RECOMMENDED

Actors long to play the bad guys, and even better, to find the “privileged moments” that define some kind of “humanity” or poetic truth beneath, beyond their essential callousness. Working from a screenplay by British savor-of-the-month Abi Morgan (“Shame”), “Mamma Mia!” director Phyllida Lloyd works across the scrim of the advanced mental failings of elderly Margaret Thatcher to create an acting showcase for the great Meryl Streep. The great Meryl Streep—in the conflicted, confounding, sometimes risible “The Iron Lady.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ferran Adrià

RECOMMENDED

“El Bulli: Cooking In Progress” is a captivating process documentary, allowed behind the scenes for a year at the research laboratories and kitchen of chef Ferran Adrià at his now-closed Catalonian restaurant. Gereon Wetzel’s chilly, fascinated documentary follows the six months of research-and-development each year that Adrià would return his staff to the laboratory in search of new alchemical taste-and-texture sensations for their thirty-dish menus. Read the rest of this entry »

Michelle Williams

RECOMMENDED

In “My Week With Marilyn,” Michelle Williams astonishes in an otherwise routine film: the pixie-cut so-serious performer from “Blue Valentine,” “Shutter Island,” “Incendiary” and “Wendy And Lucy” finds her way easily, silkily, into Marilyn Monroe’s fragility but also her teasing intelligence. Set in 1956 during the shooting of “The Prince and the Showgirl,” directed by Laurence Olivier (doughy, plummy, hammy Kenneth Branagh), “My Week” posits a love affair of sorts between Monroe and the twenty-three-year-old director’s assistant Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) who later composed a pair of memoirs claiming intimacies with the then-biggest movie star in the world. Meanwhile, her “Method” dithering contrasts with Olivier’s stage-trained technique. Names are dropped and bits of behavior amuse, but it’s all set dressing for Williams’ work, almost like a heavily posed Vanity Fair feature dressed to the nines. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Fittingly, “Serge Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life” is a comic strip of the life of the French singer-sybarite who sang a song called “Comic Strip,” and directed by a French comic strip, or bande dessinée artist, Joann Sfar. A fantasticated and louche artifact, Sfar’s debut feature is layered with animation, puppets, copiously dressed interiors and sallies, like having the adult Gainsbourg read his reviews in the form of his younger self, echo bittersweetly. And of course, music, women, smoking. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After the kapow kick-netics of Raymond Wong’s two Donnie Yen-starring “Ip Man”  origin films, Herman Yau’s 2010 prequel, ” The Legend Is Born: Ip Man” (Yip Man chinchyun) doesn’t hit new heights but it remains a big-screen eyeful, the kind of efficiently choreographed martial-arts action scenes that are joyful in any format. There’s talk among the characters about keeping the history of Wing Chun fighting to the “authentic styles”—anti-Japanese sentiments are bruited—but even the eldest characters concede that the lessons that will be handed down will be blended with other influences, and from those, decades in progress, voila, we have Bruce Lee, trained by a master. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Another book about American business lends itself to a compelling drama centered on a maverick. This fact-based look at winning is a truly calculated case of “inside baseball.” “Moneyball” is based on the 2003 book by Michael Lewis titled “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” The resemblance to “The Social Network,” based on the 2009 book “The Accidental Billionaires,” makes sense since Aaron Sorkin is credited with collaborating on both screenplays. (Steven Zaillian shares screenwriter credit.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

If you don’t know the name in the title, “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” it’s less than a minute before footage of Topol in the film of the musical of “Fiddler on the Roof” catapults onto the screen. But Solomon Rabinovitch, whose adopted pseudonym and persona basically translates as something like, “How ya doing!” has a richer, denser legacy, which director Joseph Dorman conveys zealously. For instance, he was a master of Yiddish language, and Aleichem’s use of its “portable homeland” is capably conveyed. Read the rest of this entry »

In its first three minutes, Chris Ordal’s “Earthwork” combines dearest clichés with something marvelous: a child urging slippery hornrims back up his nose creates a thing, something, amazing, out in the backyard of the family farm, and his parents look out the kitchen window, acting uncertain. “What is he up to?” Mother says with wonder. “I don’t know,” Father says with blasé certainty, “Sumthin’.” That sumthin’ they see is an early try at the artwork of the title, a boy’s-own scene of domestic life on a Kansas countryside that can only be fully seen from the sky above. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“We have over 500 years of prison time at this table. That’s a lot of fucking wisdom.”

Just over fifteen years after “Hoop Dreams,” Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz followed another Chicago group’s dreams, members of CeaseFire, offenders gone right, across four seasons of interventions in Englewood. Almost every spoken word is as piercing as that profane insight from a meeting at CeaseFire headquarters. “Violence interrupters,” they’re called, working from the idea of CeaseFire’s founder, epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, that violence is in itself “an infectious disease.”  Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Fran Lebowitz has been around the block.

The writer’s block, famously. Still not yet the most constipated of talented Manhattan-centric writers—that dubious honor falls to Joseph Mitchell, the brilliant miniaturist who remained on staff at the New Yorker, doing daily rounds, taking notes, making genial small talk, years after he’d stopped producing—Lebowitz prides herself on her daily circuit of walking the island. She procrastinates, perambulates, percolates. And smokes. And coughs. And hacks. Her anecdotes are riddled with semi-colons, apostrophe, appositives, backstrokes, attenuated clauses. (Scorsese catches her in one story about attending a Nobel Prize dinner that turns into implausible nonsense; her grin grows as she works to extricate herself.) Lebowitz’s reputation rests largely on two tiny volumes, “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies,” sardonic, cynical collections of model-slim bursts of attitude. In “Public Speaking,” a worthy, quotable quickie from Martin Scorsese, she gargles her laugh that it’s something else, it’s “writer’s blockade… Very much like the Vietnam War. Didn’t know how I got into it, don’t know how to get out of it.” Read the rest of this entry »