MOVIE REVIEW
Beyond the Hills (2013)
Sundance Selects
Cristian Mungiu’s third full-length film divided opinion when it premiered at Cannes in May, where it won some enthusiastic admirers it but failed to achieve the consensus of critical appreciation that coalesced around “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” a few years earlier.
It’s not hard to see why, because it doesn’t quite satisfy the distinct requirements for Cannes’s respective core crowds. Although it’s long and foreboding, it doesn’t quite display enough fanatical austerity or philosophical rigor to appeal to hard-core slow cinema adherents. But neither is it the relatively accessible and salable arthouse product that might appeal to buyers and distributors, unlike Mr. Mungiu’s previous film. Lying somewhere between these two dominant schools of art-cinema appreciation, the film may fall between the cracks when it comes to 2012 retrospective lists, but there’s still much to admire about Mr. Mungiu’s filmmaking.
Continue reading “Praying the Gay Away” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Ginger & Rosa (2012)
Nicola Dove/56th BFI London Film Festival
Sally Potter has always been famous for making movies considered unmakable. “Ginger & Rosa” is her determined attempt to enter the mainstream by telling a straightforward story in a straightforward — albeit minimalist — way. Her instincts as a filmmaker for style, sound and faces are as sharp as ever, but she seems to have forgotten that sometimes the most direct way of making a point is by going in a roundabout way.
Continue reading “A World on the Brink, a Friendship Tested” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Dreams of a Life (2011)
Dogwoof
The story of Joyce Vincent (played by Zawe Ashton in re-enactments) — a woman who died alone in her North London bedsit just before Christmas 2003 and lay undiscovered until January 2006 — forms the devastatingly moving basis of Carol Morley’s superb documentary.
Fascinated by the story, Ms. Morley’s investigative determination to unravel the mystery and get to the bottom of how Vincent could seemingly slip so readily through the cracks of society actually ends up being so much more than a quest for answers.
Continue reading “A Private Afterlife” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)
Memento Films
In the beginning, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” seems to signal a major departure for Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With its lush, warm colors and timeless fable-like quality, the film is at first glance nothing like Mr. Ceylan’s meditations on urban alienation. In a long shot, golden headlight beams sweep through the darkness and ignite the Anatolian steppe like comets in the night sky. A caravan of cars wriggles across the hilly countryside amid stops that are virtually indistinguishable from each other as if in an Abbas Kiarostami movie, carrying cops, a prosecutor, a doctor, a few gendarmes, some gravediggers and a pair of murder suspects searching in vain for a corpse. They argue, wax poetic and bond in the course of the twilight-zone journey. But once they unearth the body, it finally becomes apparent that Mr. Ceylan is treading familiar territory after all.
Continue reading “The Wind Will Tarry Us” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Coriolanus (2011)
Larry D. Horricks/The Weinstein Company
You can tell a lot about an actor by the vanity projects he or she undertakes, by which we mean the films an actor self-finances once he or she has made it big in Hollywood. Some actors choose to take small parts in defiant anti-blockbusters, such as when Ewan McGregor followed “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” with “Young Adam,” about a raping, stealing, murdering canal-boat worker in 1950s Glasgow. Other times an actor will take his money to direct something, such as when Samantha Morton used the clout of her Oscar nominations to direct “The Unloved,” about a girl abandoned to the British foster-care system.
So whatever Ralph Fiennes decided to use his Voldemort paychecks for would be interesting. He’s brought one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays to the screen, set it in a modern, unnamed Eastern bloc country (filmed in Serbia with a mainly Serbian crew) and showed someone shot in the head within the first five minutes. “Coriolanus” does not feel like the work of a first-time director. Mr. Fiennes pulls it off triumphantly. He’s made a historical curiosity relevant now, when our cities are in uproar and the citizens have taken to the streets.
Continue reading “A Very Top Dog to the Commonalty” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Chicken With Plums (2011)
Le Pacte
Marjane Satrapi has carved herself a very particular niche, firstly as a cartoonist with an extremely distinctive black-and-white drawing style shown off her in her graphic novels, which are based on her life growing up in Iran. Now living in France, Ms. Satrapi has further branched out into making films based on her graphic novels; the first was 2007’s “Persepolis,” an animated, autobiographical film drawn in her style co-written and co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. And now they have reteamed for the live-action — though stylized — “Chicken With Plums.”
Continue reading “Fiddle While Home Burns” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Rampart (2011)
55th BFI London Film Festival
“Rampart” is a symphony of bad decisions and their consequences. For example, early in the film Los Angeles cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) chats up a woman (Audra McDonald) in a bar, who persists in wanting to converse despite Dave’s dramatic insults. Evidently, she has a serious cop fetish. When she cheerfully presses for his nickname around the station, he shrugs: “It’s Date Rape.” She flinches; and he explains that many years ago he was involved in a shooting in which a serial rapist was killed. Dear reader, she sleeps with him anyway.
Continue reading “Weasel Weapon” »
MOVIE REVIEW
The Artist (2011)
The Weinstein Company
“The Artist” is a movie made out of love. There is no other way to describe it. It is a love letter to cinema, to style and to the art of making movies; and anyone who loves movies needs to see it — now.
It is about the relationship between George Valentin (Jean Dujardin of the “OSS 117” movies) and young Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, who was the maid in “A Knight’s Tale”). George is the biggest movie star in 1927 Hollywood; and he meets Peppy when she accidentally drops her handbag at a red-carpet event. Photographs of them together make the front page, to the annoyance of studio head Zimmer (John Goodman, who you can tell enjoyed himself). But the fuss gets Peppy — and her legs — work as an extra; and her career takes off from there. But as sound comes into movies, George doesn’t realize his star status might change along with the movies.
Continue reading “Silence Is Golden” »
MOVIE REVIEW
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Nicole Rivelli/Oscilloscope Laboratories
For many mothers, their primal, taboo fear is that the children they give birth to will be something unrecognizable, something they cannot control, maybe even something evil. “Rosemary’s Baby,” which was based on a hugely successful novel, took this fear to the extreme. But now there is the only slightly less extreme “We Need to Talk About Kevin” — also based on a novel — and coming to our screens with the same level of horrified anticipation.
Continue reading “Sowing the Bad Seed” »
MOVIE REVIEW
Guilty (2011)
Jean-Claude Lother/Mars Distribution
Vincent Garenq’s “Guilty” is signposted in its exposition as a faithful adaptation of a series of memoirs entitled “Miscarriage of Justice” by Alain Marécaux. Mr. Marécaux (a remarkable Philippe Torreton), a family man who is too often distracted by his job as a bailiff, is left shattered when he and his wife are arrested in the middle of the night on suspicion of involvement in what would come to be known as the notorious Outreau pedophile ring.
The accusations leveled at Mr. Marécaux seem incredible and baseless, yet in an instant his life begins to disintegrate around him. As it transpires, the Marécauxes have been accused of the worst sort of infidelity by persons unknown; and yet despite the lack of evidence or motive, they are remanded in custody.
Continue reading “Trial by Error” »