Personal drama and social commentary find an almost perfect marriage in “Capernaum,” an Oscar-nominated (for foreign language film) heartbreaker about a little boy navigating life on the mean streets of Beirut.
Written and directed by Nadine Labaki (whose earlier efforts — “Caramel” and “Where Do We Go Now?” — look simplistic by comparison), “Capernaum” stars 12-year-old Zain Al Rafeea, who gives a performance for the ages.
The story is bookended by a trial. Young Zain (Al Rafeea) is currently in juvenile lockup for, in his words, “stabbing the son of a bitch.” Now he has dragged his no-good parents (Kawsar Al Haddad, Fadi Yousef) into court; basically he’s suing them for giving birth to him.
Filmmaker Labaki does not dwell long on this improbable spectacle. Most of “Capernaum” is a long flashback depicting how things came to this sad state. Zain’s journey is like that of a Dickens protagonist through a world of few pleasures and much indifference.
Right from the get-go it’s obvious that Zain is one tough little guy. He swears like a sailor and has a chip-on-his-shoulder attitude. He is uncowed by adult authority and is openly contemptuous of his parents, crooks whose current scam is delivering drug-impregnated clothing to Zain’s imprisoned older brother.
The only family member Zain cares about is his older sister Sahar (Haita ‘Cedra’ Izzam). When the frightened girl experiences her first period, Zain explains what’s what and gives her his T-shirt to use as a menstrual pad, warning her not to tell anyone that she’s reached this milestone. Sure enough, once their parents get wind of Sahar’s condition they sell her to their landlord.
2018 OSCAR-NOMINATED LIVE ACTION SHORTS Overall rating: B+
109 minutes | No MPAA rating
“MADRE” (Spain, 19 minutes)
In this gripping nail biter form Spain a young mother (Blanca Apilanez) receives a call from her 6-year-old son, Ivan, who is vacationing with his father. (The couple are divorced or separated.)
Little Ivan is using his dad’s cell phone to report that he’s alone on a beach. He doesn’t know his location. His father left him there and hasn’t returned.
Mom keeps the boy calm; no doubt her ex will soon return. But the situation quickly escalates when Ivan reports the appearance of a strange man who starts chasing him…
The direction by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Maria del Puy Alvarado is like a precision watch wound to the breaking point; the tension generated by this setup is almost unbearable.
In fact, the pure storytelling is so overwhelming that it takes a while for viewers to discover that, incredibly enough, the bulk of the film is one uninterrupted shot unfolding in Mom’s apartment. The logistics of pulling off this tour de force are daunting. But “Madre” delivers.
“FAUVE”(Canada, 17 minutes)B
Two boys are roughhousing in what looks like an abandoned strip mine. For several minutes they dare each other to do dangerous things, wrestle and climb over rusting equipment.
But then they find a manmade lake. It looks enticing…until they discover to their horror that the muddy banks are the consistency of quicksand and can quickly pull a child to his doom.
Jeremy Comte and Maria Gracia Turgeon rev up the tension and fear and leave us with a haunting depiction of a young life all but ruined.
“MARGUERITE”(Canada, 19 minutes)B+
The elderly Marguerite (Beatrice Picard) lives for the daily visits by her caregiver Rachel (Sandrine Bisson). But when she learns that Rachel is in a relationship with another woman it triggers Marguerite’s own memories of a stymies girl-on-girl romance from long ago.
This film from Marianne Farley is a study in gentle revelation, a heartbreakingly tender look at the life that its protagonist might have had.
“DETAINMENT” (Ireland, 30 minutes)A-
Based on a 1993 murder case that rocked Great Britain, “Detainment” is a docudrama zeroing in on the police interrogations of two 10-year-old Liverpool boys who eventually were convicted of killing 3-year-old James Bulger, whom they kidnapped from a shopping mall.
The dialogue in Vincent Lambe and Darren Mahon’s film was drawn almost entirely from the recordings of the police sessions with the boys, and what emerges is one of the most harrowing 30 minutes of cinema imaginable.
The young killers — interrogated separately but in the presence of their stricken and disbelieving parents — pose a perplexing contrast.
Jon (Ely Solan) is terrified and panic stricken, weeping helplessly in his mother’s arms. He paints himself as a victim of his partner’s malignancy.
Robert (Leon Hughes) is, by contrast, a psychopath in training, a defiant little shit who lies nonstop and uses mind tricks to try to derail the cops as they build their case. He says it was all Jon’s idea.
In all probability neither could have done it alone, but together the boys proved a lethal mix.
As ghastly and off-putting as this tale is, there is no question that Masters Hughes and Solan deliver two of the most amazing performances by child actors ever captured on film.
“SKIN” (USA, 20 minutes) B
The first moments of Guy Nattiv’s “Skin” offer a touching display of family warmth. A young boy, Troy (Jackson Robert Scott), is getting a front-porch haircut from his doting dad, Johnny (Jonathan Tucker). Then, with Mom (Danielle MacDonald), they drive out to the country with friends for a day of shooting up old cars.
Little Troy proves a crack shot with a rifle, much to his father’s delight.
Just one problem with this cozy scene. Johnny and his pals are virulent racists. We’d know that just from their tattoos, but that night upon returning to town they nearly beat to death a black man in front of his wife and children.
The friends of the victim seek revenge, not through violence (though they do kidnap Johnny right in front of his distressed son) but by using ink and a tattoo needle to turn the racist into that thing he hates so much.
With its emphasis on irony “Skin” plays a lot like an updated episode of “The Twilight Zone” or “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Its melodramatic elements almost go too far, but the performances keep it all in check.
(Interestingly enough, the short “Skin” is a companion piece to a feature film by Nattiv also called “Skin.” In the feature Jamie Bell portrays a real-life skinhead who rejected his racist upbringing and systematically had all his hateful tattoos removed.)
2018 OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATED SHORTS Overall rating: B
56 minutes | No MPAA rating
Traditionally animated shorts were aimed at the funny bone.
Mickey Mouse. Bugs Bunny. Tom & Jerry.
Well, that was then. As this year’s slate of Oscar-nominated animated shorts makes clear, today’s animators are interested in big themes and deep emotions.
Only one of the nominees is overtly comical. The others gravitate toward the arty end of the narrative spectrum, with a special emphasis on works that attempt to encompass an entire life (or a big chunk of one). (Remember the wedding album sequence that opened Pixar’s “Up”? It’s the spiritual grandfather of many of these nominees.)
“ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR” (Canada, 14 minutes) B
In Alison Snowden and David Fine’s savage spoof of psychiatry, a canine shrink convenes a group therapy session of diverse animals.
Among others, there’s a pig with an eating disorder and a leech with self-esteem problems. But things go really south when a new patient invades the room: a towering gorilla with anger issues.
The dialogue and voices are basically naturalistic; that it’s all being delivered through cartoon animals makes it truly bizarre.
Classic moment: Leonard, the doggy doctor, notices the discomfort in the room when a single-mom praying mantis laments the difficulty of finding a good male of her species. Adapting exactly the sort of diffident therapy-speak that pisses off so many of us, Leonard offers: “Clearly, sexual cannibalism is for some still a taboo.”
Tres droll.
“BAO” (USA, 8 minutes) B
If you saw “Incredibles 2” last year you probably caught Domee Shi and Becky Neimann-Cobb’s “Bao,” which played before the feature.
A visually sophisticated (and wordless) valentine to maternal longing and generational conflict, the film centers on an Asian household — presumably Chinese — where the wife fantasizes that one of her hand-made stuffed dumplings is actually a baby. So fertile is her imagination that she watches the little guy grow up, go to school, hit those difficult teenage years and eventually show up at the door with his new squeeze, a perky Anglo gal.
“Bao” takes a too-cute (borderline freakish) idea and turns it into emotional gold, especially with its universal theme of the young growing up and more-or-less abandoning their parents.
Time travel may be just a theory, but something like it is at work at theaters where Peter Jackson’s “They Shall Not Grow Old” is playing.
Jackson, the director of the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” franchises, has taken hundreds of hours of World War I movie footage owned by Britain’s National War Museum and from it fashioned a feature film that practically jumps off the screen and into our laps (and that’s even if you pass on the 3-D version).
The story he tells is that of common English men — boys, really — who signed up to go to defend their country and found themselves in the ghastly trench war of the Western Front in France. The film relies on snippets of audio interviews the BBC conducted with veterans of the Great War back in the ’60s and ’70s; now long gone, these men reveal their experiences and innermost feelings about what they went through.
But what makes “They Shall Not Grow Old” absolutely mind-churning is the way Jackson and hundreds of technicians restored the old footage, cleaning up the dust motes and cracked emulsion, colorizing the images and providing an immersive stereo soundtrack.
The film’s first 30 minutes are basically the story of recruitment and training in black-and-white; then, with the troops’ arrival in France, the screen blossoms with color as we are, in effect, dropped into the meat grinder.
The transition from black-and-white to Technicolor is as poetically jarring as it was in “The Wizard of Oz.”
There’s stuff here that even hard-core World War I junkies haven’t seen. Like what a trench latrine looked like (a thick pole stretched across a pool of muck; we see four bare bottoms simultaneously making use of the facilities). Like a bad case of trenchfoot, a ghastly condition born of wearing wet boots and socks for days on end (in effect, it’s gangrene).
There are piles of dead rats, the result of a housecleaning in one trench. There are bodies hanging on the barbed wire; some stayed so long their living neighbors could watch the slow process of decomposition over weeks. (One old gent describes war as “a fantastic exhibition of anatomy.”)
Matt Green may be a bit nuts, but it’s a wonderful nuttiness.
Now in his early 30s, Green has spent the last seven years on a quest to walk every street, bike path, pier and park in New York City. He figures that all ads up to 8,000-plus miles.
He’s still not done, but his project has now been documented by Jeremy Workman in “The World Before Your Feet.” This love poem to the Big Apple is enough to make you want to drop everything and start hiking.
Workman’s doc is kind of awe-inspiring. We see Green striding purposefully through swirling seas of humanity; we also see him as a solitary figure in an empty landscape (yes, NYC has such places).
He cruises past landmarks like the Guggenheim Museum, but also wanders down alleyways, across seaside boardwalks and on footpaths through quiet parklands and even a ghost town in Queens. He walks in sweltering summer humidity and in blizzard conditions.
Along the way he takes pictures, which he posts on his web blog. And he meets lots of everyday people, including some who initially are suspicious of him (given his ability to defuse tense situations, Green might consider a post-walking gig as a mediator or reconciliation facilitator).
He is particularly fond of cemeteries (we see the graves of Alexander Hamilton and Harry Houdini) and of the exotic plants (fig trees!!!) that have somehow taken root surrounded by concrete. He finds the oldest and tallest living thing in the city, a tree called The Queen’s Giant.
He has stumbled across hundreds of homemade 9-11 memorials erected in front yards or painted on the sides of buildings.
Virtually everything about “Destroyer” — from its title to the plotting, dialogue and star Nicole Kidman’s Oscar-bait makeup transformation — screams overstatement.
Written by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi and directed by Karyn Kusama, this joyless (and, let’s face it, off-putting) crime drama aspires to noir greatness but succeeds only in alienating with its blend of cliche and unearned angst.
Along the way it wastes Kidman, a hugely talented actress who here is limited to a sort of slow-burn psychosis.
When we first meet L.A. Police Det. Erin Bell (Kidman) she’s sleeping in her car, looking pretty much like death warmed over. Sunken eyes, sallow/blotchy skin, painfully projecting cheekbones, cracked lips. Kidman is borderline unrecognizable; she could be a “Walking Dead” extra.
(In fact, we’re immediately reminded of Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning uglying-down for “Monster.”)
Some 16 years ago Bell was part of an undercover operation that went horribly bad. Her partner Chris (played in flashbacks by Sebastian Stan) was killed by members of the bank robbery gang the two had infiltrated.
Now Bell receives a threat in the mail…a $100 bill stained with purple dye from that long-ago bank job. It can only mean that Silas (Toby Kebbel), the gang leader who vanished shortly after the deadly heist, has returned to settle the score with Bell.
Before he became a Hollywood movie star, Australian-born Errol Flynn lived a life of adventure cruising through the Indonesian archipelago.
Drinking. Whoring. Brawling. Looking for gold in dangerous places.
Russell Mulcahy’s “In Like Flynn,” based on the actor’s memoir Beam Ends, attempts to capture the pre-movie star Flynn as he and a trio of buddies go sailing for wine, wenches and wealth.
It’s not as much fun as it sounds.
Things start out promisingly with an encounter with headhunters in New Guinea. Young Flynn (Thomas Cockerel) and a Hollywood crew shooting location footage are forced to flee for their lives. Think the opening of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Once back in Australia, Flynn decides to return to New Guinea to search for gold. He steals a yacht, the Sirocco, and mans it with two drinking buddies — the gruff Rex (Callan Mulvey) and the babyfaced Duke (William Moseley) — and a suicidal old salt (Clive Standen, channelling Robert Shaw in “Jaws”) who provides most of the sailing knowhow.
Along the way they visit dockside dives and brothels and opium dens, run afoul of the Chinese mafia and the crooked mayor (David Wenham) of a sleazy stopover, brave sharks and seasickness and poisonous spiders and starvation and shipwrecks and get involved in an underground fight club. Continue Reading »
“She’s got something,” observes a Parisian roue after taking in an eyeful and earful of Zula, the troubled heroine of “Cold War.”
No kidding. As portrayed by Joanna Kulig, Zula radiates slow-smoldering eroticism and more than a hint of working-class voluptuousness. It’s easy to understand how a man — even a sophisticated one — could endure a long search through time and space to be with her.
“Cold War” — an Oscar nominee for foreign language film, director and cinematography — comes to us from Pawel Pawlikowski, who a couple of years back delivered the Academy Award-winning foreign film “Ida,” about a young nun who discovers she is the child of Holocaust victims.
Like that earlier masterpiece, “Cold War” unfolds during Poland’s decades as a Soviet satellite state and has been shot in mind-blowingly beautiful black and white.
Pawlikowski’s subject is a passionate love affair played out against the political and social fluctuations of life on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Reportedly he was inspired by the story of his own parents, who maintained an on-and-off relationship for more than 40 years.
Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is a musical scholar traveling post-war Poland to record rural folk songs. That obsession leads to a job as artistic director of a state-sponsored school devoted to the preservation of traditional Polish culture. Hordes of desperate young people audition for the program; among them is Zula (Kulig), who initially doesn’t stand out against all the other healthy blondes hoping for a spot.
But Zula is clever and manipulative; she immediate gloms onto a girl with a terrific voice and suggests they sing a duet. The other girl’s talent will mask Zula’s limited abilities while giving Zula’s impressive “it” factor a chance to kick in.
Indeed, before long Zula is one of the company’s featured performers. There are better singers and dancers, but none can match Zula’s understated yet always-ready sexuality. She even comes with a back story about having done time for murdering the father who molested her.
In no time at all Zula is sleeping with Wiktor, who is twice her age and earning a national reputation for his beautifully-staged concerts of traditional song and dance. But the purist in him rebels when the authorities demand that the troupe perform newly-penned songs about land reform against a gigantic portrait of Josef Stalin; he lays a plan to defect with Zula on a tour stop in East Berlin.
When Zula fails to show up for their rendezvous at a checkpoint between East and West Berlin (this is a decade before the construction of the notorious wall) a disappointed Wiktor goes it alone.
But the paths of these two star-crossed lovers will intersect repeatedly over the years.
An O.K. movie elevated by a pair of jaw-dropping lead performances, “Stan & Ollie” will be appreciated best by those already familiar with comic legends Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Which is what…six percent of the population?
Never mind. “Stan & Ollie” so perfectly channels the style of this great comedy duo that as soon as it’s over you’ll go to YouTube to check out the real thing. There many pleasures await.
Jon S. Baird’s film is a fact-based comedy centering on a 1953 tour of British music halls by Stan Laurel (the skinny Englishman) and Oliver Hardy (the obese Yank). At the time they hadn’t worked together for almost two decades following Laurel’s expulsion from the Hal Roach Studio over demands for more money and control over their films.
In fact, Jeff Pope’s screenplay begins in 1937 with L (Steve Coogan) & H (John C. Reilly in an impressive fat suit and makeup) at work on their last film together. In one masterfully composed and executed tracking shot we follow the two stars from their dressing room through the bustling studio to a soundstage where boss Hal Roach (Danny Huston) awaits.
There Stan makes his demands, Roach fires him, and Oliver — who still has two years on his contract — must look for a new comedy partner if he’s to continue making a living.
All that is so much bad water under the bridge by the time 17 years later that Stan accepts an offer from a fly-by-night Brit promoter to tour England. The idea is to prove to potential backers that L&H still are popular enough to warrant investing in their proposed film parody of the Robin Hood legend.
Initially, it doesn’t look good. The theaters and accomodations are crappy and the crowds thin. But Stan, the brains behind the outfit and a master promoter, signs on for enough public appearances at charity events, etc., that within a couple of weeks the two are playing to sold-out crowds.
The notorious New York disco Studio 54 was in operation only for 33 months nearly 40 years ago.
Yet its reputation as the ultimate nightspot — a place one former patron describes as “Carefree. Hot. Sexy” — lives on. One comes away from Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary convinced that there was never another disco to equal it, and that there never will be.
The main claim to fame of this particular doc is the on-screen presence of Ian Schrager, who co-founded Studio 54 along with his college buddy, the late Steve Rubell, and ended up serving prison time with Rubell on tax evasion charges. This is the first time in 40 years that Schrager — who has carved out a post-prison career as a developer of boutique hotels — has submitted to interviews about his experiences, and it provides Tyrnauer’s film with a unique perspective.
Schrader was always the silent partner, the guy largely responsible for designing the club with its elaborate lighting and set elements (a night at Studio 54 was like a Broadway production in which the customers were the cast). He allowed the flamboyant and, initially anyway, closeted Rubell to serve as the club’s host and good will ambassador.
A former customers attest, the essence of the club was celebrity and total freedom. The owners tried to get famous people into the doors and keep out the ugly and uninteresting (though if you were ugly in an interesting way you had a good shot at getting in). A list handed out to employees described who would be comped (Keith Richards and Mick Jagger got in free) and who had to pay (all other members of the Rolling Stones).
But the club was weirdly egalitarian. Along with celebs and millionaires it welcomed drag queens, persons of color (as long as they had something interesting to offer) and folks whose main claim to fame was that they looked good.
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