Victor/Victoria

I really liked the gripping Norwegian disaster movie The Wave, with its ticking clock tension and cool disaster effects. I saw The Wave last week at Cinequest, and it opens in theaters this weekend.  I also liked Cinequest’s Eye in the Sky, with Helen Mirren, and I’ll be writing about that by next week before it opens widely in the Bay Area.

I remain completely absorbed with Silicon Valley’s own film festival, Cinequest. Check out my up-to-the-moment coverage both on my Cinequest page and follow me on Twitter for the latest.  I especially recommend the exquisite Chilean contemplation of grief The Memory of Water, which plays Cinequest tomorrow evening; I’ve seen 25 Cinequest movies so far, and this is the best one. Tomorrow night, I’ll be checking out two movies I haven’t seen yet:  The Adderall Diaries with James Franco, Ed Harris and Amber Heard, Christian Slater and Cynthia Nixon and February, a horror flick with Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka.

Then there are the Oscar winners and contenders, whose theatrical runs are winding down but still out in theaters:

• Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
• The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
• The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn, an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
• The deserved Oscar winner for Screenplay, The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.

The Italian drama My Mother is a deeply personal film about loss with some comedic highlights from John Turturro. The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.

In honor of Cinequest, my Stream of the Week is the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery from last year’s festival.  Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

This week, watch for two wonderfully fun gender-crossing comedies on Turner Classic Movies on March 13: Victor/Victoria and Tootsie. TCM is playing Blow-up on March 17. Set in the Mod London of the mid-60s, a fashion photographer (David Hemmings) is living a fun but shallow life filled with sports cars, discos and and scoring with supermodels (think Jane Birkin, Sarah Miles and Verushka). Then he discovers that his random photograph of a landscape may contain a clue in a murder and meets a mystery woman (Vanessa Redgrave). After taking us into a vivid depiction of the Mod world, director Michelangelo Antonioni brilliantly turns the story into a suspenseful story of spiraling obsession. His L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse made Antonioni an icon of cinema, but Blow-up is his most accessible and enjoyable masterwork. There’s also a cameo performance by the Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page version of the Yardbirds and a quick sighting of Michael Palin in a nightclub.