RECOMMENDED

Andrew Davis began his career as a cameraman in Chicago in the 1960s, and before his largest success, “The Fugitive” (1993), Davis was a poet of the Chicago streets in action films like “Code of Silence” (1985) and “The Package” (1989). (A variation on the Oswald-was-a-patsy conspiracy theory, “The Package” used dozens of Chicago locations to economically suggest other cities and countries.) One of Davis’ most notable obsessions in his Chicago-set films was to make them as topographically accurate as possible—that is, his skillful, adroit camera placement and cutting could, in fact, take place in the real world, rather than being pieced together from disparate locations miles apart, which filmmakers most often do. Beyond its serviceable plot, his first feature “Stony Island” is most valuable, more to be treasured, as a lovely mash note to a passed version of the South Side and a music scene that has not stood still in the past thirty-five years. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” a labyrinthine tale about British espionage and spycraft, is an adaptation of John le Carre’s 1974 novel, from Tomas Alfredson, the director of “Let The Right One In.”

The level of patience and control is similar between the two films: in the superb, measured “Tinker Tailor,” we realize there’s horror inside all of us, the potential for terrible things. George Smiley (Gary Oldman) may not even know it consciously, but he’s just waiting to spring cruelty on someone. After a botched mission, a search for a double-agent in Britain’s MI6 begins: the complex interlocking narratives are enacted by a brilliant, precise Oldman, but also John Hurt, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones and Colin Firth. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

On the 253rd day of enduring his two cousins displaced by the Luftwaffe bombing of London, the disagreeable Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter, “Son of Rambow”) scribbles in his diary: “Investigate legal ramifications of impaling relatives.” He cannot stand their nattering about Narnia, a fantastic kingdom of chatty satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs and minoboars they visited in the 2005 and 2008 installments prior to “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” All three were written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on the childrens’ book series by lit prof and theologian C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) that were published in the 1950s. Screenwriter Michael Petroni is also credited for the third, the first in 3D. The live action was converted; the CGI was created in 3D; both work quite well. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Chris Morris’ reputation as a savage satirist rests partly on his “Brass Eye” Channel 4 series mocking sensationalist television, which demonstrated brass balls with a 2001 episode about pedophilia. What on earth could you tackle to topple that reputation? Terrorism? Incompetent want-to-suicide bombers in contemporary Britain? Morris is lucid in interviews about the range of his reading about perpetrators past, but even readers with the most cursory knowledge know how much depends on fortune and how much ought to fall to fate in the planning stages. The blackest of Pynchon-meets-Kubrick comedies could be made of what the 9/11 killers were doing in the weeks before that morning. Absurdity compounds absurdity. Stupidity short-circuits nihilist “ideals.” The history of terrorists’ fuck-ups would shame the big boys of “Jackass.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When Francis Coppola “presented” Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s mammoth, 442-minute 1977 “Hitler: A Film From Germany,” roadshow-like limited runs were the rule, and Coppola retitled the film “Our Hitler.” Syberberg’s musings on the use of abuse of perceptions of the meaning of Hitler are more German than universal and more Syberbergian than something that gained footing in its culture. Still, there is one filmmaker who took from the use of rear projection and shafts of light suggesting the bright cone of white that comes from projected film: even on the not-very-good U. S. DVD transfer, it’s evident that Quentin Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson consulted “Hitler,” and the sequence of the apocryphal cinema-set killing of Hitler draws lovingly from this film. For most viewers, the slog of repetition, narration and monologue will soon grow tiresome, but there is a fierce intelligence at humorless play. As was the case with his staunchest defender, Susan Sontag, who considered Syberberg “the first film director since Godard who really matters.” Defending her extended essay in The New York Review of Books, Sontag wrote on of the “complexity of Syberberg’s views, and their formal and imaginative profundity.” She continued, “The subject of Hitler makes moralists of us all—moralists with a facility that is perhaps the last of the corruptions which is Hitler’s legacy.” It may be profitable to see how Syberberg’s 1970s explorations resonate against the work of “moralists” today. 7 hours, 22 minutes. (Ray Pride)

“Hitler” A Film From Germany” shows twice Saturday and once on Monday and Wednesday at Siskel. A video adaptation of Susan Sontag’s NYRB essay about the film is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What on earth is “Machete”? More properly, what in Texas is it? Originally one of the fake coming attractions that was part of the “Grindhouse” package—”You fucked with the wrong Mexican”—Robert Rodriguez’s expansion of his pungent “Mexploitation” joke to feature length is, surprisingly, an urgent political polemic that still pays tribute to violent and sexual eyeball kicks. In this way, it’s probably the first full-on pastiche of Roger Corman’s subversive play at his 1970s New World Pictures label that anyone’s ever assembled. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

By Ray Pride

The prescriptive yet apocalyptic anti-nuclear proliferation documentary “Countdown to Zero” has you reaching for the comforting simplicity or even banality of song lyrics; not necessarily Radiohead’s “Reckoner,” which plays at extended length, or The Cure’s “M,” (“ready for the next attack”) but something like Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??,” as in “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”

Yes, the topic today is thermonuclear Armageddon, which would offer perhaps only half an hour of anticipation followed by a second of detonation, illumination and incineration. “Countdown to Zero” does not shy from the toxic poetry of the prospect of annihilation. Hair-raising, bloodcurdling and wholly despairing, this cry-of-the-mind from the producers of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Lawrence Bender (“Pulp Fiction,” “Inglourious Basterds”) and Participant Media, is chock-full of fascinating material and articulate interviewees from former spies to statesmen, as assembled by talented writer-director-for-hire Lucy Walker (“Blindsight,” “Devil’s Playground”). For instance: What’s the best way to hide fissile material being smuggled across the sea? Put it inside a cargo container filled with kitty litter; kitty litter triggers radiation detectors. Read the rest of this entry »

Ana Sofia Joanes

RECOMMENDED

A starter of activism? Yes, ma’am, and how would you like your polemic? Over easy? Ana Sofia Joanes’ low-fi “Fresh” pits food rebels of modest means against the vastness of the petrochemical-driven industrial-farming-based food chain and hopes to inspire a rebellion. Articulate advocate Michael Pollan is among those interviewed, warning as he does against “monocultures” in contemporary agriculture; the meat of the movie is the trio of activists whose stories rebel against the model of “profit over people.” It’s modest filmmaking with outsize ambition, not as coldly formal as Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s 2005 “Our Daily Bread,” “Fresh”‘s practical glimpses of local production make it a far friendlier pamphlet than the soul-crushing “Food, Inc.” which suggests that change is not possible. Virginia “grass farmer” Joel Salatin, who also appears in “Food, Inc.,” is just one of the kindly faces in “Fresh” who says it is possible and, as another subject puts it, all it takes is “one person at a time, one farmer, one consumer at a time.” They’re looking for transformation across the next fifty years, not just the next meal. 72m. (Ray Pride)

“Fresh” hatches Friday at Siskel. The trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“The Salt Identity”? Many alternate titles would suit “Salt,” but it’s simplest to say that Bourne and Bond take a kicking in Phillip Noyce’s highly enjoyable double agent thriller. At a fleet, muscular ninety-nine minutes, “Salt” is the veteran director’s demonstration of what big budget Hollywood action entertainment can be: a crafted rush instead of indifferent mush. Working from a script by Kurt Wimmer that was once a Tom Cruise vehicle, it’s tightly wound storytelling that telegraphs conversational engagement with real-world issues, working less with story arcs than story trajectories. There are a half-dozen classic politically themed thrillers that could be cited in comparison to Kurt Wimmer’s script, but considering how gratifying the complications are, it would be spoiler-ish to cite them, or much of the story beyond the suspicion that the career CIA agent Evelyn Salt may be a Russian sleeper spy and that Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union is invoked. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Laura Poitras’ masterful, even great documentary, “The Oath,” as intricate and emotionally complex as a novel, is a portrait of two men whose chance meeting led them across the landscapes of Afghanistan, Gitmo, 9/11 and Osama bin Laden. Abu Jandal was bin Laden’s bodyguard from 1997 to 2000; among the men he recruited for Jihad was his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, who had been bin Laden’s driver, and whose 2006 case, Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, moved through the U. S. Justice system and led to a landmark Supreme Court decision, which held that military commissions violate the Geneva Conventions. Former Al-Qaeda member Jandal now drives a cab in Yemen; Poitras intercuts his story with Hamdan’s. Poitras doesn’t narrate. The stories of the two men unfold and our sympathies shift again and again; key information is parceled out as we learn about the sympathies and hopes of the pair. Is either man more complicit? Is either man wrongfully accused? Poitras, whose earlier films include “My Country, My Country,” is a master storyteller. Poitras’ and director of photography Kirsten Johnson’s images are uncommonly gorgeous, capturing such photogenic expanses as weather just beyond the razor-wire fence of the Guantánamo Bay prison as we hear the melancholy letters Hamdan has sent. Osvaldo Golijov’s score suits the brooding character of the film, which is also beautifully edited, both in pace and patient, observant shot selection. 91m. (Ray Pride)

“The Oath” opens Friday at Siskel.