RECOMMENDED

“Furious 6,” as the main title has it, has the same simian delight as “Fast Five” and prior installments of the series: friends become family, bond in crime, regroup when one of many is in a fresh scrape. As more and more reviewers have realized, as audiences did almost straightaway, this series is seriously “post-racial.” It doesn’t matter “what” anyone is: action speaks louder than one-liners. Everyone’s a colleague, a peer, a friend. “We’re family, we do things together, you’re stronger together, ya always were,” is only the first iteration of the endless, kindly affirmations. Jibes are familiar now, basic unadorned teasing, terse bunkum. Vin Diesel makes gravel audible—there’s one reason he didn’t choose “Vin Cashmere” as his nom de zoom—with elongated, not quite drawled delivery of lines like “L’es go for a li’l ride.” Women bare their backs, the men their torsos: when Diesel wakes with his latest love, we’re treated to a glimpse of his kneaded-dough belly button, its furrows as profuse and detailed as the frown lines between his eyes. There are special effects in profusion, with physics-defying stunts that grow increasingly delirious. Few pop from the screen as brightly as Michelle Rodriguez’s magnetic smile. (Or her de rigeur black tank top.)  Read the rest of this entry »

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A fierce fish tale from POV of fish and sea. Plus: Clank. Groannn. Caw-caw-cawwwwww. Rrrra– Pop. Shreeeeeee! Splurp. Ammmg. R r r rrrr— “Sweetgrass” filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University further their immersive excursions with the singular nonfiction artifact, “Leviathan,” aka “Heavy Metal Fishing Ship.” Off New Bedford, Massachusetts, once whaling capital of the world, they seek the secrets of the sea within and without the confines of one trawler among hundreds of weeks-long travails to harvest the riches of the ocean. There’s terror within the fishbelly of the beast, clamoring at work, and beneath the waves and in gull-serrated sky. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

As “Iron Man Three” opens, superhero and ego fatigue seem ready to set in, with a brittle Robert Downey, Jr. and a little-is-too-much Gwyneth Paltrow, but it only takes a few short scenes for the movie to find its own footing. This is a Shane Black movie through-and-through, down to a reliance on one-on-one banter scenes rather than huge canvases and a Christmas setting (see: “Lethal Weapon,” “The Last Boy Scout,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight” and his 2006 directorial debut, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”). Sometimes, the one-on-one banter is even more micro, pingponging between Tony Stark and Tony Stark. For about an hour in the middle, “Iron Man Three” (as spelled out on screen) is a genial throwback to the 1990s wisecracking for which Black was highly compensated, especially in his exchanges with a Tennessee moppet who is slated to be a Future Industrialist Of America by his keen skills of observation and toe-to-toe verbal sparring with Downey. Titanic, incomprehensible action scenes set in darkness in industrial settings of no consequence eventually surface, more deadly than any monsters from the id. Until then, there are many measured pleasures within the lightly sketched caterwauling mayhem. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to “TRON: Legacy” is a sleek, glassy repository of curated design, as much a lexicon of coolly appreciated influence as a functional motion picture in its own right. “Oblivion” took its first creative breath as an unpublished graphic novel by Kosinski, who shares story and writing credit here, and it has the kind of magpie fecundity you’d hope to find bursting from the pages of une bande dessinée freshly re-inked into English. But as a movie, it’s like a data mind-meld, a terabyte farm of all the films Kosinski has ever steeped in, a reduction to one singularity, an uberfilm that displaces all that it came from. But sad for the film’s fortunes, “Oblivion” requires story and actors, and it has Tom Cruise at his most Cruise-ey. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“No piece of art is worth a human life” is a refrain in “Trance,” and what a sweet, callow, tainted, full-throttle rush it is: art and artifact blend to narcotic, exhibitionistic effect. Danny Boyle shot the film before embarking upon his mad London Olympics opening ceremony with its dense, cracked vision of the Industrial Revolution, and then edited it afterward. The interruption seems to have inspired the director of “Slumdog Millionaire” to further accelerate his adrenaline habit: the result is busy, bonkers, low down and a treat I was pleased to duck and swoon through on a dank gray Chicago spring afternoon. James McAvoy plays a fine-arts auctioneer with underworld pressures who appears to rig a bold inside-job heist of a painting up for auction, a 1798 oil by Goya called “Witches in the Air.” Read the rest of this entry »

Punishingly long, director Kang Woo-suk’s “Fists of Legend” does not scrimp on the mixed martial arts action and eccentric sentimentality for observers of contemporary commercial South Korean filmmaking. Three men who had been street fighting rivals in high school are pitted against each other again in an epic reality TV fighting competition. It’s an odd, affectless hybrid that plays as much like never-ending television programming on an obscure satellite channel up in the high 600s playing out on a tavern television as anything else. Read the rest of this entry »

Instead of hot vampires and hotter werewolves we’ve come to expect from a project bearing Stephenie Meyer’s name, science-fiction adventure “The Host” looks skyward. Its world is at peace, in harmony with nature, with everyone working optimistically toward the advancement of humanity. This Utopian society would seem ideal, if not for the parasitic alien species behind it all. Director Andrew Niccol is an interesting choice to direct the first of this potential franchise, drawing on the interest in ideals of human perfections and inevitable frailty shown in movies like “Gattaca” and “In Time.” The “souls’” of “The Host” possess humans, mind, body and spirit, leaving only a bright blue, mirrored ring around the irises of the eye as a telltale sign of infestation. Only a few pockets of humans remain underground, near extinction. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Leon Panetta, Porter Goss, George H. W. Bush and David Petraeus walk into a bar… The Wild Bill Donovan Saloon and Grill… or better yet, a television studio… Let’s say one with Bill Moyers behind the camera. Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow. And Dick Cheney drops in late in the day for a little extracurricular jawing and banter.

And then these men, these public servants, proceed to answer any and every question of their well-informed interview, nay, to volunteer narratives and motivations and self-justifications and self-critiques. Pretty unthinkable for the past Directors of Central Intelligence of the United States of America. Almost as unthinkable, as the current crop of Republican Senators opposing the nomination of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel to be President Obama’s next Secretary of Defense, is any form of sustained or even lucid debate about the United States and Israel and daily affairs in the Middle East. The powers of Senators McCain, Feinstein and Levin marshaled in an attempt to intimidate Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures and the filmmakers of “Zero Dark Thirty” are yet another force that hopes to be reckoned with, but all go wooooosh in the wake of “The Gatekeepers” (Shomer Sef), Dror Moreh’s Oscar-nominated masterpiece of urgency that’s largely a talking-heads marathon with six surviving spymasters—Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gillon, Ami Ayalon, Avi Dichter and Yuval Diskin—who have been head of Israel’s counterterrorism group, Shin Bet, as they describe and discuss the decisions they made that affected both Palestinian and Jews in the Middle East. (“Shin Bet” has been translated as “defender that shall not be seen.”) Read the rest of this entry »