RECOMMENDED

Antony Cordier’s “Four Lovers” (Happy Few, 2010) is good-looking tosh that says the French, they are different than you and I, they have lots of carefree sex and then want to talk about it. “Subject A,” Preston Sturges called it, and the ménage-a-quatre of “Four Lovers” goes from A to A and back again. Two couples (former Olympic gymnast Élodie Bouchez and feng shui self-help author Roschdy Zem; jewelry-maker Marina Foïs and tattooed web designer Nicolas Duvauchelle) go through their paces of mutual admiration, mate-swapping and pretentious voiceover. The film’s clearest statement? This is how we photograph how we want people to think we live today, but with a little full-frontal nudity. These are modern lifestyles? Yes, but with a little full-frontal nudity. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Italian director Gianni Di Gregorio, whose 2008 “Mid-August Lunch” was a surprise art-house hit with older audiences, continues his warm and winning ways with “The Salt Of Life,” (Gianni e le donne, or, Gianni and the Women) an effortless, breezy romantic comedy about late-years romance gone endlessly awry. Ever-gallant Gianni, a Roman in his sixties, has lost the spark with his wife, rues encroaching days of retirement, and his elderly mother is as forbidding a matriarch as you’d ever want to encounter in fiction, let alone life. There’s genteel intimacy to Di Gregorio’s comic instincts, both as a filmmaker and as a lead actor. And the script is genuinely witty and observant. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Chow Yun-Fat stars in “Let The Bullets Fly,” (Rang zidan fei), a winning, mischievous 1920s-set Chinese action-comedy screwball western that became that country’s highest-grossing film ever in 2010. (The boom in theater construction in China doesn’t hurt record-breaking returns for local films.) Actor-director Jiang Wen (“Devils on the Doorstep,” 2000) co-stars with Chow as one of two crooks who descend on Goose Town, a tiny town in the wilds of China. Provincial politics provide some of the ample banter and complicated plot twists. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“The Raid” reduces action filmmaking to three acts: guns, machetes and fists ‘n’ feet.

Gareth Huw Evans—easily the best Welsh action director working in Indonesia—showcases silat, a vigorous and idiosyncratic Indonesian form of martial arts within over ninety minutes of near-non-stop mayhem. An unprepared squad of young policemen is sent to clear out a Jakarta gangster’s lair, a tall, moldering fortress full of baddies and bad things. Evans says that he and his fight choreographers worked relentlessly on each scene, videotaping them until every gesture fit together. As in John Carpenter’s early “Dark Star” and “Assault on Precinct 13,” Evans draws on the sinister potential of confined spaces rather than sprawling landscapes. The production values are the spiraling battles and body count, and the indeterminate timelessness of the apartment building and its tropical rot. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

There’s nothing overtly religious about most of the films by Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, but there is a spiritual character that often works in mysterious, elusive ways. “The Kid With A Bike” (Le gamin au vélo) is about a troubled twelve-year-old hard case (Thomas Doret), nicknamed “Pitbull” for good reason, who learns about life through a series of unexpected encounters, especially with a local hairdresser, played by the luminous Cécile de France. Read the rest of this entry »

Brothers David Foenkinos and Stéphane Foenkinos co-direct an adaptation of “La Delicatesse,” David’s bestselling novel, resulting in a modest, understated Audrey Tautou-starring romance that’s chaste but never truly deadly. Ever the laconic pixie-dream gamine, Tautou plays a widow who emerges from despondency after her eyes fall onto a bedraggled Swedish coworker; an odd mingling of melodrama and whimsy follows. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Killing is terrible and visceral and that horrible truth is often overlooked by the movies: Justin Kurzel’s “The Snowtown Murders,” adapted by Shaun Grant from two nonfiction books about the 1999 case of John Bunting, Australia’s worst serial killer, is a chilly, chilling reminder. (The line “It’s the Australian way, isn’t it?” is another form of bludgeoning.) Kurzel and an array of strong performers (including the superb Daniel Henshall as Bunting and Lucas Pittaway as a disaffected teen who becomes a ready accomplice) do their damndest, or most damned, to convey the extremities of the dozen murders that took place over the course of the 1990s in the suburbs of Adelaide. The actors are aided by bleak production and dismal costume design—which one almost hopes is from condescension rather than documentary impulse—and reliance more on squalid surroundings and threatening atmosphere than an ongoing revelation of the depths of brutality these “pervs” are capable of. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Far and away the best film to be released so far in 2012: Simple, beautiful, refined, restrained, leisurely, languorous, as moving as the course of night to day and night to day, “Once Upon A Time In Anatolia” may be the finest film yet by the great Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (“Distant,” “Climates”). Superficially a slowed police procedural, most of which takes place in deepest night in rural Turkish hills along winding roads, ribbons of trackbacks, as a grumbling storm approaches, the film takes its dear time revealing its concerns, becoming more profoundly affecting as the telling progresses. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“How Albanian is it?” isn’t a question the average American filmmaker expects. Joshua Marston, whose well-regarded debut feature “Maria Full of Grace” (2004) is a Spanish-language film set in Colombia, steeped himself once more in another culture for his second film. In “Forgiveness of Blood,” two teenagers coming of age in Albania are thrust into a variation of centuries-old traditions of revenge killings and blood feud. In the twenty-first century, just as it was in the fifteenth, when certain crimes are committed, the extended family is shunned, put behind doors, forbidden from the larger world. Read the rest of this entry »

In “Dracula,” the 1897 vampire tale by Bram Stoker—before “Twilight” and “True Blood”—Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing faced Dracula in order to save London and the life of Mina Harker. The Irishman has been credited with creating one of the best pieces of literary horror, a powerful invasion novel and the most iconic vampire novels of all time.

“Bram Stoker agus Dracula,” a documentary by director Keith O’Grady, is playing this Saturday at the Irish Film Festival. The film, which has been released close to the centenary anniversary of Stoker’s death on April 20, 1912, delves into the history of “Dracula” as an Irish novel and the entry of the vampire into the mass public. Read the rest of this entry »