Take Shelter

Movies to See Right Now

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Ryan Gosling in DRIVE

The best of the current crop of films is Take Shelter, Jeff Nichols’ brilliant tale of a psychotic breakdown with Oscar-worthy performances by Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain.  One of the Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

50/50 is an engaging cancer comedy with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen. Margin Call is a taut financial meltdown drama with superb performances by Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany and Stanley Tucci. The Ides of March is a fine political drama with Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and George Clooney. Drive is a stylishly arty and ultraviolent action film with Ryan Gosling.

Blackthorn is a beautiful but flawed Western set in Bolivia. Dirty Girl is a fun but unexceptional romp with promising newcomers Juno Temple and Jeremy Dozier.

You can still find The Guard, the Irish dark comedy starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle, and Sarah’s Key, an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth.

I haven’t yet seen the two psychological thrillers that open this week, Martha Marcy May Marlene or Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In, which opens this week. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD of the Week is A Little Help. Other recent DVD picks have been Incendies (the year’s best movie so far), the heartwarming documentary Buck, the very original teen misfit movie Terri, the delightful indie comedy Turkey Bowl and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1979).

All New: Movies to See Right Now

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Michael Shannon in TAKE SHELTER

The best of the current crop of films is Take Shelter , Jeff Nichols’ brilliant tale of a psychotic breakdown with Oscar-worthy performances by Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain.  One of the Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

50/50 is an engaging cancer comedy with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen.  Margin Call is a taut financial meltdown drama with superb performances by Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany and Stanley Tucci.  The Ides of March is a fine political drama with Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti and George Clooney.  Drive is a stylishly arty and ultraviolent action film with Ryan Gosling.

Blackthorn is a beautiful but flawed Western set in Bolivia.   Dirty Girl is a fun but unexceptional romp with promising newcomers Juno Temple and Jeremy Dozier.

You can still find The Guard, the Irish dark comedy starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle, and Sarah’s Key, an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth. 

I haven’t yet seen Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In, which opens this week. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD of the Week is the heartwarming documentary Buck. Other recent DVD picks have been Incendies (the year’s best movie so far),  the very original teen misfit movie Terri, the delightful indie comedy Turkey Bowl  and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1979).

Take Shelter: digging his fingernails into sanity

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Michael Shannon (Shotgun Stories, Agent Van Alden in Boardwalk Empire) is perhaps our best creep actor.   And what’s creepier than watching a solid parent and spouse enduring a full-fledged psychotic breakdown?

Shannon plays the most grounded guy in America until he starts having terrifying dreams and then hallucinations.  One of his parents is mentally ill, and he is determined to resist a breakdown and protect his family.  Unlike in a lesser screenplay, Shannon’s protagonist is very aware that he may be going crazy and is digging his fingernails into sanity.

Shannon gave a breakthrough performance in Shotgun Stories, by writer/director Jeff Nichols.  (In the excellent Shotgun Stories, Nichols created a dysfunctional family with a father so dismissive of his offspring that he non-named them Son, Kid and Boy.)  This time, Nichols has given Shannon the role of a lifetime, for which Shannon should get a dark horse Oscar nomination for Best Actor.

You may have noticed that this is Jessica Chastain’s year (The Debt, The Tree of Life, The Help, Texas Killing Fields), and Chastain should receive an Oscar nod for her supporting performance as Shannon’s wife.  Chastain must react to her husband’s behavior, which starts out quirky, becomes troublesome and spirals down to GET ME OUT OF HERE.

Nichols, Shannon and Chastain have given us one of the Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5U4TtYpKIc]

A breakthrough year for Jessica Chastain

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Jessica Chastain in THE TREE OF LIFE

If any new face has broken through in 2011, it’s the actress Jessica Chastain.  First, she delivered a fine performance as an enabling 1950s mom in the most coherent part of The Tree of Life.  This week, she followed that with an excellent performance as a 1960s Mossad agent (the younger version of Helen Mirren’s character) in the thriller The Debt. She won critical praise for the trashy but aspiring housewife in a film I haven’t seen – The Help.  So we already know that Chastain is versatile enough to play soft and tough, brittle and sexy, action and romance.

Later this fall, she will have three more films in release.  In Take Shelter, she plays the wife of the mentally disintegrating Michael Shannon.  She’s a tough cop in The Texas Killing Fields.  And then she’s in Ralph Fiennes’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Six movies in six months – that’s quite a way to start a career.  Here’s a New York Times profile of Chastain.