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)

By Ray Pride

Like a finely drawn sketch, the silky, serenely sinister “The Ghost Writer” implies as much as it illustrates.

Drawn from Robert Harris’ efficient 2007 bestseller, “The Ghost,” that riffs on the “special relationship” that the government of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had with the United States, the project was taken up by Roman Polanski and Harris after financing for their $100-million adaptation of Harris’ “Pompeii” fell apart. The film’s dialogue is drawn largely from the book, but with a more precise wit and chilly twists to the talk. Read the rest of this entry »

Writer-director Adam Green’s “Frozen,” a Sundance 2010 entry, is a high-concept chiller trapping talkative post-teens atop a high-high-up ski-lift overnight with increasingly implausible but not quite risible complications. (Its programming at midnight in the ski resort of Park City is wittier than much of the film itself.) Call it “Open Water” with wolves, or “Lifeboat” with down jackets instead of lifejackets. The complications deliver on genre expectations, but “Frozen” doesn’t rise farther than that. The characters are paranormal chatterboxes. The sometimes-inventive cinematography is by Will Barratt. With Kevin Zegers, Shawn Ashmore, Emma Bell. 94m. (Ray Pride)

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Is Roland Emmerich hoping to suggest a Fritz Lang fueled on Ecstasy and poppers?  The Teutonic apocalypticist has topped his customary grandiloquence with bursts of grandeur in the 158-minute “2012,” a bravura, breathtaking, ridiculous, assured, intermittently political, berserk masterpiece about the end of the world. As a director-producer-SFX-house-owning Euro-auteur, he has no parallel. (Timur Bekmambetov needs to notch a few more conflagrations in his belt.) The economic critique leveled against form-follows-function disjuncture in movies like “Fight Club” could escalate to Titanic scale against this pinnacle of Emmerich’s appetite for destruction. As lit and framed by Dean Semler and designed by ranks and ranks of designers, Emmerich’s provocations aren’t meant to capture the hushed, stoppled intake of breath upon encountering a finely ruined world. There’s gallery-drowned influence that’s only grown with time. Some of his images hope to sleep cheek-by-jowl with work like Maurizio Catellan’s “La Nona Ora” (The Night Hour), in which a Pope has been slain by a small, perfectly aimed bit of meteorite. Amusingly, Emmerich has shown off the yields of his profits: he’s made his London home into a gallery of boldly political art, some commissioned. He wears the galleristic influence with confident glee. He adds more and more politicized sarcasm to the kind of enterprise that was considered programmatic, say, “Gone in Sixty Wonders of the World.” Emmerich is a mephitic prankster and the perfume comes from a perfect nose, a perfect nose for what he does. With John Cusack, God bless ‘im, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Danny Glover, Patrick Bachau. 158m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)

“2012″ opens Friday.

As they no doubt teach in thriller screenwriter workshops, don’t put a soldering iron in the hand of a loving father in the first minute if you’re not going to bring it back to engineer chaos later. Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer and director F. Gary Gray (“The Italian Job”) put together a passable genre product set in Philadelphia. It’s Assistant District Attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) versus Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) The former boasts of his 96-percent conviction rate; the latter aims to “bring down the whole fucking diseased corrupt temple down on your head.” Back to the soldering iron. Clyde is tinkering at home. Enter two home invaders. Clyde survives. His wife and daughter do not. One bad guy gets a deal. The other gets the death penalty. Ten years later both die by vicious extra-judicial measures. Clyde masterminds extravagant “biblical” revenge on the courts and the malpractice of justice. (The press notes pitch “Law Abiding Citizen” as “an incriminating look at the inconsistencies of an overloaded justice system.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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A romance about terrorists and foiled ideals and fitful dreams: is that permitted? In Uli Edel’s entertaining if less-than-coherent rollercoaster docudrama “The Baader-Meinhof Complex,” a collection of post-Nazi-generation radicals calling themselves the Red Army Faction, led by journalist Ulrike Meinhof and activists Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, trouble 1970s Germany. A serious subject discussed in the omnibus film “Autumn in Germany” and fictionalized in R. W. Fassbinder’s “The Third Generation,” Edel’s approach, produced and co-written by Bernd Eichinger (“Downfall”)  is less weighty, at times even exploitative, yet at moments more discerning: what of youth’s arrogant impulses could lead to such forms of revolt, unlikely to sway common burgher or privileged politician? The lessons for today are implicit; the lectures few; the narrative clotted and wayward. Lovingly shot  by Rainer Klausmann (“The Lemon Tree,” “Downfall,” “Head-On”). With Simon Licht, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Hannah Herzsprung, Susanne Bormann, Nadja Uhl, Volker Bruch, Jasmin Tabatabai. 150m.  (Ray Pride)