Welcome to America

Remote Area Medical

Crit

The titular organization was founded to help people in South America deprived by poverty and distance from medical care, but as this documentary, set in Appalachian Tennessee, shows, the focus has pulled back to address the Third World as it exists within our own borders.

Bad teeth (and not always, as people tend to assume, says a woman about whom I'm sorry to say I'd already assumed thus, because of crystal meth), bad pumps (a 61-year-old who says he last saw a doctor when he was about 16 registers a blood pressure reading of 220/160), bad lungs (a smoker since 16 has her first-ever chest X-ray at 50 or so, and it shows scary spots), bad eyes, bad everything that can go bad in human physiology--RAM drops in with the focus and efficiency of Navy Seals and changes lives a weekend of free medical care at a time.

Way beyond inspiring, way beyond disturbing--especially when you think that this is the sort of duty accepted by governments of most developed countries, not left to the charity and organizational genius of people like Stan Brock, RAM's founder.

Wild

An  unusually political M4

Deux jours, une nuit (Two days, one night)

IFC

How to make this work: Sandra, laid off from her job after receiving treatment for depression, goes coworker-to-coworker, asking each to vote for her reinstatement, and thus against his or her own €1k bonus?

Well, it helps if Sandra is played by someone like Marion Cotillard, capable of conveying the embarrassment and the shame and the hopelessness of the process. Even so, this is something I can imagine being more successful in the hands of a brilliant short story writer.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry

CV

I still occasionally will see a successful young entertainer quoted as declaring herself "not a feminist." Any female, at minimum, and better, any human who rejects the label needs to watch this documentary, which collects a wealth of first-person reports from the women's movement's resurrection in the '60s, alongside but often bizarrely in conflict with the other freedom movements of the time.

Leviafan (Leviathan)

FF

Infidelity, venality, religion, religious hypocrisy, vodka, kleptocracy--right, all the standard ingredients of the Russian epic. Oh, and whales, too, whales dead and alive. The Job story, if Job were pretty much an asshole and drank way too much.

Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will)

FF

Marital exhaustion leads Pomme (Emmanuelle Devos) to stay in the literal and metaphorical forest when Pierre (Mathieu Amalric) leaves the literal, if not the metaphorical. 

For anyone with as big a crush as I have on both these actors, the terminal loss in translation, the insurmountable sadness, the same-magnetic-pole repulsion are heartbreaking. If this were a Hollywood movie, dammit, there'd be a way to make it right. 

Trailers

• Queen and Country--Brits in the Korean War.
• Timbuktu--And then the Islamists come to town.
• Il capitale umano (Human capital)--Sex and corruption in Italy? Say it ain't so!

Intel inside

The Imitation Game

Crit

So this Cumberbatch fellow everyone seems to be all gaga about, whom I'd scarcely seen before? He's really quite good as Alan Turing, sometimes referred to as "the homosexual who won World War II," though I think "the homosexual with Asperger's who won World War II and also invented the computer" would be more accurate.

A perfectly solid slice-of-biopic strengthened by the return to the sort of getoutatown-with-your-gender-limitations role that made me first love Keira Knightly. Yes, yes, I'm sure the process is vastly oversimplified for us not-mathematical-genius ticket buyers, but I'm even surer that failing to oversimplify would have been a fatal error.

Trailers

• The Woman in Gold--Based on the true story of a Holocaust survivor's quest to recover from the Austrian government of a Nazi-stolen portrait of her aunt . . . oh, a portrait by Gustav Klimt.
• Chappie--Another adorable robot story.

O, brother, who art thou?

Big Eyes

Post

Tim Burton's least weird film in . . . well, maybe ever . . . stacks the deck so effectively in favor of kitsch expressionist Margaret Keane that it's almost possible to believe that her paintings had artistic merit. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz make it work, mostly. 

Top Five

Post

Chris Rock goes ethnically different Woody Allen, as has been widely noticed, but, as I've not seen mentioned, also snags a huge page from Preston Sturges,  specifically from Sullivan's Travels. 

And except for about 15 minutes at the start of the 3rd act, when it goes off the rails because the necessary romantic comedy complication takes the form of something that absolutely would never happen in the world of journalism of which the New York Times is the bedrock, he does fine things with that page. 

One of the film's many strengths is Rock's confidence in the script and in himself and Rosario Dawson--never better--to deliver that wonderfully talky script such that you never want them to shut up, except maybe to make out.

And the most subversive of Rock's many nods to his comedic ancestors of every ethnicity is the massacre of "Smile" by DMX, an in joke that is plenty funny even if you don't know that the music was composed by Charles Chaplin.

A nearly great film. Oh, but one thing: if you have zero sense of humor about JFK, you might want to go for your popcorn refill when Rock's Andre Allen (spoiler alert!) takes the stage at the Comedy Cellar.

Trailers

• Selma--Yes, of course, though I gotta say it seems weird to have Englishmen playing 3 key roles.
• The Age of Adaline--Looks like a distinctly inferior Benjamin Button.
• Fifty Shades of Grey--Opening on Valentine's Day, natch!
• Paddington--Looks awful.
• Get Hard--Wait, did I say Paddington looks awful?
• Unfinished Business--Wait, did I say Get Hard looks awful?
• The Boy Next Door--What was she thinking?
• Hot Tub Time Machine 2--Anything worth doing (which the first one was, marginally) is worth overdoing.

You are now in Bedford Falls

It's a Wonderful Life

(1946)

Decided I'd make no special effort to watch this, that if I missed a year for it, it was probably due for a rest. But damn, I'm glad I watched it: even with my attention distracted my email and Facebook, it was an extraordinarily rewarding screening. Damn, it's depressing; damn, it's inspiring.

Wishes are children

Into the Woods

Crit

Thoroughly enjoyed the whack-a-mole scavenger-hunt portion of the film, right up through the fake happy ending. The dark and complicated part that follows--which is, of course, most of the point--seemed too long, even draggy, and too light on the Sondheim lyrics that inject momentum whenever they're heard. Still, a perfectly acceptable Christmas afternoon screening.

Trailers

• Cinderella--This appears to be a straightforward live-action-and-special-effects version of the Disney classic (which made the Cinderella portion of the feature even more off-kilter, of course). Highlights seem to be Helena Bonham Carter as the Fairy Godmother and . . . the awesome glass slippers (which, the FG assures Ella, and really quite comfortable).

Is the pudding still singing in the copper, Peter?

Scrooge

(1951)

First Dickens I ever read, in my high school library, was a dramatization of this, done, I believe, by the man himself. Between then (1969 at the latest) and this year, the only other Dickens I read was Bleak House. This year, though, I declared Dickens year and read a shitload of Dickens, including, in the pat 48 hours, the short story/novella that was adapted for this film. So now I know . . .

Well, first, I've never seen an earlier film adaptation of this, so I don't know whether the makers of this film deserve all the credit, but there are lots and lots of changes in the Ghost of Christmas Past segment, and all of them for the better:

• in the novella, Fan is explicitly younger than Ebeneezer; in the film, he is the younger, and his mother died giving him life, which makes a neat parallel with Fan and her son Fred--and her deathbed scene, the most sentimental scene in the film, is also missing in the text;
• Ebenezer's betrothed, Alice, marries and has a daughter in the novella, but no moviegoer wants to know that the protagonist has no chance at love, so here she becomes an unmarried do-gooder; we also have a scene with her before Scrooge becomes a dick, which makes his initial love more credible;
• all of the business stuff is new: Fezziwig's business failure; Scrooge's meeting Marley; Scrooge and Marley's power play to seize the business; Marley's deathbed scene--none of it is in the source text, all of it is critical to the film's depiction of who, exactly, Scrooge is.

Except for Scrooge declaring himself "too old" for redemption, the interaction with the ghosts of Christmas Present and Future are essentially as in Dickens's text--the film's main contribution being the addition of the tearjerking "Barbara Allen" to the soundtrack--but the filmmakers recognized better than the master that the key to redemption is the past.

God, what a grand film!

Reversal

Foxcatcher

Crit

Channing Tatum is Mark Schultz, Olympic gold medalist in freestyle Not Smiling; Steve Carell is John du Pont, a clueless Richard Cory with serious mommy problems. It's a marriage made in wrestling hell, and Mark Ruffalo is David Schultz, the big brother caught in the cross-hand. Look for an Oscar® nomination for Carell's prosthetic nose. No, but really, it's a queasy-making film with powerful performance.

Trailers

• a teaser for the Oscar®-nominated shorts, in theaters at the end of January.
• Red Army--Olympic hockey on the other side; a documentary.

People are jerks

Inside Llewyn Davis

(2013)

Guest blogger Laura Burrone:

Full disclosure, I’m an unashamed, full-on, complete fan(atic) of the Coen brothers and incapable of an unbiased opinion. Now that that’s out the way, what the heck was that? I want to like this movie, but about midway through the story it was clear that there wasn’t a likable character among them. Even the cat is not himself. It’s a dreary story, with music that makes you want to jump off of the Verrazano Bridge (a nod to John Goodman’s character), but only just so. You can’t take your eyes off this movie, and you can’t wait for the next song. How did they do that?

Maynard Ferguson, not Ulysses

Maybe they Coens have the perfect formula for movie-making. Take various parts of amusing, horrifying, and bewildering but always leave a delicious taste in the mouth and you have the secret to their success.

Hammer and nail

Wild

Crit

A beautifully made and brilliantly edited film, and another great performance by Reese Witherspoon, who at 38 can still channel her inner Tracy Flick for flashback scenes. But I hope you're not asking me to like or admire Cheryl Strayed, author of the source memoir; I'll go as far as respect, but that's it.

Trailer

• Far from the Madding Crowd--Carey Mulligan follows 48 years in Julie Christie's footsteps.

There and back again

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Crit

Yeah, OK: insomnia last night, wine at the company holiday party today, so drowsiness was preordained. Still, I just felt (while awake) that I'd seen all this before. I'm ready to leave Middle Earth now, and I hope Peter Jackson is too.

Trailer

• Focus--Will Smith crime comedy. This may be the first trailer I've seen for an actual 2015 release. What will open downtown on Christmas Day??!!? Inherent Vice, I hope! Though I'll settle for Mr. Turner.

Grit

The Homesman

Crit

It's impossible not to associate this riveting story of a frontier female defiant of the limitations on her sex, embarked on a sacred mission with the coerced assistance of a rough-about-the-edges, rough-through-and-through coot, with another story that fits the same description--would be impossible even if the recent incarnation of Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld, didn't show up in a small role near the end.

The film is unembarrassed by its debt to True Grit, employing key visual and thematic tropes, and its refusal to apologize makes the reliance easier to accept. Harder to accept are the independent assessments by two male gazes of a character played by Hilary Swank as "too plumb damn plain" and "plain as an old tin bucket," but even that works, because Swank's Mary Bee Cuddy, for all her protofeminist independence, knows she's plain, knows the rules, and, age thirty-one, pursues matrimony like the last berth on Noah's ark.

And in the end, it's not True Grit at all, but it is another dark, unpredictable tale on its own quest. This is the second big-screen feature Tommy Lee Jones has directed, each with a quest at the center, and I have no idea where he'll ask us to follow him next, but I'm there.

The book of right-off

The Babadook

Crit

This is addressed to my friend Lisa, who has an impressive collection of pop-up books: sorry, but you weren't around, and I couldn't wait to see it. Moreover, I don't know how high your tolerance for scary movies is, but I should tell you that this is the scariest film I've seen as an adult, a brilliant fogging of psychology and supernatural. The setup is this: Samuel (a perfectly cute/creepy Noah Wiseman) is a deeply disturbed not-quite-7-year-old, the disturbance arising from the fact that his father died in a car accident while taking his mother (Essie Davis) to the hospital to give birth. Without giving too much away, it also develops that Amelia is not quite the unconditionally loving mother she first seems. Into this standard haunting environment (locked basement door, dog occasionally barking at mysterious noises, cockroaches bursting from a hole behind the fridge) comes the worst children's pop-up book ever, or at least the one best calculated to keep anyone in the house from enjoying a night's sleep. And so it gets worse from there.

An absolutely terrific (in every sense) film, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, her first feature after a long and uneventful acting career. It is so good that I recommend that you skip it.

Ahead of the curve

Frank

(2014)

OK, let's compare that perfectly adequate biopic with this ambitious, weird, ambitiously weird, weirdly ambitious not-really-a-biopic-but-not-altogether-not-not-either, about a different sort of afflicted genius with an extra load above the neck.

Frank, too, seems in search of a theory of everything, but in the music of the spheres rather than in the spheres themselves. The oddness takes an unfortunately conventional turn late in the game, but until then this is as uncomfortable as anyone could wish.

My degeneration

The Theory of Everything

Crit

The convenient thing in making a film about history's second-most-famous ALS sufferer is that your narrative arc draws itself: promise, then tragedy, then tragic heroism, then triumph. The only surprise here is that a biography of someone so cosmically ambitious could itself be so atomically unambitious, not counting the ambition to rack up a few Oscar nominations via the time-tested route of the afflicted-guy movie.

Wait, I take that back: I had a huge surprise even before the film started: my MoviePass worked!

Anarchy in the KS

Vi är bäst! (We are the best!)

(2013)

This puts me in mind of Those Glory Glory Days, another film about teenage girls devoted to a "boys' pastime." There it was football (aka soccer), here it's punk, in the early '80s, when it was rumored to be dead, but 13-year-olds in Stockholm and 29-year-olds in Grafton, W.Va., were struggling to disprove that canard.

Bobo and Klara, with no skill but plenty of angst (i.e., the perfect punk DNA), recruit the Christian classical guitarist Hedvig--who has in common with them only the sine qua non: unpopularity--to join their nascent band. They survive parental repression and a Yoko Ono moment in an exhilaratingly empowering narrative. Loved loved loved it.