When judging the success of a franchise “midquel,” such as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, I ask two primary questions. Does the movie get me excited for the next film in the series? And, more importantly, does it stand on its own as a complete and compelling work? The third film in the hugely popular Hunger Games franchise answers the first question with a solid “yes.” As for the second question…kind of?

Most of the confusion comes from Lionsgate Studios’ seemingly financial impetus to split the final Hunger Games book into two parts. After the success of two-part splits in the final chapters of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises, it’s easy to understand the desire to milk a franchise for an extra movie and an extra $800 million global gross. With Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I think the decision made some artistic sense, given that book’s formidable length. But Mockingjay is only 400 pages; does the movie adaptation make an argument for splitting the final chapter in half?

We meet Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as she continues to be psychologically tormented by the memories of the brutal Hunger Games and the fact that her home, District 12, has been completely destroyed. But she has little time to rest, as her actions in the previous film have inspired whispers of revolution among Panem’s districts, rallying against the vindictive President Snow (Donald Sutherland). The leaders of the revolution, Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) and Plutarch Havensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in one of his final roles), want to use Katniss as a symbol to turn the peoples’ rebellious thoughts into actions.

But President Snow has his own weapon; Peeta Mellark, Katniss’ fellow Hunger Games survivor and possible love interest, who was kidnapped by the Capitol and is now telling the districts to lay down their arms and surrender. Has Peeta turned to the dark side, or is there something more sinister afoot?

Much of the film consists of a Public Relations war between the Capitol and the rebels, with each salvo more potent than the last. But humming under the surface is the knowledge that words will only get them so far; the revolution is certainly televised, but it must eventually go beyond that into outright war. Nonetheless, the movie does a good job of conveying the power of words and images in guiding the hearts and minds of people.

Mockingjay Part 1 is an effective sci-fi thriller, but it sometimes struggles to justify the decision to split the final book into two movies.

As most of the book’s action has been saved for part two, there is a lot of talking and crying in this movie, as various characters set up a sure-to-be-epic finale. But the movie isn’t all big breath and no plunge; there’s some real depth here. I appreciate the filmmakers’ boldness to allow the film to be boring, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. This is a slowly paced film, but it’s also shorter than its predecessors. Without worrying about completing a full story, the characters are allowed to breathe and develop with little concern for running along to the next plot point (an issue that plagued some of the earlier Harry Potter films). I appreciate how much screen time is devoted to Katniss’ mental anguish and the psychological torment of leadership.

There is also a distinct lack of Hunger Games in this Hunger Games movie, which is both good and bad. In Catching Fire, I was almost disappointed when we had to go back to the arena after getting wrapped up in the political intrigue of the districts and the ideological tug-of-war between Katniss and President Snow. Here, we get a lot more politics and a lot less sci-fi. The downside is that it makes for a pretty visually bland movie. Without any exotic game locales, we get lots of drab corridors and meeting rooms, with lighting so dim it can sometimes be difficult to see what’s going on. Even the few outdoor scenes have a drab, generic, gray dystopia tone to them, a tired visual aesthetic that Catching Fire wisely avoided.

The movie does feature two major actions set pieces, and they are both excellent. They feel much more realistic and grounded in reality than anything in the arena, and are that much more exciting for it. A tactical espionage rescue effort near the end could have come straight out of a Mission Impossible film.

The standout feature here is the caliber of the acting, which helps to atone for the movie’s sometimes slack pacing and drab cinematography. Jennifer Lawrence has several scenes of quiet anguish that are flat-out brilliant, especially when contrasted with the tightly controlled and manipulated performance she is asked to give for the rebels’ camera. Her ability to show a strange combination of fear, anger and sadness, even without dialogue, is truly remarkable. It’s a performance I can’t praise highly enough. The late Philip Seymour Hoffman, in one of his last roles, shows us what made him so brilliant. When he smiles, we don’t necessarily see happiness, but rather a layer of emotions we can’t quite figure out. His Plutarch is playful yet righteous, determined yet willing to have fun in the process. It’s a complex performance befitting one of the book’s strongest characters. And Josh Hutcherson, as Peeta, is brilliant; I think there was a lot to criticize in his performance in the original Hunger Games, but here he is asked to plumb the dark depths of Peeta’s deepest fears. It’s a performance so good it made me appreciate and connect with the character in a way the books never did. We also get a bit more depth from Finnick Odair (Sam Clalflin, also perfectly cast).

Alas, the unfinished nature of the story leaves several characters with little to do (at least until the next film). Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) returns, as does a now-sober Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), but, while these two were a major highlight of the previous films, they’re now reduced to small parts that almost constitute walk-on roles. Julianne Moore gets very little meat as rebel President Coin; much of her screen time is devoted to giving a series of speeches and looking flustered. Plutarch’s crack PR camera team introduces us to new characters, including film director Cressida (Natalie Dormer), but they seem like little more than background props. And, no matter how hard Liam Hemsworth tries, hunky love interest Gale will always be as bland as Wheat Thins.

This is where I come to a bit of an impasse regarding Mockingjay: Part 1. In a way, it’s supposed to feel like half a movie—that’s what will get you coming back to the theater for part two. But it still feels like a lot of setup for a finale that hasn’t yet arrived, and it leaves some characters in the lurch as they wait around to do something interesting in the next movie. I expect, much like with the final two Harry Potter films, part one will find greater appreciation when it stands alongside its companion film. But the filmmakers are asking us to see it as one movie, so we must engage it as such. I can’t help but think that one three (or even three and a half) hour Mockingjay movie would have been excellent. But, for half a movie, part 1 is still thought-provoking and occasionally thrilling sci-fi filmmaking.

No one does head trips quite like Christopher Nolan. The British director has successfully bridged the philosophical and the popular with hits like Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film, the sci-fi epic Interstellar, is his passion project. Executive produced by theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, the film attempts to channel 2001: A Space Odyssey in its exploration of lofty scientific concepts such as black holes, event horizons and fifth-dimensions. And, while the film does get bogged down by its excessive plotting and self-seriousness, Nolan provides enough visual grandeur and emotion to make the plot’s mental gymnastics worth the effort.

Matthew McConaughey gives an incredibly grounded performance as Cooper, a former pilot turned farmer who is caring for his teenage son Tom and 10-year-old daughter Murphy after his wife’s death, with the help of his aging father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow). They live in a near-future version of earth that is decimated by a global dust bowl, a blight that has destroyed most major crops and caused a massive food shortage. Most major technological enterprises, including space travel, have been abandoned in favor of concerted efforts to increase the world’s food supply.

Through some rather convoluted plot machinations, Cooper is recruited by an underground NASA organization to pilot a ship that will hopefully find a habitable replacement planet for humanity to travel through via a mysterious worm hole that has opened up near Saturn. Professor Brand (Michael Caine) and his daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) have come up with an incomplete equation that, when finished, will allow a mass-transit of humanity to the new planet. A much less desirable “plan B” involves a “population bomb,” which would use fertilized egg embryos to re-populate the new planet, saving humanity but sacrificing the remainder of earth’s population. All along, Cooper must cope with the fact that, in his mission to save humanity, he may never see his family again.

The early scenes on the farm are incredibly effective, as Cooper juggles his responsibility to his family with the dangers of his grim mission. McConaughey, fresh off of his Oscar win, give a marvelous performance here. His down-to-earth presence help keep the film’s lofty ideas grounded in the realm of human experience. His relationship with his daughter (and, to a lesser extent, his son, whose arc feels kind of brushed over) is affecting, and the early dialogue shows Nolan’s knack for setting up grand ideas without pulling us away from the plot’s emotional center: the relationship between a father and his children.

Interstellar is a heady mix of lofty philosophical quandaries and grounded human emotions.

McConaughey is backed by fine supporting performances (particularly Hathaway and a surprise guest actor I won’t spoil), but what really sends the film into the stratosphere is its technical wonders. Much like Inception, Interstellar would be a much lesser film without its mind-blowing visuals and sound design. The vast scale of space is given the grand scope it demands, creating a sense of awe and wonder at the cosmos that few sci-fi films have ever conveyed quite so forcefully. The sound design is out of this world, bolstered by a Hans Zimmer-penned score that’s one of the best I’ve ever heard. Nolan reportedly asked Zimmer to score the film off of a few lines of dialogue, providing no major plot details or even a genre. The result, a mix of electronics and pulsing organs, is beyond remarkable. Even better, the score knows when to stop; there are several thrilling silent sequences that help convey the scope of outer space better than any music (or sound effects) ever could.

Where Interstellar falters is in maintaining its momentum over its lengthy running time. After a while, Nolan’s storytelling flaws start to surface. His insistence on grand, speechifying dialogue grows tiring (Dr. Brand’s repeated recitation of a Dylan Thomas poem is particularly eye-rolling). And the plot’s far-reaching intellectual theories, while intriguing, exceed its grasp. Inception contained similar heady concepts, but ultimately did a much better job of giving the audience the tools it needs to fully grasp the messages and meanings it was trying to convey. This film contains no such handholding, for good or ill.

And yet, all of the reasons why I love Christopher Nolan are here to. His emphasis on the power of love and an optimistic faith that humanity will always find a way to work toward its own good is refreshing in a world of cynical auteurs. His work produces a genuine awe at the complexity of life and existence that are tough to find elsewhere. And, of course, his technical chops are through the roof; there are sequences here that are beyond jaw-dropping, both in their technical complexity and their artistic composition.

Interstellar is not for everyone. And I don’t mean that in a condescending, “this movie is only for smart people” way. I think Nolan reached a point where he let his grand ideas run a bit amok. This nearly three-hour marathon is so dense that there are stretches where it’s a bit tough to sit through. It’s the kind of movie that practically requires internet research afterwards in order to make some sense of it all. And, for those who think movies should give us all of the tools we need to figure out things on our own, that may be a fatal flaw. I wouldn’t disagree.

But I can also say that I can’t wait to see Interstellar again. With the exception of Nolan’s more populist Dark Knight trilogy, the director’s best films, like Inception and The Prestige, require multiple viewings to unravel not just the dense plots, but the complex and sometimes overwhelming emotions they convey. But, the moment where I finally “get” a Nolan film have been some of the most rewarding I’ve ever had watching movies. I look forward to the moment when Interstellar fully clicks for me. Or, maybe it’s just a load of bunk. But, with its grand spectacle, epic scale and heartfelt emotion, Interstellar strikes me as simply stellar.

In the ruthless media satire Network, TV news anchor Howard Beale, fed up with the rampant voyeurism in American journalism famously screams, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” But for Lou Bloom, the so-called hero of Dan Gilroy’s arresting drama NIghtcrawler, the diatribe might include a line like “I will always give the people what they want.”

Bloom is a lonely drifter, traveling the night streets of L.A. looking for a sense of purpose when he comes across a fiery car crash and a man (Bill Paxton) filming the wreckage to sell to a local TV news outlet. He buys his own video equipment and police scanner, and starts tracking down breaking news stories. But journalistic ethics is the last thing on Bloom’s mind; his increasingly pushy methods leave him with few friends in law enforcement. Soon, a local station and its increasingly desperate news director (an icy Rene Russo) notices Bloom’s results, and soon he gains a reputation as the guy who will get the footage no one else can. But how far will he go to get the perfect shot, particularly when he’s the first to come across evidence at a major crime scene?

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Bloom in a revelatory performance. He’s hyperactive, twitchy and odd, but there’s a seething…something simmering underneath. Is it anger? Grief? Apathy? The film doesn’t provide any answers, but Gyllenhaal’s giant, expressive eyes tell more than dialogue ever could. His high-pitched, squealing voice and rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness cadence spill over every scene, giving the film a sharp, relentless edge. Gyllenhaal has consistently proven himself to be one of the best actors around, and here he turns in perhaps his finest performance. This is the kind of movie where the hero starts out creepy and unlikeable and grows into something much worse. It’s easy to lose an audience with an antihero so repulsive, but Gyllenhaal’s performance kept me engaged every step of the way.

In its depiction of a wandering loner prowling the streets of a metropolis, Nightcrawler has obvious parallels to Taxi Driver, my all-time favorite film. I see echoes of Paul Schrader’s concept of “God’s lonely man,” a disillusioned, post-Vietnam cynic looking for something in this world he doesn’t despise.

Nighcrawler is a ruthless dissection of the exploitation inherent in our modern mediated culture.

For Bloom, the looming shadow is not Vietnam but our increasingly isolating and sensationalist media culture, which emphasizes voyeurism over any sense of humanity. Studies have shown that TV news doesn’t help us feel more connected to the suffering of others; it actually insulates us from it. No matter how sad we might feel when we hear of a violent car wreck, our inner thoughts say, “I’m glad that wasn’t me.” In one of the film’s most memorable lines, news director Nina tells Bloom, “Think of our broadcast as a woman running down the street with her throat cut open.” That takes “if it bleeds, it leads” to a whole new level.

Rather than rail against this morally vacuous culture, as Travis Bickle did in Taxi Driver, Bloom dives in headlong, heedless of the human lives (and deaths) around him. Like with Bickle, we never get a true sense of who Bloom really is, or how he got to be so messed up. He remains cold and unknowable, almost like a robot. His eventual partner offers up this valuable critique that he doesn’t sound like a human being when he talks. Some might find this lack of empathy off-putting, but I think it works as a sort of meta-commentary on how hard it is to know someone when we view them as just another statistic. And, based on his actions, there would be nothing that could redeem Bloom in our eyes anyway.

The film is a slow, steady burn, building up to a relentlessly intense second half, featuring one of the most thrilling, realistic car chases I’ve ever seen. Like Travis Bickle, we’re shocked less by Bloom’s actions than we are of a culture that allows him to get away with them, and maybe even rewards him for it. This is a remarkably polished debut for writer-director Dan Gilroy. His cynical, bleak view of L.A.’s seedy media underbelly is both terrifying and kind of funny; with a strain of pitch-black humor sprinkled throughout. James Newton Howard’s brilliant score, which starts out impossibly hopeful, builds to a cacophonous climax, descending into absolute chaos alongside Bloom’s paper-thin sanity.

Network was an eerily prescient film, predicting the rise of the 24-hour news cycle and the obsession with TV ratings over everything else. We didn’t listen to Howard Beale’s pleas, or, for that matter, Truman Burbank’s in The Truman Show. We’re more obsessed with watching other peoples’ lives than ever before. But reality TV is not interested in human beings, really; it’s interested in caricatures, controversial figures that lie on the opposite poles of any argument, while most people lie in the more sensible middle (the same can be said for our political culture). Is it really so surprising that such a culture might produce someone like Lou Bloom, interested not in other people but only in the mannequins that exist in his mind and how they can serve him?

The experience of watching Nightcrawler is dehumanizing and maybe even soul-sucking, but no matter how repulsed you are by it, you won’t be able to take your eyes off it. Sounds like how I feel when I turn on the evening news.

“What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done?” At the opening of Gone Girl, Nick Dunne asks these questions regarding marriage to his wife, Amy. He also says he wishes he could get these answers by cracking open her skull.

This thin, delicate balance between love and violence, control and chaos, is a major draw of Gillian Flynn’s breakout 2012 novel as well as David Fincher’s film adaptation. Amazingly, nearly everything that made the book so engrossing has found its way to the screen.

It’s tough to discuss the film’s plot without giving away the many twists and turns, but here’s an extremely basic summary: on the eve of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick (Ben Affleck) comes home to find his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) gone without a trace. Nick’s twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon), along with Amy’s parents, police and seemingly the entire town of North Carthage, Missouri begin a dogged search for the missing housewife. Soon, Amy is the subject of a national media frenzy. But, as the days go by and revelations begin to pile up, everyone begins to ask the question that has already been on their mind: could Nick have killed his own beloved wife?

Gone Girl is a brilliant adaptation of tricky source material.

The movie shoots back and forth between Nick’s search for Amy and Amy’s rosy (and then, gradually, less and less so) recollections of the early days of their marriage. This parallel structure worked so well in the book, and helps the film build a slow, relentless intensity. The audience is forced to piece together each part of the mystery at the same time as the characters; we never feel like we’re ahead or behind Nick in figuring out what happened to his wife. This pacing imbues even the plot’s small revelations with greater meaning.

The pacing is only one of the things that makes Gone Girl one of the best book-to-screen adaptations I’ve ever seen. The source material is tricky to say the least, but Flynn has done a bang up job adapting her own book for the screen. If anything, the tight screenplay improves upon the book, keeping the story’s unique dialogue and pitch black humor while excising some of the overlong book’s more extraneous elements.

It also helps that the acting, down to the smallest part, is spot-on. Everyone here seems perfectly cast. Ben Affleck has never given a more natural performance; he’s totally believable as a down-and-out unemployed everyman, kicked to the curb by the recession but finding ways to stay positive in the midst. Not a movie star, but an average guy put in the middle of a very bad situation. Coon is given a very juicy supporting role as Nick’s sister, and Neil Patrick Harris and Tyler Perry, cast against type, do wonders with their small but pivotal roles.

But there’s no denying that Pike is the breakout star here. Hers is an incredibly deep, layered performance, revealing Amy’s character slowly, never giving everything away. Pike’s eyes alone convey the idea that we’ll never quite figure her out, no matter how much information the movie gives us. I guess you could say she plays a woman, a real, flesh-and-blood one who refuses to be categorized or put in a box. Such a performance is surprisingly rare in our modern movie landscape. She even helps make the book’s somewhat unpalatable denouement infinitely more intriguing.

Apart from being a faithful adaptation, Gone Girl is exquisite genre filmmaking. Although some initially questioned it, David Fincher is the perfect director for this material. Although he has made a career off of crime thrillers like Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac, Fincher has really always been concerned with issues of identity. He explored it as it relates to our modern media saturated landscape in Fight Club and Zodiac, and here he’s interested in those fundamental questions Nick asks at the beginning of the film. How can I ever truly know this person in my bed? Or myself? Or anyone, really?

These are questions another famous thriller director, Alfred Hitchcock, asked repeatedly throughout his career. In fact, Gone Girl feels like the type of movie Hitchcock would have made if he didn’t have to tiptoe around the Hollywood production code. Amy strikes me as the perfect quintessential bombshell blonde, a tough-as-nails woman who won’t live her life by anyone else’s standards but her own. Nick is the film’s Scottie Ferguson, endlessly chasing after a woman he can never truly understand. I’m sure Fincher would chuckle over all the comparisons to Vertigo, but the film seems to invite them at every turn.

Fincher was wise to bring along his crew from The Social Network and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who won an Oscar for scoring The Social Network, have crafted another killer soundtrack that helps ratchet up the intensity to obscene levels. I love the now recognizable Fincher “look” cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth brings to his films, and Gone Girl’s sumptuous color palette and uncomfortably slow camera movements give it a unique rhythm all its own. Kirk Baxter won an Oscar for editing Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and his name may be in the drawing again here. A sequence near the halfway point of the film in particular is easily the finest cutting job I’ve seen all year. It’s the kind of editing that dares you not to breathe as you watch it work its magic.

The quintessential question in Gone Girl is not “do we really know or spouse?” but rather, “do we really know anyone?” And how to do we go about the process of knowing? Like Fincher’s best films, The Social Network and Zodiac, the movie doesn’t provide any answers, particularly in its bitterly ironic conclusion. But it asks some provocative and uncomfortable questions that will leave you pondering long after the lights go up. This is far more than your average thriller. Be ready for it.

Once October hits, Oscar-bait season begins in earnest. There will likely be too many good movies to keep track of them all, so now is a perfect time to catch up on some of this year’s most buzz-worthy indie films. These are the ones that you may have overlooked, but that you’ll probably hear more about as we approach awards season. Here are four of my top picks, available on demand now.

SNOWPIERCER

If the writers of Looney Tunes took The Hunger Games and set it on a train during a post-apocalyptic Occupy Wall Street movement, you’d begin to approach an attempt to describe the inspired sci-fi pastiche that is Snowpiercer.

In a future frozen, uninhabitable version of Earth, the remaining population lives on a large train that circles the globe once a year. The rich live the high life in the front, while those in the back live in squalor, feasting on nothing but bland protein blocks while their children are taken to the front of the train for a mysterious purpose. On the 17^th anniversary of the train’s never-ending voyage, a man named Curtis (Chris Evans) leads a revolt against the vicious Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton) in hopes of reaching the front and eradicating the train’s oppressive class system.

The movie is the English-language debut of Korean director Joon-ho Bong, who made the awesome horror film The Host. The plot is pretty simple, but there are so many clever little surprises running throughout the film that it’s hard to take in in just one sitting. The train, with its dozens of cars, is a genius plot device that allows Bong to show the audience pretty much whatever he wants. No two cars are alike, and each one holds a new, unexpected surprise for our freedom fighters. One may be a greenhouse, the next a classroom for the train’s privileged children. While the film’s cinematography first appears to be another slice of generic sci-fi dystopia, it quickly becomes one of the more visually arresting sci-fi films in memory.

Although the film has some grand ideas, it’s also quite violent, but not distractingly so. Curtis and his fellow have-nots have to literally fight their way to the front, and the resulting action is beyond spectacular. There is an epic, grandly orchestrated action set piece about halfway through that I think will go down as one of the finest in cinema history.

But grand visuals and action can’t carry a movie’s emotions on their own, and thankfully Snowpiercer’s wacky characters are brought to life through sharp writing and tremendous acting. Evans shows a depth here that he’s only hinted at before. But Bong has assembled an international cast that is to be envied, including Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt, Ed Harris and the brilliant Korean actor Kang-ho Song. But the biggest pleasure here is watching an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton spot oversized glasses and false oversized teeth to play the most entertaining and bonkers villain of the year.

Even with its mostly English dialogue, Snowpiercer is a Korean movie at heart, which means it’s incredibly bizarre. It’s so strange it almost defies categorization. But, even when its grand ambitions and left-field surprises threaten to derail it, the film remains a sci-fi treat that actually has something important to say. The ending is stunning, leaving us with just the right mix of hope and despair. No cinematic tale of haves and have-nots has ever been so visually arresting, consistently surprising or just plain bonkers. I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like it.

THE CONGRESS

Speaking of things you’ve never seen before, The Congress makes Snowpiercer look as comforting and familiar as a new Marvel blockbuster. It is easily one of the most ambitious movies ever made, a philosophical treatise on the nature of modern celebrity, the unreliability of memory and the concept of identity in the digital age. As you might expect, the movie takes on way too many grand ideas and ends up a bit of a mess. But it’s also an arresting work of art that defies categorization.

Robin Wright gives a spellbinding performance as a fictionalized version of herself, struggling to find fulfilling roles as an actress after her glory days of Princess Bride fame have faded. While taking care of her daughter and son, who has been diagnosed with a degenerative disease that is slowly making him deaf and dumb, her agent (Harvey Keitel) tells her of a new program, one that will “sample” her and allow a digital likeness of herself to star in endless future movies. The catch is that Robin Wright the person can never act again.

The world of The Congress is one where everything is homogenized, including the movie studios (Wright works for Miramount). The first half of the film is a sly, cynical commentary on the soullessness of the Hollywood studio system, but the script skewers it in a way that feels genuine rather than cheap (and, let’s face it, Hollywood had it coming).

In the second half, the film flash-forwards 20 years and something…else emerges. Miramount studios has become an “animation zone,” a place where even average citizens now have the ability to be whoever they want to be, whenever they so desire. And Wright, or at least her likeness, is their hero, a true embodiment of what people can do when they leave their physical manifestations behind. The film ponders over which is better, real life or this new escapist fantasy land?

The second half of the film is indeed animated, building off of director Ari Folman’s experience making the all-animated Waltz With Bashir, which I think is one of the best films of the past decade, animated or otherwise. Wait…you haven’t seen it? You should go fix that…now. I’ll wait…you’re welcome.

Anyway, the stunning animation here is less realistic than Waltz, recalling instead the gangly, stylized creations of Walt Disney and other early animated creations like Betty Boop. The animated portion is a visual feast in a strange land where people can be Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe or Abraham Lincoln. The resulting trippy visual kaleidoscope reminds me of the brilliant animation of Yellow Submarine. It has to be seen to be believed.

The Congress has important things to say about a society hooked on the drug of the age, the internet, and how it combines with our culture’s moral relativism to create, in essence, a new communist dictatorship, this one led by the entertainment industry. But it never really finds a way to say it; the trippy visuals are so bafflingly bizarre that they ultimately distract from any human drama the story is trying to convey, and the plot veers sharply into the realm of the nonsensical.

Thankfully, the last fifteen minutes are pretty amazing, suggesting a tight pacing and dramatic momentum that I wish the rest of this very slow movie would have adopted. That, along with the sheer audacity of the visuals, make this half live action, half animated sci-fi mindbender worth checking out.

LOCKE

Locke is a difficult movie to describe without giving away what makes it so interesting. It’s essentially an hour and a half of watching a man driving in a car as his life erodes around him. Yes, the entire film takes place inside a car, which is actually way more interesting than it sounds.

The man is Ivan Locke, played brilliantly by Tom Hardy, who is forced to make some incredibly tough life decisions from the driver’s seat of his car. The movie consists of Locke’s phone conversations (don’t worry, he’s got a hands-free device) with several important people; his wife and children, his boss and co-workers at a construction company preparing for the largest concrete pour of their lives and a woman giving birth to his child who is not his wife (yikes).

Hardy, who is the only person we see in the film (we hear the voices of the other characters) is absolutely arresting. Few actors can pull off a truly solo performance; even Cast Away featured scenes with other actors. Hardy plays Locke as a good man who has made a very bad decision and is dealing with the earth-shattering consequences. He’s a man that refuses to lie, and insists on doing the right thing even if, in this case, the right thing will rip his life apart.

Thanks to director Steven Knight and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, the single location never gets boring; the camera movements and lighting changes create a relentless pace. The film is also mercifully short, ensuring the gimmicky structure doesn’t get stale. In fact, I think the film’s in media res structure and single location give it a startling realism we’re unaccustomed to in the age of effects-driven blockbusters featuring exotic, globe-spanning locations.

We also stay with the movie because Locke is a good, honorable man dealing with the consequences of a single, sinful decision. It’s a film of quiet but devastating revelations, never building to any sort of traditional dramatic climax. We never see the result of Locke’s decisions, though we do get some hints. The film ends as it begins, with Locke on the drive of his life.

The film maybe feels a bit too slight, but its focus on the life of one man is also what makes it stand out. An individual life is important, and that’s something to remember in an age where action-movie extras are disposed of in increasingly creative and brutal ways. Locke is a powerful testament to the way one wrong decision can create ripples that forever alter our lives. It’s definitely a one-of-a-kind viewing experience.

STARRED UP

If you want to become a movie star, land a lead role in a British prison drama. It worked for Michael Fassbender in Hunger and Tom Hardy in Bronson. Now, if there is any justice in the world of cinema, the same will happen to Jack O’Connell, the star of the engrossing prison film Starred Up.

O’Connell stars as Eric Love, a violent teenage offender who is being transferred (or starred up) early to an adult prison. There, he attends an experimental group rehabilitation program while struggling under the “protection” of another prisoner, his unpredictable father, Neville (a brilliant Ben Mendelsohn).

The film is reminiscent of other modern British prison dramas like Hunger in that it focuses on the mundane, quiet experiences of prison life as much as it does the moments of danger. The pacing and camerawork are methodical and painstaking.  It also highlights the unjust balance of power that often exists in prison. While a supportive counselor (Rupert Friend) believes in Eric’s rehabilitation, those in power seem more intent on keeping Eric violent, unpredictable and therefore malleable. This injustice is more frightening than the film’s bone-crunching violence.

The movie is filled with very fine performances all around, but it really is O’Connell that gives the movie its soul. He is a seething mix of rage, anger and hope. He perfectly embodies a man just trying to survive while hoping and knowing that life is about so much more than survival. O’Connell is starring in this year’s Oscar hopeful Unbroken, and I can’t wait to see how he’ll fare in a big studio prestige picture. He’s definitely got a big career ahead of him.

The film builds to a very satisfying climax, even as it indulges in a few prison movie clichés. When Starred Up hits, it hits hard, and the totality of this gritty, unflinching story will leave you breathless and maybe even a bit winded. Thankfully, the script leaves room for the quiet, desperate moments of hope that are never completely out of reach even in a place as seemingly hopeless as prison. This is an utterly compelling and engrossing film, one that will likely be remembered as one of the finest of the year.