Movies

Movies to See Right Now

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INCENDIES

My top recommendation this week is the year’s best film and my DVD of the Week:  Incendies.  Rent it and see it now!

In the theaters, I still strongly recommend, The Guard the Irish dark comedy starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Sarah’s Key is an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The historical drama Amigo benefits from writer-director John Sayles’ typically excellent juggling of interconnected characters and from a fine cast. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth. Higher Ground is Vera Farmiga’s provocative take on persons of faith.

Woody Allen’s sweet, funny and thoughtful comedy Midnight in Paris is continuing its long, long run. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told.

I haven’t yet seen Love Crime or Drive, opening this weekend.  You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

Other recent DVD picks have been Road to Nowhere, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1979), Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman, The Music Never Stopped and Source Code.

DVD of the Week: Incendies

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This searing drama is the year’s best film so far.  Upon their mother’s death, a young man and woman learn for the first time of their father and their brother and journey from Quebec to the Middle East to uncover family secrets.  As they bumble around Lebanon, we see the mother’s experience in flashbacks.  We learn before they do that their lives were created – literally – by the violence of the Lebanese civil war.

Because the film is anything but stagey, you can’t tell that Canadian director Denis Villaneuve adapted the screenplay from a play.  Lubna Azabal, a Belgian actress of Moroccan and Spanish heritage, is brilliant as the mother.

It’s a tough film to watch, with graphic violence against women and  children.  But the violence is neither gratuitous nor exploitative – it is a civil war, after all, and the theme of the film is the cycle of retribution.

Incendies was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but lost out to a much inferior film on the same subject of violence, In a Better Life.

A Remarkable Film Distributor

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Roger Ebert just tweeted that today is the 20th birthday of Sony Pictures Classics.  I normally don’t weigh in on distributors, but I note that Sony Pictures Classic has already released three of the films on my Best Movies of 2011 – So Far – Incendies, The Guard and Midnight in Paris.

In 2009-20, their released four films that made my annual top ten lists:  Another Year, The Secrets in Their Eyes and A Prophet.  And, in 2008, Sony Pictures Classics released both my #1 film, I’ve Loved You So Long, and my #2, Rachel Getting Married.  Not bad.

 

Higher Ground: a provocative and respectful film about faith

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The fine actress Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air, Source Code, The Departed) directs and stars in this drama about a woman in a tightly communal church and how her faith supports and fails her.  Farmiga’s character is not a naturally spiritual person, but lives within an intensely spiritual community.  It’s rare that a film examines the question of religion so personally.  It’s a thoughtful and provocative film that takes a position, albeit a respectful one.

Higher Ground, adapted from a novel, would have benefited from less sexism from the male characters and more contemporary clothing for the female characters;  both distract from the central question of the usefulness of faith.  As a director, Farmiga is not afraid of using some magic realism, which generally works.

The performances are especially strong.  Vera’s little sister Taissa Farmiga, aided by a strong physical resemblance, is eerily perfect as the younger version of the protagonist.  Also especially excellent are Dagmara Dominczyk as an especially vibrant church member,  Michael Chernus as her sincere and dutiful husband and Norbert Leo Butz as the pastor.  The always reliable Bill Irwin (Rachel Getting Married) and John Hawkes (Deadwood, Winter’s Bone) are good, too.

Movies to See Right Now

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Don Cheadle and Breandan Gleeson in THE GUARD

I went to see The Guard for a second time and it was well worth it.  The Irish dark comedy stars Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle.   Sarah’s Key is an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The historical drama Amigo benefits from writer-director John Sayles’ typically excellent juggling of interconnected characters and from a fine cast. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth.  Higher Ground (I’ll comment tomorrow) is Vera Farmiga’s provocative take on persons of faith.

Woody Allen’s sweet, funny and thoughtful comedy Midnight in Paris is continuing its long, long run. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told.

You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick is Road to Nowhere.  Other recent DVD picks have been Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1979), Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman, The Music Never Stopped and Source Code.

DVD of the Week: Road to Nowhere

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Road to Nowhere could be subtitled Monte Hellman’s Jigsaw Puzzle.  It’s the first film in twenty years from 79-year-old cult director Hellman, and he has delivered a multi-layered riddle that challenges the audience.  There is the story of a crime as it was originally understood, the story of what really happened and the story of a film being made about the crime.  The same actors play the characters in all three stories.  One of the actors in the movie may actually be one of the participants in the original crime.

It’s not a film for everyone.  You must be willing to accept that the story is not going to make sense for a while, and some issues are never going to be resolved.  If you can engage in the puzzle, there’s enough of a payoff.

My guilty pleasures include Hellman’s 1974 Cockfighter with Warrren Oates and his 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop with Oates and James Taylor (yes, the singer-songwriter James Taylor).  Road to Nowhere is far more stylish and ambitious than those films, but far more baffling.

In Road to Nowhere, the director of the film within the film discovers and becomes besotted, even obsessed, with his leading lady – and things do not turn out happily.  I had to think of the female lead in Two Lane Blacktop, Laurie Bird;  Hellman had a relationship with Bird, who later became Art Garfunkle’s companion and committed suicide in Garfunkle’s apartment.

 

Other recent DVD picks have been Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman and The Music Never Stopped.

Coming up on TV: TCM’s History of Hollywood

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On Labor Day, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting all seven parts of its series Moguls And Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood.  Most histories of cinema emphasize the technical and creative evolutions of film.  Instead, Moguls traces the business story – how mostly Jewish immigrants started with the early peep shows in old Eastern cities and wound up building monopolistic empires in the sun and glamor of Hollywood.  It’s a great story, and this series tells it very well.

TCM originally broadcast the series in fall 2009.  The DVD set is now available for purchase for about $28.  Here’s the original TCM promo.

Movies to See Right Now

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Helen Mirren in THE DEBT

My top choice this week is still the Irish dark comedy The Guard, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. Sarah’s Key is an excellent drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating very personal aspects of a French episode in the Holocaust. The historical drama Amigo benefits from writer-director John Sayles’ typically excellent juggling of interconnected characters and from a fine cast. The Debt, with Helen Mirren, is a multigenerational thriller that addresses the costs of both truth and untruth.

Woody Allen’s sweet, funny and thoughtful comedy Midnight in Paris is continuing its long, long run. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011 – So Far.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are excellent in the romcom Crazy Stupid Love. Despite Rachel Weisz’s performance, The Whistleblower is a misfire – a potentially riveting story clumsily told.

You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.

My DVD pick is Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  Other recent DVD picks have been Poetry, Queen to Play, Kill the Irishman, and The Music Never Stopped.

A breakthrough year for Jessica Chastain

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Jessica Chastain in THE TREE OF LIFE

If any new face has broken through in 2011, it’s the actress Jessica Chastain.  First, she delivered a fine performance as an enabling 1950s mom in the most coherent part of The Tree of Life.  This week, she followed that with an excellent performance as a 1960s Mossad agent (the younger version of Helen Mirren’s character) in the thriller The Debt. She won critical praise for the trashy but aspiring housewife in a film I haven’t seen – The Help.  So we already know that Chastain is versatile enough to play soft and tough, brittle and sexy, action and romance.

Later this fall, she will have three more films in release.  In Take Shelter, she plays the wife of the mentally disintegrating Michael Shannon.  She’s a tough cop in The Texas Killing Fields.  And then she’s in Ralph Fiennes’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

Six movies in six months – that’s quite a way to start a career.  Here’s a New York Times profile of Chastain.

The essential Holocaust films

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This week, Sarah’s Key and The Debt explore aspects of the Holocaust.  Sarah’s Key is the story of the French round-up of French Jews in 1942, and of how a present day investigation shakes up several lives.  The Debt is about a team of three Mossad agents  charged with kidnapping a Nazi war criminal out of 1964’s East Berlin – and how they must revisit the mission 30 years later.   I recommend both movies.

The Holocaust has inspired many movies.  Here is my list of the 5 Essential Holocaust Films.

One of them is the 2002 documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary.   One of the central questions of the Holocaust is how could ordinary humans tolerate and even enable such monstrous acts?  Blind Spot is the story of Traudl Junge who, as a rural, naive 22-year-old, happened on a job in Hitler’s secretarial pool.  After the war, she lived in obscurity for decades.  Wracked with guilt, she was interviewed for 90 minutes shortly before her death by a filmmaker who lost his parents in the Holocaust.  This 90 minute interview is the core of Blind Spot.