Margot, married to her husband Lou (Seth Rogen, gentle and lovely) for five years, is at a crossroads. She has been reflecting on the state of her marriage, not out of sudden independent awareness of routine, but due to the arrival of Daniel (Luke Kirby), her very attractive and interested rickshaw-pulling neighbor. Margot and Lou are mutually adoring, but Daniel’s introduction into Margot’s sphere colors her marriage rote, loving but sexless....
Like a lucid nightmare on the subway at odd hours, The Double leaves one feeling intellectually stimulated, creatively charged, and close to existential panic. The second feature directed by Richard Ayoade is a dark and surreal comedy-thriller that takes a dizzying jaunt through cinematic and literary allusion, parody and paranoia. Indebted to Kafka, Hitchcock, Welles, Gilliam, Lynch, Polanski, and a long list of others, the film is set in a futuristic bureaucratic bedlam of labyrinthine offices, apartments, whose windows are thinly veiled by venetian blinds, and deserted greasy spoons....
After only 12 days in release, Stephen Chow’s comic fantasy The Mermaid became China’s top-grossing film of all time, at $375 million and counting. It is a testament to the remarkable and enduring popularity of Chow, an actor and director who has risen from Hong Kong “nonsense” comedies to become one of the most bankable names across Asia. Receiving a slow U.S. rollout from Sony Pictures, The Mermaid has all of the Chow hallmarks: it is an ebullient underdog story punctuated with cartoonishly violent slapstick, here pitting a group of militant mermaids against the developers who are destroying their habitat....
In the U.S., the AIDS pandemic struck San Francisco first and hardest. We Were Here, David Weissman and Bill Weber’s brisk, tender, multifaceted, and deeply moving documentary, tells the story of the AIDS crisis through the voices of four gay men (Ed Wolf, Paul Boneberg, Daniel Goldstein, Guy Clark) and one woman (Eileen Glutzer), all of whom pitched in—for years—to help the sick and the dying because, as the movie makes clear, the circumstances made it unthinkable for them to do otherwise....
Two years ago, Morgan Fisher reappeared to the eyes and minds of cinephiles, after an absence whose length we’d more likely associate with comets or cicadas. The occasion was marked by the appearance of the curiously titled ( ). The eponymous parentheses double as an emoticon expressing the anticipation felt during the 19-year gap between its appearance and the filmmaker’s previous dispatch, the 1984 masterwork Standard Gauge. That film, whose sense of summation came to feel over time more like a finality, offered glimpses of a historical juncture within the motion picture industry overlaid with a chapter of Fisher’s own personal history....
The Alchemist of Prauge (set design for The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer [84]; source) There are comparable, but never equivalent, online substitutes for the magical word-of-mouth transactions that happen in small, independent bookstores and record shops. In these spaces, the easily accessible thing that you’re into can lead to other, greater things—with an acutely attuned clerk behind the counter, even the Yeah Yeah Yeahs can lead to The Slits; Gravitation can lead to Black Hole....
Late in John Carney’s musical sightseeing tour Begin Again, Keira Knightley’s songwriter rebukes her rock-star ex for wrenching her delicate composition into an overblown earworm. There’s a parallel to be found with Carney’s repurposing of the “lovelorn city-dwellers bond while recording an album” premise from his weightlessly beguiling 2006 debut Once into a star-powered redemption yarn that lives for its next montage. Mark Ruffalo strains for Nicholson-esque impudence as a flask-swilling music producer with nothing left but his principles who hears Knightley in a bar and persuades her to record her songs, guerrilla-style, on the rooftops and subway platforms of New York City....
Sam Childers is a badass junkie biker who hits rock bottom after a prison stint, finds God, and heads over to Sudan to provide for orphaned children. If he sounds like the product of an overactive imagination, guess again. The small-town Pennsylvanian Childers provides Gerard Butler with his showiest role yet—and that’s taking into account his turns as the Phantom of the Opera and the King of Sparta. Even during this biopic’s most absurd moments—do hillbillies actually identify themselves as such?...
Filling the shoes of Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciarán Hinds—actors who can transcend even the limpest of material—is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas, and Sam Worthington are called upon to do in The Debt. With varying degrees of success they meet the challenge, portraying the same characters 30 years younger, without any of them looking particularly like their older selves. Weaving back and forth from 1966 to 1997, John Madden’s engrossing remake of the 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov relates both the minutest details of the fateful assignment on which the three Mossad agents meet—capturing and killing a long-in-hiding Nazi war criminal (remarkably played by Jesper Christensen)—and how each has learned to live with the fact that it may not have gone off as reported....
Started by M-Net, the South African satellite-TV and media giant, the initiative has led to more than a little uncertainty and speculation in African filmmaking circles, especially in terms of its ambitious approach to acquisitions. M-Net’s heavily capitalized private venture is already familiar: over the last several years they’ve snapped up distribution rights to films, both new and old, rapidly amassing a library of some 600 works. Their efforts have struck a blow against long-standing European control of certain rights, and have been executed with a concerted market presence and verve that are out of the reach of independent African filmmakers....
Brainchild of Casey Pugh, the crowdsourced masterpiece that is StarWarsUncut was realized with the help of a handful of developers and designers and hundreds of fanatical contributors. Pugh’s team parceled the original 121 minutes of “A New Hope” into 15-second segments to be claimed by eager volunteers, each charged with the task (nay, honor) of remaking a given scene however they saw fit. With the 473 submissions laid end to end (and subject to change at any time based on voter ratings), the resulting movie is one of the Internet’s true cinematic wonders....
The Stuntman When Richard Rush spoke of why it took so long to get his 1980 film The Stunt Man made, he invoked the reluctance of studios back then to greenlight anything involving the behind-the-scenes side of moviemaking. The suits were convinced that audiences either weren’t interested or—more superstitiously, more tellingly—that they would be disillusioned by being shown how the ostensible magic was manufactured. But for some, the truest romance of cinema resided in that loose interchange between the teeming life behind the camera and the imaginative worlds spread out in front of it....
But unlike Sirk, Fassbinder is too little remembered as an expert maker of images. Below, some key moments from Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and His Friends, The Marriage of Maria Braun, In a Year of 13 Moons, and I Only Want You to Love Me where the mise en scène does as much talking as his doomed characters. In a Year of 13 Moons (A photo of a pre-Casablanca Elvira)...
This sequence seemingly foreshadows the fate of Brocka’s waifish heroine, Insiang (Hilda Koronel), at the hands of Dado, her mother’s lover. As the film progresses, it isn’t hard to see that the plight of the pigs evokes not just the lot of one woman but the fate of her family and, indeed, of her slum-dwelling people. Too vulgar to qualify as allegory, this analogy aspires instead to exhaust the signifying powers of hyperbole....
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Devika and Clint welcomed John Klacsmann, archivist at Anthology Film Archives, and critic and filmmaker Gina Telaroli for a conversation about films that document their makers’ intimate lives. They discussed Mekas’s kaleidoscopic As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, Ed Pincus’s influential Diaries (1971-1976), and films by Anne Charlotte Robertson and Jim McBride, as well as a the work of a more contemporary diarist: John Wilson, he of the critically acclaimed, eponymous acclaimed HBO show....
