LFF 2017 - Good Time, Racer and the Jailbird, Spoor & 1%

Although it opens with a smooth helicopter shot zooming in towards New York skyscrapers, Good Time is another film by the Safdie brothers that takes us on a tour of the city at street level, moving with the same anxious energy as its protagonist. Robert Pattinson already showed a willingness to disappear into a role in James Gray's The Lost City of Z earlier this year, and he does something similar here, giving a performance that's rich in observed details – the look, the voice, the movements all feel right – but one that's also built on a leading man magnetism that's crucial for getting us to empathise with this selfish anti-hero. Pattinson's Connie is the kind of character who lives by his wits; brilliant at thinking on his feet, but with no concept of how each decision will impact on himself and others. His actions have already landed his brother (co-director Benny Safdie, superb) in jail and now he needs to raise $10,000 in one night to bail him out, which is the jumping-off point for an anxiety-inducing nocturnal odyssey that keeps escalating and twisting in absurd ways. The Safdies' control of tone is sensational. Their film has an electric energy but they can shift moods fluidly; consider, for example, the slow-burning tension of the interlude in which Connie forms a bond with a 16 year-old girl (Taliah Webster), a scene that suddenly explodes into frantic comedy with a case of mistaken identity. They can also take us down unexpected sidetracks without losing the film's propulsive drive – the yarn told by Buddy Duress, as he recounts his first day out of jail, is a mini-masterpiece nested neatly inside the drama. Good Time's intoxicating effect is accentuated by the urgent score and by Sean Price Williams' gorgeously textured, neon-soaked 35mm cinematography. It's one of the most invigorating and surprising films you'll see this year, but at its core it retains a crucial emotional weight, as Connie leaves a number of altered and destroyed lives in his wake; a toll that he appears to be finally reckoning with in the film's haunting final scenes.

Sudden changes of tone are tricky things to pull off. Done well, they can have an exhilarating impact, but handled poorly they can leave viewer dumbfounded, thrown out of the movie and wondering what the hell just happened. Racer and the Jailbird will undoubtedly lose large chunks of its audience with its increasingly ludicrous plot twists, which occur with head-spinning velocity towards the film's end, but I think it had built up enough goodwill by that point to keep me on board even as the narrative spun out of control. The biggest thing Racer and the Jailbird has in its favour is sheer star power, with Matthias Schoenaerts (in his third feature with director Michaël R. Roskam) and Adèle Exarchopoulos sharing an instant, tangible chemistry that powers the film through its rougher patches. She's the racer, he's the jailbird, although she's under the impression that he's a successful car exporter when he first woos her at the racetrack. In fact, he and his gang are highly proficient bank robbers, with a couple of their heists being brilliantly choreographed by Roskam, including a superb sequence in which they take down an armoured car. The whole film is directed with a sleek confidence but the storytelling keeps getting in its own way. It's a thriller, a love story, a weepy melodrama, a parable about fate, and prison break movie; and while it might have been possible to navigate a less bumpy path through this variety of registers, Roskam and his co-screenwriters (Noé Debré and frequent Jacques Audiard collaborator Thomas Bidegain) can't find the right rhythm, and too much plot feels stockpiled into the climactic third. Your reaction to the film as the credits roll will depend on how much slack you're willing to give it, and I'd contend that there is a lot to appreciate here. Schoenaerts remains one of the most charismatic leading men in the business, able to project toughness and tenderness so beautifully, while the radiantly beautiful Exarchopoulos shines in her best role since Blue is the Warmest Colour; and I admire the way the film goes for broke, risking ridicule as it throws everything at the screen to see what sticks. You'll either respond to that kind of filmmaking or you won't, but I wasn't bored for a minute.

Spoor is kind of a serial killer thriller, I suppose, although it certainly doesn't follow the standard template of one. Dead bodies start turning up in the forest around the remote cabin where schoolteacher Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka) resides, and as all of the deceased were hunters, she suggests that the animals are taking their revenge. (There are even cutaways to suspicious-looking deer.) The truth is, unfortunately, rather more prosaic, but it takes us an awful long time to get there as Agnieszka Holland stuffs her film with sub-plots and secondary characters, making the main narrative bewilderingly hard to make sense of. At heart, Spoor seems to be making a statement on the absurdity and cruelty of hunting, and occasionally it is effective. The film's chapters are divided by pages from a hunting calendar, showing which animals are in season – “So you can kill it on February 28th but on March 1st you can't?” Duszejko complains as she marches into the police station to report a murder (of an animal). There are just too many absurd and disconnected elements to swallow here – such as Duszejko's inexplicable ability to see past traumas from certain characters' lives, or the hilariously inept payoff to one character's involvement in modernising the town's lighting system – and at over two hours, the film's lack of narrative thrust makes it feel unbelievably sluggish. Jolanta Dylewska and Rafal Paradowski's spectacular cinematography and Antoni Lazarkiewicz's impressive score is wasted on this film, as is a fine leading performance from Mandat-Grabka. She's an appealing presence and she gives it her all, but she's playing a character who just doesn't add up.

What do you expect from a movie about motorcycle gangs? Some racing? Maybe a chase sequence? Well, you won't get any of that in 1%. As far as I could tell, these bikers just use their vehicles to get from A to B, which doesn't make for particularly exciting viewing. Other things notably absent here include any details on how exactly the Copperheads Motorcycle Club makes the large amounts of cash that they need laundered – it's possibly drug-dealing, but maybe not – and there's no sign of the police aside from some tape strapped across the door of a house after a suburban shoot-out. Instead, 1% largely consists of various hairy men drinking, fighting and shouting at each other. Most of the shouting is done by the fearsome club president Knuck (Matt Nable) and Paddo (Ryan Corr), our sympathetic protagonist, who was the stand-in leader while Knuck was behind bars and now feels he can take the gang further than the old-fashioned and brutish kingpin, but Nable, who also wrote the screenplay, just doesn't give these characters enough shading to make them interesting, and his supporting characters are little more than thin plot devices, with Paddo's mentally challenged brother Skink (Josh McConville) constantly stumbling into trouble, and his Lady Macbeth-ish girlfriend Katrina (Abbey Lee) having little to do aside from glowering from the sidelines and telling her man that he should be top dog. To be fair, Abbey Lee does deliver a good glower, and her face is often the most compelling thing in the movie. As we've seen in Mad Max: Fury Road and The Neon Demon, this young woman has an innate movie star presence, which makes her stand out like a beacon amid Stephen McCallum's flat, televisual style of direction here.

LFF 2017 - Take Every Wave, Bobbi Jene, A Skin so Soft & Tonsler Park

I see too many documentaries that follow the standard format of talking heads telling a straightforward story, interspersed with montages of photos and archive footage, so I'll admit that my heart sank in the opening moments of Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton. When Hamilton began talking about his childhood, I wondered if I could really take a 118-minute portrait of a surfer told in such a mundane way, but against all odds, Rory Kennedy's film won me over. First of all, it was Hamilton himself who chipped away at my defences. He's undeniably a fascinating individual; a man with a huge ego and an insatiable need to be the best in his field. He has always lived slightly apart from the surfing mainstream, refusing to enter into competitions because he rejects the judgement of others and instead deciding to find his own path and seek out his own challenges. Other surfers interviewed here talk with predictable reverence about him, but Take Every Wave is no mere hagiography. The same obsessive drive to dominate that makes him a champion also makes him the kind of man who goes against the grain, alienating friends who were once part of his tight-knit team by dropping them for a more lucrative solo sponsorship deal, and causing friction among surfing purists with his constant innovations. Hamilton's approach to surfing has evolved through tow-surfing, in which a rider is led into a wave by a jet ski, to foilboard surfing, which involves a hydrofoil under the board that allows the surfer to glide above the water. This strand of the film, exploring Hamilton's considerable impact on the sport of surfing, is what elevates it into something more compelling than a standard biographical portrait. Of course, Take Every Wave has all of the spectacular footage that one would expect to find in a surfing documentary – and Hamilton's legendary conquering of the monster wave at Teahupoo in 2000 is indeed jaw-dropping – but Kennedy isn't willing to settle for spectacle. Her film is an illuminating study of recent surfing history, and a compelling look at what it means to be completely consumed by an ambition to be the greatest, and to dedicate your whole life to that goal. Now in his 50s, Laird Hamilton's body has been ravaged by injuries and arthritic joints, giving him a lopsided shuffling gait, but he is still going out every day in search of the biggest waves. If he can walk, he can surf.

An remarkable physical performance is at the heart of Bobbi Jene too. We are first introduced to the dancer Bobbi Jene Smith as she practices naked in a studio, and nakedness – both physical and emotional – becomes a central theme in this strikingly intimate film. Her first question to a colleague after demonstrating a new dance she has choreographed is whether she should perform it naked or not when the time comes to present it to an audience, and it seems that revealing herself completely through her dancing is the key to her art. When she talks about dancing she talks about feeling the need to come or to vomit, as if dancing allows her to purge something from within herself, a full-bodied approach that she developed under the tutelage of Ohad Naharin during her ten years at the Batsheva dance company in Israel. Bobbi Jene captures her at a pivotal moment in her life, having just turned 30 and feeling that it's time to return to the US and to strike out on her own as an independent choreographer. This pursuit is complicated by the fact that she has just fallen in love, with 20 year-old Israeli dancer Or Schraiber, and so Elvira Lind's film tells two stories, with the director attempting to shape them both into a single compelling narrative. Unfortunately, I was much more interested in one of these stories than the other; in fact, I could have used a lot more footage of Bobbi developing her performance, although we do get some intriguing insights, such as the way she presses herself against walls to develop a level of resistance in her performance, or the complete lack of self-consciousness or embarrassment in her work as she masturbates with a sandbag. (This frankness is interestingly contrasted with her mother's awkwardness at watching her perform.) The back-and-forth with Or, as he prevaricates over moving to America with her, just doesn't hold the same intrigue, and the attempt to include both stories often leaves Lind's film feeling shallow and shapeless. Still, Bobbi Jene herself is a engaging, down-to-earth character who is a pleasure to spend time with, and there's something inspiring and moving in watching the physical lengths she'll go to just to try and communicate something through her art. I'd love to see her performing live.

Denis Côté's A Skin so Soft allows us to spend time in the company of half-a-dozen Canadian bodybuilders. Sometimes we watch them doing the things that you'd expect bodybuilders to do – working out, posing in front of a mirror – but often we just watch them do the same everyday things as anyone else. We see them playing with their kids, eating their cereal, watching TV. Côté maintains a certain objective distance as he observes these strangely sculpted creatures in their domestic lives, and it's hard to know what exactly we're supposed to take from these nicely composed but largely uninteresting scenes. A few moments stand out, notably a shot of one muscleman wolfing down his breakfast while he watches something on his laptop, when he suddenly, inexplicably, starts to cry; and there are amusing moments too, like one subject's fumbling attempts to record an aggressive pre-competition message for a team of rival bodybuilders. But we never really get to know much about these men and I found my interest waning a little as the film moved into its final third, although Côté does shift gears late on when all six of these hitherto unconnected men come together for some kind of weekend camping retreat. This part of the film, like a couple of others, left me wondering how much of what we're seeing in the film is pure documentary, and how much has been carefully crafted by the director. That's just one of the nagging questions that this curious project left me with.

In Tonsler Park, the medium dictates the form. On November 8th 2016, Kevin Jerome Everson took his 16mm camera to a number of polling stations around Charlottesville, Virginia and he captured a reel's worth of footage, with the finished film consisting of these single takes. The camera is mostly a static observer, pointed at one of the volunteers or election officials as they sign in voters, hand out ballots, answer questions. Often the image becomes obscured as somebody steps between us and the subject of the camera's gaze, but Everson never shifts for a better angle. He simply invites us to sit patiently and watch the workings of democracy for eighty minutes; to realise that while Clinton and Trump ate up every second of media time, it's these ordinary people doing their civic duty who really matter in an election. It's a simple film, but our own knowledge of what happened in that election and what happened over the subsequent year adds an inescapable poignancy and gravity to its images. Almost all of the volunteers and voters that we see in the film are black, and few could have expected that they would be waking up the following morning to news of a Trump victory; fewer still would have imagined that torch-bearing Nazis would be marching on their own streets within the space of a year, and would receive tacit Presidential endorsement as they did so. In a year when all norms and values in American politics seem to have collapsed, a film like Tonsler Park feels particularly valuable.

Commentary Tracks - The Manchurian Candidate

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) with director John Frankenheimer

On the opening scene
This scene that we're looking at here was shot day for night in Franklin Canyon, Los Angeles, and this was supposed to be Korea. The reason we shot it day for night was that we wanted to do the titles over this. Now in one of the previews we actually tried to do the titles over this scene and the subsequent scene, which is about to come up, and the audience was terribly confused, they just didn't have the faintest idea what happened. So the next night we brought the workprint up to San Francisco, which is where we were, and we previewed it with no titles over all this, and it suddenly became very clear to the audience what was happening. With titles over all this scene here, you didn't really know that the patrol was being captured, and if you didn't know that the patrol was being captured and was subsequently being taken to Manchuria, you had no idea what this movie was about.

On casting Frank Sinatra
George [Axelrod] had heard that Frank Sinatra wanted to do this picture. The next day George called Sinatra and he did have a tremendous interest in it. We went down to see Sinatra in Florida where he was singing at the Fontainebleau Hotel, and on the way down George had said to me, “Look, the one thing he must not do is get into any kind of prolonged discussion, anything that would make him think that he didn't want to do this movie.” I said, “Don't worry about it.” So we arrived and knocked on Sinatra's door. He opened it and there was this great smile on his face, and he said, “God, I just can't wait to do your movie.” So we knew that anything we said from then on would hurt us, and we said nothing practically, except how thrilled we were to be there, and we went back the next day and said, “We've got Frank.” And that got the whole project together.

On the nightmare/brainwashing sequence
Now this dream sequence, that's coming up here, presented many, many problems, because it's through this dream and the James Edwards character's dream that you learn what happened to these men. What I had to do here was really show the brainwashing. The idea for this came right out of Richard Condon's book, which stated that the men thought they were at a garden club party in a hotel in New Jersey. The idea was to go 360 degrees around here, and the way we did that, to get this feeling that they're in the Manchurian amphitheatre, was that this part of the stage was on a railroad track with the front of the hotel lobby, which was on the same railroad track. As the camera panned off the hotel lobby and was going around the room, the stagehands just pushed the other set right into place and the actors ran around from one set and jumped into the other. Then this was a completely different set here, the Manchurian amphitheatre. We filmed this scene with about six different combinations. We filmed it with the soldiers on the New Jersey stage with the woman and with the Chinese psychiatrist; we filmed it in the Manchurian amphitheatre with the Chinese psychiatrist and with the woman; with the woman with the dignitaries, and the woman with the women; with the Chinese psychiatrist with the dignitaries and the Chinese psychiatrist with the women. So the combinations were endless and we put it all together in the editing room, although we had no idea how we were going to edit it when we shot it. That we being I, really.

On the karate fight
Now this next scene, this karate fight, was a scene that Frank Sinatra looked forward to doing from the moment that he read the script. He practised for it, he got himself an artificial hand, and we staged it and shot it really fairly quickly. It was the first big karate fight ever done on film, to the best of my knowledge. The problem is that Henry Silva, the actor whom we had playing Chunjin, was actually left-handed and we couldn't stage the fight with him being left-handed, so we had to make him do everything from the opposite side, which was a bit of a problem. It's one of the first times, as I say, that this had been done, and it got criticised at the time for being very brutal. Looking at it today, it's hardly anything compared to what you'd see even in a family movie.

On watching the film abroad
About three years after I made this movie I was in Europe, filming The Train, and I had some time off from that picture and I was asked to go and do publicity for another movie I'd made called Seven Days in May. One of the stops was Athens, and I had never been to Greece before. Anyway, I got to the hotel and the United Artists representative said to me, “You must come and see your movie The Manchurian Candidate. It's playing at this huge amphitheatre right in the middle of Athens, way up on a hill. You get up there and you see all of Athens below you, there are five thousand people that come to every showing of the movie, and you will just be overwhelmed by it. So indeed I went to the movie, I went into this amphitheatre, and it was huge, it was all the things that the guy said it was. I was sitting way down at the bottom and I could see the whole screen, and up at the top – way, way up – was the projection booth, separated from where I was by about 200 steps. I was also a very heavy smoker at the time, which has something to do with this story. As the film was playing there came a time when the reels changed, and this movie was on what we call 'double reels'. It came time for this section of the movie to come up, and this I believe it reel four. Suddenly, instead of this whole section of the movie, on comes reel five! In other words, this section that you're looking at now – he skipped! Well, I was hysterical. I ran out of my seat, I grabbed the Greek interpreter with me, and we ran up 200 steps to the projection booth, wildly out of breath but so obsessed and driven by this. I said, “Tell him that he skipped reel four!” The man is saying this in Greek and the projectionists starts to laugh. He says something back, and I said, “What's he laughing about? What did he say?” He said, “He always skips reel four. He feels that the picture plays much better without reel four, that reel four doesn't really make any sense, and this way he gets another showing.” Well, I don't know what to tell you. I was just so shocked! And that's what they did every night!

On Raymond walking into the lake
Now in the scene you're about to see, where he goes outside and walks into Central Park, it was probably the coldest day that New York had had in thirty years. We had to film this shot of Laurence Harvey going into the lake and the ice on the lake was about a foot thick. Starting at five o'clock in the morning we had bulldozers and shovels trying to cut holes in that ice, and he went in on take one. It was absolutely amazing, he just kept going. It was so cold we had one of these cameras freeze up, but he kept going, he went into the water. He was staying at the Plaza Hotel, so he went back, soaking wet, covered with towels and so forth, and people were looking at him going into his room; “Oh my God, that poor man has had an accident.” Twenty minutes later he came out of his room dressed as a priest for another scene in this movie, it was unbelievable, people couldn't understand what this man was doing in this hotel. But this was unbelievably cold, as you're about to see, but he went in there. This was the shot, we had three cameras on this thing, and there it is. You have no idea how cold that it, just look how thick that ice is.

On the murder of Senator Jordan and his daughter
This scene presented a tremendous challenge to me. In other words, I've got so many bodies in this movie, it became a tremendous challenge to figure out how to get rid of them all, how to kill them. I didn't want to see blood all over the place, so I thought, this is the perfect guy, this is the good man, the pure man, and I thought I'd go over-the-top and shoot him through the milk and see how that all worked, see if I could get away with it. Again, it's a low angle on Raymond, showing the American eagle, the whole thing. If you take it shot by shot it's a little bit over the top. And this [killing Jocelyn] had to be quick. This next thing had to be quick and, not disgusting, but terribly final. Again, that's an 18mm lens with those bodies big in the foreground.

On Sinatra's first take
It's important to know that Frank Sinatra was a man who really was better on the first take. It wasn't a question of the fact that he would only do one take, as rumour has it sometimes, he was just better on the first take. This scene coming up is his most dramatic scene in the picture, and he had great anxiety about doing it. On his close-up, which you'll see, he did it magnificently on take one. When we looked at the daily rushes the next day, Frank Sinatra was out of focus and his Major Leaves were in focus. I was devastated, it's the longest walk I have ever taken, from the projection room to Frank Sinatra's dressing room, to tell him this. He was in tears because he knew how good he'd been in the scene. He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Well, we're going to have to re-shoot.” The first time we went to re-shoot it Frank got laryngitis, he was so nervous about having to re-do it. We couldn't shoot. We scheduled a re-shoot again, we did it, it wasn't good. We shot it again, we did like ten takes, it was never good. This is the shot right here. And I didn't know what to do. I was alone in the cutting room putting this movie together, I tried all of the other stuff and finally I said, to hell with it, put the out-of-focus shot in. A lot of people including the editor argued vociferously not to do it, but I said, “His performance is much better in this shot. Put it in.” Well, I can't tell you the great reviews I got as being a genius to use the brainwashed man's point of view of this out-of-focus man. Everybody thought it was Larry Harvey's point of view, everybody thought that this was on purpose, and in reality it was the assistant cameraman's fault.

Bits and Pieces

I think the important thing to remember about this movie is that it was turned down by every studio in Hollywood.

David Amram, who does the music for this movie, had done some television for me, and had done another movie for me called The Young Savages. The only other movie to the best of my knowledge that he did was Kazan's movie Splendour in the Grass. He's basically a classical composer.

As you watch this movie just be aware of the fact that a lot of the scenes were shot with wide-angle lenses in real locations. It's a style that I had developed in live television and had used to a greater or lesser degree in The Young Savages, The Birdman of Alcatraz and All Fall Down, the movies I had done before this. But really, in this film I did it almost continually. 

Incidentally, this whole business of hydrangeas, I said to George Axelrod, “Look George, we have to have a whole speech here that's going to enable me to get this camera to go 360 degrees around this room, and I need a lot of words.” He asked what I wanted the speech to be about and I said, “Well, she's talking about hydrangeas so obviously the speech has to be about hydrangeas.” He said, “Dear boy, I know nothing about hydrangeas. However, you shall have your speech!” So what he did was he got a seed catalogue and he copied the seed catalogue word-for-word, and that's what we have here. 

Here's an interesting fact about this actor here, Joe Adams. This was one of the first instances where a black actor or an African-American actor was cast in a part that specifically didn't say that the character was black. We weren't trying to win any great causes, it's just that we decided we wanted to do that.

You know, a lot of things have been said about this movie, but the thing that I really care about is that it was the first movie to take on Senator McCarthy. Don't forget this movie was made very soon after McCarthy, and the whole blacklist was still a factor in making movies and still a factor in everybody's life in showbusiness.

Now this is the black guy's version of the same dream, his dream of the same event. Now the idea was to have the whole audience be black women, because that's the way he would dream it, we thought. If you look carefully in the background there's a white bellboy – see it? Nobody ever picked that up, incidentally. It was my own private joke, I guess you'd say. Throwing the blood on Stalin was just an idea I had while we were shooting the scene.

Angela Lansbury, in my previous picture All Fall Down, had played Warren Beatty and Brandon deWilde's mother, and I wanted her very badly for this movie. Frank Sinatra had wanted Lucille Ball and we had a discussion about it, and I must say Sinatra was very gracious. He didn't have to, but he put a lot of faith in me and let me cast whoever I wanted, and when I showed him All Fall Down it was just a cinch that Angela should play the mother. The funny thing about it is, when she did this she was only two years older than Laurence Harvey.

Now the trick here was, how does Sinatra find Laurence Harvey? We couldn't come up with it. Finally one day I said to George Axelrod, “Foreign Correspondent,” and we both knew exactly what was meant by that. In Foreign Correspondent, Joel McCrea finds where the Nazis are in this mass of windmills because all the windmills are going in one direction, except for the one where the spy's radio is, which is going in the other direction because it's electrically powered. Today they call such a thing an homage, but in those days I'd call it a rip-off. I have to admit to the fact that I ripped off Hitchcock here because all the lights dim, except for one, Raymond Shaw's light does not dim and that's how Sinatra finds out where he is.

Final Thoughts
Like most scenes in this picture, Frank shot that one in one take. We shot the whole picture in 41 days, and it was probably one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life.

God's Own Country

The first time we see Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor) in God's Own Country, he's hunched over the toilet bowl, throwing up the previous night's booze. This, we soon learn, is not an unusual occurrence. Ever since his father (Ian Hart) suffered a debilitating stroke, Johnny has been running the family’s farm almost single-handed, and his few hours of freedom are spent drinking himself into oblivion and picking up men for fleeting sexual encounters. When one of them suggests meeting up for a drink some time and furthering their relationship, Johnny scoffs and drives away. There’s no emotional connection in these meetings for him. They’re simply a form of release.

Johnny is clearly a young man in need of a release. His body is coiled and hunched, and he trudges through the fields scowling, with his head down. Josh O'Connor's withdrawn but wonderfully physical performance expresses all of his resentment, frustration and repression through the way he moves, and one of the joys of watching God's Own Country is seeing him unfurl and grow over the course of the movie, until he appears to be an entirely different person, yet recognisably the same.

The catalyst for this transformation is Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a migrant worker hired for a week to help lighten Johnny's burden. Johnny reacts to this outsider with suspicion – dismissing the Romanian as a “gypsy” - but when they spend a few nights together alone on the mountain, where they have been sent to mend a fence and birth the lambs, the relationship between them gradually shifts into a quiet tolerance, an easy companionship, and then a sudden explosion of passion.

Comparisons between God's Own Country and Brokeback Mountain are as prevalent as they are reductive, and I don't wish to belabour the point, but as I watched Francis Lee's film I was put in mind of that story – not the 2005 adaptation, as such, but the original short story by Annie Proulx. “The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey,” she writes, “of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap.” As admirable as it was, Ang Lee's production could never come close to capturing such an evocative sense of post-coital intimacy, but Francis Lee invests his film with a wonderful tactility and earthiness. Johnny and Gheorghe's first coupling, as they grapple in the mud, feels raw and urgent, but it's the more tender touches that fix themselves in the memory. Johnny's first instinct is to reach for Gheorghe's cock, but Gheorghe repeatedly stops him and instead brings up his hand to caress his cheek, encouraging him to let down his guard and give in to his emotions. The moment works beautifully because Lee has already allowed us to see  Gheorghe's nurturing instinct as we watched him at work, whether he's tending to a newborn lamb or offering Johnny his gloves as they build a stone wall. Lee uses work as an expression of character.

The two leads are wonderful together, but it's a perfect ensemble. Ian Hart is stoic and moving as the gruff patriarch whose power has been diminished by a series of strokes, while Gemma Jones gives a brilliantly subtle display as the grandmother who sees and understands more than she lets on. Both actors have a moment in which they reveal hitherto concealed emotions, and both of these moments are underplayed to heart-wrenching effect. This is Francis Lee's feature debut but he handles it with unerring confidence and skill. He began his career in front of the camera and he clearly knows how to work wonders with actors, just as he clearly understands this land and the lives that are lived upon it. God's Own Country may follow some conventions of the romantic drama, but every scene is invested with a sense of authenticity and passion that ensured I spent much of the final third yearning for a Hollywood ending to emerge in the midst of the Yorkshire Dales, having been drawn so completely into the lives of these people.

Detroit

The riots that exploded in Detroit in July 1967 left 43 people dead, thousands injured and incarcerated, and with large chunks of the city reduced to smouldering ruins. When approaching events this vast and complex, which story do you choose to tell? Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal begin their new film Detroit by taking a macro view. The film opens with a montage based on Jacob Lawrence's Migration series of paintings, explaining the movement of black people from the south to the north in search of work, and how racial tensions subsequently developed in cities such as this.

It's a surprisingly lyrical opening for a film distinguished by the blunt force of its violence and for its escalating tension, which is achieved through the sharp editing of William Goldenberg and Harry Yoon, and Barry Ackroyd's nervy, responsive cinematography; but Bigelow isn't completely averse to finding grace notes amid the violence. When Larry Reed (Algee Smith), the lead singer of up-and-coming R&B group The Dramatics, learns that the concert they were set to perform in has been cancelled on police advice, just before they go on stage, he walks out onto the stage anyway. Picking up the microphone, he sings a solo number, his voice echoing around the now-empty auditorium, and then the camera catches the mixture of emotions on his face as he imagines doing that in front of an audience that is now running home through the battle-scarred streets. He savours the moment, and so should we, because such tender interludes are in short supply as the film progresses.

Bigelow does a good job of showing us how the riot was sparked by a police raid on an unlicensed club while simultaneously introducing us to the key players. As Larry and his bandmates run to the sanctuary of the Algiers Motel, we meet Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a quiet, conscientious security guard who we see drinking coffee with the National Guard when shots are heard from the direction from Algiers. Among the first responders to the scene are three policemen – Krauss (Will Poulter), Demens (Jack Reynor) and Flynn (Ben O’Toole) – who had been introduced earlier in the film through Kraus shooting a fleeing looter in the back, the groceries under his arms spilling onto the street as he ran for his life. That man ended up dying a couple of blocks away under a car. Krauss was informed that he'd face a murder charge, and then he walked out of the police station and headed for the Algiers.

Although the title Detroit suggests an overview of the riots that engulfed the city, the filmmakers are primarily interested in what happened at the Algiers. For the whole middle section of the film we rarely venture outside this building. The police and the National Guard move in, pull the residents out into the hallway (five black men and two young white women who had been partying with them) and subject them to a long night of brutal physical and psychological abuse aimed at revealing the whereabouts of a sniper rifle that we already know doesn't exist. Led by Krauss, the police strike the men with their fists, boots and the butts of their rifles, baiting them into a response – at one point, Flynn offers one of them his knife, encouraging him to defend himself. The torture escalates until they begin taking individuals into separate rooms and firing shots to make the others believe that they are going to execute suspects in cold blood if one of them doesn't give up the information they want.

It's hard to fault Bigelow's staging of this sequence. She gets in tight to the characters, allowing us to feel their overwhelming fear and confusion, making us see the impact of every blow administered by the leering cops. The sequence is claustrophobic, repulsive and agonising; it must last for something like an hour of screen time but it feels twice that. Her depiction is entirely convincing but ultimately that's all it feels like – a depiction. There's little to be gleaned from watching this aside from how appalling it all is, and Boal's screenplay fails to give us any insight into the characters' actions or, in some cases, their inaction. The figures who seemed to be set up as the ostensible leads are only given a single note to play. Krauss is very much the villain of the piece, and while Poulter relishes his scene-stealing opportunity, his work has little shading (I was much more intrigued by the casual, understated sadism of O'Toole's Flynn), while Boyega can't do much with such a passive character.

We see Boyega two more times after the motel ordeal is finally over; once when Dismukis is brought in and interrogated as a suspect, and later at the trial when the officers are cleared of all charges. We are told in the closing text that he faced death threats following his involvement in the Algiers incident, but the trial eats up so much of the film's muddled final third he, like many of the characters, feels thrown away. The only one whose story we continue to follow is Larry Reed, who finds he can no longer make music for white audiences to enjoy and gravitates towards the church, where he can sing with his own people. It's the closest thing the film has to a satisfying character arc, but it doesn't feel like enough. Bigelow and Boal have chosen to focus on exploring one incident in excruciatingly close detail, but in doing so it feels like they have lost sight of the bigger picture.