By Ray Pride

Baby, he missed that plane.

But you knew that: at the end of “Before Sunset,” (2004) even if you’re not the sort of moviegoer who believes that filmmakers must know what happens after the characters have been written away into the sunset, Jesse would not, could not leave Celine. In particular, however, the three filmmakers, director Richard Linklater and his co-writers Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, had no idea, they say. But that’s a good thing, because nine years on, like the nine years between that film and 1995’s “Before Sunrise,” they lived their lives. The result is an exquisite, unpretentious little masterpiece that took almost twenty years (and three lifetimes) to fashion. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Portrait of Jason” was essentially a legendary lost film, highly regarded but in sad shape since its first release in 1967. But it’s part of the ongoing “Project Shirley,” the indispensable Milestone Film’s effort to restore the films and enhance the reputation of the New York independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke. (As film critic Manohla Dargis has written, “Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer—Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema.”) Released in 1967, “Portrait” had fallen to a host of the quirks of independent film distribution, but Milestone’s Dennis Doros would not give up, and the story of the eventually successful search is a fascinating tale on its own. With the financial help of hundreds of Kickstarter contributions, as well as the Academy Film Archive and Modern VideoFilm, Clarke’s antic, indelible portrait of Jason Holliday, hustler, vivid, practiced raconteur and aspiring cabaret performer, shot across an expanse of only twelve hours in Clarke’s own Hotel Chelsea apartment, was something new again. Melancholy joie de vivre permeates every instant in the film, made to look as ragged as possible yet elegant in its simple, loving directness: look at him. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“1923’s comedy smash hit is shiny and new for 2013!” Ah, they sure don’t advertise movies like they used to. In Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last,” directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, his eager rube moves from the small town of Great Falls to the big city. Then-standard bits of sentiment are passed over quickly enough on a trajectory toward the central scene of a multi-story climb up the side of a Los Angeles building that made “Safety Last” legendary. The heedless traffic on the streets stories below only adds to the jaw-dropping spectacle. The fancy vehicles and streetcars and city streets and storefronts are an eyeful even before the cleanly executed setpieces and sight gags are embedded into the frame. There’s a life-endangering élan and run-for-it spirit in all of Lloyd’s inventions, and the best place to see it is in a big, packed theater. Read the rest of this entry »

 RECOMMENDED

“Furious 6,” as the main title has it, has the same simian delight as “Fast Five” and prior installments of the series: friends become family, bond in crime, regroup when one of many is in a fresh scrape. As more and more reviewers have realized, as audiences did almost straightaway, this series is seriously “post-racial.” It doesn’t matter “what” anyone is: action speaks louder than one-liners. Everyone’s a colleague, a peer, a friend. “We’re family, we do things together, you’re stronger together, ya always were,” is only the first iteration of the endless, kindly affirmations. Jibes are familiar now, basic unadorned teasing, terse bunkum. Vin Diesel makes gravel audible—there’s one reason he didn’t choose “Vin Cashmere” as his nom de zoom—with elongated, not quite drawled delivery of lines like “L’es go for a li’l ride.” Women bare their backs, the men their torsos: when Diesel wakes with his latest love, we’re treated to a glimpse of his kneaded-dough belly button, its furrows as profuse and detailed as the frown lines between his eyes. There are special effects in profusion, with physics-defying stunts that grow increasingly delirious. Few pop from the screen as brightly as Michelle Rodriguez’s magnetic smile. (Or her de rigeur black tank top.)  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Light After Darkness) Mexican intellectual-naturist-mysticist-pictorialist-diplomat Carlos Reygadas takes a non-professional cast, including his daughter, into a verdant yet dangerous world very much like his own. An urban family with money has moved to the countryside, a beautiful place that gives itself over to lightning storms, flurries of animal madness and a bright red demon with horns and tail that goes door to door with a toolbox. (While the film reveals little, Reygadas says this is his own home and property.) “I watch lots of movies, and I truly appreciate the directors that don’t try to lead me by the hand through their stories. I want to be considered one of them,” the director of “Japón,” “Battle in Heaven” and “Silent Light” has written. Carlos: with your fourth feature, you win at art-house again. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A romantic comedy without kisses, Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” (co-written with Greta Gerwig) is a vest-pocket “Manhattan,” a monochrome charmer about the mistakes a young striver makes at the elder age of twenty-seven, before her true, adult life begins, sometime shortly after the film’s “a-ha” of a final shot that illuminates the cryptic title. (And announces that all we have seen before is mere comic prelude.) Frances is getting past the proper time to be the dancer she intends to be, and the film neatly choreographs her progress toward her true and proper profession. But that’s not to say Frances, and Gerwig by extension, isn’t a creature of physicality. Gerwig’s her own Mabel Normand to her inner Mack Sennett: there’s good and proper slapstick throughout and she’s electric throughout. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“It’s hard right now.” Bryan Wizemann’s boldly understated, unsentimental “About Sunny” (aka “Think of Me”) showcases Lauren Ambrose in the role of Angela, a volatile, negligent single mother in nocturnal Las Vegas who makes one bad choice after another and the problems that it leads to with her daughter, Sunny (Audrey Scott, just a little bit goofy and ever so genuine). But Angela’s no bad guy, the bad guy’s there at every turn, the wolf at the door:  the quotidian of contemporary American working-class poverty. “It’s hard right now”: that line, proud but quietly desperate, burns like fire. Locations and each element of décor and costume quietly announce: “It’s hard right now.” Ambrose shoulders Angela’s dread with dignity but also a presentiment of doom.  Keenly observed, superbly acted, cleanly framed and shot, it’s still no surprise that a relentless experience like “About Sunny” has taken nearly two years to arrive on-screen. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It took a couple of days and an errant first draft after seeing “Star Trek Into Darkness” to realize that what I found most galling at first is in fact thrilling, glorious subversion by allegory. Sure, JJ Abrams liberally imposes his goofball digitally created lens flares; his action scenes aren’t exceptional at spatial coherence; and the reign of male-pattern bathos is interspersed with comic callbacks to touchstones from nearly fifty years of “canon” derived from Gene Roddenberry’s stories, as well as four television series and eleven feature films. There are bright colors, a camera style of no fixed address, and a pace that moment-to-moment is “fun,” aided immeasurably by a lovingly manic score by Michael Giacchino (“Alias,” “LOST,” “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” “Up,” “Super 8,” “Star Trek”), capable of striking notes that range from fear to giddiness in the same passage and always capable of being bigger than the biggest CGI explosions aloud in space, but never bigger than the love that Spock has for Man, I mean, Jim. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Sarah Polley’s third feature, the nonfiction “Stories We Tell,” is a tricky thing, one that does not stop reflecting and refracting until its very final frames.

It’s exceptionally fine, smudging the boundaries of what many consider to be documentary practice, and almost impossible to describe without tarnishing the unalloyed joy of the discoveries it offers the viewer. Starting with her third short, the thirty-eight-minute “I Shout Love” (2001), Polley was readily identifiable as a talented filmmaker, one whose intelligence was not limited to distinctive performances in movies like Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) or “Guinevere” (1999). And then her Oscar-nominated “Away From Her” (2006) and “Take This Waltz” (2012) marked her as an idiosyncratic, compelling writer-director, even as you realize each of her films, to date, have dealt with the limits of long-term relationships. In “I Shout Love,” a mismatched Toronto couple can’t part, because of their shared love for the Leafs; “Away From Her” observes a man letting his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife find a new life, apart; and the bracing awkwardness of her female protagonist in “Take This Waltz,” watching her wreck a marriage, and more, out of headstrong willfulness. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Homicidal rage be thy name! Recently arrived seer of Brit batshittery, writer-director Ben Wheatley, has a near-unrivaled knack for bile and giddy guile, put to full test in the tragicomic eye-opener, “Sightseers,” a story of a couple that thinks they’re going on a kitsch tour of the English countryside but instead go native in the goriest possible way when faced with the motley, petty grievances of modern life. (Think Mike Leigh with a body count, or, “Natural Born Campers”). Their hair-trigger reactions are priceless, and needless to say, bloody deadly. Read the rest of this entry »