RECOMMENDED

A simple scrim, lightly dancing, a sheer of muslin, ripples across the screen at an acute angle, like a movie screen, but translucent, in the briefest instance of prestidigitation introducing the 3D element to Wim Wenders’ “Pina,” a film for his late friend, dance choreographer Pina Bausch. In its own fashion, it’s as revolutionary a way of introducing the rare, effective stereoscopic effect as James Cameron’s slow reveal of the far reaches of the highly active spaceship in the opening shot of “Avatar.” Wenders was extremely articulate about the low-budget experimentation that led to the form of “Pina” in a keynote address to June 2011′s Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference, which is worth finding on his website.  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The great strength of Jennifer Fox’s documentaries is her directness, and considering that her best-known work, “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman,” is longitudinal in the extreme, a six-hour survey of her romantic life and the lives of women she meets across three years, from the ages of forty-two to forty-five, and her “My Reincarnation” (2010) encompasses twenty years of experience, it’s certainly a virtue. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A lifelong master of investigating the dramatic potential of confined spaces and encroaching claustrophobia, the seventy-eight-year-old Roman Polanski prepared his adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s boulevard comedy-cum-sketch “God of Carnage” during his confinement to his Swiss chalet while resisting deportation to California. The result, “Carnage,” is confined to a single apartment in Brooklyn, patterned within a Restoration Hardware-inch of its life by veteran production designer Dean Tavoularis (“Bonnie & Clyde,” “The Godfather: Part II,” “One from the Heart,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Zabriskie Point”). Even on a small screen, every element is pointed, as you’d hope from a Polanski picture. Take even the characteristic Brooklyn fireplace plopped at one end of the living room, whether ersatz or even Carrera marble, it’s a modest arch not known for triumph, but simplest hominess. The accuracy of each element as the camera roams the rooms is devastating, as is the hard accumulation of each character’s agitated—yet keenly right—posture and gestures. They, the entire quartet, are dismal shits, quarrelers whose life rises above the script’s homiletic disdain by some heavy lifting by each actor. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Seven shorts from the 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival make it down the slopes via The Sundance Institute Art House Project, including one of my favorite shorts I saw last year. (The best short I saw from Sundance, David Lowery’s tale-spinning bedtime story of the American empire, “Pioneer,” isn’t in this selection, but it elevates issue 14 of DVD “magazine” Wholpin.) Ruben Östlund’s Swedish “Incident by a Bank” (12m) is a single-take reconstruction of a failed bank robbery in Stockholm in 2006, the camera taking a Altman-cum-Asperger’s route around the story’s particulars, and it only gets better by the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Actors long to play the bad guys, and even better, to find the “privileged moments” that define some kind of “humanity” or poetic truth beneath, beyond their essential callousness. Working from a screenplay by British savor-of-the-month Abi Morgan (“Shame”), “Mamma Mia!” director Phyllida Lloyd works across the scrim of the advanced mental failings of elderly Margaret Thatcher to create an acting showcase for the great Meryl Streep. The great Meryl Streep—in the conflicted, confounding, sometimes risible “The Iron Lady.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Synopsis is the devil, but sometimes the devil is in the details. Here’s Tribeca Film’s synopsis of writer-director-actor-producer Edward Burns’ microbudget romantic comedy and fan letter to New York’s upscale Tribeca neighborhood, “Newlyweds”: “Buzzy (Edward Burns) and Katie (Caitlin FitzGerald) are a newly married couple living a seemingly conflict-free life. But when Buzzy’s damaged and impulsive half-sister Linda (Kerry Bishé) arrives at their doorstep expecting to stay for an indefinite period in their Tribeca loft, her antics threaten to disrupt the couple’s commitment to an ‘easy’ marriage.” Sounds like any romantic comedy, but it’s more like Woody Allen on a designer shoestring. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

When does work become a “work”?

Almost as fascinating as the cool, perfectionist sheen of David Fincher’s version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is the tattoo of tales of the making of the movie. Collaborators seem to go to special lengths to point out that the painstaking focus Fincher applies to his work is just what he does: his splendid perfectionism isn’t workaholism, it’s work, the work. He’s Lisbeth Salander in his own immodest analytical skills. As the film industry transforms in so many ways, in every way, from distribution to projection to production, the directors who’ve unapologetically forged their own way are often as fascinating behind-the-scenes as they are on screen. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Dee Rees’ Sundance-honored dramatic debut about the coming out of a seventeen-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has both substance and style. “Pariah” is luminous and boldly lit, in a range of warm-to-hot colors, often against velvet-dark backgrounds, reminiscent of some of the sturdiest images of co-producer Spike Lee’s movies. (Bradford Young took Sundance 2011′s Excellence in Cinematography Award.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Dotty, unvarnished and unwashed, Jenner Furst and Daniel B. Levin’s “Dirty Old Town” (2010) is a fugue-cum-fantasia set in Billy’s Antiques and Props, one of the last remaining bastions of ruffian funk in the Bowery area of downtown Manhattan. Aggressive music, in-your-face performances and a general air of malaise and malodorousness mark the sketch-style assembly, which has garnered favorable remarks from local denizens Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, who notably said “This movie is fucking real.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Xavier Durringer’s “The Conquest” (La conquete) is a perky, cheeky take on the rise of French President Nicolas Sarkozy from 2002-2007, featuring a fine turn by veteran comic actor Denis Podalydès as the wife-shedding social striver. Podalydès does a splendid job of typing the small, schlumpfy man’s apparent (and reported) well of arrogance. While there may be subtleties that were more apparent to the local audience, as well as the litany of scandals mentioned, Durringer’s approach is that of the boulevard comedy, of ready and amusing caricatures of politicos behind the scenes—a supremely foul-mouthed Jacques Chirac, Sarkozy as “the chirping magpie”—that beg the question whether it is a diminution of stature in politics or simple satiric instinct that makes such an acerbic portrait ring true. Read the rest of this entry »