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

Ian Palmer’s rough, ragged “Knuckle,” a Sundance 2011 entry, follows over a decade in the brawling, battering life of the warring Irish Traveler Quinn McDonagh and Joyce families, who specialize in bare-knuckle-boxing street fights. The blood and bruises will likely seem excessive in the mooted HBO fictionalization, but in its real-life endless grudge match, the “Knuckle” manages to make “Fight Club” look like a model of restraint. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Tristan Patterson’s “Dragonslayer” is an award-winning, audience-pleasing vérité documentary-cum-punk romance that meshes moments high and low in the life of Josh “Skreech” Sandoval, a twenty-three-year-old professional skateboarder from the suburbs of Fullerton, California. There are kaleidoscopic delights in the urgent assembly, as well as omens of potential disaster at most turns. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The kick-ass experience: “Haywire” is kinetic neo-pulp that lands halfway between the solar plexus and the lizard part of the mind. The latest by prolific director-cinematographer-editor Steven Soderbergh, working a third time with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, after “Kafka” and “The Limey,” is self-conscious filmmaking, using genre trappings and a multi-double-triple-cross espionage plot to explore Soderbergh’s most consistent latterday theme—where government meets money and money wins—as well as the potential of a distaff Jean Claude Van Damme taking down a succession of handsome male adversaries (with notably crummy haircuts), largely through physicality alone. (The movie’s original, double-entendre title was “Knockout.”) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

2011 held the release of a bruised, suggestive, over-the-top, under-the-radar, potential narrative masterpiece about the sensations and emotions of 9/11: Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret.” Depicting the fragmented consciousness of a seventeen-year-old girl coming to intellectual and emotional life in Manhattan in 2005, it worked as a suitable voice for the times after that fateful day.

In the luxuriantly appointed “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, the voice chosen to exert a similar effort is that of an eleven-year-old boy, Oskar Schell, his mind also anxious with multitudes, but head-on. The literary conceit of Foer’s admittedly precious narrator comes across on screen as something else: a careening depiction of the life of the mind of a small madman and a protracted attempt at wreaking profane sentimentality from the culturally shared emotions of those events. (Plot details are revealed in the remainder of this review.) 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 »

RECOMMENDED

The great strength of Jennifer Fox’s documentaries is her directness, and considering that her best-known work, “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman,” is longitudinal in the extreme, a six-hour survey of her romantic life and the lives of women she meets across three years, from the ages of forty-two to forty-five, and her “My Reincarnation” (2010) encompasses twenty years of experience, it’s certainly a virtue. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A lifelong master of investigating the dramatic potential of confined spaces and encroaching claustrophobia, the seventy-eight-year-old Roman Polanski prepared his adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s boulevard comedy-cum-sketch “God of Carnage” during his confinement to his Swiss chalet while resisting deportation to California. The result, “Carnage,” is confined to a single apartment in Brooklyn, patterned within a Restoration Hardware-inch of its life by veteran production designer Dean Tavoularis (“Bonnie & Clyde,” “The Godfather: Part II,” “One from the Heart,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Zabriskie Point”). Even on a small screen, every element is pointed, as you’d hope from a Polanski picture. Take even the characteristic Brooklyn fireplace plopped at one end of the living room, whether ersatz or even Carrera marble, it’s a modest arch not known for triumph, but simplest hominess. The accuracy of each element as the camera roams the rooms is devastating, as is the hard accumulation of each character’s agitated—yet keenly right—posture and gestures. They, the entire quartet, are dismal shits, quarrelers whose life rises above the script’s homiletic disdain by some heavy lifting by each actor. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Seven shorts from the 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival make it down the slopes via The Sundance Institute Art House Project, including one of my favorite shorts I saw last year. (The best short I saw from Sundance, David Lowery’s tale-spinning bedtime story of the American empire, “Pioneer,” isn’t in this selection, but it elevates issue 14 of DVD “magazine” Wholpin.) Ruben Östlund’s Swedish “Incident by a Bank” (12m) is a single-take reconstruction of a failed bank robbery in Stockholm in 2006, the camera taking a Altman-cum-Asperger’s route around the story’s particulars, and it only gets better by the moment. Read the rest of this entry »