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 »

RECOMMENDED

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 »

RECOMMENDED

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 »

RECOMMENDED

Oscar-winning “Precious” screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher’s “Violet & Daisy” (not based on the novel by Sapphire) is an insouciant mess filled with eccentric and ambitious moments, the kind of first feature that the industry at large had room to encourage: an Oscar-winner making a dream project that sounds like it could readily become a nightmare for all concerned. Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan play teen assassins making cash on the side for fancy clothes, taking murder assignments from Danny Trejo. (Their specialty is the “internal bleeding dance,” don’t ask.) Coming-of-age meets taking of life to absurd effect: this is a movie-movie world almost unrecognizably different from our own. And it’s not an outlaw couple film, per se: it’s the opposite of a road movie, a single-set three-hander for the most part. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Co-produced by Ridley Scott, Zal Batmanglij’s “The East” is a slimmer, trimmer rendition of some of the subjects that his late, younger brother Tony fixed on in movies like “Spy Game,” “Domino” and “Enemy of the State.”

Batmanglij and his cinematographer Roman Vasyanov (“Hipsters,” “End of Watch”) resist the characteristic, painterly visual blasts of Scott, but the film shares thematic elements of how technology permeates modern professions, and how covert behavior ironically blooms in our surveillance state. The young writer-director’s confident storytelling also partakes, usefully, of the paranoia that just enough 1970s American movies steeped in, especially the “paranoia trilogy” of director Alan J. Pakula (and cinematographer Gordon Willis), “Klute,” “The Parallax View” and “All The President’s Men.” Daylight. Simple settings. Sudden light when there’s darkness. The hunter becoming the hunted. The constant need to keep watch over one’s shoulder. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A brute, icy little shocker, “The Purge” is a thriller willing to engage blood as well as tension, with just a little politics. It’s ten years in the future, and the country’s on the upswing, with crime down and the economy bustling. It seems to all come down to a new world order that came after a non-specific economic meltdown:  a set of  “New Founding Fathers” have established “The Purge,” an annual saturnalia and revel of violence and murder. Overnight, the country shuts down and those in the streets run amok, visiting violence and murder on their countrymen. The dogma is suggestive rather than specific, working fine grubby dystopic premise of almost Abel Ferrara scale. Ethan Hawke plays a father of two, a teenage daughter and a young boy, who he keeps behind the walls of the nice house paid for by selling armor and alarm systems to his neighbors for the annual ritual. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Baby, he missed that plane.

But you knew that: at the end of “Before Sunset,” (2004) even if you’re not the sort of moviegoer who believes that filmmakers must know what happens after the characters have been written away into the sunset, Jesse would not, could not leave Celine. In particular, however, the three filmmakers, director Richard Linklater and his co-writers Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, had no idea, they say. But that’s a good thing, because nine years on, like the nine years between that film and 1995’s “Before Sunrise,” they lived their lives. The result is an exquisite, unpretentious little masterpiece that took almost twenty years (and three lifetimes) to fashion. Read the rest of this entry »

 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 »

RECOMMENDED

(Light After Darkness) Mexican intellectual-naturist-mysticist-pictorialist-diplomat Carlos Reygadas takes a non-professional cast, including his daughter, into a verdant yet dangerous world very much like his own. An urban family with money has moved to the countryside, a beautiful place that gives itself over to lightning storms, flurries of animal madness and a bright red demon with horns and tail that goes door to door with a toolbox. (While the film reveals little, Reygadas says this is his own home and property.) “I watch lots of movies, and I truly appreciate the directors that don’t try to lead me by the hand through their stories. I want to be considered one of them,” the director of “Japón,” “Battle in Heaven” and “Silent Light” has written. Carlos: with your fourth feature, you win at art-house again. Read the rest of this entry »