Butler's Cinema Scene

Jason Patric

“KEYHOLE”  My rating: C (Opens May 4 at the Crown Center)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Keyhole” is the weirdest movie Guy Maddin has yet made…which is saying a lot.

In many regards it is vintage Maddin — shot in black and white on claustrophobic sets, marked by dynamic editing and a bizarre soundtrack, and acted by performers who do their best not to be naturalistic.

The problem is that “Keyhole” lacks what may be the most crucial element of Maddin’s style — his bizarre sense of humor. There are stabs at grim hilarity here, but they don’t take. Overall, this is a brooding, dark and largely joyless enterprise.

It’s set in a falling-down mansion in what is apparently the 1930s.  A group of gangsters and their molls armed with pistols and Tommyguns take refuge in the parlor. It’s night and outside a raging lightning storm competes with the flashing lights of police cars surrounding the house  to create a hallucinogenic atmosphere.

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Tom Hiddleston, Rachel Weisz in “The Deep Blue Sea”

“THE DEEP BLUE SEA” My rating: C (Opening April 27 at the Tivoli and Glenwood)

98 minutes| MPAA rating: R

Twenty years ago British filmmaker Terence Davies made two movies — “Distance Voice, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” — that were masterpieces of personal cinema. Low budget but beautifully conceived, the films hauntingly examined Davies’ own boyhood and youth in pre-WW2 Britain. They weren’t dramas, really (there was no big dramatic narrative), but they created an indelible portrait of a way of life, a working-class existence in which the simplest things might provide the most profound joy. Simple things like gathering with friends at the pub and over a pint singing popular songs.

In a sense Davies has been trying to remake those movies ever since. Certainly that seems to be the case with “The Deep Blue Sea,” his adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s 1950 play about a woman who has left her wealthy husband for a washed-up fighter pilot and finds that isn’t working out either. Continue Reading »

“IN THE FAMILY” My rating: A- (Opening May 20 at the Tivoli)

169 minutes | No MPAA rating

“In the Family” is a first feature so meticulously made, quietly heartfelt and carefully modulated that feels like a revelation, like the arrival of a talent that might really matter. An American Bresson, perhaps.

Except…except that writer/director/star Patrick Wang seems unable to turn it off. “In the Family” runs for nearly three freaking hours, and while audiences might tolerate that excess in a big-screen epic, it’s an intimidating thing in an intimate family drama. Unless you’re O’Neill, and even then it’s iffy.

Still, I saw the film a week ago and it has stuck with me. It establishes its own rhythms and viewpoint, it took up residence in my head. That doesn’t happen all that often.

What Wang gives us here is a story about a gay family, and yet I hesitate to call this a “gay” movie because its concerns — and Wang’s obvious artistry — are so universal.

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Alex…one of the victims of “Bully”

“BULLY”  My rating: B (Opening wide on April 13)

99 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Bully” isn’t a particularly artful documentary, but there’s no question of its effectiveness.

Lee Hirsch’s film actually should be called “Bullied,” since it’s not about the perpetrators of classroom abuse but about the victims — the geeks, the gays, the goofy kids who go through life with a metaphorical target pinned to their backs.

Thus “Bully” doesn’t even address the “whys” of bullying. It’s all about the emotional and psychic pain it inflicts…and it more than proves its case.

Hirsch concentrates on five cases of bullying. In Sioux City, Iowa, he hides a microphone on young Alex to record the abuse piled on him every day on the bus ride to school. Hirsch — who served as his own cinematographer — also employs what seem to be hidden cameras to capture the slaps, punches and pushing (either that or the young bullies are actually showing off for the filmmaker).

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Maggie Grace and Guy Pierce in “Lockout”

“LOCKOUT” My rating: C (Opens wide on April 13)

95 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There are moments in “Lockout” — usually when Guy Pearce is channelling his best “Die Hard”-era Bruce Willis —  that you really wish this Aussie actor got better material.

“Lockout” is easiest described by listing the movies it rips off: The original “Die Hard,” “Escape from New York,” the first “Star Wars”…it’s not so much a movie as a laundry list of references.

The writers and directors — James Mather and Stephen St. Leger — start things off with a nifty sequence. Pierce’s character, a CIA agent named Snow, is tied to a chair and being roughed up by a goon. Between deafening punches, Snow cracks wise. He’s cocky and funny and sardonic. An Energizer Bunny with a steel jaw.

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