Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

An assured polemic that plays as an eyes-wide thriller, Don Argott’s “The Art of the Steal” is also a rousing entertainment as layered and skeptical as a marathon of episodes of “The Wire.”

The Barnes Foundation operates a museum, five miles from Philadelphia, in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, created by the late Dr. Albert C. Barnes to hold his Post-Impressionist and early Modern art. The numbers bloom: 181 Renoir, sixty-nine Cézannes, fifty-nine Matisse, forty-six Picasso, seven Van Gogh, six Seurat. Barnes didn’t care for the elite of Philadelphia, 1922.

“People didn’t like him. He insulted people,” one of the many articulate interviewees tells us, and the art establishment of Philadelphia used similar language about the documentary. Horrors! Barnes was “extremely inflammatory toward his contemporaries.” At his death in 1951, Barnes left the collection to a small African-American college, but in recent years, there’s been a movement to break the strict conditions of his bequest and relocate the multi-billion-dollar-valued collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

RECOMMENDED

The highlights of the second week of the Siskel Film Center’s marvelous March EU Film Festival include “Let It Rain,” (Fri, Mon) the latest from the writing-acting-directing team of Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri (whose credits include writing for Alain Resnais and the splendid “The Taste of Others” and “Look at Me”). It’s a comedic ensemble piece about a famous feminist writer who decides to run for office. Catherine Breillat’s latest bent-gender tale, “Bluebeard” (Sat, Thu) is another entry featured from France this week. Spain’s “Cell 211,” a prison drama that swept that country’s Goya Awards, plays Saturday and Thursday. The sweetly sweeping gem of the week, however, is from Italy, Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love,” (Io sono l’amore), with Tilda Swinton (acting in Italian) at the center of generational rumbles in a wealthy Milan family. Mad, fabulous melodrama ensues, accompanied by a fine, first score by composer John Adams. Guadagnino is an inspired director of all kinds of rhapsodic moments, and his passion extends to a feast of food imagery. (Ray Pride)

The 13th Annual European Union Film Festival continues through March at Siskel.

RECOMMENDED

“The Yellow Handkerchief” is a captivating character study of unlikely provenance, capturing eminently watchable loners in ravishing landscapes. Here’s the pile-on behind the picture: The story began as a newspaper column from the 1970s by Pete Hamill, which was the basis for the Tony Orlando and Dawn song, “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Ole Oak Tree.” Producer Arthur Cohn is 83, the only winner of five Oscars in that role, including for “Four Days in September,” “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” “Black and White in Color” and “Harlan County.” The glorious cinematography is by one of the world’s best cameramen, Chris Menges (“Local Hero,” “The Mission,” “Notes on a Scandal”); the editing is by Christopher Tellefsen (“Gummo,” “Capote”). The director, Udayan Prasad, is best known for 1997’s “My Son The Fanatic.” “The Yellow Handkerchief,” the film, written by Erin Dignam, is set in post-Katrina Louisiana, with recently released ex-con Brett (a mustachioed William Hurt) winding up in the company of two unschooled teenagers in a convertible, 15-year-old Martine and Gordy (Kristen Stewart, Eddie Redmayne). Taciturn yet menacing, precise just shy of precious, Hurt’s performance is one of his richest. But Prasad’s handling of the slim, familiar story allows the characters space to interact, to breathe, and it’s a gratifying choice. He honors the serious and the sentimental alike. It makes for a lovely fable. The able score is by Eef Barzelay, of Clem Snide, and Jack Livesay (“Sherrybaby”). With Maria Bello. 96m. (Ray Pride)

“The Yellow Handkerchief” opens Friday at River East.

Ethnic spice is lite in this cross-cultural comedy of marriage manners. A Columbia med-school grad and a Columbia law-school dropout come home to Los Angeles en route to Laos for a year with Doctors Without Borders. Marcus (Lance Gross) and Lucia (America Ferrera) have three weeks to meet each other’s family and marry. It’s hard enough to let her parents see Marcus is black, but it’s even harder for Lucia to admit she quit her studies and started volunteering at a charter school. Their two dads (Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia, respectively) engage in numbskull head-butting over who sits down first, who picks up the tab and other lame mano-a-mano bits. Lucia’s old country grandma (Diana Maria Riva) faints at her first sight of Marcus. Later she tells Lucia how women manage men: “We never apologize. That’s how we dominate their brains.” Marcus must come out as pro-matrimony to his divorced play-the-field radio dj dad. Director Rick Famuyiwa (“The Wood,” “Brown Sugar”) co-wrote these awfully thin characters with Wayne Conley and Malcolm Spellman. At one point Lucia tearfully hands her engagement ring back to Marcus. Can you believe he later places a wedding ring on her finger? Believe it. “Our Wedding Family” says we all can get along. If this is the first L.A. ethnic-themed film with no Korean jokes, it’s also the first with inappropriate interspecies sexual contact initiated by a goat jacked on Viagra. With Regina King, Lupe Ontiveros, Anjelah N. Johnson. 101m. (Bill Stamets)

Tim Burton confects a lesser landscape of adolescent angst. His fans and Lewis Carroll’s may find this “fantasy adventure” with “political allegory” and “avant-garde visuals” in Disney Digital 3D not their tea or party of choice. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton’s adaptation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the Looking-Glass” (1871) stars Mia Wasikowska. This 19-year-old Alice flees a garden party, tumbles down a rabbit hole, imbibes elixirs, converses with animals and consorts with scheming queens. A parchment scroll foretells she will behead a dreaded resident of Underland. Wasikowska here recalls Dakota Blue Richards playing the 12-year-old adventurer in “The Golden Compass” astride a fantastic galloping beast, and the 14-year-old sojourner played by Saoirse Ronan in “The Lovely Bones,” for whom a subterranean playroom was the portal to another dreamy realm. A charter member of a clique of the mad, the open-minded Alice entertains advanced ideas about propriety, arranged engagements and mercantile expansion in China. On the centenary of Carroll’s birth, G.K. Chesterton lamented: “Poor, poor little Alice! She has not only been caught and made to do lessons; she has been forced to inflict lessons on others.” The Alice of our time is assigned duty as a role model for girls nudged to think about finance rather than fiancees. There ought to be more wordplay, like Alice’s disquisition on the use of the word “secret” that anticipates the ordinary-language school of philosophy at Carroll’s Oxford. Burton fails to make her plight nearly strange enough. Her odd new world is insubstantial and its inhabitants are uninteresting. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is a major letdown, compared to inspired loons he’s played in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Sweeney Todd.” Helena Bonham Carter, though, is superb with her digitally-ballooned noggin as the Red Queen. With Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas and Tim Pigott-Smith in the flesh; and in voice only Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee and Barbara Windsor. 109m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Filmmakers, publicists and early reviewers have all made the point that Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” (Un prophete), France’s nominee for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, is an anti-”Scarface,” an anti-”Godfather.” What it is, mostly, is a self-made creature, much like its compelling main character.

Audiard is a painstaking filmmaker, with only five features as director to his credit at the age of 57. While his father, Michel, was a successful screenwriter, Audiard began his career as an editor. That experience is apparent in his movies, including 1996’s “A Self-Made Hero,” 2001’s “Read My Lips” and 2004’s “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.” “Self-Made” has an unreliable narrator as its central character; “Read My Lips” is an uncommonly uneasy, witty Hitchcock-Chabrol-style thriller that turns on what the characters hear; and “Beat,” a remake of James Toback’s fierce testosterone opera, “Fingers,” brings grace to the crude shape of a gangster film. Audiard’s notions in how to depict his characters, their surroundings and their fated choices all sing with a film editor’s ruthless insistence on speed and specificity. Read the rest of this entry »

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The 13th Annual European Union Film Festival occupies most of the month of March at the Siskel Film Center, which notes that it’s the largest showcase in North America for cinema from the EU. Fifty-nine Chicago feature premieres, from all twenty-seven EU nations: that’s a lot. The past couple of years, it’s been a refrain of mine, which bears repeating: it may be the best film festival in Chicago in terms of curatorial focus, concentrated scale, quality of attractions and ease of attendance, all in two of the best theaters in the city. Some of the movies are set for release, but it may be the only chance anytime soon to see the bulk of them. Spain currently holds the presidency of the European Union, so the fest opens with Fernando Trueba’s “The Dancer and the Thief,” that country’s Academy Award submission, and the first narrative feature from the director of “Belle Époque” in eight years. The big winner at Spain’s Goya Awards, “Cell 211,” a hit prison thriller, also plays this week. Other attractions: a preview of Niels Arden Oplev’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” (pictured) a 152-minute Swedish adaptation of the first of Stieg Larsson’s worldwide bestselling “Millennium Trilogy,” well-reviewed in its Scandinavian release, which Music Box Films will release nationwide in the coming weeks (with the two other adaptations coming late this summer).  From Italy, there’s “Mid-August Lunch,” a comedy of manners in old age, produced by the director of “Gomorrah” and directed by one of its co-writers. (It opens at the Music Box in April.) There’s also the latest from writer-director Neil Jordan, “Ondine,”‘ which matches a mermaid and Colin Farrell. All three are captivating characteristics, at least from reports from Toronto 2009. Previews of other features will appear in coming weeks. (Ray Pride)

The full schedule is at the Siskel website.

RECOMMENDED

Julio DePietro sought fortune in the financial markets to escape an Ivy League student-loan load. Having found it here in Chicago with The Citadel Group, where he was an early player in what became one of the world’s largest hedge funds, he left to get into film. But unlike other moneyed movie makers who simply produce, he literally sent himself back to school for a crash course in directing. With his debut as writer-director, “The Good Guy,” set amidst the world of the young masters of the universe who trade millions and billions in the blink of a day, DiePietro crafts an accomplished romantic drama with a knowing eye for the nuances of Wall Street, thriving in its most cocky state before the recent humblings of financial crisis. Tommy (Scott Porter, television’s “Friday Night Lights”), the rising star at the firm, has a super-sweet girlfriend Beth (Alexis Bledel of “Gilmore Girls” fame) and a compelling earnestness; he seems like a good guy. He takes on the clumsy office gopher, Daniel (Bryan Greenberg, “One Tree Hill”), as a Pygmalion project, and a fondness soon develops between the project and his could-be paramour, Beth. But the romcom conventions that seem to be fully engaged soon give way to more complex literary devices, as Beth’s book group thoughfully outlines it for us—they’re reading Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier,” and that work resonates in more ways than one. The story curves in some big and nicely small ways, carried along by an able young cast seasoned beyond its age by an abundance of youth-acting experience (a list that even includes Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy and Anna Chlumsky, Macaulay Culkin’s first kisser in “My Girl,” in what seems to be a carefully considered obsession by the filmmaker). Unlike the cartoonish characterizations of Wall Street players in most pictures as overwrought  yuppie neandrathals, “The Good Guy” captures the high-octane boys club spot on: really smart, charismatic guys unenecumbered by “adult” supervision, making fortunes and drunk on their own self-worth Kool-Aid. Read the rest of this entry »

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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)