RECOMMENDED

“It took over 200 years to create the symbol of the presidency,” notes the president in “The Sentinel,” a political thriller with an illicit romance that George Nolfi scripted in 2006. Now he writes and directs a superior “romantic thriller” that spells out what it will take to make David Norris (Matt Damon) president in a foreseeable future. Tinkering with this Brooklyn pol’s itinerary to higher office are strange men-in-hats carrying proto-iPads: their screens map the existential GPS of Norris and all the rest of us. Micromanaging fate is necessary to maintain the exact timetable of human history. Except hat-wearing Harry (Anthony Mackie) is a minute late for a preset spilling of coffee on Norris’ shirt. Norris steps into a venture-capital meeting a bit earlier than expected and sees Harry’s coworkers, some uniformed in long black leather coats like those worn by the firemen in “Fahrenheit 451,” in the act of adjusting the mind of one of his immobilized coworkers. As in “Inception,” subconscious recalibrations alter one’s later “decision trees.” Minimizing “ripples” in the space-time continuum is like maintaining film continuity. “The Adjustment Bureau” posits God not as the Ur-auteur, but as an executive producer with script doctors doing rewrites to steer history since the hunter-gatherers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Everyone’s young and precisely pretty, no one’s old in Gregg Araki’s B-movie-plus, “Kaboom,” luminously shot in Jell-O-shot-colored colors, elevating polymorphous ambisexuality at its most playful and, even, comfortingly innocent, as well as being kidnapping-, murder- and UFO-obsessed. It’s both compact self-satire and fizzy simulacrum, a “petite little snack,” to recall a phallic appellation from an earlier film. A compact greatest hits of the timeless, well, 1990s-inflected Araki-verse, “Kaboom” follows in the tradition of his “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy,”  “Totally Fucked Up,” “Nowhere” and especially “The Doom Generation.” Encouraged by John Waters to explore the snap of his earlier pop without too much regression, Araki grafts a “Twin Peaks”-ish paranoid mystery atop a tale of prototypical freshman year terror, with a wall-to-wall score that includes songs by Cut Copy, Explosions in the Sky, Ladytron, Tears Run Rings, Interpol, Airiel, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Read the rest of this entry »

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Limber young women in garters gyrate and scheme, live and love, hope and dream. That would include Ali (“short for Alice”), the small-town Iowa girl with large pipes, mom-less since the age of 7, played by Christina Aguilera as well as Cher’s fading boss of a Los Angeles burlesque palace called, fittingly enough, “The Burlesque Lounge.” They all came west in search of their own deeply felt sense of movie-musical cliché. Sex is indicated, but what’s the baddest threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of “Burlesque”? Money. Real estate. A large, wide Sunset Boulevard skyscraper in the making. That emblem of phallic consequence—and vast sums of fiscal investment—weirdly suits the second feature by writer-director Steven Antin, brother of Robin Antin, proprietress of The Pussycat Dolls, who founded that burlesque enterprise in 1995. Read the rest of this entry »

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How many versions of “Romeo and Juliet” have there been? With “Let The Right One In” and this, count two more. “Let Me In” is an American remake of Tomas Alfredson’s tender “Let The Right One In,” based on an engaging vampire novel by Alfredson’s fellow Swede, John Ajvide Lindqvist. Those who admired the 2008 import will recognize many of the same scenes, yet writer-director Matt Reeves’ (“Cloverfield”; writer, “The Yards,” seventy-three episodes of “Felicity”) transposition of the story to 1983 Los Alamos, New Mexico, feels wrenchingly personal in its own right. Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Road”) lives with his mother in a rundown enclave called Enchanted Hills, missing his estranged father, picked on by older boys. New neighbors move in: a weary older man (Richard Jenkins) and a girl, Abby (the ineffable Chloë Moretz, “Hit Girl”), who seems to be his own age. Reeves would have been 17 at the time, to his characters’ 12 or so; 1983 is also the year after the first release of another study of a Boy and his Other, “E.T.” Where Alfredson’s version is steeped in a prehensile sexuality both more suggestive and more intriguing than the chastity myths of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, Reeves finds an American corollary to the essential loneliness of both vampire and child. (A contemporary version would likely turn out more mawkish, self-pitying, a kind of “Eat Prey Bleed.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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The advertising and promotion for the Sundance-debuted “Catfish” pushes farther than any of the don’t-reveal-the-twist twist popularized by Harvey Weinstein’s “don’t tell the secret” of “The Crying Game,” even more than the by-now-rote twists that end most M. Night Shyamalan “Blinding Edge” productions. “Don’t Let Anyone Tell You What It Is.” Um. There have been articulate reactions, since its Sundance debut, ranging from Amy Taubin in Film Comment—”The most buzzed-about movie at Sundance, ‘Catfish’ was suffused with a misplaced sense of entitlement that might have been hilarious if the movie were not also profoundly misogynistic and disingenuous”—to last Friday’s review by A. O. Scott in the New York Times—”Judged by the usual standards, it is a wretched documentary: visually and narratively sloppy; coy about its motives; slipshod in its adherence to basic ethical norms. Shame on them, if that would mean anything to them. But at the same time—precisely because of these lapses—it is a fascinating document, at once glib, untrustworthy and strangely authentic. I say this with a heavy sigh: this is, by far, one of the most intriguing movies of the year.” I quote Scott at length because his reaction pretty much matched my own. Read the rest of this entry »

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(L’arnacoeur)  We make sitcoms and sometimes romcoms, but the French, they turn out romantic comedies, and how many of them star Romain Duris? In “Heartbreaker,” the shaggy-maned, shaggy-browed, slow-burn-smiling Duris plays Alex, a professional anti-gigolo, a man paid to break up couples, with ever-grateful women his reward, as we learn in the at-a-running-start pre-credits sequence. A box-office success back in France, Pascal Chaumeil’s successfully contrived comedy pits Alex against winsome, gap-toothed Juliette (Vanessa Paradis), an heiress whose father (Jacques Frantz) wants her free of the man she’s set to marry in ten days. It’s high concept, sure, but there are few diversions and distractions. Once the premise is set, the frisky, slightly risqué play, set against the brightly colored backdrop of Monte Carlo (shot with gloss by the great Thierry Arbogast), is all smiles, matched eyelines and the giddy turning of tables. The quantity of jokes that charm is gratifying; Duris’ study of “Dirty Dancing” to emulate Patrick Swayze is a particular treat. It doesn’t hurt that the slight Duris and the slighter Paradis make a compact but believable, eminently charming pairing. 109m. (Ray Pride)

“Heartbreaker” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

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When is an artist the artist we discover them to be over the course of their career? The perverse pop-art of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 “Zabriskie Point” is plainly the work of his Swinging London “Blow-Up” (1966). His exploration of urban space and the distances between alienated, contemporary characters is also recognizable as the same author’s work, in movies like “L’eclisse” and “L’avventura,” black-and-white dissections of time, architecture and thwarted desire, lovingly collated and anatomized in Criterion DVD editions. But Michelangelo was likely Michelangelo even as a babe, you’d guess from the restored 35mm print of his 1955 “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends), a rare adaptation from the filmmaker. The acting is more emphatic, the melodrama of a 1950s Italian cast, but yet… men and women, exceptionally striking women, enact roundelays of attraction in mid-century modern settings. All the ache and isolation of the movies to come are there, and hardly in germinal form. The mysteries of solitude already transfix Antonioni, and even a twenty-first-century audience should be able to recognize a great film from an already-formed sensibility. Adapted from a novella by Cesare Pavese. With Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese. “Le amiche” comes from ambitious young distribution company The Film Desk: urrà for cinephiles! (Ray Pride)

The 35mm restoration of “Le Amiche” plays Saturday-Monday at Siskel.

By Ray Pride

Long-distance relationships never work, and romantic comedies about long relationships?

Nanette Burstein ups the average with confident glee in the zippy romantic comedy “Going the Distance.” In the New York-set feature debut of the director of “American Teen,” Drew Barrymore is Erin, a would-be journalist six weeks away from moving to San Francisco, where her sister (Christina Applegate) and possibly more jobs await. She lays it out: “I’m 31, I’m an intern, I’m gonna get wasted.” Drinking in a local bar that night, trying to beat her own high score at Centipede, Garrett (Justin Long), who works at a record label, intrudes on a dare from his friends (Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day), leading to Erin’s explosion: “Fucker put his face in front of the game! Who does that?” But friendship, flirtation, more, develop. Tick-tick-tock… Read the rest of this entry »

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After a larger, lesser movie with similar themes but grandiose goals toward empty-calorie travelogue opened last week, Ryan Murphy’s “Eat Pray Love,” Ruba Nadda’s “Cairo Time” arrives, a sweet rebuke to the infinitesimal show of spirit in the Julia Roberts vehicle. After fourteen shorts and an earlier feature, the Syrian-Canadian writer-director has fashioned a story for the ever-splendid Patricia Clarkson, who, at the age of 50, sweeps away with her first leading role. Happily married fashion editor Juliette (Clarkson), vacationing in Cairo with her longtime husband, Mark, a U.N. official (Tom McCamus), must find another escort when work calls on him again and again. Mark’s trusted friend and former security advisor Tareq (Alexander Siddig) offers to show her his city, a city of history and of 17 million residents. Friendship, only friendship. East and West gain in translation. Juliette and Tareq suit each other. Juliette swans through the city. The movie moves gently on the currents of their budding friendship, looks, smiles, gazes. Is Platonic the ideal? Triangles, even impossible ones, are faultless movie material in the right hands. Nadda is deft. Clarkson is impeccable. The movie doesn’t strain for effect, for greatness. Perhaps just for calm, contentment, contemplation. For Clarkson’s compelling understatement. Hello, stranger. In a year of spectacularly apt and satisfying endings, “Cairo Time” may have the emblematic topper: blunt yet enigmatic, lovely, lasting, exquisite. It ties the past hour-and-a-half into an image, a motion, a duplicated discovery. Two into three. Cryptic? There you go. But not when you see “Cairo Time.” For international co-production reasons, Irish production house Samson Films, which made “Once,” became part of the team: perfect. “Cairo Time,” too, is sweet music. 88m. (Ray Pride)

“Cairo Time” opens Friday at Landmark Century.