Riot Cinema: Great Cinema From The Past Half Century

Mesmerizing, mysterious, willfully perverse, the Mexican movie Post Tenebras Lux (2012) opens with two scenes, one realistic, the other fantastical. In the first a toddler roams across a muddy country field at dusk as thunder booms and dogs chase cows, horses and donkeys.

It’s a cacophonous, stunning sequence. The edges of the images are softly blurred, the light is magical — although it isn’t remotely clear what that girl and those animals have to do with the following scene of a red, radiant devil with horns, hooves, swishing tail and a literal toolbox entering a house at night, like a handyman from Hades on an emergency call. It’s no wonder that a young boy in the house who sees this bizarre apparition stops cold to gawk. [Read more…]

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

December 2, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Last May, when a Cannes Film Festival jury headed by Tim Burton awarded the Palme d’Or (2011), there was widespread surprise and a few eruptions of outrage. The film — from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has become a familiar presence on the festival circuit over the past decade — is unquestionably strange, at times mystifyingly oblique. Those who insist on a linear narrative or an easily identifiable set of themes may find themselves puzzled, perhaps to the point of frustration. But it is hard to see how this movie, with its contemplative mood and genial, curious spirit, could make anybody angry. On the contrary: encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss. [Read more…]

Take Shelter

December 2, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

“You’ve got a good life, Curtis,” says Dewart, Curtis’s best friend and co-worker. (Dewart is played by Shea Whigham, Curtis by the amazing Michael Shannon.) “I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man: take a look at his life and say, ‘That’s good.’ ”

A sinister corollary to Dewart’s homespun truism might be that the greatest fear a man can experience is that of losing the good life he has. It is this anxiety, which afflicts Curtis in especially virulent form, that defines the mood of Take Shelter (2011), Jeff Nichols’s remarkable new film. It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.

[Read more…]

Dogtooth

December 1, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Peter Bradshaw

A black-comic poem of dysfunction, a veritable operetta of self-harm, this brilliant and bizarre film from the Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos is superbly acted and icily controlled – it grips from the very first scenes. Development does not get more arrested than this. Dogtooth (2010) could be read as a superlative example of absurdist cinema, or possibly something entirely the reverse – a clinically, unsparingly intimate piece of psychological realism. Watching this, and alternately gaping at the unselfconsciously shocking scenes of violence, thwarted sexuality and unexpressed sibling grief, I was reminded of Alan Bennett’s maxim that all families have a secret: they are not like other families. But I can’t imagine any family being quite as unlike others as this. [Read more…]

Winter’s Bone

November 30, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by David Denby

In the extraordinary independent film Winter’s Bone (2010), the large Dolly clan lives off the grid. The movie is set in the Missouri Ozarks, in backcountry—way back, where the front yards are filled with dead cars and cracked toilets, and the children ride wooden horses and hunt squirrels. There are no telephones, much less cell phones or computers, and not a TV in sight. [Read more…]

Fish Tank

November 21, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Mia, the 15-year-old protagonist of Fish Tank (2009), Andrea Arnold’s tough and brilliant second feature, moves with such speed and fury that she seems to be trying to flee not only from her bleak surroundings but also from the movie itself. The narrow, nearly square frame boxes Mia in, and Ms. Arnold’s on-the-run hand-held tracking shots increase the sense of panicky claustrophobia. Living in a cramped apartment in a British housing project that stands like a cluster of megaliths in the middle of nowhere, Mia is at once trapped and adrift, unable to contain or to express the feelings seething beneath the blank, sullen mien she usually presents to the world. [Read more…]

A Prophet

November 20, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Near the end of A Prophet (2009), one of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices, there’s a scene in which the lead character, Malik, travels to Paris to kill some men. The scene reverberates with almost unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway image: Seconds before he begins shooting, thereby sealing his fate, you see him catch sight of a pair of men’s shoes showcased like jewels in a boutique window in a rich Parisian quarter. He does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why he doesn’t just get on with it. [Read more…]

Drag Me To Hell

November 20, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed By Dan Kois

In each of the two great movies opening this weekend, a crotchety old person faces the loss of the family home to cold, impersonal capitalism. On which film should you, the viewer, spend your hard-earned money? Well, if you think you’d enjoy seeing the elderly hero spirit away his home in an inspiring ode to adventure and friendship, you should see Up. On the other hand, if you’d rather watch the old person viciously attack a loan officer, tear out chunks of her hair and place a horrifying Gypsy curse on her soul, then see Drag Me to Hell (2009). How angry are you feeling about the economy, anyway? [Read more…]

Gomorrah

November 19, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

There are no colorful characters in Gomorrah (2008), Matteo Garrone’s corrosive and ferociously unsentimental fictional look at Italian organized crime; no white-haired mamas lovingly stirring the spaghetti sauce; no opera arias swelling on the soundtrack; no homilies about family, honor or tradition; no dark jokes; no catchy pop songs; no film allusions; no winking fun; no thrilling violence. Instead, there is waste, grotesque human waste, some of which ends up illegally buried in the same ground where trees now bear bad fruit, some of which, like the teenager scooped up by a bulldozer on a desolate beach, is cast away like trash. [Read more…]

Let The Right One In

November 17, 2016 By Cvon 3 Comments

The title of the spectrally beautiful Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In (2008) comes from a song by Morrissey, a romantic fatalist who would surely appreciate this darkly perverse love story. “Let the right one in,” he sings in “Let the Right One Slip In.” I’d say you were within your rights to bite/The right one and say, ‘What kept you so long?’ ” These may sound like words to live by, though in the case of a film about a boy and the girl next door who may just be a vampire, they could easily turn out to be words to die for. [Read more…]

Bronson

November 15, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2008) is a highly stylized and embellished film biography of a man known as the most famous prisoner in Britain. Born Michael Peterson in 1952 and raised mostly in the city of Luton, Charles Bronson, renamed after the American movie star, has spent all but a few months of the last 35 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. [Read more…]

Eastern Promises

November 12, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

The story told in Eastern Promises (2007) is a grim and violent one, set in London’s expatriate Russian underworld. The film, directed by David Cronenberg from a script by Steve Knight, revisits a number of themes and motifs that are staples of the genre: the ties of family and culture that bind criminal organizations; Oedipal drama; honor among thieves. The audience stumbles into this realm in the company of an innocent outsider (Naomi Watts) who finds herself at once fascinated and repelled by it, as well as in considerable danger. [Read more…]

House of Sand

November 12, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

If anything, the title of House of Sand (2005) is an understatement. This lovely film, directed by Andrucha Waddington (Me You Them), takes place in a corner of northern Brazil that is a veritable universe of dry, swirling white dust. Like the main characters — three women of successive generations exiled from a softer, more accommodating life in the city — you grow accustomed to this landscape after a while, and come to appreciate its beauty. But at first it seems about as hospitable as the surface of Mars: gritty, windy, almost actively hostile to human habitation. [Read more…]

Pusher I & II

November 11, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Robert Abele

It’s the rare crime film that balances the vicarious thrill of rampant illegality with the real-world desperation of broken souls who are nearly always one wrong move away from a wretched end. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy — showing this weekend at the American Cinematheque over two days — are such movies, character-overlapping slash-and-burners about underworld types who discover the pitfalls of vulnerability in their profession when it’s least advantageous. [Read more…]

The Machinist

November 10, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

Christian Bale’s 63-pound weight loss for his role in The Machinist (2004) may take the cake (or is it a diet wafer?) as an example of an actor’s starving for his art. To play Trevor Reznik, the skeletal insomniac who stalks through this bleak psychological thriller, this buff star of American Psycho reduced himself to a walking 120-pound cadaver. [Read more…]

A Tale of Two Sisters

November 10, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Ed Gonzalez

Truly an exercise in internal horror, the glossy A Tale of Two Sisters (2003) could just as easily have been called What Lies Beneath. A hit in its native Korea, Kim Jee-woon’s gothic-style spooker is only too happy to keep its audience guessing. [Read more…]

Japón

November 10, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

After a long, dreamy car trip from the city, a haggard middle-aged man (Alejandro Ferretis) walks through a field, dotted with cactuses and scrubby trees, on the rocky edge of a canyon. He meets a group of hunters, and asks them the way to an obscure, tiny village at the bottom. Someone asks if he is going to visit family down there. ”No,” he replies, ”I’m going to kill myself.”

The production notes inform me that Japón (2002) the first feature by the young Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, whose opening I have just described, was shot in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, and also in 16-millimeter CinemaScope, a format that captures wide expanses of land and sky, as well as flickering nuances of natural light. [Read more…]

City Of God

November 10, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Christopher Orr

A few minutes into City of God (2002), the narrator offers (in English-subtitled Portuguese) a pointed description of the sprawling slum outside Rio de Janeiro that gives the film its name: “There was no electricity, paved streets, or transportation. But for the rich and powerful our problems didn’t matter.” This introduction could easily have marked the beginning of a filmic diatribe about the plight of the poor in Brazil, an earnest work intended to inform but not entertain. Instead it marks the beginning of a glorious exercise in cinematic style. Yes, City of God tells a story about the hopeless, desperate denizens of a drug- and violence-riddled slum. But tells a story, and does so with a narrative panache that owes more to Scorsese or Tarantino than to any well-meaning documentarian. [Read more…]

Demonlover

November 10, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Stephen Holden

The enigmatic antiheroine of Olivier Assayas’s diabolical techno thriller, Demonlover (2002), suggests a female cyber-age equivalent of the archetypal Man With No Name. Diane (Connie Nielsen), as she calls herself, is a coolly seductive industrial spy of ambiguous sexuality, with an invented résumé, who sometimes speaks in riddles. During a romantic dinner with Hervé (Charles Berling), her suspicious but lustful boss at a Paris-based multinational conglomerate, she declares: ”No one sees anything, ever. They watch but they don’t understand.” [Read more…]

Sexy Beast

November 9, 2016 By Cvon Leave a Comment