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RECOMMENDED

“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 »

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 »

By Ray Pride

Fireworks come screaming across the sky. Near the hulking fortress of a London housing estate, five teenagers are mid-mugging. It’s Guy Fawkes Day; a larger flare falls to earth. Monsters. Alien monsters. Who can save the “block”? Five unlikely heroes and their once-victim, now reluctant co-human, are on the run, through the streets, through the vast estate’s corridors as more monsters land and hunt. There’s only one enemy now. (“Inner city vs. outer space” is one of the filmmakers’ coinages for the elemental conflict.) Running under ninety minutes, even with end credits, Joe Cornish’s debut feature is triumphantly rude and violent and headlong thrilling and even funny, honoring worlds of influence that came before. The richest gift of Cornish’s work is how it’s permeated with influence, but he listens to film history the way he listened to the kids near his home and the actors in his film to create its fast, funny lingo: transformatively. Read the rest of this entry »

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(La doppia ora, 2009) “The Double Hour” is a visually straightforward, yet tense and twisty thriller from Italian director Giuseppe Capotondi, a former philosophy student and an experienced fashion photographer and music-video director. There’s a sense of telling detail from the serene, measured but eventually shocking opening scene, as the details of a Turin hotel room, its occupant, and the arrival of a chambermaid lead to the moment of a suicide. At a speed-dating event, the chambermaid, Slovenian émigré Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) meets widower and ex-cop-turned-security-consultant Guido (Filippo Timi, the fiery Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio’s “Vincere”) and romanticismo strikes quickly. The Monica Vitti-esque Rappoport’s charisma insures Capotondi’s slow-burn revelations convince. The prerequisite dark past for a film noir outsider provides an ample supply of complications as the romance persists, yet there are also shards of nonlinear reversals in store. The shocks and turns are speedy and satisfying, even when the story jumps into a kind of dreamland that may be supernatural. “The Double Hour” is a captivating intrigue, its satisfactions comparable to Guillaume Canet’s 2006 mindfuck “Tell No One” and hints of influences that range from Kubrick to Hitchcock to Polanski. Tat Radcliffe’s widescreen cinematography burnishes the Italian night. Rappoport and Timi won awards at the 2009 Venice Film Festival for their performances. 95m. (Ray Pride)

“The Double Hour” opens Friday at Landmark Century. A trailer is below.

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If the leading cause of screen death for assassins is other assassins, the most common non-lethal ailment for their agent colleagues is amnesia, as we see in “The Bourne Identity,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight” and now, “Unknown.” In “Taken” (2009) Liam Neeson played an ex-CIA agent who wreaked havoc in Paris to extract his daughter from the posh yacht of a Middle Eastern pervert. Now it’s Berlin’s turn to endure collateral mayhem as Neeson plays Dr. Martin Harris from New Hampshire. He must extract himself from an intellectual-property heist (156 laptop files “worth billions in the wrong hands”) and the assassination of a Middle Eastern playboy and philanthropist. Bruno Ganz (“Downfall”) plays an ex-Stasi agent who helps our hero find himself. His other helpmate is a Bosnian taxi driver played by Diane Kruger. Screenwriters Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell, working from a novel by Didier van Cauwelaert, help the historically illiterate with background briefings on the former Yugoslavia and the former East Germany. An American couple (Neeson and January Jones) check into the Hotel Adlon for a tenth annual biotech “summit.” The plot promptly detours Harris into a four-day coma. His memory is shaken and his identity is taken. This who-am-I? thriller creaks with dumb mechanics. Director Jaume Collet-Serra did far better in “Orphan,” where hypopituitarism took the place of amnesia, and the Saarne Institute, not Section 15, was where the wrong-doers originated. “Unknown” is watchable escapism with a corny finale of global proportions for popcorn concessions. With Aidan Quinn, Frank Langella, Sebastian Koch, Olivier Schneider, Stipe Erceg. 109m. (Bill Stamets)

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(L’affaire Farewell) “Farewell” is a diverting real-life spy thriller set in 1981, in the midst of the Cold War, pitting disenchanted KGB Colonel Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusturica, whose movies, including “Underground,” have scored two Palme d’Or at Cannes) and a French engineer, Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet, director of “Tell No One”), against the bulwark of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. Christian Carion was Oscar-nominated for “Joyeux Nöel” (2005), and largely makes spare, intelligent work of the atmosphere of the era; who knew a pop soundtrack featuring Queen would suit such an intrigue? While President Reagan may have vouched for the importance of the case—”one of the most important espionage cases of the twentieth century”—Fred Ward’s casting as Reagan is one of the more disturbing bits of impersonation in memory. Still, the play between Canet and Kusturica works beautifully. “One quickly learns to lie, no?” Gregoriev asks Froment in one meeting in a park. Living in “mensonges et solitude”: lies and solitude, he says. For a brief moment, it is the two film directors, as well as their characters, as their roles, communicating with each other. They’re both touching performers, and you want them to survive, even as unprepared as they are for the weight of a world of spycraft. With Willem Dafoe, Alexandra Maria Lara. 112m. (Ray Pride)

“Farewell” opens Friday at Landmark Century and Landmark Renaissance.

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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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By Ray Pride

Fierce, lovely and tender, “Winter’s Bone” is an improbable triumph, a lyrically spoken Ozarks-set thriller, drawing from the best instincts of B-movies, the art house and even Greek tragedy: It’s a Southern Gothic Western with a teenage girl as the Sheriff.

And what a 16-year-old agent of justice Ree Dolly is, brilliantly embodied by Jennifer Lawrence. Set in disadvantaged rural southwestern Missouri, “Winter’s Bone” sends her on a journey to find her dad, a recidivist crystal-meth cooker who’s jumped bail. If her missing father isn’t found before his court date, Ree, her invalid mother and a younger sister and brother will be homeless. She runs a gantlet of neighbors and relatives in hopes of finding him, crossing long-held social boundaries of a town with much to keep submerged.  John Hawkes’ ominous portrayal of Ree’s uncle, Teardrop, is a marvel as well. Ree is trying to solve a mystery, so there’s a locomotive of need and action propelling the film. But everything from costume design to lived-in settings deepen and enrich the story. And a rare gift: Spoken language, precise as the blade of a knife, gorgeous yet apt, lifts centuries of history to the present day. Sample exchange: “Are you going to kill me?” “That idea was talked about.” (Chilling on the page, turns like that are intimately epic on screen.) Read the rest of this entry »