Derek Cianfrance
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Home from the Hill (1960)
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
influenced The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Themes
It’s reminiscent of a lot of earlier films, including “Home from the Hill,” Vincente Minnelli’s 1960 adaptation of William Humphrey’s novel, which treats some similar themes.
The Devil All the Time (2020)
Directed by Antonio Campos
influenced by The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Visuals Plot Themes
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Devil All the Time consists of some backwoods Deliverance scenery, the airlessness of The Place Beyond the Pines , some shots swiped from Miller’s Crossing , and a general sense of wanting to be a tangled, Paul Thomas Anderson-esque rumination on brutality.
Campos steers away from arriving at 2005's Crash and instead heads toward something constructed with a poet’s eye, like The Place Beyond the Pines.
In a similar fashion to Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, the movie examines the inescapable recycling of brutality across family trees, and does so with more coherence than was achieved by Cianfrance’s clear triptych narrative structure.
It isn’t so much hard to follow as all over the place, in need of a through line that’s more substantial than its ‘sins of the fathers’ theme (which makes it feel reminiscent, in some ways, of Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond The Pines ).
Days of Heaven (1978)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced The Light Between Oceans (2016)
Visuals
The new film wants to be as glorious to look at and listen to as Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978) and as wracked with emotions as James Gray’s “The Immigrant” (2013), and if it doesn’t match the achievements of those two, Cianfrance still proves his point.
Gosling gives a class in Method acting, and his more physical performance - cigarette dangling from his mouth, bald spot, paint-spattered pants - is reminiscent of De Niro circa "Mean Streets."
In the 60s and 70s John Cassavetes worked in this kind of territory, in pictures like Faces, A Woman Under the Influence and Husbands.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Directed by John Cassavetes
influenced Blue Valentine (2010)
Visuals
Taking a page, or maybe a full novella, from John Cassavetes' kitchen-sink melodramas, Blue Valentine amplifies the intensity a notch or two above the expected; it leaves the actors looking bruised and exhausted, like Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands at the end of Cassavetes' A Woman Under The Influence.
The Godfather (1972)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Themes
"The Place Beyond the Pines" is a gripping, intimate family parable whose "sins of the father" theme is vaguely reminiscent "The Godfather."
Most will be surprised and easily impressed with the film’s scope and Cianfrance’s patience as a storyteller, because most would have lost control over such an expansive tale, especially given the film’s running time and endless amount of on-screen talent, but Cianfrance somehow manages to balance it all out for a majority of the film’s time and because of that I consider The Place Beyond the Pines the year’s current best film so far and one of the single most important family dramas since The Godfather.
If you saw “The Place Beyond the Pines,” you may remember the way that excellent picture embarked on a new story path when most films wouldn’t dare a such a thing.
Minus Russell’s complicated yet uplifting work as Emily, the film would still be a knockout coming-of-age story, but with her damaged optimism, razor-sharp edits that echo Terrence Malick’s best work, and a structure that recalls The Place Beyond the Pines , Waves organically builds to gigantic moments, bolstered by powerful mini-explosions along the way.
And certainly Scorsese has worked in this sort of mood; while watching Raging Bull , Steven Spielberg said he was like "an intruder."
It becomes a scary study in the woundedness of defensive manhood Raging Bull meets COPS.
Williams particularly is exemplary: I thought Gosling's performance at times has a touch of ego: he may well have been watching early Di Niro performances in such films as Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver.
But Cianfrance gives interviews in which he says he’s wanted to make a “triptych” ever since he saw Abel Gance’s silent epic Napoléon.
I'm misquoting They Live By Night, the much-imitated Nicholas Ray film about the lower-depths life.
Cinematographer Sean Bobbit (Steve McQueen’s Shame and Hunger) pulls right up alongside the cage bars and peers in, rendering the bikes abstract as they buzz by.
The Place Beyond the Pines is a much bigger canvas, and scene by scene it can be riveting, in part because of the meticulous widescreen camerawork (the d.p. this time is Sean Bobbitt, who shot Hunger and Shame for Steve McQueen) and also because of Cianfrance's sure touch with actors, who manage to rise above the ultimately thin and repetitive material.
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Plot
Pines sees Cianfrance channeling The Godfather Part 2; but instead of fathers at the head of criminal dynasties separated by and echoing through the chasm of time, it’s the collision of two men and how the subsequent fallout manifests itself in their family and heirs.
Derek Cianfrance attempts a macro-micro social approach that worked well for projects such as John Sayles’s “City of Hope.”
This is, however, the kind of narrative ambition that also eluded Sean Penn (in the similar-feeling “The Indian Runner”) as well as Cianfrance’s own cinematic father figure, John Cassavetes, in his later films.
In a Lonely Place (1950)
Directed by Nicholas Ray
influenced The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Characters
He resembles the ill-fated heroes in Nicholas Ray pictures such as They Live by Night , On Dangerous Ground , and In a Lonely Place .
Like the nightclub singer who is blinded by the shootout in John Woo’s The Killer (1989), Romina suffers as a result of the men around her and this suffering includes being kept figuratively in the dark.
Marriage Story (2019)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Blue Valentine (2010)
Visuals Themes Plot
If Marriage Story starts with the thud of an ending, then it ends with the embrace of a beginning (reminiscent of the closing sequence of Blue Valentine).
I had the same reaction to Blue Valentine that I did to Marriage Story .
Past features like Blue Valentine tend to focus on the couple’s slow deterioration from love to hate and Baumbach removes all that.
An interesting comparison can be made between Marriage Story and Derek Cianfrance’s relentlessly bleak Blue Valentine (2010), which also follows a couple’s failing marriage and their fight over child custody.
The Wrestler (2008)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
influenced The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Visuals
While the opening tracking shot evokes the isolation and despair of Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant “The Wrestler,” Luke’s life is soon punctuated by lightning strikes of crime, followed by the gentle roll of downtime with his family.
For a minute there, it looks like “The Place Beyond the Pines” will be a deeply psychological character study in the tradition of “ The Wrestler ” or “ The Fighter .”
GoodFellas (1990)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced The Place Beyond the Pines (2013), Roofman (2025)
Plot Visuals
…it’s tempting to think Cianfrance and co-writer Kirt Gunn had Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas in mind when using this storytelling device…
So many supporting characters fill the story — a corrupt cop (Ray Liotta), a woman who is fearful that she has married an entire police department (Rose Byrne), a slightly slimy district attorney (Bruce Greenwood), Avery’s father, a weary former state supreme court justice (Harris Yulin) — that at times it seems like a seedy, small-town Goodfellas.
Stylish and assured, it hooks us from the start, beginning with a dazzling travelling shot (like many directors, Cianfrance probably thinks he's imitating Scorsese and "Goodfellas"; what he's really imitating is Scorsese imitating not just "Touch of Evil," but "I Am Cuba").