Opening this week: The Third Murder is the work of director Hirokazu Koreeda, who made the 1995 art house hit Maborosi and one of the best movies of 2008, Still Walking. Koreeda’s Shoplifters just won the Palm d’Or at Cannes, and will be released in the US by Magnolia Pictures on November 23. I saw The Third Murder at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). The Third Murder is a legal procedural that takes a philosophical turn.
OUT NOW
- Please make every attempt to see the best movie of the year, now in Bay Area theaters: the emotionally powerful coming of age drama Leave No Trace from Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone). Superbly well-crafted, impeccably acted, thoughtful and emotionally powerful, it’s a Must See.
- The savagely funny social satire Sorry to Bother You carries the message that humans are more than just their commercial value as consumers and labor to be exploited.
- The political documentary Dark Money exposes the growing threat of unlimited secret money in political campaigns.
- Puzzle intelligently and authentically traces one woman’s journey of self discovery.
- The surprisingly emotional biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is about Fred Rogers’ fierce devotion to the principle that every child is deserving of love and our protection.
- First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
- Three Identical Strangers is an astonishing documentary about triplets separated at birth that ranges from the exhuverance of discovering siblings to disturbing questions of social engineering.
- American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
- RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
ON VIDEO
I’m sure that you’ve never seen this week’s video pick because I don’t think it got a theatrical release. It’s the indie thriller Dose of Reality, which brings a jaw-dropper of a Big Surprise. Dose of Reality is available to stream on Amazon.
ON TV
- This is a great week for film noir and neo-noir on Turner Classic Movies. We begin on August 6 with The Set-Up (1949), one of the great film noirs and one of my 10 Best Boxing Movies. Robert Ryan plays a washed-up boxer that nobody believes can win again, not even his long-suffering wife (Audrey Totter). His manager doesn’t even bother to tell him that he is committed to taking a dive in his next fight. But what if he wins? Director Robert Wise makes use of real-time narrative, then highly innovative. Watch for the verisimilitude of the bar where the deal goes down.
- Also on August 6, there’s the 1950 Perfect Murder noir Tension, with Richard Basehart as the meek night manager of a pharmacy who is married to a slutty shrew (Audrey Totter – of course). She sneers, “”You were full of laughs then. Well, you’re all laughed out now”” When the wife humiliates him with her newest affair, he works a pair of the newly invented contact lenses and some flashy clothes into a new second identity. The wife’s boyfriend ends up fatally shot, and the cops start looking for the pharmacy manager. Will he take the fall? Barry Sullivan is the cop and Cyd Charisse is the good girl.
- And on August 9, TCM plays one of my favorite neo-noirs, the Don Siegel thriller Charley Varrick. Walter Matthau stars as the title character, an expert heist man who sets up a “perfect crime” bank robbery which, of course, goes awry. Worst of all, it turns out that Varrick has stolen a secret Mob fortune being laundered by the bank, and now the underworld organization is after him. Only his wits can save him. I’ve rewatched Charley Varrick a couple of times recently, and it still holds up for me.
