MOVIE REVIEW
Sweet Rush (2009)
The Film Society of Lincoln Center/
Les Films du Losange
“Katyń” appears to be the masterpiece for which Andrzej Wajda, the Polish auteur and four-time Oscar nominee in the best foreign language film category, spent his entire career preparing to make. Although anything that followed would probably seem trivial next to the 2007 epic about the Katyń massacre, Mr. Wajda’s new film, “Sweet Rush,” is just as spellbinding and personal of a film.
MOVIE REVIEW
Lebanon (2009)
The Film Society of Lincoln Center/
Celluloid Dreams
“Lebanon” — the newly-minted Golden Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival — is a personal account from director Samuel Maoz, who served in the Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of the eponymous nation now famous mostly for Hezbollah and rocket attacks. But a live-action “Waltz with Bashir” it is most certainly not. The film is in many ways so indistinguishable from “Beaufort,” an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film in 2008, that one constantly wonders what the Venice jury headed by Ang Lee saw in Mr. Maoz’s film that made it so special.
MOVIE REVIEW
Police, Adjective (2009)
IFC Films
“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” have called worldwide attention to Romanian cinema. But they are tough acts for any film to follow, having set the bar impossibly high. So Corneliu Porumboiu faced an unenviable task. And given that both his debut, 2006’s “12:08 East of Bucharest,” and his follow-up, “Police, Adjective,” claimed awards at the all-important Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Porumboiu has obviously succeeded. But — unfair though the comparisons may be — his two films are nonetheless relatively underwhelming next to “Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months.”
MOVIE REVIEW
A Serious Man (2009)
Wilson Webb/Focus Features
Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) lives the quintessential postwar American dream. He has a nice suburban Minneapolis home, a picturesque family of four and a car all his own. He gets up each morning and goes to work at a university, where he’s being considered for tenure. He’s a pillar of the local Jewish community and fashions himself a success, wholly contended with the direction of his life.
But the year is 1967, it’s the Summer of Love, and the tumult that will upend the social mores of the first two decades of the baby boom has begun brewing. Although “A Serious Man,” the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, only obliquely references the changes manifesting well beyond Larry’s front porch, they’re felt throughout a narrative that finds the bedrocks of the character’s well-heeled life methodically upended. Commencing with quotes from the Jewish scholar Rashi and Jefferson Airplane, the movie brilliantly considers one of the ultimate questions: Is there some order, some higher plan, that shapes our existence, or are we going at it alone?
MOVIE REVIEW
Zombieland (2009)
Glen Wilson/Columbia Pictures
In order to survive the undead-infested America depicted in “Zombieland,” the film’s highly-phobic and anal young protagonist Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) adheres to his own set of rules. Scribbled into a pocket-sized notepad, his guidelines range from the obvious (“Rule No. 31: check the back seat”) to the darkly humorous (“Rule No. 3: beware of bathrooms”). The rule that will best prepare viewers of “Zombieland” for maximum satisfaction comes not from Columbus, but his newfound travel partner, Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), an eccentric killing machine who’s the Chris Farley to Columbus’s David Spade. It’s simple, really — “Rule No. 32: enjoy the little things.”
Unwavering in its off-center humor, “Zombieland” packs so many sight gags and droll one-liners into its rapid-fire 85 minutes that it’d be easy to under-appreciate the small details. If Rule No. 32 is embraced, though, “Zombieland” equates to brainless enjoyment of the most well-executed caliber. The horror-comedy wheel isn’t reinvented, but that’s measly potatoes when a main character’s biggest concern isn’t becoming corpse food, but finding the nearest Twinkie. And the payoff of his Hostess mission? A crowd-pleasing “D'oh!” moment right out of Homer Simpson’s playbook. “Zombieland” overcomes its ailments by simply going for comedic broke.
MOVIE REVIEW
Disgrace (2008)
Paladin
While most works of literature and cinema centered on South Africa have focused on the experience of Apartheid, Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” — a Booker Prize winning novel published in 1999 — broke from that trend. An urgent piece of contemporary fiction that serves as a warning against false complacency in the post-Apartheid era, it reveals a country still torn at its roots despite the progress that had occurred earlier in the decade.
MOVIE REVIEW
Surrogates (2009)
Touchstone Pictures
There’s an interesting movie buried inside “Surrogates,” but it rarely emerges. From director Jonathan Mostow and screenwriters Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, the film squanders a premise rife with potential on rote police theatrics. A lackadaisical adaptation of the eponymous graphic novel series penned by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, the picture trades in hoary Bruce Willis procedural clichés and underdeveloped conceits.
MOVIE REVIEW
Heart of Fire (2009)
Senator Film Verleih
Making a kids’ movie about child soldiers should be impossible. The cruelty and horror of their daily existence seems like something it’s better not to discuss. On the other hand, to ignore something that awful can only serve to perpetuate it. “Heart of Fire” is based on a German bestselling memoir by Senait G. Mehari, who as a child was forced to fight in the Eritrean wars of independence. The film does an age-appropriate job of demonstrating how people always have choices, even in situations where they have no choice.
MOVIE REVIEW
Vincere (2009)
Festival de Cannes
Marco Bellocchio has tackled some of Italy’s most delicate historical and religious subjects with an inspired touch of surrealism. “Good Morning, Night,” Mr. Bellocchio’s treatment of the Red Brigade’s 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, took that singular event and expanded it into a broader allegory of a turbulent chapter in Italian history. Similarly, “Vincere” extrapolates Benito Mussolini’s ill-fated first marriage into a cautionary tale about the price of absolute power.
MOVIE REVIEW
Black Dynamite (2009)
2009 Los Angeles Film Festival
It’s a shame that the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez exploitation duet, “Grindhouse,” derailed at the box office, because “Black Dynamite” could have been billed as that double feature’s de facto sequel. Shot with the grainy texture of aged reels, director Scott Sanders’s tongue-way-past-cheek spoof of 1970s blaxploitation cinema plays like an expanded riff on the faux trailers that broke “Grindhouse” in half. Unfortunately for that Tarantino-Rodriguez project, today’s mainstream audience proved to be resistant toward winking big-screen throwbacks, aloof to — not in on — the joke. Which doesn’t bode well for “Black Dynamite.” As a straightforward comedy, the film lays the humor on thicker than Shaft’s mustache with mixed success. There in lies its dilemma: “Black Dynamite” is so married to its high-concept that story is sacrificed for shtick. That’s surely the intention, and “Black Dynamite” ultimately lives and dies by its own agenda.
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