The Two Faces of January (2014)

Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini’s directorial debut takes its title from the English derivation of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who stands at the cusp of the new year, simultaneously musing backward at recent lessons and experiences, and peering forward to the murky and elusive future ahead, a guardian at the crossroads of the past and present. The reference implies the twin forces of duplicity and shifting circumstances that swirl in the fragrant atmosphere of The Two Faces of January, an old-school, sly, seductive Southern Europe-set tale of moral compromise and misdirection. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name, Amini’s film has its own two faces; it’s at once an involving character drama and a gripping suspense movie, a pleasurable period piece of precision and class and a tight and tidy thriller as shrewd, sleek, and scintillating as its characters.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

 














Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is a taut, tough, tart film that brims with tension and suspense. Promoting it as a thriller has been a bold move, considering we all know the conclusion. But the movie does thrill, because few are familiar with the ins and outs of the ten-year manhunt for al-Qaeda’s leader in this much detail.

Penned by Mark Boal, the reporter-turned-screenwriter who won an Academy Award for Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, the movie is a seamless weave of truth (allegedly based on “first-hand accounts of actual events”) and drama that hews closely to real-life but takes some poetic license. Much of the fascination of watching it comes from the gradual unveiling of facts, the meticulous and comprehensive chronicling of every step forward, every setback, dead-end and disappointment on the long, slow, arduous road to bin Laden’s capture on May 2, 2011 at zero dark thirty (military-speak for half past midnight).

More than anything else, the film celebrates process, professionalism, and the perfect mix of deduction, intuition, supposition, screaming matches, and luck main character Maya (the versatile, ubiquitous, incredible Jessica Chastain) uses. Like Spielberg’s Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty takes us behind the scenes of one of the most important events in American history, showcasing the messy, ethically complicated, strenuous means by which progress is oftentimes achieved.

Hitchcock (2012)

Sascha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, written by John J. McLaughlin, is a thoroughly entertaining, but ultimately uneven film about the Master of Suspense’s professional struggles to finance, make, and promote Psycho, and his personal problems with his long suffering wife, Alma Reville. The best thing the film does is treat its title character not as a legend, but as a person. Half behind the scenes look at the inner workings of Hollywood during its last decade of innocence and half family drama, the movie’s different segments, however, vary greatly in quality and tone.

Opening on a quiet prologue taking place in 1940s rural Wisconsin, the casual tone is firmly set when the peaceful tableau turns into a gruesome family murder, and the camera pans to reveal the title character’s portly presence, calmly sipping a cup of tea while directly addressing the audience, as he did in his famous “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” show. Brother has been killing brother since Cain and Abel, Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins) croons is his incomparable British drawl; who is he to deprive us of the pleasure of watching it happen on the silver screen?