Throne of Blood: MACBETH

Scheming and bloodshed are common motifs in Shakespeare’s plays, but Macbeth might be the most directly engaged with the guts of evil, following a conflicted murderer into nasty tangles of messy guilt, a tortured conscience. Macbeth, haunted by ghosts and bewitched by ambition, reluctantly screws his courage to the sticking place and kills King Duncan, then spends the rest of the narrative desperately trying to outrun the moral consequences and mortal punishments he rightly fears. He becomes a tyrant, driven mad. The latest cinematic staging of the play imagines this story in muddy period-appropriate grime and on nightmarish landscapes of vivid elements: misty moors, foggy battlefields, red clouds, pale dawns, pouring rain. Director Justin Kurzel, whose first two films were unsettling crime pictures, here digs into a disturbed mindset with a cinematic theatricality, emphasizing the visceral moments, simmering with unease, a droning score layering a haze of doom and dread over it all.

It opens with a war, two armies charging towards each other on the field of battle. Kurzel cuts between distant wide shots of running with close-ups of extreme slow-motion howls and cries. The clamor and gore seems equally inspired by Braveheart and Game of Thrones, but seen through a dark mirror. Emerging victorious, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) is nonetheless disturbed by spectral visions of Witches who prophesize he’ll soon be king. What follows should be familiar to anyone even vaguely familiar with Shakespeare. Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard), encourages this ambition by any means necessary. Chiding him for having too much milk of human kindness, she knows murder would help them rise to power. Soon, Duncan (David Thewlis) is slain, his son, the prince (Jack Reynor), chased off, and the throne passes to Macbeth, who wears the crown heavily with the burden of the price he paid to get it.

Kurzel has assembled a terrific cast up to the challenge of Shakespearean language. Although screenwriters Jacob Koskoff, Michael Lesslie, and Todd Louiso have abridged the text, the performers have more than enough to chew on. Tremendous supporting work from Paddy Considine (as Banquo, Macbeth’s friend until paranoia sets in) and especially Sean Harris and Elizabeth Debicki (as the Macduffs, who bear the brunt of Macbeth’s wrath, and are Scotland’s last best hope for a better future) gives the movie the heft it needs to power its angst. They have palpable pain, while taking strong center stage are the pair of powerful leads. Cotillard whispers most of her lines, as if her Lady Macbeth can’t quite believe the influence she wields, and then falls apart trying to get that damned spot off her conscience. Fassbender quakes and grits his teeth, hollers and seethes, sweats and bleeds, selling all too well a man in the process of rending his soul in two over surging dueling feelings of guilt and power. It’s a movie of no small emotional movements, roiling with immediacy.

With the look of a hazy walking stress dream brought to life by cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (True Detective) and cut together by editor Chris Dickens (Berberian Sound Studio), there’s an ethereal quality. The wide screen compositions flicker with bad weather and candlelight; the images flow out of sync with muttered soliloquies, flowing between flashbacks and premonitions, dreams and visions. In The Riverside Shakespeare, literary critic Frank Kermode wrote, “The suffering of the Macbeths may be thought of as caused by the pressure of the world of order slowly resuming its true shape and crushing them. This is the work of time…” Kurzel brings to life this sense of cosmic temporal fracture, the Macbeths’ foul and fair disjunction unleashing a sickness in the world, one that’ll in turn crush them under its chaos. Although strictly, faithfully linear, its visual strategies suggest that it’s all happening at once. The decision to go down a bad path leads inevitably to a host of nasty outcomes.

A commitment to slippery cutting and whispered mumbling has its limitations, and occasional monotony, as Kurzel’s vision doesn’t allow for any modulation of tone. There’s no time for small or soft moments when large anxieties fill the frame’s austere, disturbing beauty. As ostentatious as the striking imagery is, it occasionally detracts from the lines, or works at cross-purposes to the energy of the text. Still, it’s an engaged synthesis of ways to approach the play, with some of the shadowy brooding of Orson Welles’ take, and a bit of the howl of despair of Roman Polanski’s. The climactic confrontation is set on a field of fire, embers churning behind the combatants in a blood-orange sky ripped with smoke. It’s not exactly subtle, but it’s passionate. Kurzel takes the play seriously, has great actors delivering the classic turns of phrase, and creates a space of unceasing emotional turmoil. It’s rich, even when it’s not entirely satisfying. Besides, it’s always a treat to see creative minds put to use bringing more stagings of Shakespeare into our lives.

Choose to Accept It: MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE-ROGUE NATION

An efficient and engaging thrill machine, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation is further proof Tom Cruise’s signature franchise is one of the most consistently high-quality adventure series we’ve ever had. It accomplishes this by delivering strongly on a set of appealing and entertaining recurring excitements – vertiginous stunts, complicated heists, amusing spy gadgets, convincing masks, and dastardly double crosses. But no matter how cleverly the filmmakers deploy these elements, the glue holding them together is Cruise himself, racing along with hard-charging star charisma born out of hard-working determination motoring a constant forward momentum. Much has been made about his running, in which he appears to throw every ounce of his being into a hurtling mad dash across the frame. If anyone could accomplish the impossible, it would be his Ethan Hunt.

With appealing action and a megawatt star, the franchise has an ability to allow each director to play to his strengths. The result is a series of five films with a welcome familiarity in its recombination of its best parts, and yet never grows too repetitive. Each entry has its own flavor. De Palma first brought complicated pulp, then Woo had swooning balletic action, Abrams injected throat-grabbing emotional stakes, and Bird performed a juggling act of buoyant one-thing-after-another action. Now writer-director Christopher McQuarrie has the reigns, steering an endlessly enjoyable action movie into his twisty construction and clever control. He brings the mystery and the weighty violence of his last film, Jack Reacher (an underrated Cruise vehicle), and the shifting allegiances and slow realizations of his first script, The Usual Suspects.

Once more, the milieu of Ethan Hunt and the agents of the secret Impossible Missions Force is familiar, but the tone has something new. Unlike madcap MacGuffin chases of the last few entries, Rogue Nation plunges us into spy movie mechanics, with shady dealings and uneasy alliances. In D.C., the new head of the CIA (Alec Baldwin) talks a confidential Senate hearing into dissolving the IMF, using the near-miss missile and smoldering Kremlin from Ghost Protocol as his evidence. This leaves familiar faces (Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) behind desks, while Hunt (Tom Cruise) disobeys orders by staying in the field. He finds himself in hiding, trying to track down The Syndicate, a terrorist organization only he seems to know about. Connecting isolated tragedies with a conspiratorial mind, he seems crazy to the CIA, who are desperate to hunt him down and take him in.

But because an early scene sees an unknown bespectacled Brit (Sean Harris) gun down an IMF agent and attempt to kill Hunt, who barely escapes thanks to a mysterious woman (Rebecca Ferguson) and her helpful punches, it’s easy to see he’s right. So he’s on a globetrotting chase away from the CIA while attempting to track down proof of the group to clear his name, and then take them down and save the world. McQuarrie keeps things ambiguous. What is The Syndicate? Who is the Brit and the woman? What’s the IMF’s role? All is answered in sensationally staged setpieces pleasingly varied and orchestrated. Instead of the usual action beats strung along by rote connective tissue, they grow thrillingly out of an involving set of mysteries and complications. It never overwhelms or exhausts, maintaining consistently pleasing tension and thrills.

Rogue Nation is structured as a nesting doll of action, each setpiece a more compact, concentrated, and intricately designed moment than the last. It starts with big, grinning, highflying stunts, before narrowing through heists and car chases to close on bruising one-on-one combat. The movie moves quickly, enjoying a good one-liner or a perfectly timed look of skepticism just as much as it does putting Cruise on the side of a plane during takeoff, tossing him down an artificial waterfall, throwing him through a plate-glass window, and rolling his car end over end. The action is satisfying, bright, clear images (from cinematographer Robert Elswit) whipped up with crisp cross-cutting and elegant design. A gorgeously designed sequence set around an opera house backstage and on catwalks during a performance is one of the series’ best, with other highlights here including a high-velocity motorcycle chase down a desert highway, a trembling time-bomb bluff, and shootouts and knife fights kept PG-13 despite teeth-rattling sound effects.

McQuarrie stages these thrilling moments with the oomph of impact and the elegance of clockwork construction. But he never loses sight of the human-level interpersonal drivers behind the chaos. This allows Tom Cruise’s intense determination and eager motion to take appealing center stage while the terrific ensemble is allowed to be simultaneously essential team members and great comic relief, fun without diluting seriousness. (Best may be Baldwin, as a serious obstacle cut with a bit of Jack Donaghy bluster.) Meanwhile, Ferguson is great new character, complicated and an unknowable variable. Is she a foil, prey, a secret help, or a manipulative mastermind? It’s fun guessing, but even better is the realization she’s Hunt’s equal (or better, in some ways). If she’s an ally, they’re in luck. But if she’s out to destroy them, she just might win.

Running an unbelievably brisk 131 minutes, Rogue Nation is stuffed with excitement manipulated efficiently. McQuarrie and his team get just about everything possible out of each action sequence without overstaying their welcome. There’s no need to have a perfunctory car chase when it can drive the plot forward while adding participants and obstacles cleverly colliding and careening throughout. Each setpiece is wrung for all its worth, but stops where it can still leave the audience begging for more, as the characters regroup for their next move. McQuarrie understands the appeal of a blockbuster action movie at its best, marrying a fine ensemble with elaborate special effects in a tightly plotted machine delivering everything you’d want and a little more, too. The Lalo Schifrin theme has become big-budget action cinema’s most reliable sound. You can lean back sure that whatever happens next will be hugely enjoyable.