Reel youth.

Just today I watched Xavier Dolan’s Cannes prize winner, Mommy, a film praised to high heavens by letterboxd folks and the best actress in the game right now, Jessica Chastain.

Completely blown away by @XDolan. His film, MOMMY was so impressive

— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) May 22, 2014

Yea. Since May, Chastain has signed onto Dolan’s English language debut, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. My expectations were decently high, not only because of praise, but by Dolan himself. He is a twenty-five year old filmmaker, already with five features in the bag, and no signs of really stopping. Usually his films touch on his homosexuality, or a relationship with mothers. Mommy, to me at least, was basically Dolan’s debut, I Killed My Mother, with the role of the teenager instead suffering from ADHD instead of repressed homosexuality.

Still, it’s mighty impressive that Dolan has made films that maintain both quality and quantity at his young age. Though he’s yet to really make a masterpiece in my eyes, I think he’s definitely got what it takes. After all, it took cult director Wes Anderson eight tries to finally make a really great film (last year’s Grand Budapest). Dolan’s got his style down pat- all his films are distinctly his.

What he is doing for film is a lot more important than the films himself. Dolan made his first (and best) I Killed My Mother when he was only 18 years old. That’s impressive. I don’t believe he has any formal education in filmmaking, either. I think many film loving youth will follow in his footsteps. Dolan’s got something to say, and I’m sure in a few years we’ll see many debuts from teenagers much like Dolan’s.

Don’t believe me? Consider 1991’s hood masterpiece Boyz N the Hood, from director John Singleton. His debut drama was so powerful and inspirational, that he nabbed a Best Director nomination (still the youngest ever), and a spot in the National Film Registry. Look at the rest of the nineties. Because of Boyz N the Hood, we’ve got Juice, South Central, Menace II Society, and the Wayan Brothers’ Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.

The second youngest Best Director nominee? Orson Welles, for Citizen Kane. My point is not an argument, but an observation: Some of the best and most influential films of all time come from the young ones. It’s hard to say how influential or classic Mommy will be in five or ten years, but I won’t be surprised if it is both.

Interstellar (2014) is out of this world.

Christopher Nolan is one of today’s best working directors. Works like Inception, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Memento do affirm his modern blockbuster-experimental visonary status. With his latest work, Interstellar, Nolan pushes the envelope of his directoral abilities to the max. Even if his ambition is beyond his skill, the attempt is no doubt incredible.

I saw Interstellar last Tuesday (!) to take maximum advantage of Paramount’s early release, which also meant seeing the movie on 35 mm film stock. To say it was an incredible experience would be an understatement. To hear the soft hum of the projector with Hans Zimmer’s will-be influential score and Nolan’s images was special. To me, it affirmed why I went to the movies: to lose myself in characters in a world I would inhabit with them, even if it would only be for a couple of hours.

What is this world of Interstellar? It’s not pleasant, that’s for sure. Even though I am an Iowan, I would not like to live in a world where corn was the only grain available to ear. Nor would I fancy life with random dust-bowls interrupting healthy living. Actually, getting entranced into Nolan’s Earth was a gift and a curse. It’s a gift because he beautifully realizes the environment he wants his story to inhabit, but a curse because actually being there would be pretty dumpy.

Matthew McConaughey is Cooper, an engineer turned farmer due to the current food crises. He worries for the future of his kids, Tom and Murph, because Tom’s future has him set for being a farmer and Murph because of her ‘ghost’. It’s a concept that needs to be seen in the film to understand. This plot device, the ‘ghost’, requires a lot of suspension of disbelief for the film to hold. I went with it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if you don’t.

Through this ‘ghost’, Cooper is offered a gig piloting a spacecraft to explore potentially inhabitable worlds to save mankind. No pressure, right? Let’s say you don’t ride with the idea of a ‘ghost’. No matter. When Coop’s spacecraft counts down, this is when the film takes off, pun 100% intended. The visuals from this point onward are beautifully realized. Reading into the film’s production, it comes as no surprise that the film uses minimal CGI. It’s a Nolan trademark. With Hoyte Von Hoytema’s camerawork (he lensed the sci-fi classic Her), space looks amazing. Many times, the movie is absolutely silent, to reflect space’s infinite quiet. Maybe I was disrupting my audience, but many shots had me whispering “Wow”.

To explain many of the films flaws would require digging into the plot, which I will not do. As this is a review, I say “see it”! Go see Interstellar on film if you can too. The grain, the pops, and the flickers all make it 100% cinematic. As for the performances? McConaughey handles everyman quite well, Anne Hathaway is brave and dynamic, and Jessica Chastain is strong, as usual (Maybe I’m bias, but I feel she was incredibly under-utilized. She very well is my favorite actress working today; it’s unfortunate she wasn’t given more to do in the film).

A Most anticipated film and its big buzz

The 87th Academy Awards, celebrating the best films of 2014, will be held on February 22nd of next year. That’s less than two months after one of the year’s biggest award contenders is due to drop: J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, a crime saga starring up-and-comer Oscar Isaac and Zero Dark Thirty‘s Jessica Chastain.

Until today, there was little known about the film. No release date was official, and the only thing we (movie-lovers) knew for certain was that the movie was guaranteed to be in the Oscar prowl. In fact, the three big selling points for the film are Oscar bridesmaids- writer/director J.C. Chandor, an original screenplay nominee in 2011, Oscar Isaac, unfairly snubbed for last year’s incredible Inside Llewyn Davis, and two-time nominee Jessica Chastain, who shoulda won the Best Actress prize for her incredible work in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty.

I have a good feeling the film will be highly prophetic, that it will foretell this year’s award season marvelously well. This year’s Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor race look jam-packed, fortunate for many movie lovers. In my eyes, no film this year will probably pass Boyhood, but there’s a lot to look forward on the big screen and the Dolby Stage. There’s Birdman by Alejandro González Iñárritu (aka Alphabet Soup), following a former superhero actor trying for a stage comeback, there’s Foxcatcher, starring Steve Carrell as John Dupont, billionaire wrestling sponsor and schizophrenic, and there’s Inherent Vice by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Okay, back to the film. New Year’s Eve can’t come soon enough… wait, I don’t live in New York or Los Angeles. Whatever. Whenever the film comes to Cedar Rapids, that Friday can’t come sooner. Personally, I’m a sucker for crime good crime films. Gimme anything on the level of The Godfather or Once Upon a Time in America or GoodFellas or even The Sopranos (I know that’s TV, but it’s quite good). We, film lovers, haven’t gotten a good crime film in a long time, and I sincerely hope A Most Violent Year changes all that.

Both of the lead actors, Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, are incredibly talented, both delivering 10/10 performances in 10/10 films before (Isaac: Inside Llewyn Davis, Chastain: Zero Dark Thirty and The Tree of Life). These two were both classmates at Juliard, and good friends from before filming. As a married couple in the film, I do hope the real life chemistry floats off-screen. And outside of this thriller, both of them have hot sci-fi projects lined up: Isaac is filming Star Wars: Eps. VII and Chastain is third-billed in the McConaughey led Insterstellar, from the director of Inception and also Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

Director J.C. Chandor is also a big up-and-coming name. His debut, the 2011 financial crisis flick, Margin Call, nabbed Chandor an Oscar nomination for the speedy smart script. In 2013, he avoided a sophomore slump with All is Lost, with an all-star cast led by the one and only Robert Redford. No really, Robert Redford was the only person on screen in the lost-at-sea drama. Any director that can make a near-silent film with one person on-screen and make it interesting deserves heaps of praise. Third time is the charm, and A Most Violent Year looks to be the film to break him big. Will it? We’ll just have to wait and see. Impatiently.

(trailer below for those curious) (WARNING: THIS IS BADASS)