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 »

RECOMMENDED

David Cronenberg is a filmmaker who sits in mind as college-professor age, for now, forever, sunk into his quiddities for all time, tending to the postmodern, even if living in our modern age. The weird blankness of the Toronto topography in “Crash” (2004) seems more contemporary than ever; “Videodrome”‘s (1983) pretty much the monster of media stuck in the gut. But, even with an accelerated work pace in the past couple of years, and with still a fistful of projects announced as in development, he is among several masterful filmmakers of a generation of writer-directors in late bloom. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Shame” begins with slips and slides of sound. A pulsing electronic alarm leads into a score that will tick throughout with metronomic measures as Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lies awake, artfully covered with the wadding of a cool blue sheet. It’s a chilly, spent evocation of the writhing of figures in torment of paintings by Francis Bacon: from sleep-starved repose, this man will move into his city day. Read the rest of this entry »

Goodbye, First Love

By Ray Pride

After summer’s somersaults, autumn through Christmas is when the grownup movies come out to play, and the forty-seventh edition of the Chicago International Film Festival has a lot to celebrate. In this rundown, I’ll keep “great” as a random adjective to a minimum. (Disclosure: I was a program consultant for this year’s Docufest section.)

From the highlights of the program, it seems like it’s going to be a strong season for good, solid movies in coming months. The range of films being shown that have been submitted for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award seem to be uncommonly strong as well. While there may well be other discoveries to be made, most of the films recommended here will show up in commercial or art-house release. Screenings can sell out in advance, which may partly be due to the capacity of the smaller screens at River East. The festival is keeping a running tally of shutouts on their Facebook page. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Fassbender, Michael Fassbender. “X-Men: First Class” may be the most Bondian non-Bond movie of the decade to date to likely assure that a terrific screen presence becomes a box office player. The work in “Hunger,” “Fish Tank” and “Jane Eyre” were no anomalies. Call him magnetic, call him Magneto. Efficiency and dispatch are strengths of this latest Marvel origin tale. The most admirable skill Matthew Vaughn brings to his direction, and it’s a substantial one, is a sense of design, creating mood through an elevated use of color and décor. Some directors pare away so that one bit indicates everything, as in Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life,” where the white-walled, sunny, characterless duplex of disaffected architect Sean Penn is marked only by a black edition of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair. Vaughn pushes further, with fizzy bits instead of the tendency toward archive and diorama that mars “Mad Men.” It’s the past but with a present-tense eye to what has remained or become “cool” since 1962, the year “X-Men: First Class” is set. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Screenwriter Moira Buffini (“Tamara Drewe”) adapts Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel for a nuanced saga of a resolute orphan who survives a sadistic cousin, a cruel aunt and an abusive headmaster. About a decade later, this young woman (Mia Wasikowska, “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Kids Are All Right”) secures a position as the governess in a drafty estate. She can deal with gothic lore about a female vampire haunting the premises, but her tormented master Rochester (Michael Fassbender, “Hunger,” “Fish Tank”) presents her with romantic as well as Human Resources challenges. She looks plain, talks smart and stands fast. Despite a few flashback pathways and Gothic manifestations that fizzle, this “Jane Eyre” excels. Dialogue sounds closer to Brontë’s prose than what’s typically heard in BBC period imports on PBS. (In a minor instance, the novel’s “automaton” is reworded as “machine.”) Cary Joji Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) directs with attention to the text and respect for the characters. Cinematographer Adriano Goldman composes daytime shots of estate interiors with a keen eye. Buffini’s screenplay, though, scarcely cues twenty-first century viewers to “the backlash against the novel as a… burning testament of impermissible rage which breathed the revolutionary fire of Chartism and the European revolutions of the late 1840′s” that Welsh novelist Stevie Davies reports. This author of “Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution 1640-1660″ adds: “`Jane Eyre’ is a radical, secular and feminist modern revision of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress.’” Even without footnotes, this screen version passes with honor. With Judi Dench, Jamie Bell, Sally Hawkins, Simon McBurney, Imogen Poots. 120m. (Bill Stamets)

“Jane Eyre” opens Friday at Landmark Century.

The Social Network

Top 5 Domestic Films
“The Social Network,” David Fincher
“Winter’s Bone,” Debra Granik
“Ghost Writer,” Roman Polanski
“Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
— Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films
“Carlos,” Olivier Assayas
“Everyone Else,” Maren Ade
“Dogtooth,” Yorgos Lanthimos
“Father of My Children,” Mia Hansen-Løve
“I Am Love,” Luca Guadagnino
— Ray Pride

Top 5 Films
“Animal Kingdom,” David Michôd
“Enter the Void,” Gaspar Noé
“Inception,” Christopher Nolan
“Lourdes,” Jessica Hausner
“Monsters,” Gareth Edwards
—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Documentary Films
“Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno,” Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea
“Sweetgrass,” (no director credited) [Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor]
“The Oath,” Laura Poitras
“Videocracy,” Erik Gandini
“Rembrandt’s J’Accuse,” Peter Greenaway
—Bill Stamets Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Where’s the novelty in Andrea Arnold’s storytelling?

It’s everywhere, is where it is. The odd critiques of “Red Road” and “Fish Tank” that have asserted Arnold tells familiar stories with familiar characters are off the mark. The live-through-this intensity of her storytelling is charged and fresh. The English director started her career relatively late, but her first two short films, “Dog” and “Milk” were screened at Cannes in 1998, and her third, the twenty-six minute “Wasp,” won the Oscar in 2005. Her 2006 feature debut, “Red Road,” shot on digital video, exploited a fresh, bold palette in the story of a policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow’s banks of surveillance monitors. The modern paranoia and contemporary sexual violence that grows from Arnold’s unflinching film (and Kate Dickie’s intent, sere performance as the troubled, vengeful woman) are nightmarish yet haunting. The film began as a challenge by Lars von Trier’s company, that three directors with the same outline would go out and make a film with the same characters and actors, but in Arnold’s capable hands, it was so much more than a stunt. At the time of its Sundance debut, I asked Arnold how much two versions of the same script would be in the hands of any two difference directors. “I’ve always thought that; if you gave a director the same script, you’d get a completely different film,” she said, then laughed. “Okay, maybe the same story, but a completely different film.”

From its opening minutes of anger expressed by its teen protagonist with profane, “unladylike” suddenness and directness, director Andrea Arnold’s second feature, “Fish Tank,” is an electric slice of elevated everyday life. To our good fortune, Arnold amasses her own idiosyncratic observations, different sensations from other English filmmakers who trouble to traffic with class, more tender than Loach and Leigh, and also with a more kaleidoscopic eye than the Belgian brothers Dardenne. She manages to mingle the funny, the sorrowful, the sad, the melancholy and the intimate without a solitary note of false uplift. She’s a poet, really. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“I want this movie to be like a smell.”

That’s not the usual sentiment you’d find from a careerist filmmaker, someone intent on making one movie after the other on an increasingly larger scale. But it is one voiced by Turner Prize-winning English visual artist Steve McQueen [left] who offered that insight into one of his early, prize-winning installation efforts, and it could also be said about his serene, unruffled debut as a feature director, “Hunger,” about nothing less than life and death in Belfast, Ireland’s Maze Prison during a sixty-six-day hunger strike in 1981. The Republican inmates refuse to eat until the British government recognizes the IRA as a legitimate political organization. The Blanket and No-Wash protest begins: the men refuse uniforms and live in their filth. A voice of authority sounds in the prison corridors: a disembodied Margaret Thatcher. All else is refined, reduced eventually to what goes on inside prison walls, against soiled cell walls, inside the confines of an expiring mind. Read the rest of this entry »