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Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio’s very smart, genuinely troubling “Cropsey” revisits a tale that had been told when they were children on Staten Island, a much-embellished urban legend about an escapee from a nearby mental institution. Cropsey was the local bogeyman, the all-purpose chiller of children, handy to keep the tykes in line. But Cropsey was a real man, one Andre Rand, who was tried for the disappearances of disabled local children, and Zeman and Brancaccio’s horror documentary is a real jaw-dropper. Comparisons have been drawn to the fear-filled “Blair Witch Project” and David Fincher’s close, clammy “Zodiac,” as well as Stephen King stories and “Capturing the Friedmans,” yet the parallels are mere flattery, considering the film’s own unique savor, an alternately genial and sinister tone: I’d go more for saying this deeply paranoid chiller plays like Errol Morris in a good mood, sharing his favorite shaggy-dog story about true-life murder. And about true-life suspicion, real-world ambiguity: as in “Zodiac,” you’re hardly certain if Rand is criminal or scapegoat. “Cropsey” is small, but small like an earwig, cozying up in your memory once you’ve seen it. The local, the most personal things, will, at the best instants, always suggest the universal, and “Cropsey” does. Children must have their bogeymen, fear is cultivated like a perennial crop. I don’t want to describe Geraldo Rivera’s role in the story’s unfolding, but he’s a compelling key. (The Ghost Robot production company presentation logo that opens the film is a swift delight.) 84m. (Ray Pride)

“Cropsey” opens Monday at the Music Box; it continues after its Thursday closing on VOD on cable systems until August 12.

By Ray Pride

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream even bigger, darling,” a character says in “Inception” (and in its trailers), elevating an enormous weapon into frame and immediately blasting away his adversaries.

A lesson heeded over the course of a decade of writing and production on Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a hall of mirrors of artistic allusions in the form of a heist thriller that takes place in the space of sleep. The intricate carpentry and lacquering of “The Dark Knight” director’s filmmaking shines when you see it a second time: craftsmanship has pleasures, if not limitless mystery. Putting plot synopsis aside—the story’s contours are so neatly delineated and dovetailed, describing them at length defines the word “Spoiler”—Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb assembles a dream team of experts, in the best tradition of heist thrillers, to commit an anti-heist in the dreams of a powerful man: inserting themselves into his subconscious and leaving behind a powerful suggestion.

Like Alain Resnais’ aggressive mind loop, “Last Year at Marienbad,” “Inception” revolves around memories of a past love, which may or may not be “true.” Memory is fallible, dreams are malleable. Charmingly, Nolan has said he’d only ever seen that feat of bold parallel editing after completing this James Bond-scaled movie, but he felt all the other films that had been influenced by “Marienbad” had influenced him. What other influences rest lightly on Nolan’s shoulders? Read the rest of this entry »

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If Pippi Longstocking were flesh-and-blood and modern and an uncommonly pissed-off 26-year-old, what would her dark night dreams consist of? The answer’s opening around the country this week, starring one of the most memorable of twenty-first-century fairytale characters, built for our Age of Terror. A lurid, satisfying surprise, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” works on a different scale and in a different dramatic key than “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.” Made on a noticeably lower budget than its predecessor and originally intended for Scandinavian and German television, “Played With Fire,” directed by Daniel Alfredson (brother of “Let the Right One In”‘s Tomas Alfredson), begins with two virtuous elements: diminutive powerhouse Lisbeth Salander and the woman who plays her, Noomi Rapace. There’s a genuine extra-diegetic thrill to the conception of the character, however the films are executed. Read the rest of this entry »

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(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 »

By Ray Pride

Buenos Aires has a timeless air, but that illusory sensation masks history. In “The Secret in their Eyes,” the 2009 Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film by writer-director-editor Juan José Campanella, a flashback-driven structure makes its characters’ histories both distinctly of their time but also embedded in memory.

A former Buenos Aires state court investigator, Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darin, “Nine Queens”) has just retired and to get some kind of perspective on his life, starts to write a novel about the memory from his career that most troubles him: the unsolved brutal murder of a young woman twenty-five years earlier, in 1974, in the months just before the dictatorship took over the country. Espósito is impressed by the devotion of the woman’s widowed husband, which mirrors his relationship with his superior, Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil): how far can fixation go, and last, if unrequited? In the husband’s case, it’s the separation enforced by death; in Benjamin and Irene’s, there are issues of class, of propriety, of simple shyness that keeps a dance of flirtation from becoming a tango toward commitment. The story, based on a novel by co-writer Eduardo Sacheri, shifts confidently back and forth in time, with surprises not only in plotting but in character development. Campanella’s work on U. S. television includes episodes of “Law & Order SVU,” which, while at a stylistic remove from the cinematic style of “Secret,” suggests the director’s range of storytelling skills. (His next project is an animated film based on… Foosball.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to “The Host” surfaces a different monster: perhaps it’s a clutching mom, perhaps the unknowability of even those closest to you. In “Mother,” (Madeo) the 40-year-old South Korean writer-director continues to grow more confident in mixing tones, from terror to comedy, from pity to pitiful, from delight to fright. He even opens with a Kitano-esque sequence where the never-named mother (the enthralling Hye-ja Kim, known for maternal roles in her country, harrowingly intense and vital here) is crossing a vast field of dry grass, a foggy field where some yet-unspecified sorrow turns to a privileged moment where she begins to dance in a kind of techno-calypso music only she (and we) can hear. “Mother” will return to that scene, but first we learn of her uncommon devotion to her grown, simple son (played by Bin Won, whose cuteness is used with great irony). From her feudal-seeming herb shop, the mother watches over her son through a doorway into the modern world: chopping sheafs of sage, a drop of her blood falls as her son is lightly struck by a passing car. Sound and light and frame deepen every scene. Complications grow, and he’s accused of killing a young girl. As he’s jailed, she conducts her own investigation of the murder. “Mother” approaches the intensity of Shohei Imamura’s great “Vengeance is Mine,” but Bong’s mix of bumptious humor and strong plotting makes for a more eccentric mix, leading to a musical climax that’s the cinematic equivalent of acupuncture, releasing all the knots, gliding into a glorious sunset. 126m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

“The Men Who Hate Women” is the blunt original title of the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s worldwide bestseller; its harsh portrait of that country’s industry and welfare state earns it. But can a story about misogyny inadvertently traffic in it? As “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” it’s a barn-burner of a page-turner, the first of three novels Larsson left behind (films have been made of all three; the other two will be released this summer). The adaptation by director Niels Arden Oplev (“Portland”) is an adroit compression of its angry themes and doesn’t stint on the graphic material. (Its distributor is Chicago-based Music Box Films; see related story.) Financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvis) has been convicted of libel and will be going to prison, which allows an aging industrialist from the fractious Vanger clan to hire him to investigate a forty-year-old mystery about a missing girl. Before he’s hired, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a young investigator with epic hacker skills, investigates him. Their paths cross, and soon they are in league together in an increasingly epic search for a serial killer. The two-and-a-half-hour running time never feels leisurely, although three scenes involving rape and retribution involving Salander and an advocate assigned to her by the state go well into NC-17-level cruelty. (It’s one of the key differences between page and screen, especially involving violence: you imagine only as much as you need to while reading.) While made for television, Oplev’s visual style, from design to lighting to framing, has cinematic sweep (and the men’s cardigan budget must have been daunting). While several plot strands are swept away, there are lingering glances and hints toward them which suggest the filmmakers thought most of their audience would be familiar with the novels. One bit of compression that takes the place of pages of exposition suggests “Blow-Up” mingled with the brief clip that exists of Anne Frank turning her head as seen in a window: it’s the sort of creative solution that lands its own punch. 151m. (Ray Pride)

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” opens Friday at Landmark Century and Landmark Renaissance in Highland Park.

David Peace’s “Red Riding” books, drawing on the real-life “Yorkshire Ripper” cases, are a marvel of surrealism and despair, finding language both vernacular and incantatory to capture the failed attempts of investigators and journalists to solve brutal serial killings in Leeds, Yorkshire, across two decades. The quartet of novels is pared to a trilogy, rich, compelling noir movies that were produced for British television: “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974″ (directed by Julian Jarrold, “Kinky Boots,” shooting in Super 16; “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980″ (James Marsh, “Man on Wire,” shooting in 35mm widescreen); “In the Year of Our Lord 1983″ (Anadd Tucker, “Shopgirl,” shooting with the Red One camera). The visual style in all three is as dark as the crimes on show, unafraid of the possibility of the perfume of pretension and the funk of sadism: think “Se3en” instead of “Se7en.” “1974″ may be the most successful, following Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield, “Boy A”), a young reporter for the Yorkshire Post who’s returned after time spent “down South.” (The invocation of “The North”—”The North, we do what we want”—and its ways so often would be comical if not consistently menacing.) Referring to a recently disappeared peer, Peace’s novels open, “All we ever get is Lord fucking Lucan and wingless bloody crows,’ smiled Gilman, like this way the best day of our lives… Waiting for my first Front Page, the Byline Boy at last.” Young spunk meets cloacal immersion: confronting a local real estate entrepreneur John Dawson (Sean Bean) is the first instance of Eddie’s putting of many of a foot wrong. Prolific expert David Thomson has overreached in asserting these films as the equal of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather II,” but despite their gloom, violence and despair, they’re roundly thrilling: the parochial cruelty—do the police use the crimes as cover for avenging their own enemies?—is unrelenting and the depths of viciousness can hardly be guessed. Each director finds their own style, but the unity comes from screenwriter Tony Grisoni’s proficient distillation of the material and themes. In Marsh’s “1980,” Paddy Considine may give the series’ best performance as a police investigator running an internal affairs investigation of the 1974 events.) In the best possible way, “The Red Riding Trilogy” harks back to U. S. and British thrillers of the 1970s: deeply skeptical and bold in accepting that compromise and failure are an ineffable part of the human condition, or at the very least, of the genre of thrillers pitting authority against avarice. With Rebecca Hall, Peter Mullan and Eddie Marsan. 105m; 96m; 104m, respectively. (Ray Pride)

“The Red Riding Trilogy” opens Friday at the Music Box, with viewing options including a Roadshow-style marathon sit. The Channel 4 website has trailers and more.

(Frygtelig lykkelig) Two childhood pals tell a nasty tale set in a Danish village near a bog with many uses. Director Henrik Ruben Genz and novelist Erling Jepsen grew up in Gram, and shot their first collaboration nearby. Three characters are based on people they knew in Gram who share their names on screen: a wife-beating drunk; his seductive, bruised spouse; and their little daughter, whose paternity is a matter of whispers. This screwed-up family makes work and life really messy for the new marshal. Sent from Copenhagen, Robert (Jakob Cedergren) misses his daughter but not his wife. His troubled past got him this posting—the last marshal’s stint seemed oddly short-lived—and he will get into more trouble. The stranger with a badge is constantly told how things are done around these parts: from saying both “hello” and “goodbye” with the same word, to hanging his towels on his clothesline. “Terribly Happy” opens with a legend about a cow that sank in the bog, only to surface a half year later and give birth to a freak calf with a cow head and a woman’s head. An outbreak of insanity struck livestock and locals. Menfolk dispatched the creature to the municipal bog: “Since then, there hasn’t been any fuss with neither cattle nor women.” Fuss-control is what locals do best. No badges needed, but three cardplayers need to fill a vacant seat at their table. This dour noir deals bitter comic pokes. Rural surreal bits include a cat with a meow sounding just like a peculiar local phrase. With Lene Maria Christensen, Kim Bodnia, Lars Brygmann, Anders Hove, ens Jørn Spottag. 102m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” a consummate genre exercise, is not—and this is for the best—another “Cape Fear.” Instead, it’s a thrill of form and function, a fully crafted exercise in visual style and classical genre legerdemain.

In some of Scorsese’s pictures of the past couple of decades, “Casino” being the example that comes quickest to mind, the effect of so much antic erudition turns claustrophobic, even out in the desert, an overlay of shimmering design and compacted footnoting of the film history that makes up the grey matter in Scorsese’s colorful brain. But even beyond its salute to myriad movies most of us would never have heard of, let alone seen, “Shutter Island”‘s asylum-set story is ideal for this treatment: claustrophobia, physical and mental, is made evident in every turn, fully, gloriously, inhabiting the haunted house of the mind.

An obvious and key inspiration that Scorsese cites is Robert Wiene’s 1924 “Caligari,” so it’s useful to consider “Shutter Island” as “The Cabinet of Teddy Daniels.” It’s 1954, and Teddy is a U. S. Marshal dispatched to Ashecliffe Hospital, an asylum on a rocky island offshore from Boston, to find the identity of a missing patient among the criminally insane. Teddy’s new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), leads Teddy through an investigation that moves through the wards and across the rough island, but also its raft of ominous characters, including a trimly goateed Ben Kingsley as the hospital’s director and Max von Sydow as a German-accented doctor. The timeframe of Dennis Lehane’s novel (adapted by Laeta Kalogridis, who worked as a story editor on “Avatar” for James Cameron) means wounds from World War II are still raw, including Teddy’s memories of being one of the soldiers who liberated the Nazi’s Dachau concentration camp. It’s the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well, and their witchhunts are invoked, and there’s more mental pain as well, with the migraine-prone Teddy also stricken with bad dreams about the death of his wife (Michelle Williams). (The resonance with the modern day is in how much of Teddy’s stress rests in what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder.)

“How do you believe a crazy person?” is a key line in the dialogue, suggesting as well, how do you believe a constructed narrative, or a seemingly unstable and thus unreliable narrator, or how does a marshal get viable testimony from a world that is only comprised of the mad and their controllers. Scorsese’s always been stronger on mood and character than plot-driven storytelling, but one of the great pleasures moment-by-moment in “Shutter Island” is how the mechanics of the story work: even when you think you’ve figured out one aspect of how subjective or objective a certain scene is, there’s another little bit that’s superbly crafted that fits right into the evolving mystery.

On the ferry to the island, the visual style is already off-kilter and disorienting, with a nauseated Teddy surrounded by chains and clamps and damp-mottled walls that provide nightmarish atmosphere, already the trappings of the charnel house. The first flashes we see of memories of his wife are typical, the first of two shots showing her barelegged in a summer dress, surrounded by sunlight, an apparition, golden, chiding, reaching to kiss Teddy, arch of foot and red-enameled toes, a gentle angelic smile; the second shot cuts abruptly, a half-second or more sooner than we expect: even memory is unreliable.

Cinematographer Robert Richardson’s palette is classical, heightened, burnished, with especial attention paid to eyes, capturing the flickers of thought expressed by DiCaprio, Ruffalo, Kingsley and the rest. It’s something missing from a lot of latter-day movies, especially those originating on high-definition video: concentration paid to the sculpting of light to express space, and to allow an audience to see the performers’ eyes. (These are not stained windows to the soul.) The other actors, not listed in the opening credits, walk a tightrope in what they reveal as well, but John Carroll Lynch, as one of the wardens of the asylum who’s on hand to lead Teddy and Chuck around the island, remains perhaps the most distinctive of little-recognized American character actors, who can indicate an entire character with a nod of chin, the slightest of basso intonation.

Operatic in many senses of the word, the score is assembled from existing music by Robbie Robertson, and leans very little on pop, instead drawing on needle-drops of exquisite gloom and bedlam from modern composers like Brian Eno, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Morton Feldman and especially a haunting end-title mix of Dinah Washington’s vocal for “This Bitter Earth” mixed with Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” from the movie “Pi” (another horror-of-the-mind movie). John Adams’ orchestral “Christian Zeal and Activity,” from the 1970s, dovetails nicely, too.

Terrible things happen within dream sequences that are boldly colored and inventively eruptive as the universe of Paul Schrader’s “Mishima,” and Scorsese’s evocation of movies from the era and from the noir-and-snakepit genres, as well as the superb Robert Mitchum mystery “Out of the Past” to the atmospheric work of producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur, never detracts or becomes top-heavy: going for baroque, Scorsese winds up with a rococo entertainment of glistening delirium. The claustrophobia is form and function: in the end, “Shutter Island” is about the life sentence everyone’s issued, until memory goes: sentenced to life in the mind.

“Shutter Island” opens Friday.