If you count the five prior movies that feed into the “mythologies” of “Marvel’s The Avengers,” it must be the most expensive, if not the most accomplished, feature film of all time. (At least until James Cameron surfaces a couple more “Avatar”s in the next decade.) To take ten or eleven hours to build up to writer-director Joss Whedon’s new movie follows the pattern of quality television series since the past decade or so, that the two-to-two-and-a-half-hour theatrical feature format can’t fit all the chewy goodness of the amazing and beautiful and literary and emotional imagination at hand. That, of course, refers to “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men” and “The Sopranos” and should not in any way be attached to “Marvel’s The Avengers,” which is more like a plastic pumpkin at the front door filled with bite-sized, slightly mooshed and maybe a little melted candies that children would never eat unless there were a big plastic pumpkin filled with them at the front door. It will make a mint—it will buy the mint, tear the mint down, and fill it up all over again—which will help pay down Disney’s $4 billion-plus acquisition of Marvel, but which will only encourage them to make more meshuggah mayhem with an ever-attenuated attention span. Read the rest of this entry »

Udo Kier

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The first question that comes from watching most Guy Maddin films, “What on earth?” should actually be, “Where on earth?” The usual answer is Winnipeg; the correct one is “in this man’s mind.” “Keyhole,” (2011) his tenth feature, also takes place in a haunted house, and in a cracked black-and-white simulacrum of a 1930s gangster feature. Maddin, like few others, understands that the criminally under-used Jason Patric was meant to be a noir leading man. Read the rest of this entry »

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Acute, perceptive, compelling, “Monsieur Lazhar” is a rich portrait of a man finding his calling under unlikely circumstances. Canada’s nominee for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, adapted by Philippe Falardeau from Évelyne de la Chenelière’s one-act stage monologue, keeps its focus on its singular character, Bachir Lazhar (Fellag), an Algerian immigrant who applies for a job just at the moment a grade-school class desperately needs a replacement instructor after the trauma of their teacher’s suicide after hours in the classroom. Why is he in Montreal? What about him will make him not only the ideal substitute teacher for this troubled, troubling moment in the lives of the kids in the classroom, but also the kind of teacher who will be remembered, gratefully, by all of them? Read the rest of this entry »

(Habemus Papam) Nanni Moretti wears many hats—actor, writer, director, film distributor, owner of Rome’s leading art-house cinema—and his movies range from comedies about modern life to melodramas about loss (the heart-shaking “The Son’s Room”). Occasionally, he makes a not-very-good movie, and even when distribution of foreign-language films wasn’t so uncommon, they would fail to find American exposure. (1993′s semi-autobiographical, Woody Allenesque satire “Dear Diary” made it here.) Old men in Cardinals’ raiment are about the limit to the spectacle in Nanni Moretti’s quizzically underfed “We Have A Pope,” which may have been hoped to be a comedy. Eighty-six-year-old Michel Piccoli plays a reluctant, newly elected Pope who, nearing the end of a long life, has an anxiety attack accompanied by doubts about his calling, so he runs away. (Piccoli is game, but there’s little for him to do.) Read the rest of this entry »

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“The Hunter” shares pedigree with a new generation of Australian filmmaking, including co-producers behind the impressive gangster film “Animal Kingdom” (2010), and a novel for source material by Julia Leigh, who made her directorial debut with the controversial sexual allegory “Sleeping Beauty” (2011). Willem Dafoe plays a mercenary, dispatched by a Euro-biotech conglomerate to the Tasmanian wilderness to search for an animal supposedly extinct since the 1930s, the Tasmanian tiger. Can a cold, closed-off man dropped into teeming countryside of forest and fog, in search of something so rare, find what’s long dormant in himself? Blah-blah-blah, yes, but director Daniel Nettheim, an experienced director of Australian television drama, contrasts epic with intimate in chilly measure and keeps the eco-allegory to a light chill. Read the rest of this entry »

Taika Waititi. Photo by Ray Pride.

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New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi relaxes the quirk a tad after his first feature, “Eagle Vs. Shark,” (2007) the memorably eccentric comic love story that introduced Jemaine Clement, one half of “Flight of the Conchords” to the larger world. Waititi claims a mild strain of autobiography—”true and imagined memories”—in the 1980s-set coming-of-age story, “Boy,” (2010), based on his Oscar-nominated short, “Two Cars, One Night,” and which became his home country’s highest-grossing film. Waititi’s deadpan comedy about a Michael Jackson-and-E.T.-obsessed eleven-year-old boy, named “Boy,” in gorgeous rural Waihau Bay (ripe with the tall greenery of cannabis) isn’t as extravagantly strange as “Eagle Vs. Shark,” but his affable comic rhythms are his beguiling own. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…. There was a young screenwriter named Lawrence Kasdan. Co-writer on “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” screenwriter of  “The Bodyguard,” his directorial career began under George Lucas’ wing with neo-noir “Body Heat” in 1981, and then he made “The Big Chill,” his 1983 remix of John Sayles’ “Return of the Secaucus Seven.” Some thought he spoke for the entire generation of Baby Boomers. Now Kasdan is sixty-three, and he hasn’t directed a movie since the lamentable 2003 Stephen King adaptation, “Dreamcatcher,” and his time away shows in the movie’s daring inconsequence. “Darling Companion” is a generational statement as well, more AARP than “Arf!”, for a post-middle-age demographic the movie industry could possibly profit from addressing, of citizens tending to senior whose attention tends to wander and who like going to the movies because it’s warm in there and dark and it’s okay if you fall asleep. Read the rest of this entry »

Luc Besson’s career as a director-producer has been supremely profitable yet eccentric as any in the world. While he began his career with stylized art-house action like “The Last Battle” and “Subway” and then juicy, visually shellacked pulp like “La Femme Nikita,” “Leon: The Professional,” and “The Fifth Element,” his greatest success has been as a producer, with his EuropaCorp studio making propulsive if ragtag thrillers like “Lock-out,” “Colombiana,” “Taken,” “Transporter” and “Taxi,” usually with a story credit for himself. As director, he’s dipped into the hybrid animation of the “Arthur and the Invisibles” series. Of the zigs and zags of his career, one of the oddest may be his drab, reverential treatment of the life of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh). What drew Besson to the goodness and perseverance of this woman? Read the rest of this entry »