RECOMMENDED

A middle-class Tehran couple separate over differences about whether their family would have better opportunities going abroad or staying in Iran. “In these circumstances…” is the phrase the wife uses in front of an unsympathetic judge, never finishing her thought. Complications ensue, and how: seven central characters’ lives are affected by the outward eddying of this single choice, again and again and again.  Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Screenplay Oscars, Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) draws on several filmmaking traditions as well as western drama—Farhadi expresses admiration for Tennessee Williams, for instance, and wrote his graduate thesis on Harold Pinter—and it’s a consummate piece of drama, in psychology, structure, visual design, and especially performance. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Joe Carnahan’s talent as a director of dynamic action was apparent from his earliest movies, including the no-budget “Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane” (1998) and “Narc” (2002). An assignment to direct an installment of “Mission: Impossible” fell through, and the more recent “A-Team” didn’t impress many. Yet in “The Grey,” a story of men surviving in the sub-Arctic Alaskan wilderness, Carnahan’s promise is fulfilled. It’s a bravura man-against-the-wilds, man-against-wolves, man-against-himself thriller, all fire and ice. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Albert Nobbs” has been an almost lifelong project for producer-co-screenwriter Glenn Close; she first performed in the play “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs” for Manhattan Theatre Club Downstage in the 1981-82 season. Director Rodrigo García (“Mother and Child,” “Nine Lives”), with his propensity for sensitive direction of women, seems a proper choice for the tale of a woman who passed as a man for thirty years to survive in nineteenth-century Ireland. The result is eccentric, without being captivating. The performance and the telling are fiercely restrained, displaying mystery and oddness without answering many of the questions contemporary viewers would usually expect fulfilled. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s last released feature was 2002′s “Morvern Callar”; among the heartbreaks along the way was “The Lovely Bones” being wrested away from her for a directorial project for Peter Jackson, whose strange, cruel, bloated adaptation pleased no one. The Criterion edition of Ramsay’s 1999 “Ratcatcher” also holds her shorts “Gasman,” “Kill the Day” and “Small Deaths,” two of which were rewarded with Cannes honors. Simply, she’s a great, bravura, visual, sensual director. Even if you’ve never seen one of her films, you’ve missed her: she’s the kind of intelligent, unsparing filmmaker we could use a dozen of. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo’s brilliant, urgent “Miss Bala,” which was his country’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film, and easily the best film of 2012 so far, is getting an abrupt release in the Chicago area after failing to make the final five for the Academy Awards. It’s under the Fox International banner, which co-produced the film with Canana, the Mexican production company whose principals include Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, and it’s their first release in the U.S. “Miss Bala” is the propulsive story of a working-class woman in Baja California (Stephanie Sigman) who wants to enter a “Miss Baja” competition but who falls into a series of coincidences that send her on the run for the duration of the film after witnessing the murder of members of the drug cartel and DEA agents at a club. (“Bala” translates as “bullet.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Ian Palmer’s rough, ragged “Knuckle,” a Sundance 2011 entry, follows over a decade in the brawling, battering life of the warring Irish Traveler Quinn McDonagh and Joyce families, who specialize in bare-knuckle-boxing street fights. The blood and bruises will likely seem excessive in the mooted HBO fictionalization, but in its real-life endless grudge match, the “Knuckle” manages to make “Fight Club” look like a model of restraint. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Tristan Patterson’s “Dragonslayer” is an award-winning, audience-pleasing vérité documentary-cum-punk romance that meshes moments high and low in the life of Josh “Skreech” Sandoval, a twenty-three-year-old professional skateboarder from the suburbs of Fullerton, California. There are kaleidoscopic delights in the urgent assembly, as well as omens of potential disaster at most turns. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The kick-ass experience: “Haywire” is kinetic neo-pulp that lands halfway between the solar plexus and the lizard part of the mind. The latest by prolific director-cinematographer-editor Steven Soderbergh, working a third time with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, after “Kafka” and “The Limey,” is self-conscious filmmaking, using genre trappings and a multi-double-triple-cross espionage plot to explore Soderbergh’s most consistent latterday theme—where government meets money and money wins—as well as the potential of a distaff Jean Claude Van Damme taking down a succession of handsome male adversaries (with notably crummy haircuts), largely through physicality alone. (The movie’s original, double-entendre title was “Knockout.”) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

2011 held the release of a bruised, suggestive, over-the-top, under-the-radar, potential narrative masterpiece about the sensations and emotions of 9/11: Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret.” Depicting the fragmented consciousness of a seventeen-year-old girl coming to intellectual and emotional life in Manhattan in 2005, it worked as a suitable voice for the times after that fateful day.

In the luxuriantly appointed “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, the voice chosen to exert a similar effort is that of an eleven-year-old boy, Oskar Schell, his mind also anxious with multitudes, but head-on. The literary conceit of Foer’s admittedly precious narrator comes across on screen as something else: a careening depiction of the life of the mind of a small madman and a protracted attempt at wreaking profane sentimentality from the culturally shared emotions of those events. (Plot details are revealed in the remainder of this review.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A simple scrim, lightly dancing, a sheer of muslin, ripples across the screen at an acute angle, like a movie screen, but translucent, in the briefest instance of prestidigitation introducing the 3D element to Wim Wenders’ “Pina,” a film for his late friend, dance choreographer Pina Bausch. In its own fashion, it’s as revolutionary a way of introducing the rare, effective stereoscopic effect as James Cameron’s slow reveal of the far reaches of the highly active spaceship in the opening shot of “Avatar.” Wenders was extremely articulate about the low-budget experimentation that led to the form of “Pina” in a keynote address to June 2011′s Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference, which is worth finding on his website.  Read the rest of this entry »