RECOMMENDED

Deliciously idiosyncratic and genially creepy, Peter Strickland’s “Berberian Sound Studio” is a tart treat for the ear and the eye. In 1976 Italy, sound designer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) is summoned to the dank and dismal chambers of a rundown studio to provide the sound effects for a horror exploitationer called “The Equestrian Vortex.” On one page, this rude, taut tone poem is an aural nightmare in the vein of the metacinematic play of Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” or Brian DePalma’s “Blow Out”; on another it’s a cheekily disgusting catalog of squish and splorps and splats and screams and shrieks and tremolo and falsetto and rip and slash. Steeped in atmosphere, “Berberian Sound Studio” manages to be an experimental film, a chamber drama, and a neat psychological horror in its own right. Read the rest of this entry »

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James Marsh’s substantial skills as a filmmaker grow with each film, and he slips readily from a documentary masterpiece like “Man On Wire” or the fine “Project Nim” to fiction, like “Red Riding: 1980” and the sleek conspiracy thriller, “Shadow Dancer,” his 2012 movie only recently plucked from a wayward U. S. distribution deal. Written by former ITN television Ireland Correspondent Tom Bradby, from his 1998 novel, the 1970s-set “Shadow Dancer” traces the movements of one Collette McVeigh (Andrea Riseborough), a single mother in Belfast who’s captured by MI5 after a failed IRA bomb plot in London. Clive Owen plays Mac, the officer tasked with turning her and getting the names of her co-conspirators. Riseborough (striking in stinkers like “W. E.” and “Brighton Rock”; gleaming and precise in the recent “Oblivion”) commands the screen, deftly registering many levels of Collette’s inner turbulence. Suspicions course and paranoia bristles: the plot’s succession of betrayals shift with tectonic suddenness, urged along by Marsh’s elemental yet elegant widescreen compositions. Read the rest of this entry »

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(Lemale et Ha’halal)  Jane Austen in Tel Aviv, writer-director Rama Burshtein’s “Fill The Void” describes a space hidden from view: not only a segment of Orthodox Hasidic life in contemporary Israel, but the heart, the heart of a young woman whose life is shaped by the choices of others and by the cumulative snips of fate. Eighteen-year-old Shira (the luminous Hadas Yaron, large and lovely eyes ever wary and brimming) is about to wed in an arranged marriage, but cascading reversals, including cold feet from the groom-to-be and a sudden death, alter her path repeatedly. “Fill The Void” is shockingly fine, especially for a first feature, including an ending instant that is confrontationally ambiguous and a heart-stopping scene that is blocked and acted and refracted in a matter of millimeters. Read the rest of this entry »

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Directors Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos found 1970s flashback kismet in making “The Source Family,” the saga of a photogenic California sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n’ roll cult that also compulsively chronicled itself, in image and song. The breadth of archival footage astonishes. With six-foot-four Father Yod, aka Jim Baker, a guru who began as judo instructor, Marine and alleged bank robber, hedonism was the order of the day, of every day. Starting with a West Hollywood health-food restaurant (famously featured in “Annie Hall” when Woody Allen orders “a plate of mashed yeast”), Yod’s conquests increased and the family, which grew to around 150 lost souls, recorded more than sixty psychedelic albums; distributor Drag City’s inspired tagline for the film is “God Has A Rock Band.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Movies are seldom more topical than the gripping, darkly thrilling “Dirty Wars” in the week after NSA mercenary Edward Snowden’s leaking of key information about how the United States tracks the movements of all its citizens through compulsive, convulsive hoarding of data. But based on what’s onscreen, it’s likely “Dirty Wars” will never become not topical. Director Richard Rowley follows veteran investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill (“Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”) on the trail of leads about our clandestine wars in the name of the greater War On Terror, shooting with economy and style. The overt subject is the activities of the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, and how their thousands of raids around the world fit into the never-to-end war without borders or boundaries. Read the rest of this entry »

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With its radical shifts in tone from scene to scene, “Man of Steel” is as much a study in schizophrenia as a portrait of a misunderstood thirty-three-year-old superhuman sent down to save the world and the fates of a seventy-five-year-old comic book character. The constant is whirling mayhem and Christopher Nolan-scale gloom. While director Zack Snyder has his own way with brooding and blackness, the stern hand of co-producer Nolan presses down. David S. Goyer’s screenplay takes full advantage of the familiarity-unto-banality of Superman’s origins, flashing forward and back at will to underline his origins. Any true origin story, however, would take a more secretive shape that audiences will never know: the dealings in blandly gleaming conference rooms amid grande lattes and fistfuls of fiscal projections as calculations are made of the potential of 3D upcharges, Russian and Chinese repeat viewers and the revenues from compulsive cycling of product placements. That would be the “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” of origin stories: seemingly dry but of endless fascination in its gestural minutiae. Read the rest of this entry »

A one-sided advocacy documentary, the slick, overbearing CNN-bound, Microsoft billionaire-financed “Pandora’s Promise” attempts to build a case for nuclear power to save the planet: it’s infuriating stuff if you’re even vaguely acquainted with its suppositions and allegations about environmentalists, radiation, nuclear waste and nuclear war. A provocative, more convincing argument is made at the Nation by Mark Hertsgaard and Terry Tempest Williams, a more edifying read than the entirety of Robert Stone’s screed. Stone (“Earth Days”) builds his film around five people who advocate nuclear energy for being the most “green” approach to an overpopulated planet’s needs, but salts it with assertions like the radiation from the meltdown at Chernobyl only affecting the lives of the first responders on site. Cancer? Nah. Forget about it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tragedy plus time plus… what is it makes comedy? The end of the earth and all civilization plus my own minor wickednesses? “This Is The End,” the first feature directed by writing partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is Apocalypse Foul: Why not unsheathe all those petty insecurities as the seals of Revelation are cracked, at a party a few side streets just off Melrose? The conceit is that Rogen and his friend and fellow Canadian Jay Baruchel, playing mirror versions of the movie versions of themselves under their own names, interrupt a long weekend of weed and videogames only to wind up at a party at James Franco’s house when the state of California begins to crater and quake and flame and eventually demons rise not only from the id but hell itself. Read the rest of this entry »