makes the story about Snowden the man, his roots in the military, his nerdy proclivities, his cut-above skill set and capabilities and his on-again, off-again relationship with girlfriend Lindsay Mills (a vivacious Shailene Woodley) – for the two, it’s love at first IP trace. 
“Million Dollar Baby” and “Invictus” were two such inwardly wound gems, and Eastwood’s latest, “Sully,” marks another fully palpable portrait of human determination that’s more interested in the human condition and compassion than heroics. Don’t get me wrong – there’s plenty of heroics in “Sully.” After all, the film is branded after the man who executed the “Miracle on the Hudson”; if you were asleep in 2009 in the wake of the economic meltdown, when good news was hard to come by, that was when Sully (aka Chesley Sullenberger) gave the nation something to cheer about, putting down a badly damaged jet on the Hudson River, saving the 155 lives aboard and avoiding incalculable collateral damage should a return to LaGuardia fail. 
If you’re not familiar with Ayer, he’s a guy’s guy, the testosterone-probing hand behind such brooding character studies as “Harsh Times” and 
Basically in the new “Jason Bourne” we’re a long way from the Robert Ludlum material that was so organically and intricately concerned with spy games and double dealings at the highest levels, with Jason Bourne caught up as the harried fly in the ointment. In the five installments – four starring Matt Damon and now three of those helmed by chaos choreography maestro Paul Greengrass (“Captain Phillips” and “United 93”) – the impetus has moved from an internal struggle driven by outside forces to dubious machinations in those external structures (the CIA and its splintered sub-organizations) looking for any excuse to put Bourne in someone’s crosshairs. In this case it’s those of CIA director Robert Dewey (a craggy Tommy Lee Jones, inheriting the role of heavy from Albert Finney) who doesn’t want Bourne (and his long-running inside collaborative, Nicky Parsons, played again by Julia Stiles) to pull a WikiLeaks dump of the Treadstone file (listing all the behaviorally engineered Bourne-like assassins). Plus he’s got his hooks into social media mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), an amalgam of Zuckerberg and the Google guys, and wants to leverage the company’s Deep Dream network platform (think Facebook) as a tool to acquire info on anyone, anywhere, anytime. 
Our protagonist, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), an impassioned nebbish from the Bronx with dreams of grandeur, possesses the right seeding of an Allen alter-ego. Given he’s a young man living in a cramped post-Depression apartment with a yenta-lite mom (an excellent Jeannie Berlin), Bobby heads to Tinseltown, where Uncle Phil (Steve Carell) is an agent to the stars and hobnobs with the likes of Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers and Errol Flynn. We never meet any of these icons like we did in “Midnight in Paris,” but Phil talks to them often on the telephone as Bobby sits longingly across from him in Phil’s big office, hoping his mother’s brother will toss him a bone and give him a job.
For What it's Worth 