RECOMMENDED

“Filmed and directed” by Beadie Finzi, “Only When I Dance” is a gorgeous-at-moments clear-headed documentary, small in its aims and scope, yet staking a take on class and race by examining dance in modern-day Brazil. Compassion meets passion: Finzi follows Irlan and Isabela, a pair of young students from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to unlikely success. 14-year-old Isabela, for instance, would be the first black ballerina in a Brazilian company. Referring to the world around her, she says “Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, it’s always dance, dance, dance.” It’s tender, their dreams of culture beyond their own rich landscape; the triumphant moment against the Manhattan skyline is not without precedent, but lovely nonetheless. With Irlan Santos da Silva, Isabela Santos, Mariza Estrella. 78m. HDCAM video. (Ray Pride)

“Only When I Dance” opens Friday at Siskel.

RECOMMENDED

One of the richest surprises of the summer is the pungent “Peepli Live,” writer-director Anusha Rizvi’s vivid, bustling satire, in the vein of Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” or should we say, opening a vein as “Ace in the Hole” does. Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) is a poor famer from the small town of Peepli, and if he can’t pay back a government loan, he’ll lose his land. Thoughtfully yet creepily enough, the government also offers aid to the survivors of farmers who commit suicide. Natha’s brother advocates this course of action, Natha tentatively agrees, and soon the big carnival of media and politicians swoop down on Peepli, sweeping Natha’s grave decision out of the way with their own goals and agendas. Rizvi wrestles with Indian village-versus-city issues with bawdy wit and ample charm. Talking to producer Aamir Khan recently, he told me that “Peepli Live,” the first Indian movie to play in competition at Sundance, is indeed atypical of modern Indian filmmaking, and its dark undercurrents make it atypical of much of what’s called independent filmmaking in this country. Read the rest of this entry »

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The third “Step Up” film turns up the dance technique to “dazzle” on the dial, and dumbs down the storylines of “Step Up” (2006) and “Step Up 2: The Streets” (2008) to new lows in laughable. In literal brightness, though, Ken Seng’s digital 3D cinematography beats this year’s other releases in that retooled format. After two installments set at Maryland’s School of the Arts, writers Amy Andelson and Emily Meyer relocate this one to New York CIty. “Hip-hop fairy tale,” to use the tag in the film’s publicity, especially fits. The first two were merely simple-minded stories of teens dreaming of dancing and doing it. This one stuns with its godawful simplicity. Condescension is the only option. If you didn’t look down, you’d miss it, so oblige and enjoy the show. Moose (Adam G. Sevani) says goodbye to his parents, who trust he’s said goodbye to dancing and hello to electrical engineering. But in the next step, he skips his freshman orientation at NYU and dances up mayhem in Washington Park. “Family is family” is the tautological mantra of this fantasy. Family equals dance crew. (Moose’s dad, on screen for under a minute, is the only one to appear in all three films.) Like a backstage musical, this sports dance numbers that upstage the tossed-off plot. Although the choreography and camerawork are nothing like Busby Berkeley’s, certain sequences of eclectic street styles and cheerleader athletics evoke his deco machine aesthetic. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Kynodontas) I’ve thrown out half-a-dozen ways to write about Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” a weird gem of Greek black comedy made with an uncommonly assured hand. Contemporary Greek cinema, which I’ve watched a lot of in the past decade, sometimes offers moments of grace and beauty but seldom a fully realized film. “Dogtooth” is a revelation, especially arriving from Greece. Even the elder statesman of Greek cinema, Theo Angelopoulos, began a drift into mannerism with “The Weeping Meadow,” no matter how glorious its production. (Angelopoulos has gone on record as being an admirer of Lanthimos, which is in a class with Ingmar Bergman anointing Lukas Moodysson, the brightest hope of Swedish cinema after his second feature.) “Dogtooth,” which I had the fortune to see among a few hundred extremely amused young Icelanders at the Reykjavik Film Festival, attuned to the film’s black world, is funny peculiar, funny ha-ha and a remarkable singularity: it should come across as pastiche, as a rehash of provocations and surrealist gestures past. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Lets go make music-fucking history!” roadie Le Donk (Paddy Considine) says at the start of Shane Meadows’ sweetly, engagingly silly, largely improvised, shot-in-five-days music-scene mock-doc “Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee.” It’s a manifesto on shooting a feature  in five days for just £30,000, but also a lark with a dark heart: “Spinal Tap” meets the Angry Young Men. Considine is paired with real life Nottingham rapper Dean Palinczuk as Scor-zay-zee, a young “talent” he’s certain he can make into the star he almost was fifteen years ago. Meadows’ filmography includes other comedies, but he’s best known for his accomplished dramas set in the Midlands of Britain, including the boxing tale “Twentyfour Seven” (1997) with Bob Hoskins, the scalding “Dead Man’s Shoes” (2004) (also starring the mercurial, compelling Considine), the excellent coming-of-age “This is England” (2006), set during the Falklands War, and the tender miniature “Somers Town” (2008), shot in eleven days. But there’s always a sense of fun somewhere in even the deepest funks of his films, and he lets that lope throughout “Le Donk.” (Meadows captures the spirit of invective, both as catharsis and as performance, very, very well.) And Considine, as always, breathes a convincing character, even amid the detritus of mockumentary scaffolding. (And he doesn’t carry that awful odor of disreputability that is  Steve Coogan’s taint of choice.) Meadows amuses as the doc-maker named “Shane Meadows.” With The Arctic Monkeys, Olivia Colman, Richard Graham, Seamus O’Neill. 75m. (Ray Pride)

“Le Donk and Scor-Zay-Zee” opens Friday at Facets.

RECOMMENDED

Opening on more than 200 screens this week, Anurag Basu’s “Kites” is gaudy, multiculti desi masala, an unpredictable, tonally gaga fable of fate in the form of a couple-on-the-run love story between two dancers, the Indian J. (Hrithik Roshan) and Mexican immigrant Linda (Bárbara Mori Ochoa), who longs to marry a rich American. J., a dancing instructor in Vegas, has a sideline in green-card marriages. But this time… he’s fallen in love. Unfortunately, he’s engaged to a fabulously rich woman whose violent father owns a Las Vegas casino, and whose brother is engaged to “Natasha”—his green-card ex under a new name. (The family estate is vast, making any spread in Architectural Digest seem insufficiently vulgar and nouveau; Dad, or “Bob,” is shown as a top-dog bad guy with a bit of “Reservoir Dogs”-style lobe slicing.) Plot synopsis would baffle more than the story’s unfolding, even in its fractured, post-Tarantino style, and while it’s overstuffed after the fashion of Indian pop movies, it’s still a glory of delirium. “Destiny” is repeatedly invoked, but the greatest virtue of “Kites” is that unlike an overly developed or workshopped screenplay, anything can, and does, happen. I long for an Amer-indie movie with the same lunatic verve. Exuberant diaspora kitsch ensues. It’s the most fun I had at the movies all Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Tano Da Morire) Roberta Torre’s 1997 molto kitschy musical, “To Die For Tano,” recounts the life of Tano Guarassi, a Palermo butcher and small-time Mafia enforcer who gets hit by the Corleone crime family. For the first few reels, the bizarre musical results of his four sisters and characters drawn from the real-life neighborhood are fascinating, but the Neapolitan nonsense and the mad, motley score by Nino D’Angelo aren’t likely to convince every moviegoer his rise and fall were worth the recounting. While it was a hit on its home turf and an award-winner way back at the end of the twentieth century, think of this “trash musical” as extremely uncomfortable karaoke, and you have a small notion of the in-your-face experience. It’s a surreal provocation even when you don’t know what the hell’s going on. Plus mullets. Lots of mullets. With Ciccio Guarino, Enzo Paglino. (Sample “Tano’s Rap” below.) 75m. 35mm. (Ray Pride)

“To Die For Tano” opens Friday at Facets. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“These bitches suck” was Creem magazine’s timeless takedown of The Runaways when the teenage girl band bobbed to the surface of the 1970s.

In Floria Sigismondi’s writing-directing debut, the making-of-the-band, life-on-the-road, taking-of-the-drugs telling of 1970s teen rockers who made it right to the middle (despite mostly sucking, musically) has the right attitude if not a fully fleshed story. It satisfies in bursts, like an erratically track-sequenced album. Based on Cherie Currie’s slim memoir, “Neon Angel,” “The Runaways” is episodic, and Currie’s decline isn’t as interesting as 15-year-old Dakota Fanning’s embodiment of her rapid slip-slide into neurasthenia and diva-dom. (Fanning’s turn-on-a-dime from sullen to sneering as the band assembles the song “Cherry Bomb” is one of her best moments: “Ch. Ch. Ch. CHERRY BOMB!”) Joan Jett’s survival instincts are more indicated than dramatized, and Kristen Stewart, while as watchable as ever, brings more spark than fire. Michael Shannon, playing oddball Svengali Kim Fowley, is bright and funny as a leering loon, but he’s a man we ought to be fearful of as much as mesmerized by. (Shannon’s memorably theatrical styling of lines like “I am the luckiest dogfucker in space!” are more Walkenesque than truly loony.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a follow-up to “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” Jonathan Demme shoots Young rocking two nights three years ago in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. On this Chrome Dreams II tour, Young and his band had played two nights at the Chicago Theater the month before. Demme skips the interviews and backstage footage found in his 2006 concert documentary, shot over two nights in Nashville. Country and bluegrass artists don’t share Young’s stage in “Trunk Show,” nor are there the polished tracking shots DP Ellen Kuras crafted for “Heart of Gold.” Cinematographer Declan Quinn, along with Demme and five other shooters, wield digital camcorders for mostly handheld coverage. There’s some Super-8 and a few nine-screen grids, but this is more concert than film from the distributors of “The Singing Revolution,” “We Live in Public” and “Incident at Loch Ness.” Stage design is limited to remnants of an old-time theater marquee with random letters, a red telephone and a pirate flag fluttering by a fan. There is no giant microphone wrangled by hooded druid-like roadies with flashlights for eyes, as in the 1978 San Francisco concert Young turned into the film “Rust Never Sleeps.” In “Trunk Show” he performs an alternately rousing and reflective set, sometimes playing piano and banjo. The 64-year-old Canadian stomps on stage like a shaggy workhorse. Hunched over, he brandishes his electric guitar like a farm tool. His gruff-honey voice has the timbre of hardwood bark. His elderly bandmates come off as seasoned artisans, not burnout longhairs in denial, as one extended instrumental with his bassist and rhythm guitarist proves. 82m. (Bill Stamets)

“Neil Young Trunk Show” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

Damani Baker and Alex Vlack’s sweet and inevitably bittersweet “Still Bill” is an understated portrait of Bill Withers, the musician behind memorable pop like 1971′s “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “Lean on Me” and “Just the Two of Us.” The avalanche of music documentaries are a long way from simple records of performances in front of an audience, and the best dig into the quirks of personality that provide inspiration for the mystery that is tune and song. Intimacy is key. Bill Withers walked away from a career that didn’t begin until he was grown, not owning a guitar until he was 32. Why the silence since his last music release in 1985? The filmmakers shot over 300 hours of footage across two years as Withers approaches his seventieth year. A trip back to his childhood home in the worn coal town of Slab Fork, West Virginia inspires Withers’ rich reminiscence. (There’s a present-day detour as Withers records a song with his daughter in his home studio.) Withers is also prone to aphorism: “I think I’m kind of like pennies. You have ‘em in your pocket but you don’t remember they’re there”; and “It’s okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful? You’re gonna have to pass through ‘all right.’ And when you get to ‘all right’, take a good look around and get used to it, ‘cos that may be as far as you’re gonna go.” “Still Bill” passes through all right. Talking heads include Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Jim James from My Morning Jacket, Angelique Kidjo and, erm, Sting. 78m. (Ray Pride)