Authors: Angelo Muredda Archives - Page 10 of 13

TIFF ’12: Frances Ha

September 13, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There's a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie's "Modern Love." (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her "galumphing radiance.") You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender's miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song's abrupt stop, from Leos Carax's Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant's Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film's ambling structure: a lovely headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.

TIFF ’12: To the Wonder

September 12, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he's now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist's career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick's oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line's trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas's carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl's joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It's all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, "There's something missing."

TIFF ’12: Tabu

September 10, 2012****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Portugal, Silent, TIFF

****/****
directed by Miguel Gomes

by Angelo Muredda Tabu opens, fittingly enough, at the movies, with an old melodrama about an explorer who's just been turned into a brooding crocodile. That's the first of many transformations in a protean film that shifts gracefully from ironic postcolonial critique, to essay on the cinema as a means of appropriation and reincarnation, to thwarted love story. While those layers may seem impossible to navigate, take heart: Director Miguel Gomes's great coup is to let this complex material flow instinctually from its emotional core. Fluidity is key to Gomes's aesthetic, which pairs the breathless momentum of a page-turner with the non-sequitur progression of a dream. Case in point, a moment when Pilar (Teresa Madruga), the first half's protagonist, sees a movie with the stuffy man who loves her. Pilar is visibly moved by what's on screen, but we never see it, hearing only a Portuguese cover of "Be My Baby" on the soundtrack–a thread left dangling only to be gingerly picked up in the second half. "You know what dreams are like," as one character tells us: "We can't command them."

TIFF ’12: Ship of Theseus

September 7, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, India, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Anand Gandhi

by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical origins up front. Gandhi's film begins with a philosophical conceit from Plutarch–the question of whether a ship that's been repaired using parts from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all–and workshops it through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied with the biological analogy of Theseus's broken-down ship, a leaky body that needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance between humanism and intellectual rigor.

TIFF ’12: A Royal Affair

September 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

En Kongelig Affære
***/****
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Angelo Muredda A Royal Affair isn't exactly Barry Lyndon, but as period pieces go, it's surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and politicians determine a nation's political outcomes as much as the ideologies they represent. It doesn't seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. "It is the Age of Enlightenment," we're told in the tasteful font of "Masterpiece Theatre", and while the rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator, Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect–her book collection doesn't pass the Danish board of censors–who flounders in the country she now rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense back to the erratic King.

TIFF ’12: Reality

September 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Film Festivals, Italy, Satire, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Angelo Muredda Reality, Matteo Garrone's follow-up to the urban planner's nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan crook who dreams of being a contestant on "Big Brother". Luciano is played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide–unlike his modest fictional counterpart, who's involved in a baffling scheme to resell pastry-making robots on the black market. It's a terrific performance, somehow sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it's the reason Reality works as well as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.

TIFF ’12: The Hunt

September 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Jagten
**½/****
directed by Thomas Vinterberg

by Angelo Muredda The Hunt hinges on a misunderstanding, a nasty story born of a child's bruised ego and happily seized by a pack of overeager concern trolls calling themselves adults. But there's a whole other story about misunderstanding to be spun from how the film will surely be received in different quarters as either a devastating portrait of small-town life or a grim black comedy. That one is all on director and Dogme 95 cofounder Thomas Vinterberg. While it's always dicey to ascribe authorial intent, Vinterberg seems to waffle between middlebrow tragedy and scattershot satire not out of some postmodern commitment to walking the edge of irony, but because the script can't really sustain a further push in either direction. That makes The Hunt a provocative film, sure, but also a bit of a lazy one–a conversation starter without much follow-through.

TIFF ’12: Rebelle

September 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Kim Nguyen

by Angelo Muredda A firm refusal of the charge that Canadian filmmaking is unable to see much farther than its own backyard, Kim Nguyen's Rebelle tackles a complex sociopolitical situation without reducing it to easy lessons learned. The most recent reference point for what Nguyen is doing with this first-person chronicle of Komona (Rachel Mwanza), a 12-year-old abducted from her home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and turned into a child soldier for rebel forces, is probably Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. But though that film also reaches for global significance in tracing the grim trajectory of a politically disenfranchised child, its vagueness stands in sharp contrast to Nguyen's accomplishment here, which is to ground Komona's story in a particular milieu.

TIFF ’12: Amour

August 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Michael Haneke

by Angelo Muredda From the moment it screened at Cannes, Amour became the odds-on favourite to win the Palme d’Or, and no wonder: Terrence Malick worked more or less the same formalist-auteur-goes-humanist formula to great success just last year. But while The Tree of Life‘s cosmic drama was hardly a stretch for Malick, you have to think Amour, which ultimately did cop the big prize, was a harder nut to crack for Michael Haneke. He was, of course, first awarded the Palme for a thuddingly obvious Village of the Damned knockoff designed for people who don’t do horror. Would he prove himself human after all?

TIFF ’12: Rust & Bone

August 30, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

De rouille et d'os
**/****
directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda On paper, the most troubling thing about Rust & Bone is the suggestion, right from the title, that we're in for a yarn about maimed bodies that go bump in the night, grinding their way into oblivion. You have to give some credit to Jacques Audiard–who's otherwise taking a decisive step back from A Prophet–for going surprisingly easy on the figurative potential of a love story between Stephanie (Marion Cotillard), a whale trainer turned double-amputee after a rough day on the job, and Ali (Bullhead's Matthias Schoenaerts), a brutish security guard and distant father who moonlights as a back-alley boxer. Based on two short stories (it shows) from Toronto-born author Craig Davidson, the film puts itself squarely in the specious Paul Haggis tradition of the crisscrossing tragedy but keeps the stakes pretty low much of the time, mostly sparing us the usual tortured hymns about how we're all connected at some primal level. As a disability film, a problem genre that finds little middle ground between triumph-of-adversity celebrations and euthanasia apologies, it's also fairly attuned to mechanical matters that usually lie outside the bounds of melodrama. Consider Stephanie's insurance-paid apartment, a smartly-organized space for a wheelchair user, down to the widened doorframes and easily-accessible washer and dryer. Ephemera counts for something.

Premium Rush (2012)

August 23, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez, Jamie Chung
screenplay by David Koepp & John Kamps
directed by David Koepp

by Angelo Muredda Those who had hoped Joseph Gordon-Levitt's presence in The Dark
Knight Rises signalled some kind of Tim Drake extravaganza only to make do
with his dour Robin surrogate John Blake ought to perk up, for Premium Rush
is here. David Koepp's unabashedly silly, good-natured courier thriller is
curiously light on thrills, its daytime climax of a bike race in the park about
as low-stakes as Harvey Keitel's hot pursuit of a pickpocket simian in Monkey
Trouble. What it lacks in dramatic heft, though, it more than makes up for
in its fleetness and tight grasp on cartoon physics, as well as its smart use
of Michael Shannon as an unstable roadblock and Gordon-Levitt as just the blunt
instrument to push past him, a chiselled boy wonder who knows his way around a
fixie, i.e., the lightweight single-gear bike to which he's practically glued.

Identification of a Woman (1982) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

August 20, 20121980s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Italy, The Criterion Collection

Identificazione di una donna
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras D
starring Tomas Milian, Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson, Lara Wendel
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni & Gérard Brach
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Angelo Muredda When SIGHT & SOUND announced the long-awaited results of their 2012 critics poll earlier this month, the Internet was abuzz with the shifting fortunes of Citizen Kane and Vertigo–the flip-flop heard 'round the world. Less noted was the latest demotion of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, which debuted at a startling second place in 1962's poll (the film was only two years old at that point), then steadily declined with each decade before landing at number 21 on the most recent survey. What to make of this seemingly calamitous downward shift? Probably not much. Like fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who's also been increasingly received as a curio despite the continued respect for 8½ (particularly among directors), Antonioni's canonical films are stamped by their era; L'Avventura's downgraded fortune likely says as much about the limited shelf life of European modernism–which its cool classicism and intellectual rigor so fully embodies–as it does about the film itself.

2 Days in New York (2012)

August 9, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Julie Delpy, Chris Rock, Albert Delpy, Alexia Landeau
screenplay by Julie Delpy & Alexia Landeau & Alexandre Nahon
directed by Julie Delpy

by Angelo Muredda A leaner 2 Days in New York might have worked as a pilot for a Showtime series with a game Julie Delpy at the helm, but as a movie it's a bust, a high-calorie trifle that goes down lumpy. Delpy, who serves as director, co-screenwriter (with onscreen co-stars Alexia Landeau and Alexandre Nahon), and star, envisions the film as a roundabout sequel to 2007's 2 Days in Paris, but the first instalment got much of its low-key charm from Delpy's chemistry with fellow neurotic Adam Goldberg as Jack, an audience surrogate displaced in his girlfriend Marion's anything-goes European milieu. With Jack out of the picture, the follow-up brings Marion's family to the flat she shares with current partner Mingus (Chris Rock) in New York–a proposition that's supposed to be inherently funny, even though Mingus is easygoing and her widowed father Jeannot (real-life Delpy paterfamilias, Albert) isn't all that grotesque. That disjunct gives the film an identity crisis from which it never recovers. What's worse, it just isn't very funny as a concept.

The Queen of Versailles (2012)

August 9, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Lauren Greenfield

by Angelo Muredda Lauren Greenfield's greatest boon with The Queen of Versailles, an absorbing and unfailingly intelligent documentary that rises Phoenix-like out of some spotty origins, might lie in how it makes the life of two wealthy Americans seem unliveable, stressed on the verge of system collapse. Starting in the heyday of time-share emperor and Westgate Resorts CEO David Siegel (who ambiguously claims to have gotten Bush 2.0 elected in 2000, but won't explain how), the film starts off–and hints at its initial purpose–as a portrait of an industrious man building himself a monument, a house to contain his every desire. A smart but not tasteful man, he models the 90,000 square foot Orlando palace after Versailles; when asked why he needs to build it at all when his current home is already enormous (although, as he points out, "bursting at the seams"), he simply smiles and says, "Because I can." But pride, as they say, goes before the fall, and the recession hits before Versailles can be completed, leaving each of David's two hands on a very costly loose end: a massive unfinished home that's impossible to sell in a collapsed housing market; and a resort industry that filled its coffers with the life-savings of the newly foreclosed, run on hypothetical money that has run out of currency.

Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012)

August 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Chris Messina, Elijah Wood
screenplay by Rashida Jones & Will McCormack
directed by Lee Toland Krieger

by Angelo Muredda A long-overdue showcase for "Parks and Recreation" star Rashida Jones, Celeste and Jesse Forever never makes it out of the generic romcom woods it wants so badly to escape, and the strain leaves everyone involved looking exhausted. That's especially disappointing, because Jones is a comic talent, burdened by a script–her own, co-written with fellow TV vet Will McCormack–that insists on lifting beyond its weight class to subvert the story it's telling. Bridesmaids seems to be the model here (and not just because the star is her own screenwriter), although director Lee Toland Krieger has little of Paul Feig's ease in modulating tone. You could think of Judd Apatow's protagonists as one man with many faces and varying accessories, and while Apatow is AWOL here, his presence is felt in the way that Jones's Celeste, a professional trend-watcher for a PR startup, suggests a more financially secure version of Kristen Wiig's pastry chef in Bridesmaids. From the start, we get the impression that she's happily married to unemployed graphic designer Jesse (Andy Samberg, in his second marriage-themed movie this summer), with whom she shares an easy rapport too-obviously signalled by their obnoxious habit of making restaurant orders in the voice of Dieter from "Sprockets." It turns out they're separated, though still best friends–at least until romantic complications wedge them farther and farther apart for the remaining 90 minutes or so.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

July 12, 20122012, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Family, Theatrical

**/****
starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry
screenplay by Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin, based on Alibar's play "Juicy and Delicious"
directed by Benh Zeitlin

by Angelo Muredda The trailer for Beasts of the Southern Wild promises a harmless experience, but woe to anyone who goes in expecting a triumphal horn concert only to find Benh Zeitlin's accomplished yet exasperating debut, a libertarian wolf in a fuzzy Aurochs suit. That the film is far trickier than its marketing hook suggests is at once refreshing and troubling, given what it actually has up its sleeve. An oyster banquet pitched on a burial site, it's the sort of ethnographic celebration of a disenfranchised people that ends with the unspoken maxim, "And then they all died like men, and faded into legend."

Our long-overdue review of Margaret (2011)

July 12, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, DVD

***½/****
starring Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Jean Reno, Matt Damon
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Angelo Muredda The early word on Margaret was that it was a promising three-hour-plus city symphony wrested away in the editing room from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan. Still mired in legal troubles from the production over the course of its quiet release and critical resurgence last fall, Lonergan briefly spoke up to deny that what a coterie of critics and audience members had seen up to that point was damaged goods, admitting the 150-minute theatrical version is more or less his Director's Cut. While the Blu-ray release includes the famed longer version*, then, it bears mentioning that if the theatrical cut is a thwarted masterpiece, uneven but conceptually daring and powerful, it's very much Lonergan's thwarted masterpiece.

To Rome with Love (2012)

July 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Italy, Music, Romance, Spain, Theatrical

**/****
starring Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There's an odd moment early in To Rome with Love that makes you sit up and wonder if Woody Allen has made good on the promise shown by his surprisingly warm Midnight in Paris. Stumbling out of a movie theatre with his wife and another couple, regular schmo Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) mounts a rousing defense of Saverio Costanzo's The Solitude of Prime Numbers, offering that its openness to human mystery makes it far superior to The King's Speech. I can't say I agree with him, but how nice to see such an idiosyncratic opinion voiced in earnest. That's a good sign, coming from a director whose characters often sound like variations on one another in his lesser works–but it's also a false one, when much of what follows plays out like a flat homage to omnibus city movies.

The Female Eye Film Festival

June 21, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, Theatrical

by Angelo Muredda Following the boys-only slate of the Cannes Film Festival, which made room for tepidly-received efforts from the likes of Andrew Dominik and Lee Daniels but shut out women in a comparable phase of their careers, June has been a surprisingly fruitful month for female directors of North American independents. Not that it's compensation for that snub, but it's heartening to see Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister and Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz get the lion's share of positive indie press in recent weeks, putting them in good company with Wes Anderson, whose Moonrise Kingdom did make Cannes's official selection. You could think of the Female Eye Film Festival, now entering its tenth year and running through June 24^th at Toronto's Carlton Cinemas, as a low-key companion to those higher-profile releases.

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (2012)

June 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Matthew Akers

by Angelo Muredda Forty years into a celebrated career kicked off by the intense bodily exposures of 1973's Rhythm10, a solo show in which she put herself through twenty rounds of five-fingered fillet, Marina Abramović has earned the right to call herself the grandmother of performance art. "I don't want to be alt anymore," the Belgrade-born, New York-based artist admits early in Matthew Akers's engaging bio-doc Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, indulging for a rare moment in her accomplishments. It's a testament to both her frankness and Akers's tasteful curatorial approach to her oeuvre that there's nothing pretentious about the statement, only a clear-eyed assessment of the distinct phases in an artist's life and work.