Premium Rush (David Koepp, 2012)

David Koepp's Premium Rush feels like the first posthumous tribute to the work of the late Tony Scott. Unintentional, of course, but beneficial for those of us already missing the British director and wondering if anyone could match, much less exceed, his approach to action filmmaking. Koepp certainly cannot top Scott, but for a time, but it appears he picked up a thing or two while doing uncredited rewrites for The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. Stylistically, Premium Rush feels like a throwback to Enemy of the State-era Scott, with its constant zooms in and out of satellite views of New York City as a GPS plots courses for the bike messengers on whom the film focuses. Narratively, though, it calls to mind Scott's fondness for regularly making epic the banal occupations of working-class stiffs. In bike couriers, Koepp nearly manages to surpass Scott in choice of subject. Not only are these men and women paid wretchedly for grueling work, they may be the most hated group in New York City, foe to pedestrian and driver alike.

Premium Rush gets off to a great start, following reckless, brake-less rider Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) barreling nonstop through traffic-gnarled streets as he casually gets into phoned arguments with his girlfriend Vanessa (Dania Ramirez, also playing a bike messenger), pissing matches with ripped colleague Manny (Wolé Parks) and trying to get more work (and cash) from his flippant boss (Aasif Mandvi). Like Scott, Koepp casually employs a multiracial cast not for the sake of commentary but merely as a reflection of an increasingly diverse America. And like Scott, Koepp wastes no time introducing the central, driving conflict, embodied in this case by Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon), a crooked cop who attempts to intercept a letter entrusted to Wilee by a friend (Jamie Chung) in order to pay off some gambling debts he owes to Chinese mobsters.

All of this is communicated in mere minutes, with breakneck speed but visual fluidity that keeps everything coherent even as digital cameras placed low to the ground race feverishly along with Wilee's split-second reroutes around traffic jams (including visualized what-if paths that all lead to crashes until Wilee finds the perfect escape). Time stamps on-screen show a realistic passage of time as these characters pedal miles and miles at a time, but Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt's editing gives the early material, and the first chase between Wilee, Monday and a hapless bike cop who gets drawn into Wilee's dangerous evasive maneuvers is among the most thrilling sequences of the summer.

Then, the pace completely collapses. Koepp starts throwing to flashbacks that begin at the dizzying, slick speed of the what came before that soon turn to plodding, wholly unnecessary backstory. Koepp, a screenwriter by trade, perhaps feels the need to overcompensate as a director, to show Monday getting into debts, or the reason Nima has to send such a valuable package to a mysterious person in Chinatown. But these are matters summed up in single sentences, and to devote minutes to Monday stumbling around Chinatown dropping stacks of cash on games or Nima's issues with authorities back in China saps the momentum from the film with whiplash-quickness. And even when the film gets the thread back, it moves into much duller midpoint sequence that makes Willee race a belligerently irritating Manny for the object now revealed to have deep personal consequences. Manny's incessant boasts and refusal to stop only serve to derail an already sidetracked movie.

At last, though, Koepp and co. live up to the early promise when Manny's insipid chase is cut short by police and Wilee gradually recruits every bike messenger in the city to help his cause. Gordon-Levitt and Shannon even get to share a deliciously ludicrous torture scene that lets Shannon jettison what little restraint he had shown to this point. Compared to the other talky moments of the film, this bit flows into the action rather than interrupting it. A chase out of police impound manages to top even the early promise of the first sequence. In such moments, Premium Rush displays a physicality and ingenuity so sorely missing from most of the bloated blockbusters released this year. A brief outtake during the credits of Gordon-Levitt proudly brandishing an open wound received from a sudden journey through a cab's rear windshield is worth more than all the CGI in the world.

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011)

Take Shelter is not merely a gripping psychological thriller about whether a man is losing his grip on reality or his hallucinatory visions are omens. It is also a tragic portrait of that man's response to his affliction and his desire to protect his family, even if from himself. Jeff Nichols, whose debut, Shotgun Stories, displayed the clear influence of early David Gordon Green and William Faulkner, pushes deeper into that territory. He mixes naturalism with dark poetry, creating fractured views of people trying to overcome the conditioning of grim pasts and never truly succeeding.

Shotgun Stories also offered a breakthrough performance for its star, Michael Shannon, who consolidated 15 years' worth of character performances—typically as a man always on the tipping point of civility, even sanity—as the embittered son locked in a feud with his abdicated father's second family. The work Shannon does here makes that role look like a mere primer. Shannon, a character actor who has found himself in demand for a range of high-profile projects (see him now as a main cast member on Boardwalk Empire), found his first plateau with Nichols. Now he has reached the second. Even if the film around him were mediocre, Take Shelter would be worth the price of admission.

But Nichols upped his game as well. He sets his atmosphere from the opening shots, rustling wind cutting sinisterly through trees as Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) dreams of a fiendish storm carrying thick, yellow rain the consistency of "fresh motor oil." The visions only get worse from here, and Nichols mixes his ability for sustaining and building mood with more polished editing to blur the lines between nightmare and reality. The aesthetic matches the narrative; Curtis' imagined rainstorms drive people and animals mad and bloodthirsty, the attacks they perpetuate upon him in sleep leave psychic scars during the day. When he dreams of his dog mauling his arm, he feels the pain for a whole day. When a coworker turns on him in a nightmare, he can barely look at his lifelong friend.

Shannon's face, so drawn and flat but expressive, communicates a terror he tries desperately to bury for the sake of his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and young daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart), who is deaf and needs implant surgery miraculously covered by Curtis' health insurance. Shannon avoids the nervous tics and spiky energy one might expect of a man falling apart. Instead, he withdraws, coiling rather than springing. His eyes narrow with wariness and suspicion until it seems as if the very bones in his brow shuffle downward to slope over his sockets. Shannon bursts with nervousness and paranoia, but he proves all the more frightful and unpredictable by suppressing these feelings into slow, deliberate actions.

One of those actions is to reinforce the tornado shelter outside the family house, a decision Curtis settles upon with tacit firmness. Swatting away any question as to the sanity of his renovations in a time of penny-pinching hardship, Curtis sets about expanding the shelter and preparing so single-mindedly to protecting his family from the hellishness he believes is coming that he does not notice how his actions court ruin of a very different but no less affecting sort. When this realization breaks through the wall Shannon puts up around himself, the self-loathing and regret that plays out over his face is wrenching. Curtis is all too aware of his mother's past with mental illness, and the fact that he cannot overcome his fears with this knowledge only wracks him further.

Shannon's spellbinding, anguished but reserved performance eclipses all else, but he's not the only worthy player here. Chastain continues to impress as Curtis' wife, whose concern for her husband can only take so much, even as she constantly finds new wells of strength to stand by him through his ordeal. The strained but fierce bond between them forms a contrapuntal line for the ever-increasing grimness of the film, working in tandem but also in opposition to the overall tone.

Take Shelter does have its missteps, or at least its moments of less-than-perfection. The scene of Curtis reaching his breaking point with the whispers of others is a logical emotional climax but one that feels too showy after previously being so beautifully and disturbingly controlled. There's also the epilogue, which can only be justified, not lauded like the rest of the picture. Yet I confess I found it easy to justify, seeing in its left-field resolution of the film's ambiguity an unexpectedly hopeful angle of renewed filial trust and faith.

Still, I found the true conclusion to be the downright masterful sequence in the shelter during a real storm, prompting Curtis to simultaneously freak out and silently bask in having been "right." But when the storm passes, the question arises as to whether Curtis will accept that and let his family back into the surface world, leading to an agonizing couple of minutes that project Curtis' inner turmoil onto the audience in almost unbearable tension. That sequence elevates Nichols from a remarkably talented upstart to an emerging major player, and it more than proves Michael Shannon's own ascendancy to the top tier of contemporary American actors.

Shotgun Stories (Jeff Nichols, 2008)

Son Hayes (Michael Shannon) bears more scars than the shotgun marks on his back. His monosyllabic name, a description more than an identity, speaks to a childhood of neglect as much as his terse self-sufficiency. We meet him as he discovers his wife has left him, silently reacting to this awareness as if having long expected it. She wouldn't be the first person to walk out on him, whether or not he deserved it. With her gone, Son invites his similarly monikered brothers, Boy and Kid, to come live with him. The reluctance on Shannon's face communicates a primal sense of filial obligation more than any real kindness for his homeless siblings.

When word comes that the father who abandoned them as children died, they show up at the funeral in dirty work clothes to find the man's second family, the one he made after getting sober and finding Jesus, sitting apprehensively. Son says some harsh things about the father his half-brothers remember as a kind and loving man, standing before them as the skeleton from Pa's closet. At last, he spits on the coffin, catalyzing an inevitable feud that will have horrific consequences.

Jeff Nichols' Faulknerian debut Shotgun Stories creates a bleak atmosphere of its Arkansas setting, swapping David Gordon Green's rust-belt North Carolina for agricultural plains, where even a college boy knows how to fix a tractor. Gray skies hang over still fields of muted brownish-green. Poverty is an ingrained way of life, with Kid living in a camping tent outside Son's house and Boy in a van with a busted tapedeck and a battery he uses to run a salvaged window A/C unit and a margarita blender. Boy asks Son to use his VCR, but the older brother says that privilege comes with a price: a bag of Doritos.

When a character outside the fraternal conflict enters the frame, they bring only further coldness rather than a breath of fresh air. The father's first wife, who raised Son and the other two boys, lowers the already frigid temperatures into the realm of absolute zero, sucking out any hint of life with her hateful indifference to the plight of her boys before and after the altercation with the other Hayeses gets out of hand. Then there's Shampoo, who seems to come around only to let slip some new bit of gossip about the four half-brothers that reignites issues that previously hinted at settling.

Soon the insular conflict heats up, becoming so fierce it's easy to forget just how small and petty the squabble truly is. The second Hayes family cannot appreciate that the man they loved essentially ruined these three men, who in turn cannot respect that he did change and make a positive mark on the others' lives. The narrow-mindedness awakens the most destructive masculine tendencies in all of them. Well, most of them anyway, but the brother in each respective camp who tries to broker some kind of peace between the rest gets rebuffed by ally and foe alike.

"You raised us to hate those boys, and we do," Son tells his mother when the feud escalates into dire consequences. "And now it's come to this." Though Nichols elides over the violence, preferring to let a close-up of the drawing of a knife tell the audience what's about to happen rather than show the result, Shotgun Stories feels brutal and direct. Yet its lyrical quality also prevents the film from falling fully into despair. Son and Mark cannot lose face face before the other, but even when the situation spirals out of control and only deepens everyone's resolve, the men give off a sense of reluctance to continue. Bound to fight a conflict out of innate feelings of necessity, these brothers' fight seems a microcosm of so many conflicts great and small, and their conscious selves struggle against this primal urge. Some of them clearly have no clue even how to fight these battles, buying shotguns and looking at the pieces in confusion when it comes to assembling them.

That a small measure of decency manages to worm its way through the film's permafrost communicates some vague hope for concluding these seemingly unending battles, even as it does not even pretend to be an upbeat conclusion to the senseless violence. This is but the cautious first step, and there's no way to know if this is the start of a brighter dawn or merely the calm before the next storm.