RECOMMENDED

“Nobody kills me until I say so!” There’s a gangster’s declaration for you, the tagline from the fictionalization of the life and exploits of French crime kingpin Jacques Mesrine. Told in two parts, drawn from a memoir, both directed by Jean-François Richet (“Assault on Precinct 13,” 2005), “Mesrine” takes the shape of a sleekly fitted suit for a plumped-up Vincent Cassel more than a fully-fashioned crime epic. But the movie doesn’t aim for “Godfather”-style complexity or Olivier Assayas-style impressionism (as in the forthcoming five-hour “Carlos”), but rather for a rapid-fire action bauble built on scenes of Mesrine’s rise, then ending abruptly in anticipation of the second film (due for release next Friday). Don’t expect the astringent experiments of a movie like Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” or the code-of-honor classics of Jean-Pierre Melville (“Le Samourai,” “Le Cercle Rouge”): it’s just a rapid-fire bit of brute pop gangsterism with chewy star turns (aside from the magnetic Cassel, there’s a nice cameo from Gérard Depardieu as a mentor to Mesrine). The latest foreign-language release from adventurous Music Box Films, “Mesrine” likely won’t be the success that “Tell No One” and the Millennium Trilogy (“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and autumn’s “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest”) have been fiscally, but if anyone is going to get mileage out of kicky big-screen foreign-language fare in the U. S. market, it’s that Chicago-based distributor. With Ludivine Sagnier, Cécile de France. 113m. (Ray Pride)

“Mesrine: Killer Instinct” opens Friday at Landmark Century. The second feature opens next Friday. The trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Adrift on atmosphere and sublime visual beauty, “Delta,” (2008) Kornél Mundruczó’s contemporary Hungarian fable about a brother, a sister and a house goes for the eyes and the gut. (The eyes win.) In a village along the Danube, a shaggy-bearded prodigal son (Félix Lajko)returns to his home village to find his lovely, grown sister (Orsolya Tóth) and mother working in a pub alongside her violent second husband. He’s inspired to build a dock and log house on an island that had belonged to his late father, and his sister joins him in the construction. Quiet moments lead to tragic circumstances: consider the ancient Greeks to have warned the pair. The story moves as implacably as a stream, sometimes maddeningly so. Magyar countryman Béla Tarr is listed as a script consultant in the opening credits; Terrence Malick’s nature-sensitive work needs no credit. Winner of the International Critics Prize at Cannes. With Lajkó , Lili Monori, Sándor Gáspár, Lajos Bertók, Mari Kiss. 92m. (Ray Pride)

“Delta” opens Friday at Facets. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Fuk sau, 2009)  Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To’s “Vengeance” finds Melville-style bursts of creative inspiration in a story that casts French superstar Johnny Hallyday as the criminal vengeur. Where Sylvester Stallone’s approach to action filmmaking in the twenty-first century is piling on with the violent elephantiasis of the setpieces of “The Expendables,” To’s approach is to take the possibilities of the frame, fracturing and reassembling them through inventive, vigorous editing, and taking the entire idea of genre and the artistic possibilities of moviemaking very, very seriously. Very seriously, especially when the subject is action. Logic comes not from plot or strenuous attempts at plausibility, but from kinetic choreography. Action is character. Motion is wit. The cartoonish is the everyday. And Hallyday’s a perfect raincoat man for his age, as Alain Delon, young and beautiful, was in Melville’s “Le Samourai.” Hallyday’s character is a French restaurateur who comes east when Triad gangsters shoot his daughter (Sylvie Testud) and kill her family. He’s named Costello, just like “Le Samourai”‘s Jef Costello; Hallyday was a last-minute replacement for… Alain Delon. With deep-set small eyes and a deeply lined face, Hallyday’s haunted from frame one, almost a reincarnation of the smaller, bulkier Charles Bronson, and once he’s on the streets of Hong Kong, and later, the more exotic streets of Macau, the former Portuguese colony, he’s all business, whether hiring a team of hitmen (the charming Anthony Wong, Lam Ka Tung and Lam Suet) or wielding a weapon himself. There’s some plodding plotting as well as the use of Polaroid pictures that evokes “Memento,” but it’s not worth the remembering: the bold moviemaking in bright, bold colors sears the mind instead. 110m. (Ray Pride)

“Vengeance” plays at Siskel Saturday, Monday and Wednesday. The Hong Kong trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Tamra Davis’ ” Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” is that rare worthy hagiography, built on her friendship with the short-lived artist and footage which she shot in 1986, when he was only 25. Julian Schnabel’s impressionistic life of the artist, “Basquiat” has its own flair and myth-making pleasures. More than a bookend to that tribute, the glimpse of one artist at another in this documentary runs more in the vein of love letter and a window flung wide open to a moment in art in downtown Manhattan, a moment in the life of one artist who, alongside mentor Andy Warhol, was perhaps “famous for being famous,” but also more talented than many realized. Working with flash snapshots, memories from survivors of the time, appraisals from art-world powerhouses, as well as the central interview, pulled out of a drawer over twenty years later, Davis shows us a lost world: battered streets of Soho, littered streets, the World Trade Center tall and ordinary and unseen below those cobbled streets where 500 or so makers of art converged. “This is a high-quality film, right,” Basquiat jokes at the start. It’s a pungent snapshot of the time and how his “oblique pieces of poetry” turned into something larger, more grandiloquent, more deadly. The issues of race are aligned alongside those of fame, perhaps the most timeless of the themes bristling within. Davis’ other films include “Billy Madison” and “Half Baked.” 93m.  (Ray Pride)

“Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” opens Friday at the Music Box.

RECOMMENDED

(36 vues du Pic Saint Loup) Are characters ever offstage in movies by Jacques Rivette? The 81-year-old French director’s 2009 “Around A Small Mountain,” runs hardly eighty beautifully edited minutes, and its slightness resounds against his lifelong fascination with acting and role-playing. The two-and-a-half hours of “Va savoir” (2001) or the nearly thirteen hours of his 1971 “Out 1: noli me tangere” are deeply embedded in the gentle play of grown-ups who have either run off to join the circus, or who are, in fact, the circus, failing in small towns along the picturesque mountain roads of the Pic Saint Loup region of France. Jane Birkin is especially striking as the ringmaster of all the affairs. They’re ghosts, ghosts ever in touch with life, like the characters in Robert Altman’s last film, “A Prairie Home Companion,” knowing that angels are not of this life. But they’re also artists, and their process, creating and improving their circus gags for increasingly small audiences, provide the movie’s modest momentum. The last shot placidly observes as a full moon is slowly occluded by glaucous clouds: the clouding of sight, memory, the pulling of a final curtain. With Sergio Castellitto, André Marcon, Jacques Bonnaffé, Julie-Marie Parmentier, Hélène de Vallombreuse, Tintin Orsoni, Vimala Pons, Mikaël Gaspar, Stéphane Laisné. 84m. (Ray Pride)

“Around a Small Mountain” opens Friday at Siskel. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

(Non ma fille, tu n’iras pas danser, 2009) At the hurting center of Christophe Honoré’s dysfunctional family story, “Making Plans for Léna,” is the radiant Chiara Mastroianni, born of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, handsome axioms of the European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. (It’s startling how much she can resemble both her parents, in different ways, from different perspectives.) Preparations for a trip to visit her family for summer holiday in the countryside go awry for this single mother and Honoré pitches her into a story resembling Arnaud Desplechin’s superior “A Christmas Tale.” In lesser hands, the succession of sketches of the random trials of tense, unnerved Léna would remain wan, but Mastroianni transforms her unlikable character into a figure of fascination. Honoré’s camera embraces her, surrounds her with landscapes and figures in landscapes that express Léna’s disarray. As in his earlier movies, like 2004′s “Ma mère,” Honoré is more a teller of mood than of tales. With Marina Fois, Marie-Christine Barrault, Jean-Marc Barr, Louis Garrel. 105m. (Ray Pride)

“Making Plans for Lena” opens Friday at the Music Box. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Writer-director Samuel Maoz served in the first Israel-Lebanon war in June 1982, and like his countryman Ari Folman with his “animated documentary,” “Waltz with Bashir,” he draws from his own experience of the time for “Lebanon,” his superbly drawn portrait of young men in war, and the claustrophobia of battle in tank warfare. (They’re trapped in what could look to be the safest place in battle, but think “Das Coop.”) Middle-aged artists are still haunted by events of their youth. The compression of memory almost three decades along is lapidary. It’s “The Hurt Locker” compressed to one long, lasting ache. Once the four inexperienced soldiers come under fire in a small village where they are unwelcome, the world is largely seen through gunsights, a frame, a small, privileged frame that suggests everything within its range is a story, and the story is filled with antagonists, attackers, enemies. Everyone, every thing is in the crosshairs. There is no overview, no God’s-eye perspective, no strategies of the higher-ups, the generals, the politicians. A single day in their life could be the single day of their death. Every sound—and the sound design is immaculate, nightmarish—is alive. Maoz wants to convey visceral sensation and palpable fear. He succeeds. This is cinema of sensation, the moments of war without glory, only mortal fear. With Oshri Cohen, Michael Moshonov, Zohar Shtrauss, Reymond Amsalem, Itay Tiran, Yoav Donat, Dudu Tassa. 94m. (Ray Pride)

“Lebanon” opens Friday at the Music Box. A trailer is below. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Five English kids get five lessons in manners from a nanny enhanced with a magic cane. By a peculiar logic, the bulky, snaggletoothed, hairy-moled Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson) loses one of her unsightly features each time her charges acquire a new degree of civility and character. Thompson reprises her role from “Nanny McPhee” (2005). She also writes the screenplay based on Christianna Brand’s three books originally published in 1964, 1967 and 1974. In the first film, Mr. Cedric Brown was a widower with seven unruly offspring. Now Mrs. Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) may learn she’s a widow upon opening a telegram concerning her husband who’s away at a war with no name. (An aircraft labeled “Enemy Plane” will drop a jumbo bomb in her barley field.) Susanna White directs this welcome exception to American fare for families. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Writer-director David Michôd took ten years to get his brooding, simmering, explosive Melbourne crime-clan tale, “Animal Kingdom,” to the screen.

In that time, he edited an Australian film magazine, affording access to interview established filmmakers, but it also gave time to build on filmmaking relationships, to make several shorts and to define what “Animal Kingdom” really needed to be. What Michôd wanted, he tells me, is a movie that is grand, “but not grandiose.” The Cody clan is shepherded by Smurf, mother of Pope (Ben Mendelsohn, pictured), Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and Darren (Luke Ford). Pope’s an armed robber in hiding, and Mendelsohn’s tactile performance as a loathsome, impulsive criminal is topped only by the brilliant Jacki Weaver as the sunny yet whole-heartedly, black-heartedly deranged Smurf, their mother, and grandmother to J. (James Frecheville), who is left in their care. J., who’s our eyes, slinks to corners of the frame, learns as every possible thing that could go wrong goes very, very wrong: the transformation of this gangly teen is as momentous as Michael Corleone’s. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Filmed and directed” by Beadie Finzi, “Only When I Dance” is a gorgeous-at-moments clear-headed documentary, small in its aims and scope, yet staking a take on class and race by examining dance in modern-day Brazil. Compassion meets passion: Finzi follows Irlan and Isabela, a pair of young students from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to unlikely success. 14-year-old Isabela, for instance, would be the first black ballerina in a Brazilian company. Referring to the world around her, she says “Everywhere I look, everywhere I go, it’s always dance, dance, dance.” It’s tender, their dreams of culture beyond their own rich landscape; the triumphant moment against the Manhattan skyline is not without precedent, but lovely nonetheless. With Irlan Santos da Silva, Isabela Santos, Mariza Estrella. 78m. HDCAM video. (Ray Pride)

“Only When I Dance” opens Friday at Siskel.