RECOMMENDED

A survey of the last of the elderly whippersnappers left living in the 160 studios atop New York’s Carnegie Hall before the Carnegie Hall Corporation began evictions in 2007 toward renovation to office space, Josef Birdman Astor’s “Lost Bohemia” (2010) is bittersweet diversion. A twenty-year tenant himself, Astor recorded several hundred hours of his neighbors across an eight-year span, and their cultural memories evoke times already lost, as well as the rarefied air of prior tenants, including Norman Mailer, Isadora Duncan, Marlon Brando, Enrico Caruso, Charles Gwathmey, Andrew Bergman and Bill Cunningham (whose digs are seen in the more dynamic documentary, “Bill Cunningham New York”). Read the rest of this entry »

(Habemus Papam) Nanni Moretti wears many hats—actor, writer, director, film distributor, owner of Rome’s leading art-house cinema—and his movies range from comedies about modern life to melodramas about loss (the heart-shaking “The Son’s Room”). Occasionally, he makes a not-very-good movie, and even when distribution of foreign-language films wasn’t so uncommon, they would fail to find American exposure. (1993′s semi-autobiographical, Woody Allenesque satire “Dear Diary” made it here.) Old men in Cardinals’ raiment are about the limit to the spectacle in Nanni Moretti’s quizzically underfed “We Have A Pope,” which may have been hoped to be a comedy. Eighty-six-year-old Michel Piccoli plays a reluctant, newly elected Pope who, nearing the end of a long life, has an anxiety attack accompanied by doubts about his calling, so he runs away. (Piccoli is game, but there’s little for him to do.) Read the rest of this entry »

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“The Hunter” shares pedigree with a new generation of Australian filmmaking, including co-producers behind the impressive gangster film “Animal Kingdom” (2010), and a novel for source material by Julia Leigh, who made her directorial debut with the controversial sexual allegory “Sleeping Beauty” (2011). Willem Dafoe plays a mercenary, dispatched by a Euro-biotech conglomerate to the Tasmanian wilderness to search for an animal supposedly extinct since the 1930s, the Tasmanian tiger. Can a cold, closed-off man dropped into teeming countryside of forest and fog, in search of something so rare, find what’s long dormant in himself? Blah-blah-blah, yes, but director Daniel Nettheim, an experienced director of Australian television drama, contrasts epic with intimate in chilly measure and keeps the eco-allegory to a light chill. Read the rest of this entry »

Taika Waititi. Photo by Ray Pride.

RECOMMENDED

New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi relaxes the quirk a tad after his first feature, “Eagle Vs. Shark,” (2007) the memorably eccentric comic love story that introduced Jemaine Clement, one half of “Flight of the Conchords” to the larger world. Waititi claims a mild strain of autobiography—”true and imagined memories”—in the 1980s-set coming-of-age story, “Boy,” (2010), based on his Oscar-nominated short, “Two Cars, One Night,” and which became his home country’s highest-grossing film. Waititi’s deadpan comedy about a Michael Jackson-and-E.T.-obsessed eleven-year-old boy, named “Boy,” in gorgeous rural Waihau Bay (ripe with the tall greenery of cannabis) isn’t as extravagantly strange as “Eagle Vs. Shark,” but his affable comic rhythms are his beguiling own. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Ealy, Taraji P. Henson

By Ray Pride

What’s the secret to making a good, contemporary, satisfying, successful commercial romantic comedy? Not even a classic, not even an “Annie Hall” or a “Some Like It Hot,” just one that embraces the here-and-now?

Just to be good. Talky, funny, headlong, “Think Like A Man” succeeds in its modern multi-couple roundelay by being brisk, breezy and sometimes shameless while feeling as modern as can be, and capturing its milieu in and near Culver City, California, as well as any urban-set story out this year. So what possible problem could it have reaching a wide, eager audience, the kind that makes hits of earnest movies from filmmakers like Nancy Meyers, about urbane, optimistic neurotics battling their worst impulses and eventually embracing their best? Read the rest of this entry »

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Robert Greene’s documentaries “Kati With An I” and “Fake It So Real” possess a vivid “presentness”: it’s a combination of observant cinematography and a keen editing sense honoring the tradition of cinema vérité. In the case of his latest, the terrific “Fake It So Real,” which he photographed along with Sean Price Williams, Greene makes vivid work of a single week in the lives of a ragged bunch of North Carolina independent wrestlers before a big Saturday night show. The gritty shooting style is an appropriate joy: seemingly casual but splendidly caught, the rehearsals and boasts and tale-telling and talk establish a straightforward slab of white working class Southern culture. Read the rest of this entry »

Luc Besson’s career as a director-producer has been supremely profitable yet eccentric as any in the world. While he began his career with stylized art-house action like “The Last Battle” and “Subway” and then juicy, visually shellacked pulp like “La Femme Nikita,” “Leon: The Professional,” and “The Fifth Element,” his greatest success has been as a producer, with his EuropaCorp studio making propulsive if ragtag thrillers like “Lock-out,” “Colombiana,” “Taken,” “Transporter” and “Taxi,” usually with a story credit for himself. As director, he’s dipped into the hybrid animation of the “Arthur and the Invisibles” series. Of the zigs and zags of his career, one of the oddest may be his drab, reverential treatment of the life of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh). What drew Besson to the goodness and perseverance of this woman? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Kevin Macdonald (“Touching The Void,” “One Day In September”) directs an intimate, detailed portrait of Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley (1945-1981). Made with his family’s cooperation, this polished documentary lists his musician son Ziggy Marley as an executive producer, along with Chris Blackwell, who signed Bob Marley to Island Records in 1971. Marley recorded “Judge Not” in 1962 at age sixteen. His early days included overnighting in a cemetery to overcome stagefright, and covering “Teenager in Love.” The account of his family life looks at his absent white father and his own distance from his offspring with different mates. Read the rest of this entry »