The Third Murder

Movies to See Right Now

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Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson in SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

It’s getting harder to find the year’s best movie so far, so please track down Leave No Trace. I’ll be seeing the muc anticipated BlacKKKlansman by Spike Lee.

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 Third Murder is a legal procedural that takes a philosophical turn.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

On August 16, Turner Classic Movies will offer the delightful Peter Bogdanovich screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc? The nerdy academic Howard (Ryan O’Neal) and his continually aggrieved fiance Eunice (Madeline Kahn) travel to San Francisco to compete for a career-launching grant. The luggage with Howard’s great discovery (musical rocks) is mixed up with two identical suitcases, one containing valuable jewelry, the other with spy secrets, and soon we have juggling MacGuffins.

That’s all funny enough, but Howard bumps into Judy (Barbra Streisand), the kookiest serial college dropout in America, who determines that she must have him and utterly disrupts his life. Our hero’s ruthless rival for the grant is hilariously played by Kenneth Mars (the Nazi playwright in The Producers). Austin Pendleton is wonderful as the would-be benefactor.

The EXTENDED closing chase scene is among the very funniest in movie history – right up there with the best of Buster Keaton; Streisand and O’Neal lead an ever-growing cavalcade of pursuers through the hills of San Francisco, at one point crashing the Chinese New Year’s Day parade. I love What’s Up, Doc? and own the DVD, and I watch every time I stumble across it on TV. Bogdanovich’s hero Howard Hawks, the master of the screwball comedy, would have been proud.

WHAT’S UP, DOC?

Movies to See Right Now

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Kôji Yakusho in Hirokazu Koreeda’s THE THIRD MURDER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society (SFFILM).

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.
Audrey Totter and Richard Basehart in TENSION

THE THIRD MURDER: legal procedural turns philosophical

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Masaharu Fukuyama and Kôji Yakusho in Hirokazu Koreeda’s THE THIRD MURDER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society (SFFILM).

The Third Murder opens with a killing, and the audience gets a clear full-face view of the killer.  Then the mystery begins – not about who done it, but about why and who will be held accountable.

A high-powered defense lawyer (Masaharu Fukuyama) has been called in to take over a challenging case; it’s potentially a death penalty case, and the defendant (Kôji Yakusho) has confessed. Moreover, the defendant has previously served thirty years for an earlier murder, he’s an oddball and he keeps switching his story.

Nevertheless, the lawyer thinks he can avoid the death penalty with a technicality about the motivation for the crime. He gets some good news from forensic evidence and then discovers one startling secret about the victims’ family – and then another one even more shocking – one that might even exculpate his client.

The Third Murder is a slow burn, as the grind of legal homework is punctuated by reveal after reveal. Eventually, there’s a shocker at the trial, and this legal procedural eventually gives way to philosophical questions. Finally, there’s an edge-of-the-seat epilogue – a final lawyer-client face-to-face where the shell-shocked lawyer tries to confirm what really happened and why.

Masaharu Fukuyama in Hirokazu Koreeda’s THE THIRD MURDER. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society (SFFILM).

Yakusho (Tampopo, Shall We Dance?, Babel, 13 Assassins) is quite excellent as the defendant, a man who seems to be an unreliable mental case, but who might have a sense of justice that trumps everyone else’s.

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).

 

Movies to See Right Now

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Subject Sammy Davis Jr. in a still from SAMMY DAVIS JR.: I’VE GOTTA BE ME. Photo courtesy Menemsha Films/JFI.
This week, Dark Money and Puzzle have opened in Bay Area theaters.  And one of the Bay Area’s top cinema events: the 38th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF38), has opened and runs through August 5 in San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Rafael, Albany and Oakland.  The SFJFF is the world’s oldest Jewish film festival, and, with a 2017 attendance figure of 40,000, still the largest.  As always, there’s an especially strong slate of documentaries, including my recommended Must See docs; I especially liked the closing night film Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me.

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
In honor of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, now underway, my this week’s video pick comes from last year’s festival. Israel was created as a home for refugees. What happens when African refugees overwhelm a neglected Tel Aviv neighborhood is the subject of the topical documentary Levinsky Park. Levinsky Park is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

ON TV

On July 31, Turner Classic Movies brings us two generationally iconic films – one from The Greatest Generation and one for Baby Boomers.

First there’s the WW II melodrama From Here to Eternity. Sure, it’s a soap opera with that much lampooned Burt Lancaster-Debroah Kerr embrace in the crashing surf. But it’s packed with a great cast, and the story threads are expertly braided together by director Fred Zinneman. Besides Lancaster and Kerr, there’s Montgomery Clift, Jack Warden and – resurrecting his career – Frank Sinatra. One of the best performances is by Ernst Borgnine as the hulking bully named Fatso.

Next, it’s easy to recognize the greatness of The Graduate today, but it’s hard to appreciate how groundbreaking it was – all because of Mike Nichol’s directorial choices. Dustin Hoffman’s performance was central to the success of the film, yet he was a nobody at the time and Nichols had to fight for him – the studio preferred a conventionally handsome leading man. Nichols sure wasn’t copying anybody else when he put the Simon and Garfunkle songs in the soundtrack. And the final shot – where Nichols kept his camera lingering on Hoffman and Katherine Ross until the actors became uncomfortable – is one of cinema’s best.

Dustin Hoffman (and Anne Bancroft’s leg) in THE GRADUATE