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Ralph Fiennes’ slashingly bleak directorial debut, “Coriolanus” is a raucous modern-dress action-movie read of Shakespeare’s war-against-Rome play. Contemporary Serbia is the every-conflict setting for “a place calling itself Rome,” beset with protest and hunger riots. It’s a gruff, bold simulacrum of the twenty-first century, media, graffiti and all. (One of the first shots finds “Fuck The Rules” spraypainted across a banister.) The expected iambic pentameter remains, even in the mouths of “Fidelis TV”‘s newsreaders. Fiennes’ character seems entirely the modern martial martinet, unsuited for any kind of elected office: he’s a one-man GOP debate. Read the rest of this entry »

Billed as a “rescue adventure,” “Big Miracle” retells a true saga from 1988 about freeing a family of doomed whales from arctic ice. But this is more about family and romance among the smaller mammals lending a hand. Indigenous Iñupiat, a wildlife biologist, an Alaska National Guard helicopter pilot, an Alaska Northern oil corporation CEO, and a Russian icebreaker come together to do the right thing because, as Universal Pictures’ official site for this feel-good PG movie reminds us: www.everybodyloveswhales.com (which is also the film’s original title). Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

On the simplest level, “A Separation” is about the end of a marriage, or the attempt to separate.

But that’s too simple. In Asghar Farhadi’s fifth feature, the mere fact of one life in contemporary Tehran brushing up against another leads to fateful conflict. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants husband Nader (Peyman Moadi) to leave Iran with their young daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), as she says to a judge at the opening, “In these circumstances…” But Nader won’t leave his father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Without his wife to help him, the middle-class Nader hires a young woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), to tend to his father. But Razieh keeps this from her unemployed husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), which leads to harrowing complication after complication in what the writer-director calls “a detective story without a detective.” (The performances comprise the best ensemble acting of any film nominated for an Oscar this year: vital, electric and often wholly unexpected in detail.) “A Separation” also builds on what Farhadi’s countryman, Abbas Kiarostami, calls the “unfinished film,” one that the viewer must complete with his or her attention to suggestions and inferences. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »

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“You’re going to die, that’s what’s happening,” John Ottway soothes a dying colleague, a fear-whisperer, himself a man strangely at peace, reconciled. In the opening narration of “The Grey”—a title reflecting the determination of survival, not wolves—Neeson’s sharpshooter character refers to the Arctic oil roughnecks around him as “ex-cons, drifters, assholes, men unfit for mankind.” Weariness, not loathing or judgment, freights his voice, sonorous masculine gloom. Ottway’s just a grey-beard tucked into a green rag-wool hat, aswirl in snow, eyeing advancing wolves. (“And I’ve stopped doing the world any real good” is Ottway’s sad murmur, more of alienation than self-pity.) Shortly, things grow grimmer: grayer. In a time of timid large-scale movies, “The Grey” is bold in its harsh turns, with obvious dashes of “Moby Dick” and “Jaws”—man against the implacable beast but ultimately himself—as well as moments that hark back to predecessors like Robert Aldrich’s crash-survival “Flight of the Phoenix,” “Deliverance” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” (But that’s not to call the movie “derivative.”) 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 after an accident, Carnahan’s promise is fulfilled. It’s a bravura man-against-the-wilds, man-against-wolves, man-against-himself thriller, fire and ice. And Neeson: worldly, weary, worn. He and Carnahan this time ’round: the Alpha-Team. The blues, grays and whites of the film’s palette chill from the first frames: you can tell straightaway it’s going to be a story of survival against the odds, or earnest failure. The cinematography by Masanobu Takayanagi (“Warrior”) is raw and beautiful. Brute without brooding, it’s a very masculine movie. But there are moments of brisk lyricism: in distance at night, dozens of eyes float in the darkness, a gloaming of fear as much as a phalanx of carnivores. Human blood wells and visibly, audibly ices, defining a track, a huge paw-print. The survivors look toward blackest night, their breath rising in unison in columns like kanji, Japanese lettering. The commercials that have been playing the past couple months have been canny about misdirection: all I’ll suggest is stay through the end credits. With Dallas Roberts, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie, James Badge Dale. 117m. (Ray Pride)

“The Grey” opens Friday.

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“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 »

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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 »