Yaron Scharf/2014 Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Zero Motivation (2014)
Tribeca Film Festival winner for Best Narrative Feature and Nora Ephron Prize, Talya Lavie’s “Zero Motivation” is an absurdist comedy that readily plays with fire. Revolving around a hapless female troop stationed on a desert artillery base in the south of Israel, the film wastes no time in targeting the Holy Grail among taboos: making light of the Holocaust.
Maria Malin/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Third Person (2014)
Paul Haggis has again formulated an interwoven story with “Third Person,” this time finally resolving the contrivance inherent in the narrative device by having all interconnected vignettes conveniently taking place in one writer’s fertile imagination.
Guy Ferrandis/Mars Distribution
MOVIE REVIEW
Venus in Fur (2014)
Roman Polanski revisits his fascination with the psychosexual realm in a big-screen adaptation of David Ives’s Off-Broadway two-character piece “Venus in Fur,” which itself is a meta-reimagining (think Charlie Kaufman) of Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella “Venus in Furs” that famously spawned the term masochism.
CIM Productions
MOVIE REVIEW
Dior and I (2014)
Frédéric Tcheng’s documentary “Dior and I” juxtaposes the compressed first eight weeks of Belgian designer Raf Simons’s reign as incoming creative director at the fashion house of Dior — from the announcement of his appointment to the runway of his first haute couture collection — with founder Christian Dior’s preparation for his own 1947 “New Look” collection (as recounted in passages from his 1956 memoir, “Christian Dior and I”).
Jeong Park/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
Love Is Strange (2014)
In Ira Sachs’s “Love Is Strange,” newlywed longtime companions Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) must separate when their matrimony causes the latter to lose his breadwinning job as a music teacher at a Catholic school.
Ben quickly wears off his welcome at the household of his nephew (Darren Burrows), stay-at-home writer wife (Marisa Tomei) and young son (Charlie Tahan). Meanwhile, George barely puts up with frequent parties thrown by his hosts/former neighbors (Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez) that prevent him from crashing on their couch.
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.
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