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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 »

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A fierce fish tale from POV of fish and sea. Plus: Clank. Groannn. Caw-caw-cawwwwww. Rrrra– Pop. Shreeeeeee! Splurp. Ammmg. R r r rrrr— “Sweetgrass” filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University further their immersive excursions with the singular nonfiction artifact, “Leviathan,” aka “Heavy Metal Fishing Ship.” Off New Bedford, Massachusetts, once whaling capital of the world, they seek the secrets of the sea within and without the confines of one trawler among hundreds of weeks-long travails to harvest the riches of the ocean. There’s terror within the fishbelly of the beast, clamoring at work, and beneath the waves and in gull-serrated sky. Read the rest of this entry »

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Talk about a title that points toward its subject, once you know it’s about a young man and his younger, seventeen-year-old sister in a verdant corner of Brooklyn: what would, could that “unspeakable act” be? In film critic/filmmaker Dan Sallitt’s “The Unspeakable Act,” the act is spoken, with a dramatic tact and flow of uncommon precision. About half an hour in, there’s a scene shot in a single extended take, where Jackie (Tallie Medel) and Matthew (Sky Hirschkron) have peeled off from a group of friends, leaning into each others backs while sitting on a park bench. The light under leafy green trees is gentle, and the sounds of the city and the night precisely present, hush of traffic, a commenting insect. “This is such a perfect night,” Jackie says. “It’s what I wish life could always be like. I know, it’s just a fantasy but it’s very sweet.” A pause. Matthew says, “Maybe it wouldn’t be much fun if it weren’t a fantasy.” “Well, we’ll never know, will we?” Jackie says, and Medel’s little uptick is everything. A pause. “Since when did you get so resigned to your fate?” She has the words, as she often does: “What makes you say that? All my life I’ve known there’s no solution, I don’t have any expectation of us having a life together. I never have.” She pauses. A child’s voice, raised nearby. She continues: “I’m not talking about the unmentionable act, I don’t think that’s such a big deal. I think that’s just a matter of logistics.” He rolls his words wryly:  “Or, an unmentionable act that gets mentioned a lot.” 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 »

Baz Luhrmann, Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio.

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I never expected Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” to feel understated, but it’s almost demure at times. While busy and jumped-up, it’s as much about trappings of luxe, the secret life of brands. (The brands include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay-Z, Tiffany & Co., Miu Miu, Prada, Brooks Brothers, Fogal of Switzerland, Moët & Chandon, and of course, Baz Luhrmann.) Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio: none of this trio of dreamers, schemers, adulterers and enablers feels like a grown-up, only playacting children rather than Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway and Daisy Buchanan. (Even DiCaprio’s pronounced laugh lines fail to make him seem Gatsby’s age of thirty-two.) But Gatsby’s mannered way of speaking, a made-up accent of uncertain and variable provenance, is annoying, transparent and wholly appropriate. As is our introduction to the elusive Gatsby’s full face, gleaming and golden and fireworks-festooned like the most grandiloquent Suntory whiskey ad ever storyboarded. Such freighted momentousness is endless, the acting erratic, sapping even Mulligan’s sorrowful kitten-cum-coquette intonations of quiet despair. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »

 Robert Cicchini’s “Waterwalk,” based on a memoir by Steven Faulkner, is an uplifter following a canoe trek made by a newly fired newspaperman and his adopted Korean teenage son, tracing the route taken by explorers Marquette and Joliet from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to St. Louis in 1673. Spoiler: the latter-day duo doesn’t agree on much. “Waterwalk” is yet another entry in the burgeoning twenty-first-century American tradition of soothing, reassuring, earnest, oh-so-small micro-movies that capture a moment in less-traveled, often verdant reaches of the land. 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 »