RECOMMENDED

Homicidal rage be thy name! Recently arrived seer of Brit batshittery, writer-director Ben Wheatley, has a near-unrivaled knack for bile and giddy guile, put to full test in the tragicomic eye-opener, “Sightseers,” a story of a couple that thinks they’re going on a kitsch tour of the English countryside but instead go native in the goriest possible way when faced with the motley, petty grievances of modern life. (Think Mike Leigh with a body count, or, “Natural Born Campers”). Their hair-trigger reactions are priceless, and needless to say, bloody deadly. 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

Whisky galore! The cheeky side of Ken Loach meets up with the picturesque side that loves Scotland for all its flaws to satisfying comic (and yes, political) effect in the comic caper “The Angels’ Share.” The rude sweary bits have co-existed with the now-seventy-six-year-old Loach’s revolutionary side for decades. Four working-class knuckleheads, including one determined not to return to crime—by name, Robbie, Rhino, Albert and Mo—are led on a merry chase from Glasgow to the Scottish Highlands by Robbie’s nose, which turns out to indicate a perfect taster’s palate for fine malt whiskys. Farce intervenes for the boys of the “Carntyne Malt Whisky Club” at welcome moments, especially as the film’s early passages are steeped in the horrifying frustration of permanent social immobility—despair, desperation, street violence. (Call it “Ocean’s Forty Proof.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Gonzo is seldom the way to go in documentary, but there is a blithe prankishness and sweet-souled don’t-give-a-fuck to some, if not all, of Tanner King Barklow and Gil Kofman’s “Unmade in China,” which follows Kofman’s hiring to direct a cheap, slapdash thriller, in Chinese, in the Fujian city Xiamen, China and have it sanctioned by the strictures of local censorship. (The script for ”Case Sensitive” was based on a famous Internet hoax.) Kofman doesn’t speak Chinese and says he doesn’t even like Chinese food. I don’t have a handy description to say what “Unmade in China” is on its own terms, following the stages of “unmaking” a movie the producers wanted an American director for, in name only, but it could handily wind up on a shelf that also holds “American Movie” and a good half-dozen other movies about movies about moviemakers falling on their face. Read the rest of this entry »

 Quentin Dupieux’s prior excursion into deadpan illogic and intermittent surrealism, “Rubber,” followed the exploits of a killer tire. “Wrong” is weird, too, in brightly colored, handmade, shambling fashion. A shaggy lost-dog tale, the exceptionally flat “Wrong” doesn’t create its own alternative world, as “Rubber” did in sometimes-explosive fashion (as in exploding heads), but instead slows, elongates and randomizes daily life as not worth living in a meaningless suburban world. Meaninglessness is a dangerous subject to caress, and reaching toward a no-budget Charlie Kaufman world with a loser protagonist (Jack Plotnick) looking for a lost dog in a world rife with random events is also a dodgy dance. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Matteo Garrone is a cheeky, vulgar, amped-up director, given to grandiloquence and fantastically busy camerawork embellishing a sturdy sense of place, and he’s good at it, even when sentimentality swamps his instincts and settles his filmmaking into mere kitsch. He’s Italian! And in his fierce, confident 2008 Neapolitan crime saga, “Gomorrah,” Garrone rose to the top of the local heap of stylishness. “Reality” pushes a Naples fishmonger who’s also a small-time swindler into the choppy waters of the local edition of “Big Brother.” Fairytale-scale wish-fulfillment is promised even within a critique of the manufactured false idols of our modern age that rings with an awareness of “The Truman Show”‘s less affectionate take on media exaltation of the emptiest everyman. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

After a middle career making movies in the U. S. like “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “Peter Pan” (2003), PJ Hogan returns to his Australian roots with the autobiographical “Mental,” two decades past his early success with “Muriel’s Wedding” (1994). Set in the fictional suburban beach town of Dolphin Heads, “Mental”‘s brood of lead characters are the Moochmore girls, each equally convinced they are suffering various psychological disorders: one would much rather be mental than simply unpopular. Their “Sound of Music”-obsessed mother goes “on holiday” after suffering a mental breakdown, leaving the philandering politician father (Anthony Lapaglia), the local mayor, to care for five girls he barely knows. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Everybody’s miserable here, they just see the same things, it’s sad.”

One of four female characters in Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” says that of her disillusion in the middle of a long, loud, bright, violent, neon-and-fluorescent-colored Florida spring break weekend, but it could also apply to some of the amusingly disparate and volatile reactions from its opening press, especially in the past week since its debut at the SXSW festival in Austin.

Four college girls—Brit (Ashley Benson), Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Cotty (Rachel Korine)—have little on their mind—seemingly—except going to spring break somewhere along the Florida coast, but they’re broke. So, balaclava-hooded, the four hold up a restaurant for the cash they need. Once in the Promised Land, they wind up in jail, where they’re inexplicably bailed out by Alien (James Franco), a willful self-caricature of a white-wanting-to-be-black pimp who is deeply, darkly conflicted about himself and the world, or the cartoon, he lives in. More guns and more disillusionment ensue, with Britney Spears’ musical numbers and a loping, warping score by Skrillex and Cliff Martinez (“Drive” and many Steven Soderbergh movies). Korine’s gotten more and more artful over the years at describing/disemboweling his wanton provocations, usually obscuring intention for sensation: “I never cared so much about making perfect sense; I wanted to make perfect nonsense,” is one of his calling-card quotes about “Breakers.” Read the rest of this entry »