"Beats Being Dead" from "Dreileben"

By Ray Pride

Here’s an impressive statistic: in its fifteenth edition, the Siskel Film Center’s European Union Film Festival, the largest North American showcase for films from the EU, boasts sixty-five films from all twenty-seven EU countries.

As impressive, but slightly confusing are the four different formats the movies are being shown in: It’s a buffet of selections from among the choices theaters still have, at least until next year.  There are thirty-three being shown on projected celluloid in thirty-five millimeter; nineteen in HDCAM video (a format often mandated by film festivals), seven in DigiBeta and seven in the DCP format, which is the heavily protected format that the U.S. film industry has chosen to replace 35mm as an exhibition medium. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Sometimes in a man’s life stuff happens that makes everyone go quiet. So quiet that no one even dares talk about it. Not to anyone, not even to themselves. Not in their head and not out loud. Not a fucking word.” Auspicious words to start any story… The Bovine Hormone mafia is raising a ruckus in Belgium, and for Jacky, a raging thirty-year-old bull farmer, it’s an understatement to say that it’s balls-to-the-wall all the way. “Bullhead” (Rundskop), Belgium’s entrant for the Best Foreign Language Oscar and one of the final five competitors, is one grim nightmare. The key to the protagonist’s dilemma is an extended flashback to his childhood, where something… bad… happens. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

From its bravura title sequence to its bracing puzzle-box of an ending, Rafi Pitts’ spare, stern, beautiful “The Hunter” (Shekarchi, 2010) is a steely, fated Iranian noir. Heavily influenced by American filmmaking both of the classic era and of the 1970s Hollywood Renaissance, Pitts’ tightening vise of tragedy makes for a vital, potent mix, as if Monte Hellman remade “Targets” in Tehran with a chilly dash of Bresson’s “L’Argent.” But while it wears its influences, this laconic thriller is gorgeous cinephilic transformation, and its sound design is as expressive as its spiraling drama and sterling composition and pacing. Kafka would be impressed, tittering quietly at the paranoiac downfall of Ali, Pitts’ brimming-eyed hero (played by the director himself), recently released from prison and hoping to change his life for himself, his wife and his daughter. The teeming Iranian metropolis looks for all the world like an extension of Los Angeles, or any overpopulated city across the globe. But there are fascinating specifics throughout. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Oscar-winning Spanish director Fernando Trueba turns to animation in the Oscar-nominated “Chico and Rita,” a grown-up entry in hand-drawn style that even boasts sexual interludes and ladies without clothes. While his 1992 “Belle Epoque” evokes pleasant memories of goofy period-set romance, Trueba and co-director Javier Mariscal’s “Chico and Rita,” a musical set in 1948 Cuba, is largely blah. (His Oscar acceptance speech for “Epoque” is memorable: “I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder… So, thank you, Mr. Wilder.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Polish director Agnieszka Holland reportedly waited a decade to make “In Darkness”—another dark telling of an aspect of the Holocaust, no matter how compelling the true story, put her off. (Her “Europa, Europa” was released in 1990.)  In the occupied Polish city of Lvov, a sewer worker who is Catholic but also a petty thief and a devoted family man becomes an unlikely savior for a group of eight Jews escaping the liquidation of the ghetto, and even more unlikely is the time spent under the streets: fourteen months. With dialogue in Polish, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian and Balak, and shot in low light in grimy settings, without light sources that romanticize the moment, “In Darkness” wears its ambiguities well. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The bold, hyper, often wondrous “Declaration of War” is a very personal project for director Valérie Donzelli and co-writer Jérémie Elkaïm—who also star—as a couple who find out their newborn boy is very ill. Their response is as much comic as tragic: how do we battle for the very life of our child in every possible way? In their autobiographical drama, Donzelli and Elkaïm go so far as to name their characters “Romeo” and “Juliette,” their son “Adam,” but insist that their fates are not fully written. How does this beautiful couple challenge ugly possibilities? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Of the fifteen short films nominated for Oscar this year, Lucy Walker’s “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” is as staggering as anything in feature competition. It begins on March 11, 2011, as the waters approach that left 15,372 dead and 7762 missing, as a cataclysm of “found” footage of onrushing waters, bursting fires, the moving houses, off-camera shrieks. Civilization converted to debris in the slow-fast relentless rush of the wall of water. And words like “Houses riding toward me on a black wave…” “I ran away in my slippers.” But in the foreground in the frame from the primary camera, high on a hill? A branch with fresh cherry buds, silent. The camera pans: a world of destruction. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

On the simplest level, “A Separation” is about the end of a marriage, or the attempt to separate.

But that’s too simple. In Asghar Farhadi’s fifth feature, the mere fact of one life in contemporary Tehran brushing up against another leads to fateful conflict. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants husband Nader (Peyman Moadi) to leave Iran with their young daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), as she says to a judge at the opening, “In these circumstances…” But Nader won’t leave his father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Without his wife to help him, the middle-class Nader hires a young woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), to tend to his father. But Razieh keeps this from her unemployed husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), which leads to harrowing complication after complication in what the writer-director calls “a detective story without a detective.” (The performances comprise the best ensemble acting of any film nominated for an Oscar this year: vital, electric and often wholly unexpected in detail.) “A Separation” also builds on what Farhadi’s countryman, Abbas Kiarostami, calls the “unfinished film,” one that the viewer must complete with his or her attention to suggestions and inferences. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo’s brilliant, urgent “Miss Bala,” which was his country’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film, and easily the best film of 2012 so far, is getting an abrupt release in the Chicago area after failing to make the final five for the Academy Awards. It’s under the Fox International banner, which co-produced the film with Canana, the Mexican production company whose principals include Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, and it’s their first release in the U.S. “Miss Bala” is the propulsive story of a working-class woman in Baja California (Stephanie Sigman) who wants to enter a “Miss Baja” competition but who falls into a series of coincidences that send her on the run for the duration of the film after witnessing the murder of members of the drug cartel and DEA agents at a club. (“Bala” translates as “bullet.”) Read the rest of this entry »

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 »