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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“Boardwalk Empire” producer Rudd Simmons, who’s also worked on Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson films, is an eagle-eye-on-the-wall in his self-financed “The First Season,” as he follows the fortunes of New Yorkers Paul and Phyllis Van Amburgh across five years after they’ve moved upstate to live the lives of dairy farmers, raising three children with another on the way while reviving a defunct dairy farm. Romantic? Back-to-the-earth? More like a fresh grindstone, however appealingly stark the surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »

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One of two films on globalization presented in advance of the NATO summit shutdown of Chicago, Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre’s “Maquilapolis (City of Factories)” profiles women who work at a Tijuana factory run by a multinational, or a maquiladora, who fight for severance pay after their employers take flight, leaving behind lost jobs and toxic waste. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Lord

By Ray Pride

Beaming fifteen-inch figures stand at rubbery attention in front of a roaring fake fire in a cleared-out hotel bar. Peter Lord, director of “The Pirates! Band Of Misfits” and co-owner of Aardman films, is not impressed.

“It’s a rubbish fire,” he says, “Rubbish,” as we sit before the audience of the Pirate Captain, various cohorts and a squishy little Dodo, the most agreeable of the lot from “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” the animated eighteenth-century-set seafaring send-up from Aardman. During the 3D stop-motion action, which was produced on actual scale sets, I wondered if there would be a squeezable bath toy based on this little fellow. Now I make the mistake of reaching for the Dodo, and neither of us can get it back on its extinct feet. Read the rest of this entry »

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A survey of the last of the elderly whippersnappers left living in the 160 studios atop New York’s Carnegie Hall before the Carnegie Hall Corporation began evictions in 2007 toward renovation to office space, Josef Birdman Astor’s “Lost Bohemia” (2010) is bittersweet diversion. A twenty-year tenant himself, Astor recorded several hundred hours of his neighbors across an eight-year span, and their cultural memories evoke times already lost, as well as the rarefied air of prior tenants, including Norman Mailer, Isadora Duncan, Marlon Brando, Enrico Caruso, Charles Gwathmey, Andrew Bergman and Bill Cunningham (whose digs are seen in the more dynamic documentary, “Bill Cunningham New York”). 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 »