RECOMMENDED

A lifelong master of investigating the dramatic potential of confined spaces and encroaching claustrophobia, the seventy-eight-year-old Roman Polanski prepared his adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s boulevard comedy-cum-sketch “God of Carnage” during his confinement to his Swiss chalet while resisting deportation to California. The result, “Carnage,” is confined to a single apartment in Brooklyn, patterned within a Restoration Hardware-inch of its life by veteran production designer Dean Tavoularis (“Bonnie & Clyde,” “The Godfather: Part II,” “One from the Heart,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Zabriskie Point”). Even on a small screen, every element is pointed, as you’d hope from a Polanski picture. Take even the characteristic Brooklyn fireplace plopped at one end of the living room, whether ersatz or even Carrera marble, it’s a modest arch not known for triumph, but simplest hominess. The accuracy of each element as the camera roams the rooms is devastating, as is the hard accumulation of each character’s agitated—yet keenly right—posture and gestures. They, the entire quartet, are dismal shits, quarrelers whose life rises above the script’s homiletic disdain by some heavy lifting by each actor. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Actors long to play the bad guys, and even better, to find the “privileged moments” that define some kind of “humanity” or poetic truth beneath, beyond their essential callousness. Working from a screenplay by British savor-of-the-month Abi Morgan (“Shame”), “Mamma Mia!” director Phyllida Lloyd works across the scrim of the advanced mental failings of elderly Margaret Thatcher to create an acting showcase for the great Meryl Streep. The great Meryl Streep—in the conflicted, confounding, sometimes risible “The Iron Lady.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

When does work become a “work”?

Almost as fascinating as the cool, perfectionist sheen of David Fincher’s version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is the tattoo of tales of the making of the movie. Collaborators seem to go to special lengths to point out that the painstaking focus Fincher applies to his work is just what he does: his splendid perfectionism isn’t workaholism, it’s work, the work. He’s Lisbeth Salander in his own immodest analytical skills. As the film industry transforms in so many ways, in every way, from distribution to projection to production, the directors who’ve unapologetically forged their own way are often as fascinating behind-the-scenes as they are on screen. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Dee Rees’ Sundance-honored dramatic debut about the coming out of a seventeen-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has both substance and style. “Pariah” is luminous and boldly lit, in a range of warm-to-hot colors, often against velvet-dark backgrounds, reminiscent of some of the sturdiest images of co-producer Spike Lee’s movies. (Bradford Young took Sundance 2011′s Excellence in Cinematography Award.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Dotty, unvarnished and unwashed, Jenner Furst and Daniel B. Levin’s “Dirty Old Town” (2010) is a fugue-cum-fantasia set in Billy’s Antiques and Props, one of the last remaining bastions of ruffian funk in the Bowery area of downtown Manhattan. Aggressive music, in-your-face performances and a general air of malaise and malodorousness mark the sketch-style assembly, which has garnered favorable remarks from local denizens Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, who notably said “This movie is fucking real.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Xavier Durringer’s “The Conquest” (La conquete) is a perky, cheeky take on the rise of French President Nicolas Sarkozy from 2002-2007, featuring a fine turn by veteran comic actor Denis Podalydès as the wife-shedding social striver. Podalydès does a splendid job of typing the small, schlumpfy man’s apparent (and reported) well of arrogance. While there may be subtleties that were more apparent to the local audience, as well as the litany of scandals mentioned, Durringer’s approach is that of the boulevard comedy, of ready and amusing caricatures of politicos behind the scenes—a supremely foul-mouthed Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy as “the chirping magpie”—that beg the question whether it is a diminution of stature in politics or simple satiric instinct that makes such an acerbic portrait ring true. Read the rest of this entry »

Actress Angelina Jolie writes and directs the upsetting story of a Bosnian woman who survives the Balkan conflict without the backup of stunt women, unlike Jolie’s doubles in such action-adventures as “Salt,” “Wanted,” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.” “In the Land of Blood and Honey” recalls Michael Winterbottom’s “A Mighty Heart,” where Jolie played the wife of a real-life journalist decapitated by terrorists in Pakistan, and “Beyond Borders,” where she played a fictional do-gooder in Cambodian and Chechnyan conflicts. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“I want you to help me find a killer of women.”

Rooney Mara attains the role of Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” with the slightest lift of her chin on hearing those words, the coldest fire in her eyes, as she matches the gaze of Daniel Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist.

Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy of novels reads, in its present English, like the worst rush translation on Earth, but at its heights, the late author’s moments of pulse-rushing pulp instinct are vital. And its immodest beating heart is Lisbeth. As adapted by screenwriter Steven Zaillian and director David Fincher, “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is terse, telegraphic, fluent, a watercolor composed in molten pewter pen nib. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Steven Spielberg’s second release in this week, “War Horse,” adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 bestseller by Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) and Richard Curtis (“Love Actually”) is a grandiloquent tearjerker galloping after movie-movie magnificence, square jaw jutting to the horizon. Beginning in the English countryside before World War I and segueing into Europe for the Great War, “War Horse” charts poor young Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and his farm family against the wealthy man they lease from. When his father (Peter Mullan) buys a stallion for a ploughhorse, a love story is born, boy and horse against the world. And it will soon be against the world, when the horse, Joey, is sold to the army. Read the rest of this entry »