This buddy pic about loyalty in the workplace is based Eric Garcia’s novel “The Repossession Mambo.” (It’s not a pluralized sequel to 1984’s “Repo Man.”) In the near future, when there’s a “global recession” and an overseas war called Operation Hope Springs Eternal, an organ transplant company called The Union– “Helping You Get More You Out of You”– employs back-office repo men to extract hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs and other body parts with its barcodes from clients in arrears. A pancreas can set you back $618,429 with a 19.6 percent APR. I didn’t catch the price of the 5.5 Neural Net. After a ninety-six-day grace period, your transplant turns into a loaner. “It was never a horror film,” claims Garcia, who co-wrote the screenplay with TV producer–writer Garrett Lerner. “The original was always a comedy.” Miguel Sapochnik directs this anti-corporate thriller with scapel action that elicits multiple squirms per centimeter of incision. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“These bitches suck” was Creem magazine’s timeless takedown of The Runaways when the teenage girl band bobbed to the surface of the 1970s.

In Floria Sigismondi’s writing-directing debut, the making-of-the-band, life-on-the-road, taking-of-the-drugs telling of 1970s teen rockers who made it right to the middle (despite mostly sucking, musically) has the right attitude if not a fully fleshed story. It satisfies in bursts, like an erratically track-sequenced album. Based on Cherie Currie’s slim memoir, “Neon Angel,” “The Runaways” is episodic, and Currie’s decline isn’t as interesting as 15-year-old Dakota Fanning’s embodiment of her rapid slip-slide into neurasthenia and diva-dom. (Fanning’s turn-on-a-dime from sullen to sneering as the band assembles the song “Cherry Bomb” is one of her best moments: “Ch. Ch. Ch. CHERRY BOMB!”) Joan Jett’s survival instincts are more indicated than dramatized, and Kristen Stewart, while as watchable as ever, brings more spark than fire. Michael Shannon, playing oddball Svengali Kim Fowley, is bright and funny as a leering loon, but he’s a man we ought to be fearful of as much as mesmerized by. (Shannon’s memorably theatrical styling of lines like “I am the luckiest dogfucker in space!” are more Walkenesque than truly loony.) Read the rest of this entry »

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“The Men Who Hate Women” is the blunt original title of the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s worldwide bestseller; its harsh portrait of that country’s industry and welfare state earns it. But can a story about misogyny inadvertently traffic in it? As “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” it’s a barn-burner of a page-turner, the first of three novels Larsson left behind (films have been made of all three; the other two will be released this summer). The adaptation by director Niels Arden Oplev (“Portland”) is an adroit compression of its angry themes and doesn’t stint on the graphic material. (Its distributor is Chicago-based Music Box Films; see related story.) Financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvis) has been convicted of libel and will be going to prison, which allows an aging industrialist from the fractious Vanger clan to hire him to investigate a forty-year-old mystery about a missing girl. Before he’s hired, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a young investigator with epic hacker skills, investigates him. Their paths cross, and soon they are in league together in an increasingly epic search for a serial killer. The two-and-a-half-hour running time never feels leisurely, although three scenes involving rape and retribution involving Salander and an advocate assigned to her by the state go well into NC-17-level cruelty. (It’s one of the key differences between page and screen, especially involving violence: you imagine only as much as you need to while reading.) While made for television, Oplev’s visual style, from design to lighting to framing, has cinematic sweep (and the men’s cardigan budget must have been daunting). While several plot strands are swept away, there are lingering glances and hints toward them which suggest the filmmakers thought most of their audience would be familiar with the novels. One bit of compression that takes the place of pages of exposition suggests “Blow-Up” mingled with the brief clip that exists of Anne Frank turning her head as seen in a window: it’s the sort of creative solution that lands its own punch. 151m. (Ray Pride)

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” opens Friday at Landmark Century and Landmark Renaissance in Highland Park.

RECOMMENDED

An auto-interview with the fantastically flaky Nick Nolte (interviewed by a TV journalist alter ego) amuses far more than you’d think: Nolte’s bemused knack for toying with interviewers is matched by his passion for performance. What should the gimmick here be called, one-on-one? Nick-on-Nick action? In making “Nick Nolte: No Exit,” director Tom Thurman is wise to stand aside. It’s not in the same league as James Toback allowing Mike Tyson to narrate the voices that ripple inside that man’s troubled mind, but it’s in that league. The frame falls away in the face of a wry and articulate man’s talky ramble, and appearances by other actors like Ben Stiller and Rosanna Arquette are mostly fun. “Nobody has ever asked me to be silent,” Nolte claims. Not when you’re this entertaining, no. With Jacqueline Bisset, Powers Boothe, F.X. Feeney, Barbara Hershey, Paul Mazursky, Mike Medavoy, Alan Rudolph. 74m. (Ray Pride)

“Nick Nolte: No Exit” opens Friday at Facets.

RECOMMENDED

In a follow-up to “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” Jonathan Demme shoots Young rocking two nights three years ago in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. On this Chrome Dreams II tour, Young and his band had played two nights at the Chicago Theater the month before. Demme skips the interviews and backstage footage found in his 2006 concert documentary, shot over two nights in Nashville. Country and bluegrass artists don’t share Young’s stage in “Trunk Show,” nor are there the polished tracking shots DP Ellen Kuras crafted for “Heart of Gold.” Cinematographer Declan Quinn, along with Demme and five other shooters, wield digital camcorders for mostly handheld coverage. There’s some Super-8 and a few nine-screen grids, but this is more concert than film from the distributors of “The Singing Revolution,” “We Live in Public” and “Incident at Loch Ness.” Stage design is limited to remnants of an old-time theater marquee with random letters, a red telephone and a pirate flag fluttering by a fan. There is no giant microphone wrangled by hooded druid-like roadies with flashlights for eyes, as in the 1978 San Francisco concert Young turned into the film “Rust Never Sleeps.” In “Trunk Show” he performs an alternately rousing and reflective set, sometimes playing piano and banjo. The 64-year-old Canadian stomps on stage like a shaggy workhorse. Hunched over, he brandishes his electric guitar like a farm tool. His gruff-honey voice has the timbre of hardwood bark. His elderly bandmates come off as seasoned artisans, not burnout longhairs in denial, as one extended instrumental with his bassist and rhythm guitarist proves. 82m. (Bill Stamets)

“Neil Young Trunk Show” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

When would’ve been the right time for Paul Greengrass’ latest headlong movie, a heady venture into a foreign land, the Morocco-shot Iraq War fable “Green Zone,” which suggests one honest man, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (played by a more-than-solid Matt Damon) could have unburied the truth about nonexistent WMDs, or weapons of mass destruction. A week shy of seven years since “shock and awe,” its opening weekend didn’t do so well, and its further commercial prospects are dire, but the director of the latter two “Bourne” films has done “too soon” already, and well, with “United 93.” Miller crosses lines of authority when faced with both a Paul Bremer-like bureaucrat (an oleaginous Greg Kinnear) and a Judith Miller-like journalist (Amy Ryan, working for the Wall Street Journal rather than transcribing for the New York Times; she’s vital with very little dialogue) who have their own running dogs in the game. Within minutes, or hours, in screen time, it’s “Bourne” in the fashion of 1970s conspiracy thrillers like “Three Days of the Condor,” “Green Zone” proves its metaphoric acumen by eliciting cries of “anti-American”! from august journalistic corners such as the New York Post. Working from a script credited to Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential”), Greengrass captures the perspective of those on the ground, particularly Iraqis, in a way that maybe only the documentary “No End In Sight” has among American ventures into this subject matter, and the final shot is a blunt about why we’re there. Still, a little more skepticism would be in order, as in “Condor,” which ends with CIA retainer Robert Redford, having dropped information in the lap of the New York Times, is asked by his handler, Cliff Robertson, “What makes you think they’ll print it?” With Brendan Gleeson. 115m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“Green Zone” is playing wide.

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

An assured polemic that plays as an eyes-wide thriller, Don Argott’s “The Art of the Steal” is also a rousing entertainment as layered and skeptical as a marathon of episodes of “The Wire.”

The Barnes Foundation operates a museum, five miles from Philadelphia, in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, created by the late Dr. Albert C. Barnes to hold his Post-Impressionist and early Modern art. The numbers bloom: 181 Renoir, sixty-nine Cézannes, fifty-nine Matisse, forty-six Picasso, seven Van Gogh, six Seurat. Barnes didn’t care for the elite of Philadelphia, 1922.

“People didn’t like him. He insulted people,” one of the many articulate interviewees tells us, and the art establishment of Philadelphia used similar language about the documentary. Horrors! Barnes was “extremely inflammatory toward his contemporaries.” At his death in 1951, Barnes left the collection to a small African-American college, but in recent years, there’s been a movement to break the strict conditions of his bequest and relocate the multi-billion-dollar-valued collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Read the rest of this entry »

David Peace’s “Red Riding” books, drawing on the real-life “Yorkshire Ripper” cases, are a marvel of surrealism and despair, finding language both vernacular and incantatory to capture the failed attempts of investigators and journalists to solve brutal serial killings in Leeds, Yorkshire, across two decades. The quartet of novels is pared to a trilogy, rich, compelling noir movies that were produced for British television: “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974″ (directed by Julian Jarrold, “Kinky Boots,” shooting in Super 16; “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980″ (James Marsh, “Man on Wire,” shooting in 35mm widescreen); “In the Year of Our Lord 1983″ (Anadd Tucker, “Shopgirl,” shooting with the Red One camera). The visual style in all three is as dark as the crimes on show, unafraid of the possibility of the perfume of pretension and the funk of sadism: think “Se3en” instead of “Se7en.” “1974″ may be the most successful, following Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, “Boy A”), a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post who’s returned after time spent “down South.” (The invocation of “The North”—”The North, we do what we want”—and its ways so often would be comical if not consistently menacing.) Referring to a recently disappeared peer, Peace’s novels open, “All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,’ smiled Gilman, like this way the best day of our lives… Waiting for my first Front Page, the Byline Boy at last.” Young spunk meets cloacal immersion: confronting a local real estate entrepreneur John Dawson (Sean Bean) is the first instance of Eddie’s putting of many of a foot wrong. Prolific expert David Thomson has overreached in asserting these films as the equal of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II,” but despite their gloom, violence and despair, they’re roundly thrilling: the parochial cruelty—do the police use the crimes as cover for avenging their own enemies?—is unrelenting and the depths of viciousness can hardly be guessed. Each director finds their own style, but the unity comes from screenwriter Tony Grisoni’s proficient distillation of the material and themes. In Marsh’s “1980,” Paddy Considine may give the series’ best performance as a police investigator running an internal affairs investigation of the 1974 events.) In the best possible way, “The Red Riding Trilogy” harks back to U. S. and British thrillers of the 1970s: deeply skeptical and bold in accepting that compromise and failure are an ineffable part of the human condition, or at the very least, of the genre of thrillers pitting authority against avarice. With Rebecca Hall, Peter Mullan and Eddie Marsan. 105m; 96m; 104m, respectively. (Ray Pride)

“The Red Riding Trilogy” opens Friday at the Music Box, with viewing options including a Roadshow-style marathon sit. The Channel 4 website has trailers and more.

In this romantic drama of trauma set in lower Manhattan and Queens, the daughter of a cop and the son of a lawyer are both taking a Global Politics class at NYU where terrorist ethics are under discussion. They find love, work through a few personal non-global issues, break up for a bit, get back together, then BAM! it’s all gone. “Remember Me” starts with three loud bangs one night in 1991 when a mugger shoots a nurse on a Brooklyn subway platform. Ten years later, her daughter Ally (Emilie de Ravin), who witnessed the slaying, lives at home with her detective dad Neil Craig (Chris Cooper).”I don’t date sociology majors,” she lies to Tyler (Robert Pattinson, two “Twilight”s, two “Harry Potter”s and “Little Ashes,” where he played Salvador Dali). She asks him what he is. “Undecided,” answers Tyler. “About what?” asks Ally. “Everything,” he answers. This sounds a little like “The Wild One” when Mildred asks Johnny what he’s rebelling against and he asks, whaddya got? Tyler is an unshaven cliché with a chip on his slouched shoulder, a cig in his sullen mouth, and a tattoo on his chest remembering his older brother who hung himself. Tyler lives with an insufferable sidekick Aidan (Tate Ellington) and shelves used books at the Strand Bookstore. His epicenter of hurt is his hardcharging attorney father Charles (Pierce Brosnan). Tyler hates him for neglecting his older brother, once a guitarist, and his little sister in the sixth grade who paints. Tyler shares his own creative vulnerability by reading the film’s narration from a leatherbound journal. He quotes Gandhi and tracks what Mozart and Chuck Berry achieved at age 22. Allen Coulter (“Hollywoodland”) directs an earnest script by Will Fetters, and makes his actors shout at each other much too often in this tony weepie about wounded New Yorkers. With Ruby Jerins, Lena Olin, Kate Burton, Gregory Jbara. 113m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

“The Yellow Handkerchief” is a captivating character study of unlikely provenance, capturing eminently watchable loners in ravishing landscapes. Here’s the pile-on behind the picture: The story began as a newspaper column from the 1970s by Pete Hamill, which was the basis for the Tony Orlando and Dawn song, “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree.” Producer Arthur Cohn is 83, the only winner of five Oscars in that role, including for “Four Days in September,” “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” “Black and White in Color” and “Harlan County.” The glorious cinematography is by one of the world’s best cameramen, Chris Menges (“Local Hero,” “The Mission,” “Notes on a Scandal”); the editing is by Christopher Tellefsen (“Gummo,” “Capote”). The director, Udayan Prasad, is best known for 1997’s “My Son The Fanatic.” “The Yellow Handkerchief,” the film, written by Erin Dignam, is set in post-Katrina Louisiana, with recently released ex-con Brett (a mustachioed William Hurt) winding up in the company of two unschooled teenagers in a convertible, 15-year-old Martine and Gordy (Kristen Stewart, Eddie Redmayne). Taciturn yet menacing, precise just shy of precious, Hurt’s performance is one of his richest. But Prasad’s handling of the slim, familiar story allows the characters space to interact, to breathe, and it’s a gratifying choice. He honors the serious and the sentimental alike. It makes for a lovely fable. The able score is by Eef Barzelay, of Clem Snide, and Jack Livesay (“Sherrybaby”). With Maria Bello. 96m. (Ray Pride)

“The Yellow Handkerchief” opens Friday at River East.