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Julio DePietro sought fortune in the financial markets to escape an Ivy League student-loan load. Having found it here in Chicago with The Citadel Group, where he was an early player in what became one of the world’s largest hedge funds, he left to get into film. But unlike other moneyed movie makers who simply produce, he literally sent himself back to school for a crash course in directing. With his debut as writer-director, “The Good Guy,” set amidst the world of the young masters of the universe who trade millions and billions in the blink of a day, DiePietro crafts an accomplished romantic drama with a knowing eye for the nuances of Wall Street, thriving in its most cocky state before the recent humblings of financial crisis. Tommy (Scott Porter, television’s “Friday Night Lights”), the rising star at the firm, has a super-sweet girlfriend Beth (Alexis Bledel of “Gilmore Girls” fame) and a compelling earnestness; he seems like a good guy. He takes on the clumsy office gopher, Daniel (Bryan Greenberg, “One Tree Hill”), as a Pygmalion project, and a fondness soon develops between the project and his could-be paramour, Beth. But the romcom conventions that seem to be fully engaged soon give way to more complex literary devices, as Beth’s book group thoughfully outlines it for us—they’re reading Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier,” and that work resonates in more ways than one. The story curves in some big and nicely small ways, carried along by an able young cast seasoned beyond its age by an abundance of youth-acting experience (a list that even includes Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy and Anna Chlumsky, Macaulay Culkin’s first kisser in “My Girl,” in what seems to be a carefully considered obsession by the filmmaker). Unlike the cartoonish characterizations of Wall Street players in most pictures as overwrought  yuppie neandrathals, “The Good Guy” captures the high-octane boys club spot on: really smart, charismatic guys unenecumbered by “adult” supervision, making fortunes and drunk on their own self-worth Kool-Aid. Read the rest of this entry »

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Three cops on different beats in Brooklyn will end up at one housing project. Narcotics officer Sal Procida (Ethan Hawke, “Training Day”) is the over-extended dad of Vito, Vinnie and Vicki, with twins on the way. To buy a bigger house, he robs dealers. “I don’t want God’s forgiveness—I want his fucking help,” he rails at his priest at confession. Clarence “Tango” Butler (Don Cheadle) is an undercover narc desperate for an overdue desk job but leveraged to sell out his tattered ethics. Eddie Dugan (Richard Gere) is a week away from a pension he may never collect if he keeps putting his service revolver in his mouth. Shooting at the Van Dyke projects in the Brownsville part of Brooklyn, Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) ably directs a lengthy well-built script by first-timer Michael C. Martin. “Brooklyn’s Finest” does solid work as a study of occupational risks. The workplace is a daily violation for Sal, Jake and Eddie. And each character breaks ranks. Cops can self-corrupt in more ways than one. Hell is a two-way mean street in the 65th Precinct. “In the lexicon of cop movies, it feels epic,” states producer Basil Iwanyk in the press notes.“This feels like Lumet or Scorsese.” Gere drops other names: “We were thinking of Othello and Richard III.” With Wesley Snipes, Will Patton, Shannon Kane, Brian F. O’Byrne, Lili Taylor, Ellen Barkin and Vincent D’Onofrio. 140m. (Bill Stamets)

Argentine director Gabriel Medina’s “The Paranoids” (Los paranoicos, 2008) has sidelong graces more successful than a storyline with its romantic-comedy trappings, notably a pervasive mood of uneasiness and urban discontent. Luciano (Daniel Hendler in a sly, ticklish performance) is a paranoid thirtysomething surviving as an awkward performer at children’s birthday parties dressed as a purple furball from a local TV show; the discovery that he’s attracted to Sofia (Jazmin Stuart), his friend Manuel’s  (Walter Jakob) girlfriend comes around the time he discovers that his every fumble is translated by Manuel into the stuff of a Spanish telenovela about a complete loser. Many of the turns of the tale are gratifyingly witty. There are echoes of Daniel Burman’s neurotic comedies like “Family Law” (2006) and “Lost Embrace” (2004) and not only because Hendler has been his alter ego in them, but because of a pervasively glum mood in the striking Buenos Aires locations. The casting of characteristic Porteño faces and spaces is another satisfaction. The city’s bright and grubby glories come out to play. Lucio Bonelli’s cinematography in both interiors and location exteriors has a bruised beauty and uneasy intimacy that elevates Read the rest of this entry »

(Frygtelig lykkelig) Two childhood pals tell a nasty tale set in a Danish village near a bog with many uses. Director Henrik Ruben Genz and novelist Erling Jepsen grew up in Gram, and shot their first collaboration nearby. Three characters are based on people they knew in Gram who share their names on screen: a wife-beating drunk; his seductive, bruised spouse; and their little daughter, whose paternity is a matter of whispers. This screwed-up family makes work and life really messy for the new marshal. Sent from Copenhagen, Robert (Jakob Cedergren) misses his daughter but not his wife. His troubled past got him this posting—the last marshal’s stint seemed oddly short-lived—and he will get into more trouble. The stranger with a badge is constantly told how things are done around these parts: from saying both “hello” and “goodbye” with the same word, to hanging his towels on his clothesline. “Terribly Happy” opens with a legend about a cow that sank in the bog, only to surface a half year later and give birth to a freak calf with a cow head and a woman’s head. An outbreak of insanity struck livestock and locals. Menfolk dispatched the creature to the municipal bog: “Since then, there hasn’t been any fuss with neither cattle nor women.” Fuss-control is what locals do best. No badges needed, but three cardplayers need to fill a vacant seat at their table. This dour noir deals bitter comic pokes. Rural surreal bits include a cat with a meow sounding just like a peculiar local phrase. With Lene Maria Christensen, Kim Bodnia, Lars Brygmann, Anders Hove, ens Jørn Spottag. 102m. (Bill Stamets)

Photo: Ray Pride

Monday night, Cobra Lounge is ground zero for a six-city experiment, launching the DVD and video-on-demand of the Sundance award-winning documentary, “We Live in Public.” Now situated in Chicago, the so-called “Warhol of Internet TV,” Josh Harris, accompanied by director Ondi Timoner, will take questions before and after a showing of the film.

On a large screen over the bar, a quadrant of feeds from Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Vancouver and Atlanta alternate with images from the Cobra’s own surveillance cameras inside and outside the building. The phone booth has its own flat-screens and cameras. Harris’ ideas were early: he got millions from investors for Internet TV years before broadband made it feasible. Bored, Harris built a bunker in downtown New York, dubbed “Quiet,” where a hundred or so people lived, ate, frolicked and fired off handguns and automatic weapons for free. The only condition? Cameras captured everything and Harris owned the images.

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At Northwestern’s University Hall there is a small room, perfectly square, with walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are all but empty. A large flatscreen TV hangs on the front wall, next to two chairs facing the audience at different angles.

As part of a discussion titled “Where the Arts Meet,” writer Alex Kotlowitz and filmmaker Steve James are seated in these chairs, prepared to discuss a currently filming collaborative project titled “The Interrupters” and the intersection between film and nonfiction prose.

On storytelling in general, Kotlowitz mentions “a constant state of astonishment of being knocked off-balance.”

James, donning a navy blue fleece sweater, explains the premise of his 2002 film “Stevie,” a documentary about a man he met ten years ago in rural Southern Illinois who was once an “at-risk youth” in a Big Brothers Big Sisters program, now awaiting trial for a molestation charge. “Instead of this tidy little first-person portrait of a half-hour long,” James says, “it ended up being this two-and-a-half-hour documentary.” He then shows a clip featuring Stevie and his friend Tim, who is later dubbed “the existential fisherman.” Read the rest of this entry »

Iowans react to an outbreak of a virus that not only elevates their body temperature, but makes them kill neighbors and loved ones, although not livestock. First-person shooter thrills go exponential in a spree of Iowan-on-Iowan mayhem. The infected versus the disinfectors. “Initiate Containment Protocol” reads a directive annotating a satellite image of Pierce County. Extreme hygiene ensues. Breck Eisner (son of former Paramount and Disney exec Michael) directs a screenplay by two updaters of horror films: Scott Kosar did the 2005 version of the 1979 “The Amityville Horror” and 2003’s remake of 1974’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”; and Ray Wright rescripted the 2001 “Kairo” into the 2006 “Pulse.” “The Crazies” revisits the 1973 original by George Romero, credited here as an executive producer. Horror shocks are added and political satire is subtracted. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) and town doctor Judy (Radha Mitchell) are upgraded from volunteer fireman and nurse, respectively. Songwise, “Heaven Help Us” is replaced by a Johnny Cash cover of “We’ll Meet Again,” perhaps a nod to “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” (“When Johnny Comes Marching Home” is heard in all three films.) Eisner sounds savvy when calling our Midwestern wasteland “endless plateaus of nothingness” but this USC grad is silly to label his work “extremely thoughtful.” From the director of the fun, issue-free “Sahara,” that may be a stretch. This otherwise satisfying genre exercise blows off opportunities to contemporize Romero’s pointed references to Vietnam with new ones to Iraq and Afghanistan. That self-immolating priest in 1973 has no counterpart in the shoe-bomber of 2001 or the underwear-bomber of 2009? Eisner reportedly fact-checked the etiology of his crazed characters who look and act like they could have rabies, tetanus and erythema multiforme. What really ails them and their victims is a viral fear that entered our vital national fluids after 9/11. With Danielle Panabaker, Joe Anderson, Christie Lynn Smith, John Aylward, Glenn Morshower. 101m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Like a finely drawn sketch, the silky, serenely sinister “The Ghost Writer” implies as much as it illustrates.

Drawn from Robert Harris’ efficient 2007 bestseller, “The Ghost,” that riffs on the “special relationship” that the government of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had with the United States, the project was taken up by Roman Polanski and Harris after financing for their $100-million adaptation of Harris’ “Pompeii” fell apart. The film’s dialogue is drawn largely from the book, but with a more precise wit and chilly twists to the talk. Read the rest of this entry »

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Karin Albou’s “The Wedding Song” (Le chant des marieés) is a demandingly poetic story set in 1942 Tunis about the lives of two 16-year-old girls who are neighbors, Myriam (Lizzie Brocheré), a worldly Jew and Nour (Olympe Borval), an observant Muslim. The strength of the film lies in the community of women that surrounds them as the demands of family and of Nazi occupation of Northern Africa encroach. Going behind the walls of a woman’s Hamam (bath), Albou’s view of the female body is at a great remove from the way male directors might photograph the rituals, sensual. As dispassionate arranged weddings approach, the politics of the larger world and of smaller rooms converge. There is much that is bluntly painful. Albou’s accomplishment is weaving her brimful tapestry into  a sweeping parable as well as a song of female intimacy. 100m. (Ray Pride)

“The Wedding Song” opens Friday at Siskel.

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“Unmade Beds” twines together two journeys of pretty young drifters, Axl (Fernando Tielve) and Vera (Déborah François), gone to ground in modern-day East London. He’s a towheaded, bright-eyed little Spanish twink; she’s a Frenchwoman tentatively abandoning one love for another whose name she refuses to learn. He’s come to London to find his English father, he claims, and couch surf-safaris his way into an immense squat the bright chaos of which looks like a Redmoon Theater production hit by a bomb, so sprawling the pair don’t realize they’re both living there. They’re artists who haven’t found their art, unless you count their wanderings. Hipster quirk, yes, but Argentinean director Alexis Dos Santos’ exquisitely shot second feature is a genuine charmer, moving in and out of focus like emotional liqueur. These characters are made of real stuff. Like Jonás Cuarón’s little-seen coming-of-age “Year of the Nail,” “Unmade Beds” makes cost-effective, poetry-heightened use of montages of still photographs, and like two still unreleased American movies, Ry Russo-Young’s “You Wont Miss Me” and Bradley Rust Grey’s “The Exploding Girl,” Dos Santos uses a heightened digital palette to brighten and heighten and to stay very, very close to characters who don’t yet understand that the bleary, febrile moments they’re finding and feeling will define themselves. The sexy bits are tense, vulnerable, believable and sometimes lightly surreal. It’s playful, grotty Utopia. 98m. (Ray Pride)

“Unmade Beds” opens Friday at Facets.