RECOMMENDED

“I’m Roger Brown, and I’m 5’6″ tall.” “Hodejegerne,” Jo Nesbø’s best-selling 2008 novel, provides the genetic material for a clever, high-energy, heist-chase thriller. Self-aware, self-assured sociopath Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), a corporate recruiter living beyond his means and on both sides of the law, is matched by director Morten Tyldum’s sleek, chilly visual style, embracing contemporary Oslo with just the right, slight nudge of satire. The striver with the too-tall, too-beautiful wife has much to prove, and often proves it with bold, calibrated art robberies, replacing valuable art in clients’ homes with just-good-enough forgeries (including an Edvard Munch drawing). Read the rest of this entry »

Béla Tarr.

RECOMMENDED

Godard famously quipped that a movie has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. A Béla Tarr movie has rain, wind and despair, but not necessarily in that order. The Hungarian director of “The Werckmeister Harmonies” and “Sátántangó” says he’s chucking it in, at the age of fifty-six, with this Last Testament of High Miserabilism, and it’s an epic (and intimate) place at which to choose to end. It’s a fierce, glorious slog. In thirty shots that comprise the 146-minute running time of “The Turin Horse,” cinematographer Fred Kelemen, an ace director of the dark and brooding in his own right (“Abendland”) charts the light and dark of six days of increasingly dismal weather as an elderly farmer and his daughter watch their workhorse lose its will to live on their isolated rural homestead. It’s 1889, and it’s always, and it’s never. It’s a lustrous hell on earth, an apocalypse both minor and major, with little but boiled potatoes and plum brandy to stave off extinction. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The proscenium frames life; behind the curtain, another life? More life. In an introduction to the 2002 Criterion edition of “Children of Paradise” (Les enfants du paradis), Terry Gilliam swoons in his rocketing enthusiasm that Marcel Carné’s lavish epic is “one of those films that seemed to me that we’ll never see again, because there was a time when poetry and big budgets seemed to go hand-in-hand, we don’t allow that anymore.” You can see parallels between Carne’s masterpiece and Gilliam’s later work, but his championing of the film is nonpareil: “It’s everything I dreamed about movies. It’s a world that didn’t exist, this density of people, this extraordinary world, these extraordinary buildings, extraordinary events, it’s a circus! It’s magic! It’s all there.” Oui. Depicting Paris under Louis Philippe in the 1840s along the Boulevard du Crime, produced in the 1940s under the Occupation, “Children of Paradise” teems with melodramatic goodness, timeless drama, intriguing details that come to life on the largest possible screen. It’s the kind of film that cries out neither for yet another plot synopsis nor a monograph or treatise, it simply calls out a friend to introduce another friend to a lasting treasure. Pass it along. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

RECOMMENDED

There’s a terrible truism that novels have always been betrayed by feature film adaptation, that the ideal source material is a short story, something that requires thematic amplification rather than narrative compression. Much of the wealth of recent microbudget American movies that’s meandering through festivals and cinematheques works best with deadpan and apparent minimalism. One masterful example would be Alex Ross Perry’s “The Color Wheel,” seemingly shambling but in fact arching toward a single powerful revelation. David Lowery’s kids-on-the-run “St. Nick” and his bedtime story short “Pioneer” also rush with powerful undercurrents. And Chicago’s own Frank V. Ross (the Desplechin-in-the-rough “Audrey the Trainwreck”) is moving toward something eccentric and mysterious. Simple as an anecdote, as transparent as a single bad idea, throw notions up in the air, as if story has become a succession of straightforward sentences rather than an intricate weave of experience and observation, transformed. “Bad Fever,” writer-director Dustin Guy Defa’s self-identified “feature film about self-expression” (edited by David Lowery) features Kentucker Audley, himself a practitioner of low-fi, no-budget filmmaking, as Eddie, a Salt Lake City loner who has unlikely dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian. Read the rest of this entry »

Serial Mom seeks sooth. Kathleen Turner is a dynamo lighting up Anne Renton’s “The Perfect Family,” a Catholic-oriented “let’s-put-on-a-show!”-scaled comedy of modest range. As a suburban mother who covets the local Catholic Woman of the Year plaque, Turner gives the material her all, even when the material is maddeningly shallow or internally contradictory. Conflict ensues with her “nonconformist” family, including a lesbian daughter (Emily Deschanel) and a philandering son (Jason Ritter), and her husband is a recovering alcoholic. Let the interpersonal eamy-squeamies ensue! Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks’ globe-girdling Canadian documentary, based on Ronald Wright’s bestseller “A Short History of Progress,” asks, is the earth at the end of “a failed experiment”? Galvanic and bristling, it sleekly surveys factors threatening life itself on earth, including, but not limited to, centuries of industrial development, elevated levels of consumption, overpopulation, largely unstemmed pollution and global warming.  Shooting in New York, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Shanghai, Beijing, Brasilia, Sao Paolo, DC and Dubai, “Surviving Progress” arrays smart people to offer a startling array of pessimistic analyses. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Director-editor P. David Ebersole’s “Hit So Hard: The Life And Near Death Story of Patty Schemel” is a raucous documentary about a figure from the band Hole just as strong as notorious bandleader Courtney Love, drummer Patty Schemel. Schemel’s home movies, preserved as a carrying case of Hi-8 videotapes, provide pronounced muscle to the bone-hard construction of the film, illustrating more than one meaning to a familiar phrase: “live through this.” The video imagery is a profuse mess, unselfconsciously mirroring the slur-and-drang sound the band accomplished. Drug addiction is swept to the side by testimony to Schemel’s importance as a musician and as an openly lesbian rock ‘n’ roll figure. Read the rest of this entry »

Udo Kier

RECOMMENDED

The first question that comes from watching most Guy Maddin films, “What on earth?” should actually be, “Where on earth?” The usual answer is Winnipeg; the correct one is “in this man’s mind.” “Keyhole,” (2011) his tenth feature, also takes place in a haunted house, and in a cracked black-and-white simulacrum of a 1930s gangster feature. Maddin, like few others, understands that the criminally under-used Jason Patric was meant to be a noir leading man. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Boardwalk Empire” producer Rudd Simmons, who’s also worked on Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson films, is an eagle-eye-on-the-wall in his self-financed “The First Season,” as he follows the fortunes of New Yorkers Paul and Phyllis Van Amburgh across five years after they’ve moved upstate to live the lives of dairy farmers, raising three children with another on the way while reviving a defunct dairy farm. Romantic? Back-to-the-earth? More like a fresh grindstone, however appealingly stark the surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »