The Master

Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams - Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

Joaquin Phoenix is a returned world war two sailor, prone to violence, obsessed with sex like a naughty boy and seemingly unaware of his motivations. He is most likely suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the Master, the head of a Scientology-like sect. They meet and are oddly drawn to each other, two sides of a coin, one seemingly intellectual and controlled, the other rough and wild.
The film loosely follows their relationship over subsequent years, a series of vignettes relying less on plot than slowly cumulative connections: scenes are brilliant in themselves but always seem to hint at a deeper meaning and symbolic resonance lurking elusively beneath the surface. This makes for either a fascinating and frustrating experience. Or both.
It is certainly an exceedingly good-looking film and the cast are exceptional – Amy Adams is positively frightening as the Master's Lady Macbeth-like wife - but the deliberate pacing, oblique story and lack of sympathetic characters is challenging.
Phoenix's Freddy Quell is almost unique in films, seemingly a representation of pure id. His one skill is in creating brain-shredding alcoholic concoctions from almost anything on hand. His first big meltdown – while working as a department store photographer – seems triggered by a baby's incessant crying. Or perhaps not.
On one level this is a parable of America adjusting to life after WW2, but it is also so much more. I already want to watch it again.

Jack Reacher is a well-made thriller but your enjoyment of it will depend on one thing – what you think of Tom Cruise. Most specifically, if you are a reader of Lee Child's series of books, what you think of Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, the famously tall and tough moral man of mystery. And, much as I enjoyed the film, I couldn't shake the feeling – despite never having read the books – that Cruise was totally miscast. He tries to be so butch and serious but never really stops being Little Tom. Meanwhile, Werner Herzog is excellent but underused as the villain.

Dreams of a Life is a documentary, and a sad story it is too. It takes its start from the death of a woman in London, 38-year-old Joyce Vincent. Unbelievably her body lay in her depressing bedsit in front of the still-playing television for three years before anyone found her. The director gathers what friends of Joyce she can find and talks to them about this vibrant beautiful girl who seems to have one day just fallen off the radar. It's very moving but also frustratingly short on key information and wider context, its runtime padded with unhelpful 'recreations”.

Extracted is a little indie thriller that fell through the cracks and, well-assembled though it is, it's not hard to see why. In it a guy invents a device that allows him to enter other people's subconscious minds. He wants to use it for medical assistance but a funding shortfall finds him coerced into crime-fighting inside the mind of a killer. Where he gets lost for four years. Low budget but smart, there are worse ways to spend your time despite echoes of The Cell and a well-known blockbuster which was presumably the reason this had its name changed from 'Extraction”.

Robert Grindle is the clown equivalent of Bad Santa. Calling himself Stitches he quickly gets his comeuppance courtesy of a rotten show, some uppity kids and an unfortunately placed kitchen knife. The film's bizarre leap is that clowns are members of a supernatural order - 'a clown that doesn't finish a party can never rest in peace” - so at another party a few years later the now-teenage kids are visited by a vengeful resurrected Stitches. It's a gory Irish comedy horror that doesn't take itself too seriously while delivering squirmingly twisted killings.