Movie reviews: The Place Beyond the Pines
The movie opens with Luke discovering that a one-night stand with Romina (Eva Mendes) during his last visit to Schenectady has resulted in a baby boy; determined to do the right thing, Luke decides to stick around and help raise the boy, despite the fact that Romina is in a steady, loving relationship with Kofi (Mahershala Ali). When he finds that a decent wage is hard to come by working as a mechanic, Luke turns to armed robbery, a decision that puts him on a collision case with ambitious young cop Avery (Bradley Cooper). Writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s film opens up with a neo-noir storyline, but the movie is more interested in exploring the far-reaching consequences of Luke and Avery’s actions. The deeds men do percolate down through the generations here, with the story broadening out to incorporate the men’s respective sons (played by Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan, the latter turning in a star-making performance) and the way in which their lives are shaped by their fathers’ actions. The result is a powerful tale cleverly told as Cianfrance allows the kinetic energy of the opening act to mellow into a more philosophical exploration of both the nature of justice and the audience’s expectations of a genre movie.
Set in a post-apocalyptic future on an Earth devastated by nuclear war, Oblivion (12A) stars Tom Cruise as Jack Harper, a maintenance operative charged, along with telecommunications officer Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), with the smooth running of the various machines that purify water for the human population that has long since transferred to one of Saturn’s moons. When a spaceship crash-lands in their sector, however, Jack is shocked to discover that the sole survivor is a woman, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), who has haunted his dreams — and stunned to discover that she comes from the past. Directed by Joseph Kosinski, Oblivion is a slickly produced movie that offers an inventive, fresh sci-fi iconography for its first half with an unsettling domestic arrangement. Naturally, Julia usurps Victoria in Jack’s affections when she arrives, but here the movie suffers something of a setback, as Kurylenko has none of Riseborough’s presence, craft and sense of mischief. At roughly the same time the story begins to develop plot-holes at an alarming rate, with Kosinski, who co-adapted the screenplay from his own comic book, compensating for the increasingly ludicrous twists by paying homage to a plethora of sci-fi classics. It all looks fabulous, and Cruise and Riseborough are very watchable, but the final act sags badly under the weight of the unnecessarily convoluted plot.
