RECOMMENDED

Homicidal rage be thy name! Recently arrived seer of Brit batshittery, writer-director Ben Wheatley, has a near-unrivaled knack for bile and giddy guile, put to full test in the tragicomic eye-opener, “Sightseers,” a story of a couple that thinks they’re going on a kitsch tour of the English countryside but instead go native in the goriest possible way when faced with the motley, petty grievances of modern life. (Think Mike Leigh with a body count, or, “Natural Born Campers”). Their hair-trigger reactions are priceless, and needless to say, bloody deadly. Read the rest of this entry »

Savage if not entirely graceful, South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk’s eighteenth feature (which he proudly denotes in the opening credits), the violent yet minimalist “Pietà” tracks the actions of a pitiless loan shark after the appearance of a woman who claims to be the mother he didn’t know he still had. Grisly, self-pitying and violent in both act and implication, it’s recognizably the work of South Korea’s leading rube provocateur, whose earlier, equally absurd films include  “The Isle” (2000), “Bad Guy” (2001), “Time” (2006), and “3-Iron” (2004), most of which star sexually unpleasant, self-centered, violent men. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Olivier Assayas’ marvelous meander of a memory piece, “Something In The Air (Après mai)” is a tactile collection of impressions, with the movie itself finely situated in France, 1971, but also in the world of Gilles, seventeen-year-old high-school student intent on becoming a painter, and who follows a path very similar to the one the filmmaker took to his storytelling career.

Dreamily paced, serenely elliptical and seldom less than beautiful, the fifty-eight-year-old writer-director’s film looks back at his own coming to awareness, but also engages in a serious conversation with the late work of French master Robert Bresson, including his “L’argent,” “Four Nights of a Dreamer” and especially, “The Devil, Probably.” There is an implacable, concrete beauty to those films, where objects and colors and young faces, especially young male faces, are presented as mute forces of manmade nature. (The ending of the film, however, impresses a female face onto the protagonist and the filmgoer alike: a fantastic, phosphorescent image in a film about a film that loses its boundaries and becomes the film itself, pointing Gilles emphatically toward his vocation.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Prolific and oft-mischievous French filmmaker François Ozon’s latest play in the swimming pool of the mind boasts fine portraits of middle-age petulance from Fabrice Luchini, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Seigner. While the plot of “In the House” follows the transgressions of sixteen-year-old Claude (Ernst Umhauer), writing essays about a classmate’s family for the amusement of his teacher (Luchini) that grow increasingly perverse, it’s the performances that tickle. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Antonio Méndez Esparza’s “Here and There” (Aquí y Allá) is a fine heart-crusher, a contemplative story of home and hope that etches the fate of an immigrant worker who returns from “There”—the never-seen United States—to his hometown of Guerrero, Mexico to find his family changed beyond his imagination. As writer and director, the thirty-six-year-old Esparza’s delicacy bears quiet grace, as political in its accruing details as any dozen hectoring parables would be. Read the rest of this entry »

Known for high-minded melodramas (“After the Wedding,” “Brothers,” “In a Better World,” “Things We Lost in the Fire”), Susanne Bier comes down to earth with the less ambitious “Love is All You Need.” A wedding at a rustic villa by a lemon grove on the Amalfi Coast is the main locale for a comic and romantic affair that recalls “Freud Leaving Home,” her 1991 debut, set during a family birthday gathering. A mother with an inoperable brain tumor is replaced with a mother-of-the bride undergoing chemo for breast cancer. A gay son figures in both plots. Instead of locating most of the drama in Scandinavia–with storylines citing Afghanistan, England, India, Israel, Kenya and the U.S.– Bier and longtime writing partner Anders Thomas Jensen match sweet hairdresser Ida (Trine Dyrholm), married to a cheating lunk, and sour exec Philip (Pierce Brosnan), a widower whose picturesque property is the wedding destination. Ida’s daughter and Phillip’s son met only three months ago and most of the film occurs in the three-day run-up to the nuptials, which is three months prior to Ida’s next scheduled check-up with her oncologist. Read the rest of this entry »

“Violeta Went To Heaven” is director Andrés Wood’s eventful yet purposefully mussed and jangly telling of the life of Chilean artist, singer and activist Violeta Parra that engages with her fraught existence in time-snapping fashion but gathers its narrative around her suicide, making it the central act of her life. Francisca Gavilán’s performance as Parra is filled with exquisite, quicksilver instants even as the script paints her as an untrustworthy, selfish, self-destructive artistic cliché. Visually, the film excels, capturing a range of light in village and city and by day and by night that enriches Gavilán’s sturdy habitation of the overachieving, anxious Parra. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Gilles Bourdos’ period piece about the painter Jean-Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet ) in the late days of old age in 1915, relishing the light of the French Riviera, partakes of a bold mythos, providing the elder painter with a young female muse (Christa Théret) who also attracts Jean-Auguste’s son when he returns from World War I after being wounded. That son would be Jean Renoir (Vincent Rottiers), later the great filmmaker of “The Rules Of The Game” and “Grand Illusion.” The situation is charged, the pace perhaps unduly measured, but also of bold perfume, of an elevated lushness to make older members of whatever remains of a classical arthouse audience justifiably swoon. Bourdos doesn’t wring as much moment and momentousness as he should from the story, but it’s still a respectable featherweight, and certainly light years from a Renoir “Renoir” would have been. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

More loving, willful anachronism from Europe, Pablo Berger’s silent black-and-white fairytale “Blancanieves” (“Snow White”)—”a local film for a global market”—retells the familiar tale against the backdrop of bullfighting and flamenco in 1920s Seville, along with intermittent roosters and dwarfs. Berger writes of his fantasy, “By the end of the 1920s the language of cinema had been completely developed and great masterpieces had been created. ‘Blancanieves’ is not a copy but a reinterpretation of the films of that era for today’s audience.” Spain’s entry for the 2012 Best Foreign Language Oscar is sumptuously designed and pleasingly performed, and while amply, eagerly besting the whimsical “The Artist,” its psychosexual undercurrents play out as one more check-listed component of what might be described as authentic pastiche. Read the rest of this entry »

Punishingly long, director Kang Woo-suk’s “Fists of Legend” does not scrimp on the mixed martial arts action and eccentric sentimentality for observers of contemporary commercial South Korean filmmaking. Three men who had been street fighting rivals in high school are pitted against each other again in an epic reality TV fighting competition. It’s an odd, affectless hybrid that plays as much like never-ending television programming on an obscure satellite channel up in the high 600s playing out on a tavern television as anything else. Read the rest of this entry »