By Ray Pride

Thematically, Arkansas-born writer-director Jeff Nichols’ fourth feature draws capably from the models of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and “Starman,” as well as Nichols’ own affinity for spare widescreen compositions akin to Clint Eastwood movies of that filmmaking era.

“Midnight Special” is a shaggy God story, withholding secrets without being precious, and hardly ever explaining. A boy is taken from the compound of a religious sect led by a patriarch (Sam Shepard) who’s convinced that eight-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) is a vessel for languages and numbers from God. The boy also has a tendency when disturbed to disrupt everything around him through blue light that shoots from his eyes. The abductor is his father, Roy (Michael Shannon, bringing a taciturn, complex characterization to a Nichols film for the fourth time), and an accomplice (Joel Edgerton). The layers of reasons for their cross-country escape are slowly revealed, including meetings with his mother (Kirsten Dunst) and a quizzical NSA agent (Adam Driver) also curious about Alton’s talents or origins. Visually, dramatically, things stay cool, at a distance or middle distance. Like ”Close Encounters”’ Roy Neary, this father takes a son on a journey to an unknown place, a proving ground.

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RECOMMENDED

Richard Linklater’s ever-amiable, always ambling, achingly intelligent “Everybody Wants Some!!” is an early-eighties-set comedy-drama set on the weekend before college begins for the baseball team at a Texas university. It slots neatly into the narrative timeline of his filmography, from the boy years of “Boyhood” to the picture it most parallels, and is not quite a sequel to “Dazed And Confused,” as well as to the onrushing “present” days of the “Before” trilogy. Profane, teasing, taunting, Linklater’s script also indulges comedy high and low: hormones and burgeoning ego and beginners’ alcohol consumption bristle on screen. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Canadian filmmaker Robert Budreau’s playful meta-essay “Born to Be Blue” doesn’t even try to supplant Bruce Weber’s ethereal mood piece about the later years of musician Chet Baker, “Let’s Get Lost.” It’s akin to a walking-talking version of one of the poetic wanders of Geoff Dyer’s great book, “But Beautiful,” in which Dyer takes single iconic images from the history of the early days of jazz and extrapolates a brief narrative from what may have happened directly before or after the icon was etched. Read the rest of this entry »

Werner Herzog’s “Lo & Behold”

By Ray Pride

After two years of Docs at the Box, a spring showcase of new nonfiction at the Music Box, programmed by journalist-programmer Anthony Kaufman, a larger event, expanding the work of the nonprofit Chicago Media Project, will take its place. The quartet behind the long weekend, which will augment Chicago debut attractions with post-screening discussions, interactive events and panels, are Kaufman, CMP co-founder and board chair Steve Cohen, CMP co-founder and executive director Paula Froehle and festival coordinator Sarah Nobles.

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Much, much, much is backward and wrong with the sour, vile, inexplicable wreckage of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” Begin with the dim slurry of cinematography. Where celluloid was flecked with dream-sparkles of silver, Zack Snyder’s darkest dark-beyond-dark digital project yet is all clutter and cloaca, as if sprayed and spackled with a sewer’s worth of a city’s shit.

Perspective is another. “BvS: DOJ” is a rotten title, but it could well have been “Watchmen II: The Reckoning, I Reckon.” Based on an interview the Monday before its release to the Wall Street Journal, Zack Snyder reassures the world that his DC Comics blunderbuss would be in school with his elephantine burlesque, “Watchmen,” a major case of putting the meta before the text. “I was surprised with the fervency of the defense of the concept of Superman,” Snyder says of his detractors. “I feel like they were taking it personally that I was trying to grow up their character,” Snyder told Michael Calia. “It’s all about the ‘why’ of superheroes: the political why, the religious why, the philosophical why. In some ways, this will be, I hope at its really best, the impossible version of ‘Watchmen.’”

So. Which part of “inexplicable” is best to convey in a few hundred words? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Murder runs in the family in “The Clan,” the latest drama from Argentine cinema mainstay Pablo Trapero. Based on a true story of a middle-class family being dragged into the kidnapping, ransom and murder trade of the family patriarch, Arquímedes (Guillermo Francella), Trapero quietly suggests that all may not be as it seems in an even larger clan known as “Argentina.” (The time frame encompasses more than one dark era in the nation’s history.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a career of two decades plus, Northwest-centric filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s established her voice in features like “Old Joy” (2006; two male friends reunite on the road), “Wendy and Lucy” (2008; a woman and her dog part on the road), “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010; a western in search of a trail), and “Night Moves” (2013; activists seek action to ignite ideas). But even her 1994 feature debut, “River Of Grass,” is a deadpan delight, as richly observant of suburban southern Florida landscapes as the more classical locations in which her characters now shift. (It’s being rereleased now in a digital restoration.) Reichardt’s described the sun-kissed not-quite-a-comedy as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love and a crime story without the crime.” Genial Lisa Bowman plays Cozy, a bored thirty-year-old housewife who hits the road with Lee (Larry Fessenden, also the film’s editor and co-producer), whose hope is to “just drink.” There’s no lack of charm in the not-lackadaisical spark between these two generous performers as guns, hapless robbery attempts and seedy motels decorate their lives. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse) Do the French have a word to encompass the cockeyed cornucopias of Arnaud Desplechin’s full-blooded, full-throated movies like “Kings & Queen” (2004), “A Christmas Tale” (2008), and now his masterful “My Golden Days,” one of the very best films from 2015? I know that’s the Germans’ stock in trade; the French likely accept the generous pirouettes and warm embrace without having to verbalize even more than his fretful figures already do. (Oh, shit: joie de vivre, that’s it.) An episodic sequel of sorts to his hypnotically voluble 1996 “My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into An Argument,” the best moments of the vivid, vivacious “My Golden Days” reach across space and time, banter hopefully, traffic in first love that will become lasting laceration. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Xavier Giannoli’s “Marguerite” is a charming, even beguiling multilevel comedy of manners set in France in 1921, with acting stalwart Catherine Frot embodying the naïve ambitions of Marguerite Dumont, a baroness-turned-amateur soprano. The character name is cagily akin to that of Groucho Marx’s frumpy foil, Margaret Dumont, while the character is loosely inspired by Florence Foster Jenkins, an American singer of the 1940s who committed similar sins against pitch and tune and aural decorum. Richly appointed, emotionally confrontational, often rollickingly funny, “Marguerite” is candied tragicomedy, and Giannoli and Frot demonstrate all the expressive control their character fails to attain in her mad goal of succeeding at public performance. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Shakespeare, with his love-labored language offering ever-elastic intonations, ever-fungible interpretations (and misinterpretations) down the ages, hasn’t fared as well with direct interpretations on screen as with indirect adaptations—although I recently heard a non-acting friend’s unexpectedly impassioned defense of Kenneth Branagh’s uncut-text 70mm version from 1996. But the voices that have already been raised high this season are for “Chimes at Midnight.” It’s an unexpectedly fantastic revelation to find what had already been acknowledged as Orson Welles’ garrulous late masterpiece, attentively melding the “Henry IV” plays, as well as “Richard II,” “Henry V, “and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” has been scrubbed to a fine digital shine after years of exhibition in substandard prints with hard-to-hear sound. Legends are attached to it: Welles himself said, ““If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up,” and Pauline Kael said the seat-of-the-pants production’s major battle scene ranked with the best of “Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa—that is, with the best ever done.” Read the rest of this entry »