Oscar 2015 Hot On The List Of Nominees Review

American Sniper

As a young boy, which is to say before he grows up into a burly, bearded Bradley Cooper, Chris Kyle receives a lesson in life from his strict Texan father. The world, according to Dad, is divided into sheep, wolves and sheepdogs, those rare, righteous souls called to protect the innocent from the wicked.

It’s a tough, stark view of the order of things, one that guides Chris in his subsequent career as a Navy SEAL sniper and one that has, with some modification, informed much of the work of Clint Eastwood, the director of“American Sniper.” Faithful in shape and spirit to the real Chris Kyle’s memoir, “American Sniper” also reaffirms Mr. Eastwood’s commitment to the themes of vengeance and justice in a fallen world. In the universe of his films — a universe where the existence of evil is a given — violence is a moral necessity, albeit one that often exacts a cost from those who must wield it in the service of good.

“American Sniper” are celebrations of the profane, aggressive humor and endless teasing that men in combat deploy to relieve the tension. Chris’s courtship and marriage — to Taya, played by Sienna Miller — are rendered a bit more stiffly, but the warmth and ease that are among Mr. Eastwood’s underappreciated virtues make their way into the movie’s brief forays into romance and domesticity.

Mostly, though, we are in Iraq, where Chris Kyle served four tours of duty, racking up 160 confirmed kills. He approaches his work with steady nerves and a clear conscience, banishing the doubt and fatalism that afflict some of his comrades and buttressed by the unambiguous depravity of his enemies. These are people who use women and children as suicide bombers, who mutilate and torture anyone who opposes them, who ambush American Marines in the street. Giving them cover is Chris’s nemesis and sinister doppelgänger, a shadowy sharpshooter rumored to be a Syrian Olympic medalist.

SELMA

 David Oyelowo plays Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In Selma, about the Historic 1965 Selma to Montgomerry March for voting right

On the afternoon of March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and members of a Dallas County posse, armed with clubs, cattle prods and tear gas, attacked civil rights demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. The marchers had planned to walk the 50 miles to Montgomery, the state capital, as part of a long-building protest against the denial of basic voting rights to Southern blacks.

The procession would have crossed Lowndes County, where not a single African-American voter had been registered in more than 60 years. Efforts to change this had been met with bureaucratic obstruction, intimidation and lethal brutality, including the killing, a week earlier, of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old laborer and protester, by a state trooper.

BIRD MAN

About a terminally ill man who communes with the dead. For “Birdman,” he has lightened both his mood and metaphysical load to productive effect by concentrating on Riggan’s efforts to stage — as writer, director and star — an adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” It sounds like an alarming idea (and a strange fit, especially given Carver’s minimalism and Mr. Iñárritu’s maximalism), yet Riggan has bet his career on it in hopes that the play will deliver him from his ignoble, lucrative past playing a screen superhero called Birdman.

The story is as old as time — the play’s the thing, once again — and unwinds over several dreamily integrated days and nights that take Riggan from his meditative calm through the labyrinthine halls of the St. James in the hours and minutes leading up to the opening, during which (big breath): He rehearses an actor, receives a kiss, throws a punch, downs a drink, smokes a joint, walks a street and waxes poetic, comic, tragic and melodramatic.