J.C. Chandor

The Chandor shot is a face deciding something. In Margin Call (2011) nobody trades anything; a dozen frightened, well-paid people sit in rooms between a Thursday afternoon and the following morning and work out what a number means and what it will cost to act on it. In Kraven the Hunter (2024), the one stretch that feels like his is the opening fight in a Russian prison corridor, where Ben Davis keeps the camera near enough to the bodies that we could tell whose elbow was whose. He likes to hold a shot and let the actor carry it. When the material allows that, he is a fine director. When it does not, he is a competent one.

He came to features late, after fifteen years of commercials, documentaries and corporate videos, and Margin Call arrived only after another project collapsed. He wrote it himself, and wrote All Is Lost (2013) while still editing it: a film in which Robert Redford spends most of the running time on a boat saying almost nothing. A Most Violent Year (2014) put the same interest in ethical compromise into a period business drama. Then the scale grew. Triple Frontier (2019) is a heist with an ensemble, and Kraven is a comic-book film with a cast of a dozen, three countries and a lion.

What he does well is pressure in a confined space, without spectacle. Margin Call is the best film we know about the 2008 crash because it is not about the crash at all; it is about a meeting, and it declines to say whose fault any of it was. We have watched it several times, late, and the point where a roomful of people finally understand the figure in front of them still tightens our chest more than most car chases manage. The flaws are his too. His people talk in finished paragraphs, and after the second hour of the night the speeches start to sound like speeches.

Kraven is the problem, and most critics have said so. The script explains everything twice, the lion never once looks like one, and the tension comes and goes in ninety-second pieces where All Is Lost held it for a whole film. Russell Crowe and Alessandro Nivola enjoy themselves, and Craig Wood cuts the brawls to be followed rather than hidden, but the film around them belongs to a studio, not a director. The later studio work is plainer than the early films, and Chandor has not yet shown he can make a big picture feel as small as it needs to.

He has kept the same producers, Neal Dodson and Anna Gerb, across three films, which suggests a man who knows what he is for. He once said, "I try to ground characters in the choices we all make." Few of us have had to decide whether to fight a lion. Start with Margin Call, alone, with the lights off, and come to the rest when you trust him.