By Ray Pride

Some movie reviews don’t want “Public Enemies” to be the film that it is.

“Time is luck,” a character says in “Miami Vice,” and that’s become a deep theme in Michael Mann’s carry-case of notions about work, rivalry, crime, law and how masculinity is defined by men in action. Even more so than in earlier films, “Public Enemies,” a portrait of the last short sharp burst of independent criminals like John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) robbing banks in the midst of the Great Depression, Mann works from implication more than explanation. Read the rest of this entry »

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A nonplussed colleague who was less than impressed with Steven Kijak’s fine, haunting documentary “Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” observed that there must be dozens upon dozens of possible subjects for nonfiction films about musicians with small followings and eccentric leanings who are an acquired taste. The phrase, I said, was “dozens and dozens of works-in-progress.” The good fortune is that Kijak’s portrait of the now-sixtysomething publicity-shy Walker, once a teen idol, then unconventional crooner and finally, maker of haunting, near-musique-concrete pop of sorts, is quietly observant of the making of Walker’s most recently released album, “The Drift.” But Kijak is good as well at demonstrating how musicians affect one another, most memorably and innovatively in “listening parties” of several tracks, where a Walker song begins and a musician like Brian Eno is seen listening, joined in another quarter of the screen by another musician like Damon Albarn or Johnny Marr or David Bowie or Jarvis Cocker and then finally four musicians contemplating the sound just as we do. A moment in the studio where Walker instructs a percussionist on how to “play” a side of pig may be the strangest, but there are many fugitive insights as well in this entertaining glimpse of a quiet life as well as the matter of taste, whether instinctual or learned. “He’s got a way of disappearing,” an interviewee says, one of the few hints at his years lost of alcoholism and other dark places. Kijak’s got ways of making him manifest. It’s one of my favorite rock documentaries of the past few years: may it influence many more to come. 95m. (Ray Pride)

“Scott Walker: 30 Century Man” plays Siskel Saturday, Sunday and Thursday.

And I really hate “I Hate Valentine’s Day.” If you loved Nia Vardalos in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and in “My Life in Ruins,” then you will love another serving of her non-stop smile and hunt for a nice man. As Genevieve, she owns Roses for Romance, a Brooklyn flower shop staffed by two gay clichés. Down the block, Greg (John Corbett) opens a Tapas restaurant called Get On Tapas. He played the groom in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Here he’s lucky to get as far as boyfriend because Genevieve lives by a rule of dating one man no more than five times, then quitting him since things always go wrong for her after that. Romance is fun when short-lived; permanence spells pain. The sitcom plot turns on a miscount of their dates: she wonders why he doesn’t call after number four; he figures number five means don’t call again. Although Vardalos possesses the appealing personality of a supporting character, she is entirely at fault for writing and directing herself into nearly every scene of this routinely bad romantic comedy. She mocks the art scene by naming an artist “B. Neo” and his exhibit “Exhibitions.” The humor is numskull. As is this quip: “You act like you were in the opening credits of some French film.” French films do sometimes screen at the Music Box, which inexplicably booked “I Hate Valentine’s Day.” Count on hating no film from that country at this fine art house like Vardalos’ witless out-of-place time-waster. With Stephen Guarino, Amir Arison, Zoe Kazan, Gary Wilmes, Mike Starr, Jason Mantzoukas, Judith Friedlander, Rachel Dratch. 98m. (Bill Stamets)

The fun cohort of prehistoric critters return for a third installment of family-oriented animation. Manny the woolly mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano), Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) and Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) teamed up for a trek to take a human baby back to its father in “Ice Age” (2002). “Ice Age: The Meltdown” (2006) added Ellie (Queen Latifah) as a mammoth mate for Manny. “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” sees the birth of their first offspring. The message: moms love babies, and males love adventure. As their pal lumbers into fatherhood, single Sid adopts some dinosaur hatchlings and Diego ponders a solo odyssey. The exodus motif of the last film—outrunning a deluge of melting ice water—is now multiplied into a multitude of chases and rescues. The new terrain is a tropical underground where dinosaurs roam. This hollow-earth is home to a new character, Buck (Simon Pegg), a loner pursuing an albino dinosaur. This eyepatch-accessoried, Cockney-accented weasel is modeled on Captain Ahab. Another single male with an obsession returns in recurring bits of classic cartoon action. The kinetic squirrel-rat Scrat continues to chase a nut. A female squirrel-rat named Scratte adds tail to his quest. However, the heartbeat of this franchise is the notion of a blended family, here called a “herd,” where pan-species pals do not eat each other. Step-sibs, are you getting this? Screenwriters Peter Ackerman, Michael Berg, Yoni Brenner and Mike Reiss keep the tone kind and clever, with only three yuks about testicles. Director Carlos Saldanha and co-director Michael Thurmeier lend inventive detail to the physical comedy in this 3-D treat. 87m. (Bill Stamets)

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Erica Zonca made an indelible impression with his “Dreamlife of Angels” (1998) but managed only to produce one other feature since. In his erratic but fascinating “Julia,” Tilda Swinton is center screen as a 40-year-old alcoholic and liar who’s lousy at con jobs and lousier at life. Coming from an actress who’s avowedly teetotal, the sense, and almost the scent, of dissolution and despair is ever-present. (A child-kidnapping plot that goes multiply awry adds to the dread.) While the narrative lurches, Swinton ably captures states of drunkenness and disregard, disorientation and self-degradation. It takes the film’s exhausting but often-exhilarating duration to cycle through self-abasement to self-awareness and perhaps even hope. With Saul Rubinek, Kate del Castillo, Adam Gould. 144m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

“Earth. Birthplace of the human race.”

And Michael Bay, too! Dear Lord. What is this farrago called “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”? A Monday night screening offered two-and-a-half-hours of pummeling, lashing, transformation, goop, goo, fairy dust in a tube sock, simulacra of human behavior and agreeable air conditioning. In another narrative (equally without consequences) the only fair review of an indigestible mess like this would consist of two words: “I Quit.” Read the rest of this entry »

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In each of his features, telling his stories at great velocity, with running times seldom more than ninety minutes, Christian Petzold and his cinematographer Hans Fromm’s sense of sturdy composition and clear-eyed sense of light on landscape (most recently economically backward reaches of East Germany) transfix the eye. Working largely in sunlight, his images gleam, like literal representations of watercolor renderings or stage design. What confines his characters, however, is not the near-formalism of the filmmaking, but a reduction of their behavior to physical gestures and compulsive repetitions. Emotions seethe under his actors’ impassive surfaces. “Jerichow,” the name of a village west of Berlin on the River Elbe, is where Thomas (Benno Fuermann) returns for his mother’s funeral. Family conflicts that turn violent quickly sketch the mindset of a character we will later learn is a dishonorably discharged Afghanistan war veteran and the middle-distance way Petzold observes his characters. While working on a more metaphorical level than Bresson, Petzold pares performance down, especially with Thomas, whose tense back and coiled expressions tell us more than psychologically derived dialogue might. But the effect allows the movie to breathe: I wouldn’t want to make “Jerichow” sound airless, oppressive or without genuine empathy. Petzold’s variation in this case is on James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” with a chance crossing of paths with Ali (Hilmi Sozer, whose intricate performance teems with melancholy and resigned self-awareness), a Turkish-German owner of forty-five doner kabob shops. A drunk-driving charge and a suspended license leads Ali to offer the endlessly humiliated, simmeringly resentful Thomas a job as his driver. When we meet Ali’s wife Laura (Nina Hoss, from “Yella”), the die is cast. Cain’s Greek restaurant owner is now a Turkish-German entrepreneur. Sexual, political, class and racial issues are implied in the first fleet collision of the characters, and an audience’s response is calibrated by Petzold so that we have the room to muse on such things as why two Germans would or should begin an affair behind a Turkish husband’s back: ugly frictions reside in each crossing of glances. It’s familiar and heartening melodrama from Petzold, who is also a keen student of his late German forebear, Fassbinder, down to small bites of the color red, ghostly manifestations, crossed boundaries and terse dialogue that takes history and fate on each character’s anxious shoulders: “You can’t love if you don’t have money, that you know.” (Ray Pride)

Or, “doesn’t work” as the case may be. Waxworks filmmaking of intermittent animatronic voltage, Woody Allen’s fortieth feature, “Whatever Works,” is reportedly a long-shelved script he’d written for the late Zero Mostel back in the era of “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan.” “The Meanest Man in the World,” it was called. Allen’s claimed in the past not to have castoffs; there are few clues to the present day, although a line of voice-over does invoke President Obama. It’s another February-December romance in which the overbearing Manhattan motormouth and egotist Boris Yellnikoff takes in chicken-fried runaway Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood, who finds music in her character where Allen has provided little or none), whom he dubs a “sub-mental baton twirler” but eventually takes into his bed and marries. Larry David handles the mouthpiece chores here, reciting garrulous harrumphs of abuse directly to the camera; the prolix bursts, studded with calls to bring down the “sub-mental inchworms” and “pygmies” of society, do indeed sound like a first draft from oh-so-long ago, and the self-realization clichés in store do sound very, very 1970s. With Patricia Clarkson as Melodie’s mother, who discovers her inner artist, and Ed Begley, Jr. as Melodie’s father, who discovers his inner gay man. Nuance does not abound. With Michael McKean. 92m. (Ray Pride)

“Voices of women do not matter here,” Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo (”24,” “House of Sand and Fog”) tells journalist Freidoune Sahebjam (Jim Caviezel, “The Passion of the Christ,” “The Thin Red Line”) who is passing through her mountain village in Iran. “I want you to take my voice with you.” This issue-oriented docudrama unfolds as a flashback told over a long afternoon as the Paris-based, Farsi-speaking visitor waits for his car to get repaired. Director Cyrus Nowrasteh and his co-writer Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh adapt Freidoune Sahebjam’s 1990 book about the 1986 stoning of Soraya, here played by Mozhan Marnò (”Traitor”). Her abusive husband falsely accused her of adultery so he could marry another woman. With the collusion of the corrupt local mullah and a coerced witness, Soraya was stoned to death by her village. Her father, husband and elder sons threw the first stones. Sahebjam heard of the incident when he passed through the unnamed village while on assignment for Paris-Match, working on an unrelated report on satellite listening dishes installed near the Pakistani border. Nowrasteh-who earlier wrote the television docudramas “The Day Reagan Was Shot” and “The Path to 9/11″-ratchets down the evil Sahebjam recorded. This harrowing expose of fundamentalist justice is daunting fare, even as Nowrasteh spares us the sight of the victim’s brains spilling from her skull and stray dogs feasting on her decapitated corpse. With Navid Nagehban, David Diann, Ali Pourtash and Parviz Sayyad. 116m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

Based on the 2003 book by the prolific Jodi Picoult-she’s published fifteen novels since 1992-this well-made chemo weepie poses a tough issue of medical ethics without shameless tearjerking. An L.A. family deals with chronic illness in a script by Jeremy Leven (”The Notebook,” “Alex & Emma”) that’s directed by Nick Cassavetes (”The Notebook,” “Alpha Dog,” “She’s So Lovely”) with over a dozen medical consultants, including pediatric oncologists, in the credits. When Sara (Cameron Diaz) and Brian (Jason Patric) learn their little daughter Kate has leukemia, they genetically engineer a sister, a supply of compatible tissues and organs for treating Kate’s disease. (A similar decision figured in last year’s “A Christmas Tale” by French director Arnaud Desplechin.) This designer donor is Anna (Abigail Breslin “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Signs.”) After a lifetime enduring painful procedures for keeping Kate (Sofia Vassilieva, NBC-TV’s “Medium”) alive, 11-year-old Anna decides she does not want to donate a kidney. She hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to file a “petition for medical emancipation.” His own medical issue-alerted by his service dog named “Judge”-will come to light in a hallway of the justice building. The judge in the case (Joan Cusack) is just back from a six-month leave after an emotional breakdown triggered by her 12-year-old daughter’s death. In court her own mom, an attorney who sacrificed her career to take care of Kate, questions Anna. Cassavetes handles the turmoil with measured performances, and downplays a trite plot turn around a courtroom outburst and leaked secret. I’d prefer more on Anna’s tragic conflict to sacrificing for her sister, and could do without all the narration and flashbacks. Kate’s terminal nobility is prescribed: “I don’t mind my disease killing me, but it’s killing my family too.” If only Cassavetes and Leven gave equal time to her physical pain, instead of their hurt by proxy. With Evan Ellingson, Thomas Dekker, Heather Wahlquist, David Thornton. 106m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)