Reviews

"I think this is one of the best movies of the past several years-or at least the most thrilling, finely crafted, and piercingly insightful one yet made about the 2008 crisis and contemporary capitalism.

There is, admittedly, not a lot of competition there. Cynical though it may be, one can understand how profit-minded studio executives might be skeptical of drama manifested in numbers and balance sheets. Most other entries in the genre (let's call it 'financial thriller') tend to be squarely polemical-either satirical depictions of greed like The Wolf of Wall Street or Oliver Stone's 1987 Wall Street, or else advocacy documentaries like Capitalism: A Love Story or Charles Ferguson's Inside Job. Margin Call strikes something of a balance between the two, giving us a sense of the numbing scale and complexity of the crisis as well as the way it affects-and is affected by-the human qualities of the people involved, and for this reason its portrayal of a Wall Street firm feels both more realistic and more insightful. It's the rare fact-based story that finds drama not just in showing what happened, but in trying to understand why it happened.

"...to read too deeply into a movie like Pacific Rim risks losing sight of what makes it great. Whatever subtle critiques del Toro may make about the modern action blockbuster, he understands the simple principle that truly makes the genre work. It has to do with the above phrase: "just because." As I mentioned, studios today seem to need their blockbusters to mean something (or at least, pretend to mean something, which is usually as far as they get), but a fundamental part of the appeal of the film medium has always been its ability to show us sights or feats that are impossible in the real world, for no other reason than to provoke in us that wonderful reaction of gleeful amazement. Practically as soon as film was invented, a French stage magician named Georges Méliès was using rudimentary special effects and editing tricks to wow his viewers. His films had plots, but as in a magic show, the primary goal was to astound. Similarly, the great silent-era comedian Buster Keaton became famous for his remarkable stunts, many of which would have killed him had he screwed them up. His film The General was already hilarious; was that death-defying stunt with the railroad ties really necessary? No, it wasn't, but he did it anyway, because it's awesome.