★★★★☆
Four Stars

It has been a long road for Azealia Banks following the release of the all-conquering ‘212’ back in 2011. Since then she’s been signed by indie-label XL, then a major, had her album delayed multiple times, been unceremoniously dropped, and become a pop-culture punch line for her legendary twitter feuds. But now, at last, her debut album Broke With Expensive Taste has arrived as a surprise iTunes release, providing Banks with a chance to demonstrate her artistic vision on a commercial LP.

Unlike Beyoncé’s recent surprise release, which was specially designed to provoke a media-storm of hysteria, I can’t help but feel Banks has pushed out her long-delayed album just to get it over with. Finally following up on the exhilarating promise of her debut, Broke With Expensive Taste is a showcase so assured that it will have even her harshest critics struggling to doubt Banks’ talent, direction, and yes, taste.

Her first full length release since 2012’s Fantasea Mixtape, the album finds Banks with a more eclectic range of influences than the high camp and sea punk styling which typified that witch-hop outing. Ditching her mermaid alter-ego, Banks throws almost anything at the wall, from the salsa on ‘Gimme a Chance’ to ‘Yung Rapunxel’’s metal, the synth pop energy of ‘Ice Princess’, and even the bizarre but fantastic deployment of Carolina beach music on ‘Nude Beach A-Go-Go.’ The most impressive thing is that nearly all of them stick.

It is a testament to Banks’ delivery, flow and presence that she is never lost amongst the album’s diverse production. Broke stakes her claim in the pantheon of hip hop’s most commanding voices as she navigates complex rhythms with her trademark Brooklyn swagger. It also helps that her ear for a solid House track has never been stronger. Most of the musical experimentation occurs in the melodies, leaving Banks to ride the infectious dance beats which have served her and her mischievous delivery so well in the past.

It perhaps isn’t Banks’ fault that nothing else on the album quite matches the immediacy of the ubiquitous ‘212’. You get the sense that she is done with defining her public persona in three minute radio slots. Instead, she uses Broke as a means to establish the range of her abilities, the diversity of her style and the depths of her vulnerability.

So whilst Banks struggles to craft a hit as compelling as those former smashes (though ‘Chasing Time’, with its radio friendly hook does come pretty close) it seems as though, above all, she is content to use this album to reassert herself, while still only 23 years old, as the most exciting and promising enfant-terrible that the rap world has to offer.

With her debut album, Azealia Banks proves that her claim to having “expensive taste” is correct indeed. Yet fortunately, on the strength of the material here, it’s unlikely she’ll remain broke for all that much longer.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

North Dakota is booming. Fracking has opened up huge oil reserves and drawn jobseekers for all over America. As The Overnighters begins we see a series of grainy home videos showing people from all corners of America – Kentucky, Wisconsin, Mississipi – packing their bags, reassuring themselves with rumours of people getting jobs in one or two hours; people getting recruited as they step off the bus. The coupling of an oil boomtown and a depressed economy attracts the destitute, and the hopeful: “People with ten felonies are getting one hundred grand a year just ‘cos they tough enough”. 

In the midst of all this is the town Williston, and the Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke. Jesse Moss, camera on shoulder, trails the pastor as he converts his church into a shelter for the often homeless migrants. Most arrive with just one bag slung over their shoulder. The illusion does not last: they soon realise jobs are not so easy to come by, and house prices have shot up with the demand. The film opens as Reinke, a real-life Ned Flanders, chirps hymns and glides through the corridors of his church – bright and early – waking up the snoring piles of men who are scattered just about everywhere. He is carefully Christian, welcoming everyone, regardless of whether they are “broken” or “sinners”. 

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At first his congregation are welcoming, but the mood soon begins to turn. This documentary largely skirts around addressing the ecological aspects of fracking, or the increasingly macho environment of a town where the gender balance has been skewed dramatically, fuelling sexual violence. The men – often boys, really – gun cars, drink beers and talk women around fires, and even ‘fish’ for birds with bread on their hooks. We see glimpses of the local’s feelings through newspaper headlines blaring about the sex offenders cruising into town, and in the rare moments the camera can be drawn away from Reinke. 

Reinke is a fascinating study, though, and this documentary is really half about him. As the film draws on, as the tensions mount and his position weakens, he increasingly reveals his fears to the camera. His willingness to do this, and some of what he says, invites suspicion, and he has clearly watched the mega-pastors on the big stage longingly in the past. But, in spite of the trite rhetoric, he remains oddly compelling. He has that overwhelming earnestness, eyes peering over his glasses by turns imploring and understanding – understanding you in a way you have never been understood before – which is quite mesmerising. By the end the confessional aspect becomes quite bizarre, even intrusive, as secrets are revealed which reframe much of what passed before: “The public persona, you can believe that, and the private becomes something else. The result is always pain.” 

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The pastor’s mission soon becomes his trial and at first, you feel, this is how he likes it. It is his cross to bear as he squares up to the press, the city hall, and mutiny in his congregation. These scenes are both understated and remarkable as the community closes ranks against the drifters who do not want “to build anything”. They try to reconcile their lack of charity with their Christianity. One of the workers cannot believe it: “Everyone deserves a chance, this is America, this is what this country was founded on you know – helping your neighbour, just being good people”. 

This documentary is both a story about one man’s state of faith and a study of contemporary America. Moss, priced out of the Williston hotels, lived with Reinke’s family throughout and has made something that manages to be intimate and epic. Some of the film’s weaker moments include the drippy portraits of the men, overlaid with cloying music. These are unnecessary attempts to strike sympathy in a film that is as dramatic as any fiction film, and lead by its own unlikely star man. 

★★★★☆
Four Stars

The opening credits of Mr Turner begin in silence over a black screen before a cut to a landscape evoking those painted by the title character and eventually panning to give the first view of Timothy Spall in his latest role — a meditative start to a film that is meditative throughout. Gary Yershon’s eerie soundtrack accompanies a first few minutes dominated by Spall’s grumpy expression before the commencement of any dialogue, setting the scene for a film that is unafraid to take its time.  

Mr Turner depicts the last 25 years in the life of J.M.W. Turner, the celebrated British landscape painter of the Romantic period, following his work, family and relationships up to his death in 1851.

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The character of Turner is interesting and compelling. As visceral in life as his painting style, he is at first difficult to assess, treading the line between friendly and threatening in almost every scene. He grunts his way to the position of alpha male among contemporaries such as Constable, and is something of an eccentric. Tying himself to the mast of a ship in a storm in order to learn how to paint such a scene is the epitome of this. Such commitment to work incidentally recalls the methods of Spall, who had painting lessons for two years in preparation for the role — maybe actor and subject are not all that different.

Family relationships exemplify Turner’s light and dark. His relationship with his father, the other Mr Turner after whose influence on the artist’s life the film could easily be named, is a charming one, with a grown man’s father still telling his son when to have a shave. Other family   relationships are rather more strained and a darker and more mysterious side to Turner is revealed through scenes and dialogue that hint at the fates of those not present, revealing a catalogue of murky secrets as the film develops.  

In terms of both writing and directing, Mr Turner comes right from Mike Leigh’s top drawer. His dialogue brings two and a half hours of effortless flow and tender treatment, with a great deal of humour along the way, while his direction pulls off ambitious scenes like the continuous shot of various conversations in a doorway as Haydon walks away to the river to glorious effect.

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The era of the early to mid Nineteenth Century is created and sustained in a manner that does not feel obtrusive. Aside from the costumes and scenery, the audience is reminded of the times by the less glamorous jobs of families such as the shaving of a pig’s head in preparation for dinner, rather than by the more grandiose clichés that could have been employed, giving a true sense of attention-to-detail. 

Much praise and some awards have already been heaped on Timothy Spall’s performance in the lead role, and it is easy to see why, with his captivating range of facial contortions and the opportunities for deeper emotion in the second half of the film. It was the two leading ladies, however, whose performances caught my eye. Dorothy Atkinson gives little away in the sympathetic role of Hannah Danby, Turner’s faithful housekeeper, while Marion Bailey is particularly accomplished in the role of Mrs Booth, offering a worthy equal to Turner in a believable and endearing romance. 

The generous run-time of Mr Turner is very much felt. It does not, of course, purport to be a fast-paced thriller, and nor should it be. Every scene is well crafted and enjoyable, but there is no getting away from the fact that it takes its time. As a film to be enjoyed with time on your hands to rejoice in each offering of beautiful cinematography and perfect writing without thoughts of when the plot might progress, it is almost faultless, but I wouldn’t recommend seeing it with a busy schedule either side. It needs and deserves full attention in order to be enjoyed in all of its intricacy. 

★★★★★
Five Stars

Is this the moment when the ‘man bun’ trend will finally be put to bed? Watching Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom repeatedly tie his greasy locks into a tiny little top-knot would be enough to put anyone off the hairstyle for life. Louis is an abhorrent and shady character, coldly dispassionate in the face of morbidity and violence. Played with unsettling brilliance by Gyllenhaal, he skulks through the film with a poise and control that is always hinting at something diseased inside of him. And his hair really is horrible.  

When we first meet him, he is unemployed, unable to get a job (or even an unpaid ‘internship’) at the local scrapyard. As he drives home from another unsuccessful day’s job-hunting, he notices a car crash and stops to see what’s going on. It is here, as he watches two men boorishly shove cameras as close as they can get to the wreckage, into the faces of the emergency services and the bleeding victims themselves, that he learns of the sordid, after-dark world of ‘nightcrawling’, finding the latest crimes and accidents using police scanners and racing to the scene in order to be the first to capture exclusive footage to sell to the TV news companies. Louis quickly becomes very good at this and, in a world already rife with corruption, he manages to sink to the lowest points of immorality in order to rise to the heady heights of the profession. 

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Louis is driven entirely by his desire to succeed. He explains to the news editor of the TV station that he has learnt everything he knows through the internet; he is the modern, corporate man, but this corporatism, when translated to this seedy underworld, seems incongruous, even disturbing. He hires an ‘intern’, Rick (Riz Ahmed), he is permanently adding his latest videos to a portfolio, and he speaks the language of the intern, the potential employee.

As he says in his impromptu pitch to the scrapyard boss, he’s a hard worker; he sets high goals. Louis is a corrupt exaggeration of a businessman, a man who has taken the advice of CV building websites and interview guides to their grotesque extreme and will stop at nothing to achieve those high goals, even if it means stomping all over any notion of journalistic ethics in his path. 

Undeniably, though, Louis is good at his job. He clearly has an eye for a great shot, and Gyllenhaal’s sleek, almost greasy performance, gliding unemotionally through the carnage, highlights his skill as a cameraman as much as his moral vacuity.

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And this skill in making the gross look great is shared by first time director, Dan Gilroy. Nightcrawler is the latest in a long tradition of films which imbue a corrupt, pulsating city with such lurid beauty that you almost forget how disgusting it is. Comparisons to Taxi Driver have been bandied about and they are very much justified: Gilroy does for LA what Scorsese did for New York, rooting out fantastic shots in a city that has become mired in its own immorality. His framings of the dawning sun against the mass of grey below, in particular, serve both as gorgeous images in their own right, and a cleansing from the experiences Louis has put us through during the previous night. 

If his first film is anything to go by, Gilroy will be climbing that career ladder as quickly as his protagonist. Nightcrawler is silky yet cerebral, brutal yet beautiful. Through a compellingly nasty central performance by Gyllenhaal, Gilroy forces us to enter LA’s unrelentingly dark, disturbing underbelly. A subtler but still excellent supporting cast contributes too — great turns from Rene Russo and Riz Ahmed catch the eye — and despite the violence, it is impossible to turn our eyes away.