Movie reviews: Ex Machina, A Most Violent Year, The Gambler
Identifying the essence of what it means to be human is a staple of the sci-fi genre, a philosophical question that becomes ever more pressing the more advances are made in the realm of computer-generated artificial intelligence.
As opens, computer programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is delighted to win a competition to spend a week with his boss, the legendary coding genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the man behind the internet search engine Bluebook.
When Caleb arrives at Nathan’s remote mountain retreat, however, he discovers that he is expected to play his part in an unusual experiment.
Nathan has taken robotics and artificial intelligence onto a whole new level, and requires Caleb to take part in a variation on the Turing test, interacting with the robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) to discover if her apparently human quality of consciousness is genuine or simply a very clever simulation.
Written and directed by Alex Garland, Ex Machina develops into a tense, thoughtful thriller as a kind of three-cornered game of cat-and-mouse.
Caleb may well be an affable, likeable geek, but his admiration for Nathan doesn’t blind him to the possibility that Nathan’s motives are not necessarily pure; at the same time, Caleb can’t be certain that his burgeoning relationship with Ava, which is monitored at all times on CCTV, isn’t being played out according to a pre-programmed script.
Isaac is deliciously creepy as the ambiguous Nathan, and Gleeson burnishes his impressive CV with yet another excellent performance, but it’s Vikander who steals the show by shouldering the burden of a very difficult role, that of playing a character who is very nearly human.
Kudos too to Garland, whose storyline involving Ava’s gradual empowerment gives the genre’s traditional riff on the fear of technology an anti-patriarchal spin.
It’s a good week for fans of Oscar Isaac, who also stars in , which is set in New York in 1981.
Ambitious businessman Abel Morales (Isaac) has plans to expand his oil trucking empire by purchasing a riverside tract of land that will enable him to cut out his shipping middlemen, but Abel’s business is being attacked — literally, and violently — by his competitors.
With the police standing idly by, and corrupt politicians unwilling to help, Abel is forced into taking a stand — but can this ‘honourable man’ countenance stooping to the level of his enemies?
Written and directed by JC Chandor, A Most Violent Year is the movie that The Godfather III should have been — it’s no coincidence, surely, that Oscar Isaac here conveys the physical and emotional intensity of a young Al Pacino — despite the fact that it can be characterised as an ‘anti-gangster’ flick.
Determined to succeed in a cut-throat world, but by legitimate means, Abel finds himself thwarted at every turn by a political and legal system that treats Abel and his wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) — a second-generation immigrant and the daughter of ‘a corner-store Brooklyn gangster’, respectively — as outsiders unworthy of the same respect accorded their business rivals.
A slow-burning drama that derives much its narrative power from the drip-feed rise in tension throughout, the story is a densely layered tale that benefits hugely from excellent performances from Isaac and Chastain as the embattled couple, with strong support coming from David Oyelowo, Albert Brooks and Alessandro Nivola.
stars Mark Wahlberg as Jim Bennett, an English Literary professor with a serious addiction, not least because Jim is ‘the kind of guy that likes to lose.’
Owing a quarter of a million dollars to a variety of loan sharks, Jim has a week to make good on his debts — although Jim’s biggest problem appears to be that he doesn’t care if he lives or dies.
Rupert Wyatt’s drama isn’t a conventional tale of a gambler scrabbling around to make one big score to clear his slate: laced with references to Shakespeare and Albert Camus, it’s a meditation on the vagaries of human nature in general, and an investigation into why Bennett, in particular, is so obsessed with putting himself in no-win situations.
Wahlberg puts in a gripping performance as Bennett, which is all the more impressive given that the character, despite his compulsive behaviour, seems to drift through his life detached from the world at large.
William Monahan’s script allows unusually long and emotionally complex scenes the time and space to breathe, which in turn gives a strong supporting cast — especially Jessica Lange, John Goodman and Michael Kenneth Williams — the opportunity to give Bennett’s existential crisis the context it deserves.
