Ferran Adrià

RECOMMENDED

“El Bulli: Cooking In Progress” is a captivating process documentary, allowed behind the scenes for a year at the research laboratories and kitchen of chef Ferran Adrià at his now-closed Catalonian restaurant. Gereon Wetzel’s chilly, fascinated documentary follows the six months of research-and-development each year that Adrià would return his staff to the laboratory in search of new alchemical taste-and-texture sensations for their thirty-dish menus. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tom Tykwer is one of the most perfectly polished of marbles on the roulette wheel of worldwide filmmaking, landing once in a while on a bet like “Run Lola Run” (a red bet that won) but more often on the likes of “Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer” (2006) and “The International” (2009) (a large, red, table-running bet that lost wildly). The bet of “3″ (“Drei” in German) is a small, polished white bet that pays substantial returns in the form of a romantic comedy-cum-ménage-a-trois. Read the rest of this entry »

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“The World Is Big And Salvation Lurks Around The Corner,” Stephan Komandarev’s 2008 drama, a Bulgarian-German-Slovenian-Hungarian co-production, is a modest drama about loyalties, to state, to ideology and, especially, to family. Miki Manojlovic’s performance as a wise man who takes his grown grandson on a road trip via tandem bicycle from Germany back to their home village, through a series of backgammon games, is the strongest part of a surprisingly direct story with an unforgettably cumbersome title. (The Serbian Manojlovic is best known for his roles in several Emir Kusturica films, especially “Underground.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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Lars Von Trier starts at the apocalypse and then works his way from there: the planet’s the Titanic. There’s been controversy about jokes-gone-deadly that Von Trier said at the press conference after the debut of the bold, wrenching, relentless, majestic “Melancholia” at the Cannes Film Festival this year, but there’s no dispute he’s one of the few directors who would react to a serious bout of depression by writing an intimate, tear-coursed family melodrama that demolishes the world entire. That’s not a spoiler, but the primary story element: another planet (not “Another Earth”) fills the sky as it rushes toward a collision with ours. (The errant orb is called… Melancholia.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Aki Kaurismäki’s “Le Havre,” his first feature in too long, is an uncommonly gentle fairytale set in France, instead of among his comically solemn and bibulous Finns. It’s a political film, too, commenting on the life of immigrants to contemporary Europe. An elderly shoeshine man takes an African boy under his wing, annoying the local constabulary. How are they related? “I’m the family albino.” But there’s more to the elder man, Marcel Marx, a retired writer and “well-known Bohemian.” Kaurismäki’s best work, such as his bleak, near-perfect masterpiece, “The Match Factory Girl” shouldn’t be an acquired taste. He’s a wry Chaplin in the simplicity of his humor. Read the rest of this entry »

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Fittingly, “Serge Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life” is a comic strip of the life of the French singer-sybarite who sang a song called “Comic Strip,” and directed by a French comic strip, or bande dessinée artist, Joann Sfar. A fantasticated and louche artifact, Sfar’s debut feature is layered with animation, puppets, copiously dressed interiors and sallies, like having the adult Gainsbourg read his reviews in the form of his younger self, echo bittersweetly. And of course, music, women, smoking. Read the rest of this entry »

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There are many ways to label the elegant “The Skin I Live In” (La Piel Que Habito)—silken, sinister, melodrama, neo-noir, sexual thriller, black comedy, “Vertigo”-meets-”Frankenstein,” the face of Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face,” a splicing of “Pygmalion,” a bursting design bazaar—but the DNA is all Almodóvar. The Spanish director’s latest feature, reuniting him with early muse Antonio Banderas, bears one of his darkest twists. Read the rest of this entry »

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“World On A Wire,” (Welt am Draht) the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 science-fiction epic about virtual reality, made for German television, has been restored from its 16mm Ektachrome origins and into 35mm visual splendor. Among other things, it’s a gorgeous, strange time capsule of futurism past, with dollops of Philip K. Dick, intriguingly prescient musings on alternate realities, and many other recognizable Fassbinder themes and players brought at long last to light. Read the rest of this entry »

Crazy Horse

By Ray Pride

No matter even if you truly wanted to, there’s no way a single viewer could give you an overview of an international film festival with more than a hundred events: you can surmise all you want, based on what festival films have played or have been reviewed at already, or the filmmakers’ reputation. Even festival programmers miss out on sections they’re not part of. I’ll be curious to see statistics after this year’s CIFF to see how many programs the average, but dedicated moviegoer, is able to attend. It’s tough even if you’ve been to a few prior festivals, seen a fistful of advance screeners, availed yourself of advance screenings. But, as luck, fortune or programming may have it, Chicago International has more programs of note in its second week, and a growing number of them have further distribution in the near future. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.) Read the rest of this entry »

 RECOMMENDED

Anne Sewitsky’s “Happy, Happy” is a genial jab of a comedy about small frustrations and small satisfactions. A privileged couple in the Norwegian countryside rent a house out to new tenants, who have an adopted African son. The dynamics of the two couples quickly clash, especially in a discomfiting early dinner scene. Sexual dismay leads to emotional display, especially from the delightful Agnes Kittelsen whose needs the other characters respond to, whose character Sewitsky calls “insistently happy… her driving force becomes happiness.” Read the rest of this entry »