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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 »

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“Accomplices” (Complices), the debut thriller by Swiss shorts director Frédéric Mermoud, is a cannily constructed thriller that jumps across time, from the first meeting of Vincent (Cyril Descours) and Rebecca (Nina Meurisse), who have both just turned 18, to the investigation by two police inspectors (Gilbert Melki, Emmanuelle Devos) after Vincent’s body is found in the River Rhône and Rebecca’s disappearance soon after. Reconstructing the events, an increasingly complex story of the young couple’s happy-go-lucky involvement in prostitution captivates the investigators as they make their rounds of acquaintances. While stylishly directed, “Accomplices” is a very French film, far from “CSI: Paris”: details of character and behavior accrue in gratifying turns and actors are cast for innate charm rather than Hollywood looks. It’s poppy and contemporary without turning trashy. Devos, a mainstay of movies by Arnaud Desplechin (“A Christmas Tale,” “Kings and Queen”), is, as always, a fine feral presence, brimming with attention and the suggestion of intelligence. I’d say the same about Mermoud: “Accomplices” is a work by an already-accomplished narrative detective. 93m. U.S. theatrical premiere. (Ray Pride)

“Accomplices” opens Friday at Facets. A trailer is embedded below.

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Bag of cash. Leave it be. Hundreds and thousands of dollars in a bag? Walk away. You can tell characters in most movies don’t watch movies: they repeat all the splendidly entertaining cock-ups of decades of the avaricious and doomed on-screen. A lovingly constructed neo-noir, “The Square” is the feature debut of Australian stuntman-turned-director Nash Edgerton and his brother Joel, who co-writes and plays what may be the story’s only honorable man. What if you could get away with murder and got away with it repeatedly, no matter what fate threw your way? That’s the underlying tragedy that befalls Raymond Yale (David Roberts, face increasingly drawn with worry and despair), a middle-aged contractor in an affair with a younger woman, Carla, who convinces him that her criminal husband’s ill-gotten gains will pay their way into a better life. As brackish as anything by James M. Cain (“The Postman Always Rings Twice”), the story’s turns from theft to arson to accidental death to murder to blackmail to… 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 »

By Ray Pride

“Chloe,” Atom Egoyan’s thirteenth feature, was intended as a directorial project for producer Ivan Reitman.

But after working on a screenplay with screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”), the director of “Ghostbusters” decided the story might better suit fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan, whose “Exotica” he admired. Egoyan’s dense, cool, yet luxuriantly imagined movies play tricks with time and perspective, but this script is linear. Catherine (Julianne Moore), a Toronto gynecologist, suspects her music-professor husband David (Liam Neeson) has been cheating on her, and she hires a young call girl (Amanda Seyfried) she encounters in a bar in the city’s pricey, middle-aged Yorkville district to reveal how far he might go with flirtation. The greater flirtation in Wilson’s juicy script is with absurdity, but what’s on screen is the most compelling, even hypnotic Egoyan film in years. Read the rest of this entry »

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When would’ve been the right time for Paul Greengrass’ latest headlong movie, a heady venture into a foreign land, the Morocco-shot Iraq War fable “Green Zone,” which suggests one honest man, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (played by a more-than-solid Matt Damon) could have unburied the truth about nonexistent WMDs, or weapons of mass destruction. A week shy of seven years since “shock and awe,” its opening weekend didn’t do so well, and its further commercial prospects are dire, but the director of the latter two “Bourne” films has done “too soon” already, and well, with “United 93.” Miller crosses lines of authority when faced with both a Paul Bremer-like bureaucrat (an oleaginous Greg Kinnear) and a Judith Miller-like journalist (Amy Ryan, working for the Wall Street Journal rather than transcribing for the New York Times; she’s vital with very little dialogue) who have their own running dogs in the game. Within minutes, or hours, in screen time, it’s “Bourne” in the fashion of 1970s conspiracy thrillers like “Three Days of the Condor,” “Green Zone” proves its metaphoric acumen by eliciting cries of “anti-American”! from august journalistic corners such as the New York Post. Working from a script credited to Brian Helgeland (“L.A. Confidential”), Greengrass captures the perspective of those on the ground, particularly Iraqis, in a way that maybe only the documentary “No End In Sight” has among American ventures into this subject matter, and the final shot is a blunt about why we’re there. Still, a little more skepticism would be in order, as in “Condor,” which ends with CIA retainer Robert Redford, having dropped information in the lap of the New York Times, is asked by his handler, Cliff Robertson, “What makes you think they’ll print it?” With Brendan Gleeson. 115m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“Green Zone” is playing wide.

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.

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Three cops on different beats in Brooklyn will end up at one housing project. Narcotics officer Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke, “Training Day”) is the over-extended dad of Vito, Vinnie and Vicki, with twins on the way. To buy a bigger house, he robs dealers. “I don’t want God’s forgiveness—I want his fucking help,” he rails at his priest at confession. Clarence “Tango” Butler (Don Cheadle) is an undercover narc desperate for an overdue desk job but leveraged to sell out his tattered ethics. Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere) is a week away from a pension he may never collect if he keeps putting his service revolver in his mouth. Shooting at the Van Dyke projects in the Brownsville part of Brooklyn, Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) ably directs a lengthy well-built script by first-timer Michael C. Martin. “Brooklyn’s Finest” does solid work as a study of occupational risks. The workplace is a daily violation for Sal, Jake and Eddie. And each character breaks ranks. Cops can self-corrupt in more ways than one. Hell is a two-way mean street in the 65th Precinct. “In the lexicon of cop movies, it feels epic,” states producer Basil Iwanyk in the press notes.“This feels like Lumet or Scorsese.” Gere drops other names: “We were thinking of Othello and Richard III.” With Wesley Snipes, Will Patton, Shannon Kane, Brian F. O’Byrne, Lili Taylor, Ellen Barkin and Vincent D’Onofrio. 140m. (Bill Stamets)