Staragara
MOVIE REVIEW
Silent Sonata (2014)
This is a movie of such strangeness that it is surprising it was able to secure financing and, subsequently, distribution. It is a testament to the backers of the Slovenian-Irish-Swedish-Finnish co-production that financiers were willing to risk backing such an unusual and demanding project. It is a pity that the movie itself does not quite stand up to its concept.
Merrick Morton/Open Road Films
MOVIE REVIEW
Chef (2014)
The film “Chef” heralds the glorious return to the big screen of food porn, a term once ascribed to “Babette’s Feast,” “Eat Drink Man Woman” and “Big Night” but now mostly relegated to the Cooking Channel. At a Tribeca Film Festival screening, the audience collectively let out an audible gasp at the sight of Aaron Franklin’s fresh-from-the-pit Texas barbecue oozing meat juices when sliced with a carving knife.
Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures
It was a huge relief to many comic-book fans that Marc Webb’s “The Amazing Spider-Man” was such a charming, witty and enjoyable return to form, after the action-packed but plot-mangled mess that was “Spider-Man 3.”
It’s hard enough to reboot a series that is only five years old, but even harder to supply a worthy sequel. Much of the success of the first film was down to the on-screen chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, a sharp script and a few logistical changes (mechanical rather than genetic web slinging for example). The temptation would always be to go bigger and throw in everything in an attempt to stun the audience into submission, and this has resulted in some of the common problems that sequels always face.
Niko Tavernise/Columbia Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
Some superhero stories can shoulder excess baggage with ease, but by rights a Spider-Man film should drill down to their simplest essences: the transformed human body; the exhilaration of flight; urban strife; youthful revolt; hubris. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” isn’t really into simple essences, obliged instead to do that modern thing of providing $200-million-worth of mild legal highs, via scripts in which all relevant bullet points are actioned. The only properly new element is an air of collective panic about Disney, judging by the fractured clip from the next “X-Men” film shoehorned into the end credits of this one to try and bolster a mutual defense. Would-be wild and crazy cinema with all strings attached, “ASM2” is an average superhero film in every way, and so has to shoulder its share of the blame for the fact that the average is now decaying with a pretty rapid half-life.
Erik Aavatsmark/Vertigo Média
MOVIE REVIEW
Pioneer (2014)
Norway’s natural environment was a big factor in “Insomnia,” Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 debut in which Stellan Skarsgård struggles with a murder case and the extended daylight hours, and comes off worst on both counts. It’s at the heart of “Pioneer,” too — the director’s new film set in the early 1980s — right at the moment when exploitation of the North Sea oil lying offshore is about to alter the country from top to bottom. Part paranoid conspiracy thriller and part blue-collar procedural, it maneuvers deep-sea diver Petter (Aksel Hennie) into position as the fly in the ointment for those awaiting Norway’s transformation into one of the world’s richest countries. They duly set about removing the irritant obstacle; a plot whose fidelity to real events hinted at in the credits is hard to judge, but whose broad authenticity for those caught up in the transformation at the time would seem tough to deny.
Jamie Kingham
MOVIE REVIEW
The Motel Life (2013)
This is a movie about people who’ve slipped between the cracks. They have no settled life of any kind — no steady jobs, supportive families or stability. Some of this is their own fault, since they drink too much and make bad decisions. Some of it is pure bad luck. You can’t pick your parents. But what you can do is figure out how you’re going to deal with it, and “The Motel Life” is about three people who cope in different ways.
Allen Fraser/TriStar Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Heaven Is for Real (2014)
Based on the Rev. Todd Burpo’s account of son Colton’s near-death experience at age three, “Heaven Is for Real” climbed The New York Times best-seller list in 2010 and has now become a motion-picture event.
Colton (Connor Corum) claims to have left his body, gone to heaven and met rainbow-colored horses, his miscarried sister and even the Lord Jesus himself all while supine on the operating table with a ruptured appendix. The enterprising Pastor Burpo (Greg Kinnear) has of course seized the godsend and turned it not only into sermon anecdotes but also a best seller. But in the telling, he would very much like to convince us that he too was a skeptic and that Colton’s anesthetics-induced delirium actually made him question his own beliefs.
Christian Geisnaes/Magnolia Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Nymphomaniac (2014)
Upholding the tradition by which Lars von Trier spooks the massed ranks of the tabloids with talk of pornography before then unveiling films that prove as arousing as a kick in the knee, the four-hour, two-volume “Nymphomaniac” is merciless and hilarious in close proximity. The story skips between an intellectual investigation of a woman’s insatiable libido and a stylized erotic farce, threatening to cast its vote against optimism altogether and decide that no peace between the sexes is possible or perhaps advisable. Along the way, Volume I — with its droll laughs at regular intervals — becomes Volume II, which plunges into darkness headfirst. Large themes are invoked; large genitalia are inspected. Large theories are inevitable.
MOVIE REVIEW
Stalingrad (2014)
Columbia Pictures
The use of Imax 3-D is still something of a gimmick to get us into the cinema instead of watching movies on ever smaller personal screens. It is best used to immerse us into the world of the story with sensory overload. A great deal depends on the choice of the world. The one in "Stalingrad" is one of the more unusual ones — at least to non-Russian audiences — in recent memory.
MOVIE REVIEW
RoboCop (2014)
Columbia Pictures and MGM Pictures
There are several films wrapped up in "RoboCop," of which the new one starring Joel Kinnaman as the luckless Alex Murphy and Abbie Cornish as his traumatized wife is competent, slick and knows that some topicality will condense automatically in a movie with Samuel L. Jackson as a ranting conservative talk-show host. The immediate problem is the heavy fan-service nods made to another film, Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original, which tend to land with a clang. If the new model is going to invoke its predecessor as knowingly as that, it can't complain if some comparisons are made about the level of ambition. The Reaganite military-industrial complex with its heartless wonks was only one target of the original film, a curate's cornucopia that also scooped up the Vietnam mind-set, blue-collar nobility, the role of women, contempt for intelligence and religious symbolism. José Padilha's version puts all its chips on one number instead, correctly spotting that contracted-out drone warfare is a moral minefield, but down-shifting the end result from gallows pulp to a high-concept sci-fi actioneer about a dead-shot cyborg and the woman who loves him. American Jesus has been swapped out for American Gladiator.
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