Maïwenn.

RECOMMENDED

With as much sprawl as attained ambition, Maïwenn’s “Polisse” is a busy, ragged, largely hand-held procedural mosaic following the workdays of police in the Parisian Child Protection Unit (Brigade de protection des mineurs de Paris). There’s a whiff of Sidney Lumet in the writer-director’s rapt attention to group dynamics of a police brigade, mingling vice and victims, gallows humor and stress, as well as sordid details of sexual abuse. Twining work life and personal life, stress is the order of the day, and the melodrama. Working from 150 hours of footage, the film feels rushed and headlong, for better and for worse: the form—and vivid performances—suggests an authenticity not always matched by the writing. Still, the sustained intensity impresses. Read the rest of this entry »

There are volumes yet to be written about characteristics in movies like “Canadian-ness” and “amateurishness” that would be well served to include a couple of the not-so-rare examples like “The Samaritan” in the proposal pack. Working for a second time with producer Andras Hamori (“The 51st State”), Samuel L. Jackson takes a hike to Hogtown as Foley, a conman-murderer who’s looking for a new beginning after twenty-five years in stir. Shot in an economical five weeks, co-writer-director David Weaver’s “The Samaritan” shares peculiarities of pacing and raggedness of tone that inhabit Canadian movies from low to high, and you have to ask at moments, is this just odd, piquant, or is it simply bad? Read the rest of this entry »

An art-house jaw-dropper, Canadian filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s “Where Do We Go Now?” (Et maintenant on va où?) manages to annoy and offend in almost equal measure in its many miscalculated scenes, from cultural caricature to musical numbers and back again. The opening scene, a dance tableau that seems like it could be drawn from the 1960s choreographic masterworks of Hungarian filmmaker Miklos Jancso, promises more than the Greek-myth-set-in-unnamed-Middle-Eastern-country-pssst-it’s-Lebanon ever manages to deliver. In a dusty mountain village, Muslims and Christians live side-by-side in a cute form of peace and tolerance until random slurs and misconstrued accidents lead to battle and beatings and deaths and weeping and gnashing among the very cute elders and equally cute youth. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Dark Shadows” is a weirdly tender mash note to the pop culture of 1972, the year after the vampiric soap opera ended its five-year run, but also when the young Tim Burton would have been all of fourteen years old. It’s great fun, when things aren’t exploding, burning or bursting into flame. While the illustrator-director’s dreams of dead things are often taken as his most personal expression—partly because of how many dead things there are in his work—”Dark Shadows” feels somehow joyful, somehow more “personal” than most of his movies. It feels… felt. Read the rest of this entry »

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“I’m Roger Brown, and I’m 5’6″ tall.” “Hodejegerne,” Jo Nesbø’s best-selling 2008 novel, provides the genetic material for a clever, high-energy, heist-chase thriller. Self-aware, self-assured sociopath Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), a corporate recruiter living beyond his means and on both sides of the law, is matched by director Morten Tyldum’s sleek, chilly visual style, embracing contemporary Oslo with just the right, slight nudge of satire. The striver with the too-tall, too-beautiful wife has much to prove, and often proves it with bold, calibrated art robberies, replacing valuable art in clients’ homes with just-good-enough forgeries (including an Edvard Munch drawing). Read the rest of this entry »

Béla Tarr.

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Godard famously quipped that a movie has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. A Béla Tarr movie has rain, wind and despair, but not necessarily in that order. The Hungarian director of “The Werckmeister Harmonies” and “Sátántangó” says he’s chucking it in, at the age of fifty-six, with this Last Testament of High Miserabilism, and it’s an epic (and intimate) place at which to choose to end. It’s a fierce, glorious slog. In thirty shots that comprise the 146-minute running time of “The Turin Horse,” cinematographer Fred Kelemen, an ace director of the dark and brooding in his own right (“Abendland”) charts the light and dark of six days of increasingly dismal weather as an elderly farmer and his daughter watch their workhorse lose its will to live on their isolated rural homestead. It’s 1889, and it’s always, and it’s never. It’s a lustrous hell on earth, an apocalypse both minor and major, with little but boiled potatoes and plum brandy to stave off extinction. Read the rest of this entry »

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The proscenium frames life; behind the curtain, another life? More life. In an introduction to the 2002 Criterion edition of “Children of Paradise” (Les enfants du paradis), Terry Gilliam swoons in his rocketing enthusiasm that Marcel Carné’s lavish epic is “one of those films that seemed to me that we’ll never see again, because there was a time when poetry and big budgets seemed to go hand-in-hand, we don’t allow that anymore.” You can see parallels between Carne’s masterpiece and Gilliam’s later work, but his championing of the film is nonpareil: “It’s everything I dreamed about movies. It’s a world that didn’t exist, this density of people, this extraordinary world, these extraordinary buildings, extraordinary events, it’s a circus! It’s magic! It’s all there.” Oui. Depicting Paris under Louis Philippe in the 1840s along the Boulevard du Crime, produced in the 1940s under the Occupation, “Children of Paradise” teems with melodramatic goodness, timeless drama, intriguing details that come to life on the largest possible screen. It’s the kind of film that cries out neither for yet another plot synopsis nor a monograph or treatise, it simply calls out a friend to introduce another friend to a lasting treasure. Pass it along. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

RECOMMENDED

There’s a terrible truism that novels have always been betrayed by feature film adaptation, that the ideal source material is a short story, something that requires thematic amplification rather than narrative compression. Much of the wealth of recent microbudget American movies that’s meandering through festivals and cinematheques works best with deadpan and apparent minimalism. One masterful example would be Alex Ross Perry’s “The Color Wheel,” seemingly shambling but in fact arching toward a single powerful revelation. David Lowery’s kids-on-the-run “St. Nick” and his bedtime story short “Pioneer” also rush with powerful undercurrents. And Chicago’s own Frank V. Ross (the Desplechin-in-the-rough “Audrey the Trainwreck”) is moving toward something eccentric and mysterious. Simple as an anecdote, as transparent as a single bad idea, throw notions up in the air, as if story has become a succession of straightforward sentences rather than an intricate weave of experience and observation, transformed. “Bad Fever,” writer-director Dustin Guy Defa’s self-identified “feature film about self-expression” (edited by David Lowery) features Kentucker Audley, himself a practitioner of low-fi, no-budget filmmaking, as Eddie, a Salt Lake City loner who has unlikely dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian. Read the rest of this entry »