Drama Archives - Page 37 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Schindler’s List (1993) [Collector’s Gift Set] – DVD|[20th Anniversary Limited Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 12, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Spielberg

Schindlers1

***/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
BD – Image A+ Sound A Extras B-
starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall
screenplay by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bill Chambers It’s not the “I could’ve done more” speech that rankles, but rather the scene directly preceding it, in which Herr Direktor Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) shames a gaggle of SS guards into leaving the 1100 Jews they’ve been ordered to kill unharmed in a manner not far removed from one of paterfamilias Mike’s guilt-trips on “The Brady Bunch”. (“You don’t really want to shoot these nice people, do you?” he asks (I’m hardly paraphrasing)–and one-by-one they skulk off.) I realized during my first viewing of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in almost a decade that I’m too much the representationalist to treat any text as sacred just because its subject matter is. Ergo, I allowed myself to cringe whenever I perceived Spielberg to be leaning on the crutch of suburban ethics, which he does often in the film’s “for he’s a jolly good fellow” denouement.*

Driving Miss Daisy (1989) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

March 3, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama

*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Morgan Freeman, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, Patti Lupone
screenplay by Alfred Uhry, based on his play
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw The heart-warming story of how a bitter old Jewess learns to not be such a bitch to a patient Negro driver in an idyllic pre-integration South, Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, released the same year as other such landmark films about race as Ferris Bueller’s Black Civil War Regiment and Do the Right Thing, discusses how forty-one years of forced companionship can overcome even the deepest-seated prejudices and resentments. Or, at least, dementia can. We meet Ms. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) as she crashes her car, and we meet Hoke (Morgan Freeman) when he begs Miss Daisy’s son Boolie (Dan Aykroyd) for a job as her chauffeur–meaning they’re both prisoners of circumstance, see? Meaning this is an unlikely but no less racially naïve remake of Stanley Kramer’s embarrassing melodrama The Defiant Ones, scored by Hans Zimmer with outtakes from his synth-heavy, bullshit-rich Rain Man score, all teddy bears humping and building music boxes and shit. Meaning, essentially, that we are to believe there is no substantive difference between a wealthy white woman needing to hire a driver and a destitute black man looking for work in 1948 Atlanta. My favourite scene is either the one where Hoke asks Miss Daisy’s permission to make water, or the one where Hoke says something and Miss Daisy tells him to “be still.”

The Loneliest Planet (2012) – DVD

February 28, 2013****/****, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Thriller

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras C+
starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Hani Furstenberg, Bidzina Gujabidze
screenplay by Julia Loktev, based on the short story by Tom Bissell
directed by Julia Loktev

by Walter Chaw Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet is an existentially terrifying little film about life’s essential loneliness, the absolute mutability of interpersonal relationships, and the ways our identities are formed not only by our perceptions of others, but by our preconceptions of the roles we play and, in turn, cast others to play, unbeknownst to them or to anyone. It gives the lie to the possibility of an unconditional relationship, to the idea that we can ever truly know ourselves or the people with whom we choose to share our lives. Most uncomfortably of all, it posits that everything we believe, everything we hold most dear about who we are and who we think we are, can change in an instant. It’s about love in that way, but love only in the context of the brutal, capricious, arbitrary world–love in the sense that we invest everything in it in acts of faith entirely unjustified by Nature and circumstance. There’s a scene in The Loneliest Planet where two pairs of feet play with each other on top of a sleeping bag, followed fast, after something small but terrible happens, by the owner of one pair of those feet watching the owner of the other walk away and eventually disappear into the ugly, insensate terrain of Russian Georgia’s Caucasus mountains. I think it’s no accident that the film takes place there, where mythology places Titan Prometheus in his eternal torment: Prometheus the bringer of fire, and life, and foresight (literally, in his name)–the father of Man flayed bare and reintroduced to the carnal night.

Holy Motors (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2013****/****, 2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica

Holymotors1

****/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue
written and directed by Leos Carax

by Angelo Muredda It’s no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from the same headspace as The Lovers on the Bridge and Mauvais Sang–movies that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What’s most surprising is that beneath the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax’s freewheeling cinema, is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor, in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax’s films have been ranked among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it’s also perfectly legible within a body of work that’s always found a human streak in the avant-garde.

Ivan’s Childhood (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 19, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Russia, The Criterion Collection, War

Ivanschildhood

Ivanovo detstvo
****/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov
screenplay by Vladimir Bogomolov and Mikhail Papava (uncredited: Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky)
directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

by Bryant Frazer Ivan’s Childhood opens, unexpectedly enough, inside a dream. The film is impatient. Its dreaming actually begins before the Mosfilm logo has faded from the screen, as the call of a cuckoo echoes softly on the soundtrack. Young Ivan appears, surrounded by trees (their pine needles dripping with what must be cool morning dew), our view of his face criss-crossed by the lines of a spider’s web strung up between the branches. The shot is perfectly composed, with the tree’s slender trunk and one of its branches creating a secondary, off-centre frame around the boy’s face. Ivan pauses there for only a moment–he must be looking for the cuckoo–before turning abruptly out of frame, a move that sends the camera skyward, moving vertically up the body of the pine and revealing more of the landscape. When the camera finishes its ascent, Ivan is again visible, in the midground of the image. His scrawny body, now seen in apparent miniature, turns again towards the camera. Nature is large and beautiful; he is small and, while lovely in a way, still awkward in his skin.

Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season (2010) – Blu-ray Disc

February 12, 20132000s, 2010, 2013, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, DVD, Gangster, Television

Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
“Boardwalk Empire,” “The Ivory Tower,” “Broadway Limited,” “Anastasia,” “Nights in Ballygran,” “Family Limitation,” “Home,” “Hold Me in Paradise,” “Belle Femme,” “The Emerald City,” “Paris Green,” “A Return to Normalcy”

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Two things right off the bat about HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”. First, the Martin Scorsese who directed the pilot would eat the tedious old guy who made Hugo for lunch. Second, for as good as the first season turns out to be, it’s based almost entirely on the strength of a cast minimizing the disappointment of opportunities lost. Even the actors, though, can be something of a liability, in that the mere presence of Michael Shannon cues us that straitlaced, proto-Untouchable Agent Nelson Van Alden is on his way to becoming a full-blown nutter. The premise is tired, too, as almost a century’s remove from the 1920s American gangster cycle has made the whole genre exhausted. There are no new delights in a midnight Tommy-gun execution in the woods, or an unhinged Guido unloading on a hapless shopkeeper. There’s not much joy, either, in trainspotting the parade of gangsters, the Lucky Lucianos (Vincent Piazza) and Al Capones (Stephen Graham, late of Public Enemies) and Meyer Lanskys (Anatol Yusef), partly because if you’re a student of gangland history, you’re immediately cued to their fates. Implanted spoilers, if you will. The real revelations of “Boardwalk Empire” are Jack Huston as a mutilated WWI doughboy and Gretchen Mol, who spent the first half of her career as Cameron Diaz’s haircut (see also: Malin Akerman) but emerges in this venue as an actress of complexity and intelligence. It’s enough to wonder what the series might have been were the casting not so otherwise on the nose–a strange liability, I know.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) + The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) [The Limited Edition Series] – Blu-ray Discs

February 1, 20131940s, 1950s, 2013, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Romance, Thriller

Postmanalways1

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
***/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil Kellaway, Hume Cronyn
screenplay by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch, based on the novel by James M. Cain
directed by Tay Garnett

THE RAINS OF RANCHIPUR
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Lana Turner, Richard Burton, Fred MacMurray, Michael Rennie
screenplay by Merle Miller, based on the novel by Louis Bromfield
directed by Jean Negulesco

by Jefferson Robbins There’s a series of doublings in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner’s best-known vehicle, that illuminates its obscure title. Disillusioned young wife Cora Smith (Turner) and drift-through handyman Frank Chambers (John Garfield) try twice to make way for their illicit love by eliminating her diner-impresario husband, Nick (Cecil Kellaway). There are two court cases steered by suspicious chief prosecutor Sackett (Leon Ames) and defended by wonderfully shifty lawyer Arthur “I’m Handling It” Keats (Hume Cronyn). There are two moonlight swims, each a turning point in the criminal couple’s courtship. Twice, the action bends when ailing female relatives, never seen, summon a main character to their sickbeds. There are even two roadside-diner femmes fatale: Cora, and her double Madge (Audrey Totter), who diverts Frank while he’s on the outs with the woman he killed to obtain. Finally, the murder itself creates a literal echo. These aren’t anvils falling from the heavens, but instead the patterns life presents only in retrospect: This moment, that day, that was when God was trying to get my attention. Like Frank, we’re too preoccupied to ever hear the first ring.

The Client (1994) – Blu-ray Disc

January 29, 20131990s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Thriller

Client1

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras D
starring Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary-Louise Parker, Brad Renfro
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by John Grisham
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Walter Chaw Joel Schumacher’s The Client starts out like a sequel to Schumacher’s own The Lost Boys, as two little boys (one of them Brad Renfro) try out cigarettes and John Grisham’s awful dialogue (augmented by awful screenwriter Akiva Goldsman) in a verdant backwoods Eden before witnessing the suicide of mob lawyer Jerome Clifford (Walter Olkewicz). “Romey” is despondent, see, because he knows where mobster Muldano (Anthony LaPaglia) has buried a body. Because little Mark (Renfro) spent quality time with the goombah before his voyage to the great Italian restaurant in the sky, Mark is now Little Italy’s Most Wanted. Cut to Muldano polishing off a Shirley Temple–judging by the way Schumacher makes love to the maraschino cherry between LaPaglia’s teeth–at a sleazy New Orleans nightclub to complete the impression that all schlockmeister Schumacher ever wanted to make was variations on arrested-vampire movies. At least it sports Will Patton in a supporting role back when he was a well-kept secret. And JT Walsh, and William H. Macy, and Mary-Louise Parker. Plus, Anthony Edwards, Bradley Whitford, Ossie Davis, Dan Castellaneta, William Sanderson…

Tha Makioka Sisters (1983)

January 25, 20131980s, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Japan, Theatrical

***/****
starring Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa
screenplay by Kon Ichikawa, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki
directed by Kon Ichikawa

by Angelo Muredda “So many things have happened in this house,” middle child Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma) tells her older sister Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi) near the end of The Makioka Sisters, an expansive period piece in miniature that could be churlishly described as a film about the sorts of mundane things that happen in houses. In settling down to adapt Junichiro Tanizaki’s 500-page tome about prewar Japan in a state of profound social and economic transition, glimpsed only through the intersecting marital and financial crises of the titular siblings, writer-director Kon Ichikawa inherited a difficult task, best appreciated by pausing to consider that there’s no English equivalent of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (though Sam Mendes keeps trying). If historical epics are hard to translate to a medium that doesn’t allow for marginal notes and flow charts to keep track of the minor players, the cloistered setting of domestic ones is doubly tricky. Consider that Joe Wright’s recent and thoroughly rotten stab at Anna Karenina adapts the first part of the novel as a self-reflexive essay about how difficult it is to dramatize tragedies that take place in drawing rooms, and the rest as an utterly banal dramatization of a tragedy set in drawing rooms. Ichikawa’s solution, after his own flirtation with hyper-theatricality in the first reel (which unveils the ensemble in a series of spatially disconcerting close-ups, then medium shots establishing the siblings’ relatives ages), is largely to mine the charismatic reserves of his all-star cast.

Krivina (2013)

January 24, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Goran Slavković, Jasmin Geljo
written and directed by Igor Drljaca

by Angelo Muredda 2012 was an unusually rich year for Canadian cinema, from the strangely fruitful pairing of David Cronenberg and Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis–though it comes from DeLillo, is there a more Cronenbergian line about deformity than the doctor’s insistence that Robert Pattinson let his mole “express itself”?–to the near perfect genre vehicle of Michael Dowse’s Goon. Both films are legibly Canadian in terms of content, despite Cosmopolis‘s faux-Manhattan setting, but one of the most heartening developments in last year’s crop was a turn to formalism that might confound expectations about what our movies are supposed to look and sound like. Weird Sex and Snowshoes, both Katherine Monk’s book and Jill Sharpe’s documentary adaptation of it, sketched a history of Canadian cinema through its dourness of tone and harsh thematic machinations–necrophilia, the malevolent north, and so on–so successfully as to canonize that image. Yet films like Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow and now Igor Drljaca’s Krivina (which debuted at last year’s TIFF) are a nice reminder that there’s also a sharp formalist strain, à la Michael Snow, for which such thematic surveys can’t quite account.

Gangster Squad (2013)

January 10, 20132013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Gangster, Theatrical

*/****
starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn
screenplay by Will Beall
directed by Ruben Fleischer

by Angelo Muredda In his recent chat with David Poland, Ruben Fleischer bristled at the suggestion that Gangster Squad shares any DNA with Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. That’s the sort of aesthetic family resemblance a lightweight like Fleischer ought to milk for all it’s worth, but hear him out: Sean Penn’s enterprising mob boss Mickey Cohen, he insists, isn’t a cartoon bruiser in the tradition of Al Pacino’s Big Boy Caprice, but a real guy whose face only looks a little off because it’s been molded by other men’s fists. He isn’t a comic-strip grotesque, then, but a seasoned boxer-turned-kingpin reanimated by a grand old actor and his team of historically-faithful makeup artists. What more could one ask of a Warner Bros. crime movie than such attention to detail? A lot, apparently–especially if the finished product looks more like Elmer Fudd than any retired amateur boxer. Verisimilitude is a nice goal, but it doesn’t suit Gangster Squad, at once a lumbering history lesson and a squib of a gangster picture–a zit on the ass of Mulholland Falls, Lee Tamahori’s somehow more accomplished stab at L.A. noir.

The Apartment (1960) – Blu-ray Disc

January 2, 2013****/****, 1960s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Billy Wilder, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Romance

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston
screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
directed by Billy Wilder

by Walter Chaw The older I get, the better I understand Billy Wilder. And the better I understand Billy Wilder, his weariness and acerbic sense of humour, the more I feel comfortable saying, with that complicated mix of affection and fair warning that I think indicates his work as well, that his movies are assholes and mean it. Billy Wilder, the ten-cents-a-dance Austrian gigolo, the roommate of Peter Lorre who learned English by listening to Dodgers games on the radio, the admirer of Ernst Lubistch. The guy who demanded he be allowed to direct his own screenplays and so made a legendary hyphenate debut with Double Indemnity. The writing partner of both Charles Brackett and I.A.L. Diamond, the man who made whores of Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and Shirley MacLaine, because nothing could ever be as simple, as innocent, as it appeared at first glance. The guy who lost family in Nazi concentration camps, who came up with the best closing line in movie history, which was “nobody’s perfect.” Maybe the last line of The Apartment–“Shut up and deal”–is a close second. Narrative context tells us the line refers to a card game; the Wilder context suggests a certain way of looking at the world: coping, acceptance, fatalism. Would you believe The Apartment is actually one of Wilder’s optimistic films? Optimistic because the way it views the world is through a scrim of absolute cynicism–and despite it, despite all the towers falling down, there’s the possibility of love, sweet and simple, between Ms. Kubelik and Mr. Baxter.

Promised Land (2012)

December 28, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Matt Damon, John Kraskinski, Frances McDormand, Rosemarie DeWitt
screenplay by John Krasinski & Matt Damon, based on a story by Dave Eggers
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw The first warning sign is that Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land is named after a Natalie Merchant song, though that’s really all the warning you need. Give this to Steven Soderbergh, another director who, like Van Sant, has alternated small, personal projects with the occasional crowd-pleaser: At least when Soderbergh does it, it’s not simpering crap like Finding Forrester or Milk. (The best Van Sant film of the year, in fact, is Julia Loktev’s astounding The Loneliest Planet.) Here, alas, Van Sant is reunited with Good Will Hunting buddy Matt Damon, directing a screenplay Damon co-wrote with co-star John Krasinski from a story by (gulp) Dave Eggers. Featuring enough self-satisfaction to power Ed Begley, Jr.’s enviro-car for a century, Promised Land is the kind of movie that suggests everything Conservatives believe about Lefties being tree-hugging, privileged morons is pretty dead on the mark. What I’m saying is that it’s stupid; Ayn Rand ain’t got nothin’ on Damon and Krasinski.

This is 40 (2012)

December 20, 20122012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, John Lithgow, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Judd Apatow

by Walter Chaw It’s scattershot, and sloppy, but any movie about fortysomethings dealing with familial, financial, sexual, and physical issues that ends with Ryan Adams performing “Lucky One” in a little club is a movie I will like. And I do: Judd Apatow’s This is 40 isn’t good, exactly, but it listens and it has a sense of humour, as well as a certain optimism about it. I bristle at Apatow’s desire in his other films to impose a traditionally moral conclusion on all the atrocity that’s preceded it, but in a “spin-off” of Knocked Up, about people exactly my age in roughly my situation discovering they’re the grown-ups for some reason and through no fault of their own, that desire for a hopeful conclusion is extremely compelling. This Is 40 is one of those works that gets you at the right time, I think. I’ve often wondered if the reason I’ve never liked Tolkien is that I didn’t read him when I was 12. I wish I had. For what it’s worth, I’m glad I saw This is 40 in these last six months before my own fortieth birthday. It’s my Twilight. I know it’s terrible–flabby, obviously tinkered with ’til the last minute (the commercials for the film are about 90% cut footage), and packed with digressions that distract rather than edify (a bit with Charlyne Yi is a particular lowlight), but it speaks to me, and when Apatow’s right, I realize, he’s spot on.

Les visiteurs du soir (1942) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 17, 20121940s, 2012, Authors: Jefferson Robbins, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Fantasy, France, Romance, The Criterion Collection

a.k.a. The Devil’s Envoys
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Alain Cuny, Arletty, Marie Déa, Jules Berry
screenplay by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche
directed by Marcel Carné

by Jefferson Robbins Fairytale is the oldest way we know to exorcise trauma or repurpose it to didactic ends. The moving image, probably the newest. So Marcel Carné’s Les visiteurs du soir (literally, The Night Visitors, though its international title is The Devil’s Envoys), created in France during a period of repression equalled only by the Terror, pulls both tricks. It’s a film, therefore it’s not reality, but it’s also shaped as a magical courtly romance and set in a distant past where romances were both entertainment and cultural transgression. Gilles (Alain Cuny) and Dominique (Arletty) are figures out of a medieval fresco or some monk’s illuminated pages, from Gilles’s suggestively forked mullet to Dominique’s graceful, benedictory poses. The two are minstrels on horseback in 1485–when troubadours carried news, gossip, and forbidden literature from one feudal estate to the next, singing songs of organic, passionate love for nobles trapped in arranged marriages. A long way from Vichy France, under the Nazi occupation, yet either world offered death as punishment for dissent, and both found succour in art that trespassed boundaries.

Trouble with the Curve (2012) [Combo Pack] – Blu-ray + DVD + Ultraviolet

December 16, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Sports

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman
screenplay by Randy Brown
directed by Robert Lorenz

by Angelo Muredda Trouble with the Curve is an unfortunate title for a film beset with problems on every side. Helmed by longtime Clint Eastwood producer/assistant director/close friend Robert Lorenz, making his equally unfortunate feature debut, it isn’t directed so much as stiffly pushed in the direction of new events once every ten minutes or so. A father-daughter family drama, a sports movie, and a portrait of a career woman swimming with the sharks, first-timer Randy Brown’s screenplay is a mess beyond even an experienced director’s fixing.

Umberto D. (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

December 10, 20121950s, 2012, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Italy, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B
starring Carlo Battisti, Maria Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari, Ileana Simova
screenplay by Cesare Zavattini
directed by Vittorio De Sica

by Walter Chaw Though he’s best known for The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. is, to my mind, the superior film, and ultimately one of the few pictures I’ve ever revisited from the era of Italian Neo-Realism–a movement I’ve never particularly understood nor, indeed, liked. It’s possible that there’s not much to understand, that as a reaction to the execution of Mussolini and during that brief “Italian Spring,” Italian cinema, freed by necessity from the studio and looking to present a more authentic representation of the country’s broken cities (film critics were to blame for the movement, of course, as they would later be for the French Nouvelle Vague), found non-professional actors to play out social melodramas. I wonder if I’ve always bristled at the notion that the Giuseppe De Santises and Luchino Viscontis produced during this time were anything like “realism” as I understood it; when I was first introduced to American films noir, I had no idea they were as stylized as they were because of an attempt at “realism,” too. Whatever the case, I see Umberto D. as something like an early Fellini, like La Strada or even 8½: There’s something that feels very much like a humanistic solipsism at its middle. Which is so much more interesting than the cries for social equality that inevitably turn to plaintive keening in my ear. Sometimes liberals damage their own cause–long-held close-ups of crying children have a way of doing that.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

December 3, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Christopher Nolan, Disaster Movie, Drama, Superhero, Thriller, UK

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw For all its overreaching (and what’s perilously close to a training montage), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is fascinating, engaging, and aggressively present. It’s a wonderfully-performed melodrama about the sad, intractable state of our sorry state, painted in broad strokes in a muted palette. It’s what many would think impossible despite the evidence of its predecessor: a comic book for grown-ups. And it accomplishes what it sets out to do without much in the way of action sequences or hero moments–the irony being, of course, that The Dark Knight Rises is fated to become the best-reviewed and most-lucrative release of 2012 for having the very same qualities for which the deeply-underappreciated Superman Returns was lambasted. I would argue that a wide swath of the people who will adore it will have difficulty articulating exactly why.

Rosetta (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

November 28, 2012****/****, 1990s, 2012, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Belgium, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Palme d'Or Winner, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Émilie Dequenne, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Anne Yernaux
written and directed by Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

by Bryant Frazer If there were any doubt that the Dardennes discovered what would be their lasting aesthetic with La promesse, it was dispelled in the opening moments of Rosetta. The earlier film spent a lot of time following characters around, hovering behind them as they made their way through their world. As Rosetta begins, we’re again in close to a character, but this time we have a velocity: The girl, Rosetta (Emilie Dequenne), is storming from room to room in some kind of industrial facility, and the Dardennes’ camera is following her at speed. This isn’t a virtuoso tracking shot out of Scorsese or P.T. Anderson, though; Rosetta isn’t accommodating the camera. When she exits a room, she slams the door behind her and the camera is caught up short, forcing an edit. When she erupts onto a factory floor, she ducks underneath the machinery, making her own passageways where the camera cannot go, and again forcing a cut. We are not welcome to follow.

Greatest Hits (2012)

November 22, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Mexico, Theatrical

Los mejores temas
***½/****
starring Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez, José Rodriguez López, Luis Rodriguez
written and directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Angelo Muredda Odd as it might seem for a 30-year-old director to get a retrospective, you can see the logic behind TIFF Bell Lightbox’s series on Nicolás Pereda, whose six features demonstrate a remarkably consistent vision stemming from Pereda’s interest in gently setting an audience’s narrative expectations on their side. Pereda, who’s been relatively unheralded in his adoptive home of Toronto (despite his sturdy international reputation and his 2011 feting at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, to name just one laurel), brings the sophistication and focus of an old hand to each of his formally rigorous but unassuming projects. Although it’s his most recent work, there’s perhaps no better starting point for the uninitiated than the aptly titled Greatest Hits, which sees Pereda gathering his cast of players for a twist on the family reunion.