An art-house jaw-dropper, Canadian filmmaker Nadine Labaki’s “Where Do We Go Now?” (Et maintenant on va où?) manages to annoy and offend in almost equal measure in its many miscalculated scenes, from cultural caricature to musical numbers and back again. The opening scene, a dance tableau that seems like it could be drawn from the 1960s choreographic masterworks of Hungarian filmmaker Miklos Jancso, promises more than the Greek-myth-set-in-unnamed-Middle-Eastern-country-pssst-it’s-Lebanon ever manages to deliver. In a dusty mountain village, Muslims and Christians live side-by-side in a cute form of peace and tolerance until random slurs and misconstrued accidents lead to battle and beatings and deaths and weeping and gnashing among the very cute elders and equally cute youth. Read the rest of this entry »

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“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.

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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 »

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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 »

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Acute, perceptive, compelling, “Monsieur Lazhar” is a rich portrait of a man finding his calling under unlikely circumstances. Canada’s nominee for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, adapted by Philippe Falardeau from Évelyne de la Chenelière’s one-act stage monologue, keeps its focus on its singular character, Bachir Lazhar (Fellag), an Algerian immigrant who applies for a job just at the moment a grade-school class desperately needs a replacement instructor after the trauma of their teacher’s suicide after hours in the classroom. Why is he in Montreal? What about him will make him not only the ideal substitute teacher for this troubled, troubling moment in the lives of the kids in the classroom, but also the kind of teacher who will be remembered, gratefully, by all of them? 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.

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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 »

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“If we could tell a film then why make a film?” Heard the one about the prisoner who had a saw smuggled into prison in a cake? Ollllld joke. The absurdist modern version that ekes only a mordant “Ha!” is the journey of “This Is Not A Film” (In Film Nist) from Tehran to the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, a seventy-one-minute digital film smuggled out on a USB thumb drive tucked into a pastry. Read the rest of this entry »

As if a daylong lineup of films about music isn’t enough, The Chicago International Movies & Music Festival boasts a lineup of live music by night, inspired by the movies it screened earlier in the day. The festival, which takes place at various venues throughout Wicker Park and Logan Square, is all about highlighting the symbiotic relationship between music and film. For the organizers of the festival, one wouldn’t be what it is without the other.

Musician Josh Chicoine and film editor Ilko Davidov co-founded CIMMFest in 2009 when they met as neighbors at a housing co-op for artists and musicians in Bucktown. Read the rest of this entry »