Pure Cinema that is agonizingly suspenseful. <em>All is Lost</em> is the Robert Redford lost at sea film, the beginning shot is of his sailing boat getting a shredding by a metal cargo container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Redford, at 77, has a crucial opening voiceover monologue to give us foreboding, but has almost no dialogue the rest of the way. But the miraculousness of his performance is how we can read the decision-making on his face the whole way. It’s as much a tribute to Redford’s rugged, weary performance as it is to the cinematographer Frank DeMarco and writer-director J.C. Chandor whom focus on Redford during his life-and-death ordeal.

This is truly a visceral film that relies on natural elements, that tells its story solely on visuals without the intrusion of dialogue (this is the essence of Pure Cinema). I will now bring up the unusual topic of Sound Design by Steve Boeddeker, which is outstanding. Few films have ever captured the tactile essence of rough seas and tumultuous weather like this film. You can hear every whisk of wind, or thrash of weather hitting the cabin. It’s maybe every two or three years that I bother mentioning Sound Design in a review.

As his yacht floods slowly, Redford finds solutions that surprisingly work. Glue and burlap fill up a hole, a device pumps out water, and Redford climbs the mast to fix a radio antennae – the fall could kill him like so many other things. What makes <em>All is Lost</em> such a gasping experience is how his patchwork disintegrates away in the face of extreme Mother Nature especially when the yacht helplessly sails into a storm. From that point on, after the boat holds up in mere shambles, food is in short supply and supplies are squandered, to live through anymore to me would be punishing. Redford has the will to survive, so he does go on, continuously to face residual punishment.

Survival films are among my favorite unofficial genres, but this one is near the top for its canny matter-of-fact shooting style, its cruel twists of fate, the cap of limited words spoken, the fury of a very realistic storm – the scenery, the sounds, and that storm is pedigree for big-screen cinema! There have been underrated Redford performances through his career (“Out of Africa,” “The Natural,” “Downhill Racer,” “The Candidate” was just about his best) but this is his career capper, his finest performance. Only when the worse of the worse happens – and a lot of bad things happen to Redford’s unnamed character – do we see a subtle light into his soul. To see Redford in <em>All is Lost</em> is to be captivated by a higher sense of being.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s first debut movie remains one of the best he ever made. He’s electric, riled and rebellious, maturing before our eyes and replete with self-preservation.

As Tobias Wolff, the young DiCaprio is a juvenile delinquent having trouble adjusting to different schools and adjusting to mother Ellen Barkin’s bad decision-making. Following multiple relocations throughout the country, they end up in a town called Concrete outside of Seattle, Washington circa 1957. Here we are absorbed by a film that understands the culture and air of life of the 1950’s… better than most 1950’s movies themselves.

As a mother in need of a reliable man, Barkin chooses martinet and temper tantrum addled Robert DeNiro to be courted by. Here’s a man who becomes intensely jealous of the boy.

If there has ever been a signifier that you should sleep and have sex with a partner before you marry them, it’s proven by this movie. The bedroom scene starts promising for Barkin, then quickly takes a turn for the worse. “I don’t like looking at the face. We either do it doggy style or side style. It’s my house, my rules,” DeNiro growls in bed. It’s an ugly sex scene, and a truthful one about the toxic insecurity of the American male.

Chances are, you’ve unfortunately never heard of <em>This Boy’s Life</em>, but I proclaim it as one of DeNiro’s best performances. He is a bellicose master of the family, full of rancor or dire impatience, and at some point he begins to smack Tobias around. This is indeed a film about domestic abuse.

What does this do to Tobias’ character at school and in the neighborhood? He becomes both an inimical troublemaker and super sensitive to other outcasts at the same time. He constantly is overcoming embarrassments. For instance, he makes the basketball team, but his stepfather will not let him purchase gym shoes so he is playing constantly in dress shoes; slipping and falling on the basketball court.

If there is an aspect that the otherwise impeccable director Michael Caton-Jones overlooks, it is that we don’t get enough of an idea of what Tobias’ teachers at school think of them. It is suggested by hearsay that they find Tobias an intelligent but misdirected boy, but one or two scenes would have more clearly rounded out what acceptance and non-acceptance Tobias has at school.

This biographical drama makes one statement unmistakably clear, and it’s that if Tobias was going to escape the dead-end world of Concrete, Washington he was going to have to pave his own destiny himself. Become an adult quickly, become master of his own mature decision-making, and find his way into college on his own.

The final encounter between DeNiro and DiCaprio is utterly powerful; it’s a complaint in the kitchen that starts with the stepfather humiliating his stepson, then it descends into violence. It’s an instance of violence where any accidental step could end in lethal wrongdoing; it’s certain, at least to me, that in that raw and eruptive moment Tobias is fighting for his life. <em>This Boy’s Life</em> is a memoir of how, in order to succeed in life, one had to first escape.

Governments are made up of fascist/bully idiots, Exhibit #93.

Two of my favorite acting moments of the 90’s belong to Daniel Day-Lewis for <em>In the Name of the Father</em>. First, the sequence where Day-Lewis, as Gerry Conlon, is tortured by interrogators to such strenuous degrees until he breaks down to sign a false confession, is unmistakably harrowing (Day-Lewis literally stayed up three nights in a cell while having crew members to heckle and behave as tyrants to get him into such frays). Second, the plea before TV cameras in the finale where he vows an appeal until his father Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite) is declared innocent and his criminal record scrubbed.

The words spoken by Conlon, if listened carefully, are not the most articulate. What’s powerful is that Day-Lewis is bravely acting from the id, from a core of outrage in this film. We feel his pulse in this.

To start the film, British police patrol are nothing but oppressors with guns. Their opponents are the IRA whom desire freedom and national independence; regrettably, some rebels operate in heinous methods—they bomb a pub frequented by British soldiers, and the collateral damage of commoners is cruel. In the aftermath, Gerry and a number of his friends are picked up by the British police on the broad basis of circumstantial evidence. They are tortured for seven days, goaded to confess. They become known as the Guildford Four, and at court are pinned as scapegoats.

Sickening to the max, on fabricated evidence, Giuseppe and other family members are labeled as part of the IRA network even though they have a history of being hardworking and dull citizens.

This is the kind of film that puts emphasis on years of injustice and pain, until a righteous lawyer (Emma Thompson, getting a crucial end speech at court) works on the innocents’ behalf.

Director Jim Sheridan and co-writer Terry George infuse so much hot-blooded realism that it is—unfortunate to report—diminished by one manipulative element. The real bomber has admitted to police that he’s responsible for the bombing, is convicted, and sent carelessly to the same prison to serve where Gerry is at. Fact-check: Joe McAndrew (Don Baker), known in real-life as Joe O’Connell, was not sent to the same prison as the Conlons’. Corrupt police authorities, to hide their guilt, sent him somewhere else.

Nevertheless, the anger of this true life story and the ferocity of Day-Lewis makes this into a considerable classic on political debacle imposing worse consequences on an already human tragedy.

Attempting to climb the corporate ladder, Jack Lemmon as C.C. Baxter loans out his apartment key to higher ranked executives for their infidelities with tarts, bimbos and hussies. This leads Baxter to hangout on the outside of his own pad until it is done with, often he is waiting on the street in the cold. Yeah, these executives away from their wives are using Baxter’s apartment for some hanky-panky. My question, the one I did not have when I first saw this as a teen, is this: Does Baxter not bother washing his own bedsheets after his place is used up? Or does all the dirty business take place on his own couch? Seems like Baxter picks up all the empty booze bottles once home, but he doesn’t have to, uh, wipe down any of the sticky wet spots.

Never mind.

A major reason to turn on <em>The Apartment</em> in the first place is that we are able to use it as a time capsule to look into the past, to look into the social mores and kinky little trespasses that must have been going on in that period. We look at these corporate lechers using Baxter’s place, and we think, oh how rude and crass the upper elite were back then. Different from the rude and crass types of today. The lechers then were, oddly I find, both dirty and quaint.

It helps that we get that Billy Wilder (“Some Like It Hot,” “Love in the Afternoon”) wit. There was nobody else like him that could write zingers like he did, cookie-wise and otherwise.

During the course of Baxter’s ambition, he falls for elevator girl Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) even though she’s the sexpot to top executive Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, who in his self-absorbed way pockets the film’s best performance). There is a brush with suicide, then Baxter gets suckered into Miss Kubelik’s vulnerability. Also, observe the moral quandary and invasion of personal boundaries for Baxter as he continuously gets used as the company’s sucker even after he gets the promotion he’s been so aching for. Let’s face it: Baxter is a lousy negotiator.

Despite the flaws, the Oscar-winning <em>The Apartment</em> is still a pungent snapshot of licentiousness and lewdness for its time. Yet, yes, it’s also funny and poignant. Lemmon and MacLaine make a cute pair.

Midway, there’s a helicopter shot flying over Mexico City that’s filmed in bleached yellow colors, and it’s a scorching cinematic expression—not just a mere scene transition montage.

In the hyperlink narrative of <em>Traffic</em>. Steven Soderbergh uses different color filters to distinguish one storyline from another as it explores the eternal mire of the drug trade and its subsequent abuses. The intelligent screenplay by Stephen Gaghan furthermore makes connections between parties so clearly that we know how one storyline affects the other. The only slightly incoherent storyline is the Benicio del Toro one in Tijuana, Mexico; however, his arc is so rich that we get the impact of its main beats anyway. I always found the Michael Douglas plot – where he’s a judge whom has become appointed the new drug czar opponent to U.S. trafficking – the most compelling. He attacks his new occupation with gusto, encouraging brainstorming from his cabinet on how to improve America’s “war on drugs,” while at first blind at home that his own daughter is falling into the most degrading abysses of addiction that can occur for a teen (she starts prostituting her body for drugs and succumbs to an environment of pretty serious squalor).

The film explores its theme of how drugs trigger a cycle of not only addiction but societal violence, though an ensemble of characters where every last cast member has a kick of jolt, and validity.

Steven Bauer is perceived as a clean businessman but imports drugs; Catherine Zeta-Jones is his unassuming wife who learns to survive following her husband’s arrest; Dennis Quaid is the personal attorney who withholds information from the wife in hopes he can gain.

Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman are DEA agents whose pride in their work deteriorates as their investigation gets dirtier; Miguel Ferrer is an arrested dealer asked to become an informant against the posh Palos Verdes dealer Bauer.

Additional roles for Albert Finney, James Brolin, Amy Irving, Erika Christensen, Clifton Collins Jr., Peter Riegert, Benjamin Bratt, Topher Grace, Salma Hayek all leave important marks.

Soderbergh’s authentic, verité abilities brings out the best in all performances, as well as bolstering integrity in scene dressing. Not even a rare line of message-mongering happens where the characters come off as anything less than real, yet dynamic. With <em>Traffic</em>, a film about a very complicated world problem that doesn’t come up with tepid fake solutions, Soderbergh made one of his most electrifying pieces of filmmaking of his career.

Pure Cinema that is excruciatingly suspenseful. All is Lost is the Robert Redford lost at sea film, the beginning first shot is of his sailing boat getting shredding by a metal cargo container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Redford, at 77, has almost no dialogue. But the miraculousness of his performance is how we can read the decision-making on his face the whole way. It’s as much a tribute to Redford’s rugged, weary performance as it is to the cinematographer Frank DeMarco and writer-director J.C. Chandor whom focus on Redford and his life-and-death ordeal.

This is truly a visceral film that relies on natural elements, that tells its story solely on visuals without the intrusion of dialogue (this is the essence of Pure Cinema). I want to now bring up the unusual topic of Sound Design by Steve Boeddeker, which is outstanding. No film has ever captured the essence of rough seas and tumultuous weather like this film. You can hear every whisk of wind, or thrash of weather hitting the cabin. It’s maybe every two or three years that I bother mentioning Sound Design in a review.

As his yacht floods slowly, Redford finds solutions that surprisingly work. Glue and burlap fill up a hole, a device pumps out water, and Redford climbs the mast to fix a radio antennae – the fall could kill him like so many other things. What makes “All is Lost” such a gasping experience is how his patchwork disintegrates away in the face of extreme Mother Nature especially when the yacht helplessly sails into a storm. From that point on, after the boat holds up in mere shambles, food is in short supply and supplies are squandered, to live through anymore to me would be punishing. Redford has the will to survive, so he does and faces residual punishment.

Survival films are one of my favorite unofficial genres, but this one is near the top for its canny matter-of-fact shooting style, its cruel twists of fate, the cap of limited words spoken, the fury of a very realistic storm – the scenery, the sounds, and that storm is pedigree for big-screen cinema! There have been underrated Redford performances through his career (“Out of Africa,” “The Natural,” “Downhill Racer”) but this is his career capper, his finest performance. Only when the worse of the worse happens – and a lot of bad things happen to Redford’s unnamed character – do we see a subtle light into his soul. Watch “All is Lost,” you’ll be gripped.

107 Minutes. Rated PG-13.

SUSPENSE-THRILLER / MOTHER NATURE / LATE NIGHT CHILLS

Film Cousins: “Cast Away” (2000); “The Grey” (2011); “Kon-Tiki” (2012, Norway); “Life of Pi” (2012).