Monday at the Movies - April 2, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, I double the number of John Wayne movies I’ve seen in my life.

The Searchers (1956)– How do you review a film that was in the inaugural class of the National Film Registry? It’s hard to believe that this is only the second John Wayne movie I’ve seen in my life, or that it’s roundly considered a classic and I’ve only just gotten to it with more decades of birthdays under my belt than I’d care to admit. But maybe it’s a good thing that I’ve only just seen The Searchers, because so much of what I enjoyed about the film was the level of deliberate craft on display, which has to be appreciated before it can be enjoyed. Take the starring performance of John Wayne, deliberately self-conscious in a world that doesn’t quite have room for him – reflected in the way other characters treat him, but also in the number of doorways he has to stoop to enter. As Ethan Edwards, Wayne is notable as a character whose moral center the film clearly endorses – he is, after all, the hero – but his narrative arc isn’t contingent on the other characters in the film coming around to his way of seeing things. Director John Ford is not interested in that kind of metaphorical harmony; he is instead interested in surprisingly long takes, harsh and unforgiving landscapes, and all the ways that Ethan bristles against the world he inhabits. The Searchers is the kind of film that I am sure I will need to see more than once to fully comprehend it, now that I know the basic shape of it, but on first viewing it looks pretty good to my eyes.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Hostiles (2017)

Like Roman J. Israel, Esq. before it, I had no idea what to expect from Hostiles because I hadn’t encountered any marketing for it; I conducted a minimal amount of research before seeing it and determined that it was worth a look based on the strength of its leading man (Christian Bale) and director (Scott Cooper, of the Oscar-nominated Crazy Heart). And in both cases, the element of surprise worked in the film’s favor; I genuinely didn’t know what to expect from Hostiles, and I found myself compelled by the plot and its anchoring performances.

Christian Bale stars as Captain Joseph Blocker, an Army man nearing retirement in 1892. For his last mission, Blocker is assigned by President Harrison to escort the ailing Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family to Montana. Despite losing several of his men in battle with Yellow Hawk, Blocker heads north, where he and his troops meet Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose family was recently slaughtered by a Comanche raiding party.

I think Luke Skywalker gave the best review of Hostiles near the middle of The Last Jedi when he advised, “This is not going to go the way you think.” Despite the setup of its opening shots, Hostiles does not behave like a traditional revenge western; though there are certainly elements of that subgenre, it’s far from the film’s main focus, and the film approaches that plotline from an angle that ends up serving the film’s actual center – the absurd senselessness of violence motivated only by a history of racial prejudice, and the deep scars left by that violence. It’s to the film’s credit that this lesson is never overtly didactic, instead filtered through the character of Blocker, who begins the film clinging to the certainty of his prejudice, only gradually eliding the gap between himself and Yellow Hawk.

From behind one of the most expressive mustaches since Aaron Eckhart in Sully, Bale gives a riveting performance as only Bale could, presenting all the rage and self-doubt from behind the stoniest of exteriors; his whole body shaking at times, wracked with all the emotions he’s struggling to repress, Bale does amazing things with a furrowed brow or a bowed head. His scenes with Wes Studi (who, I must say, it’s good to see again) are commanding for their silence, in which we see Blocker struggle to understand, while Yellow Hawk struggles to communicate – two men so mired in the past that they are unable to imagine a better present. The gradual development of Blocker’s character feels organic, and the film’s final “twist” (in that it’s unexpected, not that it turns out he was dead all along or something) helps us understand more about how much the character has changed over the course of the film.

If there’s an aspect of the film that feels out of place, it’s Rosamund Pike, who is so radiant that it’s difficult to believe she could look that pulled together after suffering so much violence in 1892. She’s a far cry from the silliness of Haley Bennett in The Magnificent Seven, and she does get some plot moments that show her character to be underestimated by the men who spend the film trying to protect her. She’s also a nice counterpart to Blocker’s internal battle with his own prejudice, but by and large the film tends to treat her like a footnote to the main plot. Having seen what Pike can do with a meaty role like “Amazing” Amy in Gone Girl, it’s a bit of a letdown to see her utilized in such an underwhelming role, especially when the film orbits an undercooked romance plot that feels more perfunctory and inevitable than necessary. (And I think the film knows it, because that envelope is never really pushed.)

Hostiles ends up reckoning with a dark chapter in American history by attempting to imagine a rehabilitated future borne out of mutual understanding. The film tracks Blocker’s recognition that he possesses so many of the things he hates about Yellow Hawk, least of all being a basic common humanity, while Yellow Hawk struggles to make himself understood to his escorting captain and to himself. Measured when it needs to be and bursting with western-style action in several key shootouts and raids, Hostiles is a surprisingly engaging film, particularly for a moviegoer who has never been all that fond of westerns.

(Sidebar: High Noon is probably my favorite western – what’s yours?)

Hostiles is rated R for “strong violence and language.” Written and directed by Scott Cooper. Based on a manuscript by Donald E. Stewart. Starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and Wes Studi.

The Magnificent Seven (2016)

The very first thing that must be said about The Magnificent Seven is that any movie directed by Antoine Fuqua that stars Denzel Washington is automatically worth a look. Having said that, one can’t help but feel that The Magnificent Seven suffers a bit for being an ensemble piece because we don’t get as much Denzel time as we deserve. That’s not to say that The Magnificent Seven is ever boring or unwatchable, but it is underwhelming.

In a remake of the eponymous 1960 western (which was itself a remake of Seven Samurai), Denzel Washington stars as Sam Chisolm, a bounty hunter recruited by Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett) to save her village from a mustache-twirling robber baron (Peter Sarsgaard) who wants the exclusive mining rights to the valley. Chisolm assembles a posse comprised of the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest lover” (Chris Pratt), a mountain man (Vincent D’Onofrio), a traumatized Confederate and his Chinese comrade (Ethan Hawke and Byung-hun Lee), a Mexican outlaw (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and a Comanche (Martin Sensmeier) on his own path.

Here’s a pretty good cast, and it’s really very evident that they’re all having a terrifically good time together. D’Onofrio is delightfully strange, as is his wont, and the rest of the cast seem to enjoy playing off that peculiarity. (Ten points to anyone who can identify that accent, incidentally.) Washington and Pratt are, essentially playing variations on the Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, with an engaging chemistry between the two of them.

It is, however, a chemistry predicated on Pratt playing the clown and Denzel as the straight man, which is a tragic underutilization of the latter’s skill. It’s no surprise that Pratt is a success as a character that boils down to “Star Lord by way of John Wayne,” but it’s a wonder that Denzel loses to his costar so many opportunities for clever one-liners and sarcastic reactions. This isn’t to say that Denzel himself is a disappointment – in a sense playing both the leads of Django Unchained, Denzel is charismatic and heartbreaking, determined and haunted, and (we sense) withholding a part of himself from his exterior out of a sense of duty and propriety. But it is a bit of a letdown to come to expect a leading performance out of an actor who’s modest enough to embrace his role as 14% of an ensemble.

The Magnificent Seven is not, as its title promises, magnificent. It’s not a transcendent moviegoing experience, but then again in late September I don’t think it has to be. Because on the other hand, The Magnificent Seven is not a disappointment of heroic proportions. It’s fun and fluffy and diverting, and it doesn’t do anything egregiously wrong. It’s in that Baby Bear territory of “just right,” and perhaps it’s gluttonous of me to want the Papa Bear portion of a Denzel Washington western. Moreover, it’s different enough from its predecessors to justify its existence as a variation on a theme. At any rate, keep them coming, Denzel, because I’ll be in the front row every time.

The Magnificent Seven is rated PG-13. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Written by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk. Starring Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Haley Bennett and Peter Sarsgaard.

Hell or High Water (2016)

You wouldn’t believe what a difficult time I had seeing this movie. Aside from the fact that the limited release didn’t hit my area for a few weeks, my matinee showing had a problem with the audio, leading me to come back later in the evening. But despite the difficulty in actually getting to Hell or High Water, the experience was all worth it; it’s a first-rate flick, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it up for a few golden statues come early 2017.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers forced onto the wrong side of the law. In order to save their family’s ranch after the death of their mother, the two have resorted to bank robbery, meticulously planned and carefully precise. Their robbery spree attracts the attention of a retiring Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) and his partner (Gil Birmingham), who aim to stop the robberies – or at least understand why they’re happening.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of westerns, perhaps just because I haven’t seen the right ones, but I’m a big fan of this genre-in-progress, the neo-western, which takes the themes of the western and relocates them into more contemporary trappings in order to continue to ask questions about justice, frontier spaces, and the nation’s long, complicated, and often troubling history. At the same time, it’s also (I think, indirectly) a space where older performers can step back into the genre and reevaluate it and themselves, where audiences can read the frontier’s weariness on the crags of an actor’s face.

You might think that I could very well be describing No Country For Old Men, and you’d be onto something, because Hell or High Water is very much of a piece with No Country. Both neo-westerns take questions of frontier justice into pressing issues of the twenty-first century (there, the loss of the “good old days”; here, the question of economic injustice). Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones are characters who ought to join each other on rocking chairs on the porch of their retirement, wearied as they are by the cases that baffle them. And while there’s no figure of pure evil like Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in Hell or High Water, there is the same lingering attention to the prairie wastelands of Texas, highlighting the bleak despair of the soul and the relentless persistence of our protagonists, who have only their own codes to which they can cling.

It’s truly riveting stuff, a two-hour trip that flies by despite its fairly small scope and tight narrative focus. The key is the well-crafted screenplay, as precise as the bank heists and wisely funny in a way that the trailers didn’t let on. Pine is surprisingly subdued, given his recent turn as the swaggeringly confident Captain Kirk in Star Trek. Of course, a Jeff Bridges performance is always worth the price of admission, with Hell or High Water somewhere between True Grit and Crazy Heart on the Dude-ometer. His turn as the retiring ranger practically prickles, and it’s the knowing gleam in Bridges’s eye that humanizes the character as we and his partner question why he’s pursing the case so doggedly.

Who knew it would take me through hell and high water just to see Hell or High Water? It’s worth the watch if you can find it, and it’s worth a double feature with No Country For Old Men to really think about where the neo-western is going.

Hell or High Water is rated R. Directed by David Mackenzie. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Gil Birmingham.

The Hateful Eight (2015)

The name of the game in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight, is not race relations in America, nor is it the thoughtful interrogation of justice it thinks it is. It’s not a postwar state of the union, a snowbound Twelve Angry Men, or even a claustrophobic Django Unchained. No, the name of the game is exorbitance, an immoderate superfluity indulging in the most colorful – and overfull – version of the story. When the characters on screen play raconteur, it’s charming and engaging, but Tarantino’s intemperance in the same suggests a contempt for his audience which is, frankly, wearisome.

En route to deliver his prisoner Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the hangman’s noose, John Ruth (Kurt Russell) finds his carriage occupied by fellow bounty hunter Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the sheriff (Walton Goggins) of Red Rock, the foursome’s destination. A blizzard, however, detours the carriage to Minnie’s Haberdashery, an insular cabin already populated by four quirky characters – a hangman (Tim Roth), a Confederate general (Bruce Dern), a writer (Michael Madsen), and caretaker Señor Bob (Demián Bichir). As the snow falls, tensions rise when the occupants of Minnie’s find that not all of them are telling the full truth.

That’s a really keen premise. Armond White took the words right out of my mouth when he called The Hateful Eight a cross between Agatha Christie and John Ford (those are, however, the only words we have in common). It’s akin to an adaptation of And Then There Were None as filmed on the set of Bonanza with the profanity filter set to Deadwood. And in the hands of a screenwriter who could restrain himself in the way that he restricts the setting, The Hateful Eight could have been a masterclass in a lot of ways that would make Sidney Lumet smile with admiration.

Tarantino is not, however, that filmmaker. It’s very nearly accurate to refer to The Hateful Eight as his most narcissistic film, as in love with the sound of his own dialogue as he clearly is, but he’s equally enamored of the Wyoming landscape which must look a treat in 70mm (which I didn’t see) but otherwise come off as sideshow decoration, and there are only so many lingering shots of landscape one can bear before the weight of three hours feels a punishing burden. The fact is that The Hateful Eight might have been a much stronger film had it been pruned much more tightly. Of its six chapters, for example, one (the fifth) is entirely negligible, consisting as it does of yet another mindless slaughter whose particulars any thinking audience would rightly have inferred. Rendered in its full Technicolor glory (and gory), however, it’s one more note of excess in a film that is grossly (and I use the term advisedly) bloated.

That’s not to say there isn’t anything to be enjoyed in The Hateful Eight. Jackson is, as ever, charismatic and a joy to watch; there’s a surprising chemistry between Jackson and Russell, poignant at both ends of the spectrum from their lukewarm greeting to the simmering disappointment between them. And there’s a knockout sequence at the beginning of Chapter Four where the tension is at fever pitch, recalling the tensest moments of Inglourious Basterds when the narrator – in a gimmick I usually loathe but here can’t imagine a better deployment – reveals that all is not as it seems because someone knows something the others in the room don’t. As Minnie’s descends into amateur sleuthing and chaotic distrust, we get glimpses of the dynamite that The Hateful Eight could have been.

Instead, we get a film that sags under its own weight. There are good performances in it, memorable moments, but what ought to be the standout feature – Tarantino’s dialogue – is utterly and disappointingly unmemorable. (I defy you to quote a line from it, the way you could after Django or Pulp Fiction.) Tarantino has said that he’s only going to direct two more films, and if that’s the case he may need a new editor (apologies to Fred Raskin, who did a good job on Django but didn’t nay-say enough here). Something’s gotta give, and at three hours with The Hateful Eight, this time it was me.

Is it some kind of perverse pattern that I’m destined not to enjoy fully the first film I review each year?

The Hateful Eight is rated R for “strong bloody violence, a scene of violent sexual content, language and some graphic nudity.” It’s a Tarantino movie, so you’ve got your usual (read: exorbitant) quantity of N-words, F-bombs, and strawberry-colored effluvium. A man is seen fully nude while another man narrates about sexually assaulting him, with colorful prose.

The Lone Ranger (2013)

Although it’s not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination, the biggest problem with Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger isn’t the perceived cultural insensitivity of the “redface” casting of Johnny Depp as Tonto.  It’s that the film is longer than it needs to be and short on that relentless charm that made the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise such a winner.

Following the death of his brother and given a second chance at life, whitebread lawyer John Reid (Armie Hammer) dons a mask and a badge to become “The Lone Ranger.”  He teams with offbeat Cherokee Tonto (Depp) to apprehend the outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) while railroad tycoon Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) works to complete his cross-country line.

With Pirates, Verbinski and Depp distilled a pitch-perfect blend of high-octane action and quirky character comedy (I’m on record as being of the opinion that the franchise has done no wrong).  A kind of revival of the Indiana Jones brand of action/comedy, Pirates also launched Depp into the household imagination as “he of the strange faces.”  But it’s a long shadow into which The Lone Ranger rides, which means the film’s shortcomings are either the result of detrimentally heightened expectations or simply a case of a film not living up to its predecessors.

The Lone Ranger has been called “bloated” by more than one critic, which accurately describes (but maybe embellishes) the principal problem with the film, which is one of length and pacing.  At 2:29, the film is longer than The Curse of the Black Pearl, and it takes even longer to get started; scene three of Pearl introduces us to Captain Jack Sparrow in one of cinema’s best introductions, yet it takes nearly an hour for Armie Hammer to don the mask.  And while Hammer is a good fit for the milquetoast pacifist Reid, charismatic he’s not, which forces the film to be Tonto’s.  Indeed, the film is often confused about who the star is; Depp’s name is above the title, but Hammer is the eponymous Ranger, though Depp headlines a (largely unnecessary) frame story.

Let’s back up and clarify here.  Hammer and Depp are fine choices for their respective roles.  Though one suspects this won’t be the start of the franchise Disney may have wanted, the two have good chemistry together, and the begrudging partnership that forms would make for interesting sequels that deconstruct the idealized 1950s partnership.  (If anything, the frame narrative sets this up as the “true” account of The Lone Ranger.)  Hammer is good at repressing his personality when he’s riding into battle atop Silver (here, a “spirit horse” with intractable charm in the vein of Fritz from Django Unchained).  As for Depp, this is “strange character #43” in his repertoire, albeit with more depth thanks to a surprisingly nuanced script that goes places of which the marketing campaign seemed blissfully unaware (and which those crying “racism” – at least, those who’ve seen it – seem willfully to ignore).

And the villains of the piece are delightfully hammy; classic bandit Fichtner snarls it up and isn’t apologetic about eating human hearts, a far cry from his blue-collar bank managers in Heat and The Dark Knight.  And I don’t need to tell you that Wilkinson is as always a treat, pouring the syrup on the scenery in lieu of twirling a mustache; you know he’s evil the moment you see him, though the inevitable revelation is played off with an additional, unexpected twist.

So with all these ingredients – including a near-cameo by Helena Bonham Carter as a one-legged brothel madam – what is it that doesn’t hit it for The Lone Ranger?  In large part, it’s an issue of length; like Pirates, there are several action set pieces, and the plot becomes quite complicated as the disparate story elements entangle themselves.  But unlike Pirates, Verbinski and company seem to have, sadly, listened to those who bemoaned that Pirates was too confusing; consequently, plot twists are recapped to death, and the status quo is reevaluated at the end of each.

When the film’s on, though, it’s on.  The action scenes are Pirates quality – particularly a harrowing canyon ambush, a barnyard shootout, and a horse-vs.-train duel set to a rousing reinterpretation of the William Tell Overture – and the performances, as I’ve said, are reliable.  In the end, The Lone Ranger is a bit like walking a mile when a run would do; you’ll get to the same place and feel about as good, but darned if it doesn’t take longer than need be.

The Lone Ranger is rated PG-13 “for sequences of intense action and violence, and some suggestive material.”  There’s some blood here and there, but most action sequences are bloodless and more exciting than gruesome.  A bandit speaks provocatively about a woman, while other men visit a brothel (which looks like a Disneyfied Moulin Rouge).

Loyal readers:  be sure to come back on Thursday for The Cinema King's take on World War Z!

Monday at the Movies - December 31, 2012

Welcome to Week Forty-Five of “Monday at the Movies,” the final installment for 2012 (and, I think, also the final numbered installment).  We close the year with another arbitrary theme, movies that start with the word “The.”

The Debt (2011) – The Debt barely got any play when it came out under the radar last year, which is both a surprise and a shame, because there’s enough A-list material here – done successfully, to boot – to entertain most audiences.  Parallel narratives reveal what really happened when three Mossad agents (Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, and Marton Csokas) pursued a fugitive Nazi official (Jesper Christensen) and how the experience affected them later in life.  The older agents are portrayed by “big names” – Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds, and Tom Wilkinson – all of whom turn in their usual exceptional work; Mirren and Wilkinson find themselves at moral odds over the truth of their experience, with Wilkinson’s determination matching Mirren’s internal and external scars.  But it’s Chastain who gives the best performance; granted, she gets the lion’s share of the film as the younger Rachel, but her work in The Debt proves why she’s a rising star in Hollywood.  She is tough and vulnerable, holding her own against Christensen’s Dr. Vogel (who’s the smarmiest Nazi this side of Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List) as a proper action heroine while also allowing the audience to see just how traumatic her encounter is.  It’s an interesting companion piece to Munich, but director John Madden wisely avoids the preachy moralizing Spielberg deployed in his 2005 Mossad movie (which, coincidentally, also co-starred Hinds).  It’s hard to believe this is the same director behind Shakespeare in Love and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, since The Debt is more intense and more severely compelling than those two (not to denigrate either, of course), smartly playing on the relationship of past to present while brilliantly leading the audience to several premature conclusions.  In short, The Debt is overwhelmingly underrated.

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) – After 12 Angry Men, I’ll follow Henry Fonda into any movie, particularly with the expectation that he’ll be playing a character of similar moral fiber (Juror #8 is, after all, one of cinema’s best good guys) – even if I’m not the world’s biggest devotee of westerns.  The Ox-Bow Incident, regarded as a classic, stars Fonda as a drifter suspected of rustling before he gets enfolded into a lynch mob in pursuit of a trio of suspected murderers.  The “plausible doubt” element (familiar to us 12 Angry Men fans) is of course the central conceit of the film, as is an interrogation of the validity of vigilante justice (familiar to us Batman fans).  My father rightly pointed out that the film feels a bit like a Twilight Zone episode, and I think he’s onto something; the film is sans the supernatural, but it includes the morality play aspect and the simplistic cinematography, as well as the cast of character actors in smaller roles.  What’s disappointing is that the film feels a bit like a 22-minute story stretched into 75 minutes, repetitive at times and unfulfilling in others (as in a hasty subplot involving Fonda’s sweetheart).  Perhaps worse, Fonda is criminally underused, likely due to the size of the large supporting cast.  It’s not that the movie is bad – it just isn’t great.  And it suffers by the unfair comparison to 12 Angry Men (which I contend is a perfect film) that I held in my head the whole time I was watching The Ox-Bow Incident.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  Happy New Year, loyal readers! 

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

Don't let the gregariously prejudiced (and spoiler-iffic) title throw you. Don't let the total lack of publicity throw you. Don't even let the name of Affleck on the poster throw you. Director Andrew Dominik's sophomore showpiece is a masterpiece of high tension, nuanced characters, and one of the best screenplays of '07.

I knew very little about the history between Jesse James and Robert Ford - I was even, before hearing of this film, unable to name James's assassin. So in a lot of respects, the movie was a learning experience for me, a student of history. So I shirked my concern for spoilers upon reading the title but did not research further, letting the movie unfold history for me.

I suppose there isn't much in the way of plot synopsis, since the title seems to do all that for me. Casey Affleck (who looks more like a cross between Hugh Grant and Zac Efron circa Hairspray than his own dispiriting brother Ben, whose apple fell far from Casey's acting tree) does a sound job of portraying the hero-worshipping titular "coward" who slowly turns from utter idolatry to jaded enervation, while Brad Pitt is electrifyingly eerie as the waning bandit with a touch of destiny surrounding him. The other performances are negligible (in that they're by no means as dynamic as Affleck and Pitt) but by no means disposable; each fits perfectly within the era, especially Garret Dillahunt's role as the nervous Ed Miller.

The screenplay is a risky one, asking the thespians to tackle lines like "You're just like any other tyro who's prinked himself up for an escapade." The last time I heard dialogue that expertly crafted was on the short-lived David Milch drama Deadwood (sadly cancelled by the boneheads at HBO); ditto for the delivery, which flows like those liquid goodies in Canaan. Dominik has done a bang-up job adapting the eponymous novel into a first-rate screenplay, arguably the second-best of the year (after, of course, P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood, also an adaptation).

At two hours and forty minutes, the runtime of the film might intimidate a few. And for good reason - a few spots in the film drag, littered with loving long shots of desolate scenery that belong more in No Country for Old Men than they do in between the tense peaks of this film. Believe me, it gets tense, especially in a scene where Jesse James visits Ed Miller, who's heard that Jesse is wiping out the old gang, one by one. Recall the sensation you got from The Descent as you waited for the bang that you knew was coming, and amp it up when you see the absolutely spooky Pitt, who ominously leaves on his heavy black coat when he enters Miller's home.

Speaking of bangs, there's of course the big one near the end of the film. Not knowing the circumstances of Jesse James's demise, the whole of the movie felt like an intense build-up to what I expected would be a cataclysmic showdown, O.K. Corral style. But Dominik stages the much anticipated execution (and it is that, in clear gory detail) quietly, without fanfare or nobility. Instead, pure poetry plays out before us, with an air of tragedy to rival John Coffey's last walk in The Green Mile. Then Dominik does something risky - he continues the film for about twenty more minutes after James's death, reminding us that this is as much the tragedy of "the coward" Robert Ford (who, like Pancho's betrayer Lefty from the old Willie Nelson songbook, descends into ignominy faster than Amy Winehouse) as it is of Jesse James.

I'm going to have to re-evaluate my Top Ten of '07 List.