Enter the dragon

Latter-day M4

So called because while I did only 3 movies, the final M is for Mormon, as in Book of, which was just as much fun as I'd long anticipated (it celebrates its ninth anniversary next month!), but we don't do live here.

Dolor y gloria (Pain and glory)

VE

The scattered past as heroin dreams in Pedro Almodóvar's largely autobiographical and literally titled film. Always been a big Pedro fan, always struggled to say why. Let's just say this: humanity in extremis. Banderas the best I've ever seen him, Cruz plays frustration perfectly, and the kid cast as young Salvador, Asier Flores, gives one of those kid performances so good it seems like it's not acting.

This came to the hard-to-get-to theater on the edge of town and left before I knew it was there, so while I wouldn't ordinarily have included it in a Manhattan trip, it was a must today.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a lady on fire)

VE

This, in contrast, probably will come to my downtown theater [update: yup], but because it was so convenient and I didn't have a crowded itinerary of musts, I treated myself to a screening on Village East's big screen.

A film about gaze, female in this case, and perhaps more sympathetic and less unwelcome for that, but still complicated, especially as the gazed-at turns gazer, both at the gazer and at herself through an imagined perspective of the gazer's eyes. As I said, complicated.

Also a thrilling festival of sisterhood, with men onscreen for maybe 5 minutes, and pretty much just in the way for that. No surprise that we're so disposable.

Buffaloed

Quad

Not remotely a great film, but it manages one great feat: makes us sympathize with and root for a character whose behavior and moral standards are despicable. Credit Zoey Deutsch for making debt collection seem like something a human being might do.

• A wealth of trailers, most notably for the documentaries Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things and The Booksellers, the extra-odd Extra Ordinary, and the wtf? Run This Town.

Hate crime

Mistakes-were-made M4

But first, a couple of general notes: (1) The Quad, which was closed for remodeling for two years (meaning that most of us were sure it would never open again), is back, and beautiful: a sleek, modern lobby and concession area and--are you sitting down?--clean, chromy, and spacious restrooms (well, I'm assuming the plural applies). One too-cutesy but harmless change: the screens, formerly 1, 2, 3, and 4, are now designated . . . Q, U, A, and D. (2) Apparently it's official: it is now perfectly acceptable behavior to play loud videos on your phone in the theater, though (so far) only before the movie begins.

Dim the Fluorescents

CV

What a strange, existentially confused film about two young (but no longer all that young) women, a playwright and an actor, who eke out a living and barely keep their artistic dreams alive by presenting short instructive dramas to companies hoping to improve customer service or avoid sexual harassment.

That sounds like a promising film, and I think it would have been better had the focus not been allowed to stray to peripheral characters with their own peripheral subplots. That said, it's a definitive M4 film: it's barely showing in Manhattan (opened yesterday, showing at 11 & 11) and will never turn up in New Haven, and for all its faults, I'm glad to have seen it.

L'Insulte (The insult)

Quad

In the context of an unforgiving history, two good men say and do a bad thing each, and the bad snowballs and threatens to efface if not erase the good.

For a welcome change, Israel is reduced to bogeyman status rather than given its customary role as oppressive force and/or embattled survivor: the antagonists are Lebanese Christians and Palestinian refugees. 

A couple of sentimental wobbles en route to a conclusion with just the right balance of hope and dread.

My Brother's Wedding (1984)

Quad

One wedding and a funeral you might say, with protagonist Pierce (Everett Silas) failing to balance obligations of family and friendship, the latter having the stronger tug on him.

Charles Burnett made this five years after Killer of Sheep, with which it shares rough-hewn filmmaking and a palpable emotional investment in working-class African-American Los Angeles.

Azad

CV

Wow. Really, wow. To be fair, this not-very-futuristic tale of a "West" (no specific nation is named, but there are clues) in thrall to alt-right racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism--enough, you get the idea--is not 100% risible: it contains a handful of images worth contemplating for a moment, and one clever line of dialogue (which, sadly, I've forgotten), and good golly, its heart is manifestly in the right place. Oh, and it was made for $10,000, and I have a soft spot for that kind of budget. 

But in every respect, creatively and technically, in front of and behind the camera, this is something a group of intelligent and politically aware fifth graders could have done. This may well be the worst feature film I've ever watch beginning to end.

Transit

New Year's Eve eve M3

Julieta

Sun

Almodóvar, so about mothers. And mystery. And time. And it's lovely but not one of his first rank.

Casablanca (1942)

FF

Oddly, this 35mm print is not as good a copy of the film as I have at home, and the picture is maybe 6 times as big, but having missed my usual July screening, I couldn't resist the rare viewing in a crowd. Though even the crowd wasn't as big or as appreciative as I'd have expected. So I suppose I'd say that if it's possible to be disappointed by a screening of my favorite film, this would be the time. But it's not, and I wasn't.

Toni Erdmann

FF

Wow. I do not remotely get why smart film critics love this. Of the three factors cited in every review--charm, hilarity, and length--the last is the only one that made an impression on me.

Trailers

• My Life as a Zucchini--I actually got in too late to know anything about this, but I couldn't resist the title. 
• La toutue rouge (The red turtle)--More Ghibli, and I wasn't even at IFC this time.
• Marius, Fanny, and César--Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles trilogy.
• Panique--From a Simenon mystery.
• Everybody Knows . . . Elizabeth Murray--Nope, not me.
• The 100 Years Show--Nope, don't know Carmen Herrera either
• I Am Not Your Negro--I do know James Baldwin, a bit.
• Franz--Love, guilt, and confusion.

Strange fruit

Preholiday M3

13th

IFC

Yes, I could have streamed this on Netflix (and you should if you're a subscriber), but (1) I'm currently getting discs from Netflix,  not streaming, and (2) I'm not an altogether rational moviegoer.

Oh, and I also wanted to see it on a big screen and among an actual audience, but in fact, the screen it was on isn't vastly bigger than the one in the bunker, and the size of the audience was only about 5 more than I usually have there.

But none of that matters. What matters is that Ava DuVernay has created a remarkable and horrible document of the way lynching has not gone away so much as evolved into inequitable laws enforced inequitably, prosecuted inequitably, and sentenced inequitably so as to evade the titular constitutional amendment's proscription against involuntary servitude. It would be a powerful call to action if the presidential election had gone differently; as it is, it's a terrifying prediction of a trend extended.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

IFC

Well, here I was concerned that the golden age of horror films I'd been talking up was eroding. Holy crap, not so!

André Øvredal's first English-language feature (you may have seen his wonderfully wacky Trollhunter) gets us in ways we've been gotten before, but what makes the film great (yes, great)  is the brand new way it gets us: by making the slow, painstaking, ostensibly tedious process of the titular forensic procedure creepy far beyond any standard blood-and-viscera squeamishness you might bring to it.

Brian Cox's usual broadness is made for this role, and Emile Hirsch is perfectly OK, but the fresh face of Olwen Kelly is what will stick with you. I hope she isn't doomed to typecasting.

Elle

Ang

Jesus, Isabelle Huppert could give a shit what you think--we already knew that she has no fear about playing a despicable character, but she also has no fear about carrying an arguably despicable film, by veteran despicable-film maker (which is not the same as "despicable filmmaker," technically) Paul Verhoeven, and carrying it as heroically as she has carried all her nondespicable films.

Elle can fairly be described as a rape romance, though as they say on Facebook, it's complicated. I'm sure someone invested in the film's defense could make a case for its being a feminist manifesto, wherein Huppert's Michèle is only briefly a victim and is for the most part as much in control of the events of her life as she is of the events of the adolescent-boy-sex-and-violence-fantasy video games her company makes. And then there's her backstory, which strikes me as a red herring but could be served as psychological poached salmon, I suppose.

In short, it's a film I needed to see, and I don't wish I could unsee it, if only for Huppert's high-wire act, but don't try to make me watch it again.

[A footnote, which I am not making up: I dreamed the night after seeing the film that I was the willing consort of a (literally, I think) vampiric Huppert.]

Trailers

• Umi ga kikoeru (Ocean waves)--Damn, IFC loves Ghibli.
• Rester vertical (Staying vertical)--Wolves and (human) sex.
• Forushande (The salesman)--Directed by Asghar Farhadi, he of A Separation and The Past.
• Under Sandet (Land of mine)--German soldiers held in Denmark after World War II to clear mines; was the pun necessary in the English title?

Search for intelligent life

Let's go Metrograph M4

Brand new art/revival house on the Lower East side. Problem: so L on the ES as to be an awkward reach from my usual Houston, Sixth Avenue, 13th Street stomping grounds. Solution: baptize the place with an exclusive M4--not the first M4 I've done all at the same site, but the first I've planned that way.

It's a lovely venue, at 7 Ludlow, just north of Canal (quickest subway route from Grand Central: Lexington line to Broadway/Lafayette, then Brooklyn-bound F three stops to East Broadway, which exits a little more than a block from the theater). If you have plenty of time and good weather, though, just take the 6 to Canal and meander east through Little Italy and Chinatown. Two screens, one of which has a small balcony; 35mm prints; reserved seating; a staff comprising very young, very pretty people of both traditional genders. Interesting seasonings on the popcorn, which is 6 bucks for a dry quart and staler than you'd think possible, given the theater's brief tenure. On the other hand, 4 bucks gets you a massive box of Whoppers. And like everything else, the concession nook looks terrific.

Hua li shang ban zu (Office)

Met

Speaking of looking terrific, the stars of this film are the sets, particularly the titular headquarters of a global investment firm--an office dominated by (M4 symmetry alert!) a Big Clock.

This is the best Chinese 3D musical I've ever seen. Also the worst, and it seems likelier to maintain that status than the other: unless ill-served by the subtitle translator, the songs are neither smart nor otherwise interesting; the plot is soapily conventional; and even the 3D is pointless: those beautiful sets could have been given depth just as effectively by good cinematography.

High School (1968)

Met

When I saw this was showing, I thought, "Frederick Wiseman classic that I've never seen!" Oddly, I did not think, until the film began and I saw those godawful clothes and hairstyles, "Nineteen sixty-eight? I was fourteen and in high school!"

I've just now learned that the Northeast High School at which Wiseman points his camera is in Philadelphia; I'd have thought somewhere in Ohio--this midwesterner felt a definite midwestern vibe.

Anyone who has ever seen a Wiseman documentary knows what to expect (documentation) and what not to expect (commentary), but of course the filmmaker's wise editing has a commentary edge of its own: you can't come away from this without sensing that Wiseman was on the side of the generational angels: stodgy old crewcuts and matrons enforce rules whose foundations are past practice, while nerdy youngsters try desperately to exercise their budding muscles of independence.

A Space Program

Met

Yes! That's why I make these trips! A team of bricoleurs uses steel and plywood and Tyvek and epoxy to simulate a womanned mission to Mars, and the narrative, too, is bricolage: the filmmakers take everything completely seriously, except when they don't. The film documents a 2012 art installation by Tom Sachs in the Park Avenue Armory wherein an audience was invited to observe the mission; I was too unhip and too far away and too unclued-in to be there, but I'm happy with the film experience. A contender for my long-contemplated festival of brilliantly weird films.

The Big Clock (1948)

Met

Charles Laughton at his most oleaginous is a Rupert Murdoch of mid-twentieth-century media, with a -ways magazine (Newsways, Styleways, Artways) for every taste; Ray Milland is the editor of the leader of the pack, Crimeways. When Laughton's Earl Janoth murders a mistress, Milland's George Stroud is trapped in a wrong-man plot as nonsensical as it is delightful. Elsa Lanchester contributes a wonderful turn as a flighty but calculating artist whose work is sometimes brutalist, sometimes surreal.

But a bookend comment about the Metrograph: clocks are not big here. Showtimes are listed at precise hours, but your 1 p.m. screening might actually get under way at 1:05, 1:08, 1:11--another reason why the venue will probably not appear in the middle of a lot of M4 itineraries. The Big Clock, with a 95-minute runtime, was scheduled to be screened at 7, making me certain of catching the 9:34 train home, and giving me some small hope of the 9:02 and being home & watching the German-England friendly by 11:30.

But about 9:10, manager Alexander Olch came in to tell us that one of the projectors for the theater had blown a bulb, so we would be "going really old school": a pause between reels to load the one remaining functional projector. I have to say there was something gained in stopping every 18 to 20 minutes, typically at a moment of particular suspense (especially the final break, of course), but lost was any hope of getting to New Haven before midnight.

Ah well: a fine day nonetheless, and a vibrant, quirky addition to the Manhattan film world.

Smoke gets in your eyes

It's great to be old M4

Guess what?! Senior discount kicks in at 62 at IFC: 10 bucks instead of 14! And at Cinema Village I discovered that I've apparently been wasting money for two years: 8 bucks instead of 11 at 60! God, I love slouching toward senescence!

Hitchcock/Truffaut

VE

Wonderful nerdfest of a documentary about a book about two people talking. I need that book.

45 Years

IFC

An unconventional mystery/ghost story about unconventional infidelity, and I really don't want to say much more than that, except that it's a contender for my favorite film of the year. OK, I'll say one more thing: did it never occur to them when they chose the song for the first dance at their wedding reception that it's less a love song than it is a love-gone-all-to-hell song?

The Hateful Eight 70mm

VE

Worth twenty bucks? Absolutely: gorgeous Morricone score behind a gorgeous panoramic Colorado (standing in for Wyoming) screened in my favorite Manhattan theater, the palace in thirteenth-century Córdoba Moorish and Jewish décor that somehow survived the multiplexization of the rest of the building. Smart, funny Tarantino script, treated skillfully by members of his repertory company.

Great filmmaking, but I think maybe I'm getting too old for repetition of the n-word and physical abuse of a prisoner (never mind a woman) to work for me as running jokes. Now the running joke that did work for me--and, as it turned out, the one integral to the plot--was the need to kick in the front door and nail it shut again whenever anyone needs to enter Minnie's Haberdashery.

By the way, I expect intermission comes only in the 70mm Roadshow screenings, but if there's a break at about 1:50 (the fastest almost 2 hours imaginable, by the way) and you think, "There's hasn't been much violence yet," trust me: you won't feel cheated in the next hour.

TransFatty Lives

CV

Patrick O'Brien was just another maker of goofy trash films until he was diagnosed with ALS, whereupon he became a documentor of disease, determination, love, fatherhood, lost love, death, and life. An astonishing, queasymaking film that will never come to your town unless your town is Manhattan or Los Angeles, and judging from attendance at my screening and the one before it (total: 2), it's not going to be in either of those towns come Friday. Eminently worth renting.

Trailers

• Moonwalkers--Yeah, maybe: based on the myth that the moonlanding was a myth and that NASA tried to hire Kubrick to fake it. Do I need to say "a comedy"?
• Rolling Papers--Another story of newspaper intrepidity, this one a documentary about the Denver Post's symbiotic relationship with legalized recreational pot.
• The Boy--No, come on: no one is stupid enough to agree to be nanny for a ceramic doll modeled on an elderly couple's dead son.
• Anesthesia--Danger! Looks like another of those many-stories-connected-by-auteristic-pretense. Oh, but that's interesting: just noticed that the auteur in question is Tim Blake Nelson, in whom pretense would be a disappointing surprise for me.
• The Treasure--Yes, please: post-Ceaușescu comedy by Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective).
• Omhide poro poro (Only yesterday)--Part of IFC's Ghiblifest, wonderful, I'm sure, but I've gotten kinda Ghiblijaded.
• Yosemite--Even the trailer admits what's you'd been thinking: this is Stand by Me.

Tell mama

Home-in-time-for-the-Illini-game (well, on DVR) M3

Janis: Little Girl Blue

IFC

Little here that I needed to know that I didn't already know about Joplin, a decade my senior but forever 27. But I didn't come for the knowing, I came for the seeing and the hearing. I have only three regrets in life, and one is never having heard (and seen) her perform live.

Mustang

IFC

Five Turkish sisters shame their family by . . . swimming, fully clothed, with boys? Yep, that's right. Lockup and forced marriages ensue, and only the youngest is emotionally equipped to fight back actively. A depressing, invigorating slice of a life we're fortunate to have avoided.

In Jackson Heights

FF

This was briefly my (Airbnb) neighborhood a couple of times this year, but I had no idea that it's home to what is apparently the oldest NYC gay pride parade, started 20-odd years ago by a guy who's now a councilman. Or how vigorous the organized support for immigrants is. Or how steadfastly the small-business owners oppose the so-called business initiative organization whose primary initiative seems to be to make it easier for Gaps and Walmarts to find homes.

You can observe a lot just by watching, Yogi Berra probably didn't say, but that could be Frederick Wiseman's mantra: point the camera, edit wisely, and respect the audience.

Trailers

• 45 Years--Rampling, Courtenay, and Something Never Spoken Of.
• Every Thing Will Be Fine--I doubt that.
• River of Fundament--5½ Matthew Barney film that is doubtless genius, but I'll take it on faith.
• Son of Saul--Not saying I'll never see another Holocaust film, but the bar is high.

Who let the dogs out?

My last M4 before the Mets' championship season

La Sapienza

FF

Two couples, Alexandre (Fabrizio Rongione) and Aliénor (Christelle Prot), middle-aged, married, French, mutually habituated but fatigued, he an architect, she a social engineer for the Parisian banlieus; and Goffredo (Ludovico Succio) and Lavinia (Arianna Nastro), young, brother and sister, Italian (Piedmontese), he eighteen and an architect to be, she younger and frail but coruscant, mutually devoted, with a faint hint of incest.

The action: Alexandre tries to revivify a Borromini book project by touring the architect's works; instead, he encounters the ephemerally idealistic Goffredo, who reminds him of the importance of light and love. Meanwhile, their other halves share parallel discoveries. Hey, it's European: there doesn't have to be a car chase. Puzzling, lovely, unhurried, surprisingly sweet. Written and directed by Eugène Green

L'enlèvement de Michel Houellebecq (The kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq)

FF

The French auteur provocateur plays himself in a brilliantly absurd comedy of a gang that can't think straight, making no attempt to disguise themselves from the victim (who helpfully points out that in a novel that would mean that they were planning to kill him) or to conceal their location. Worse, they find out that Houellebecq seems to have no one who wants him back enough to pay enough to cover the wine and liquor he's consuming and the local hooker they procure for him. The worst kidnappers since . . . well, we'll get to that in a moment.

Fehér isten (White god)

IFC

No humans were harmed, much, in the making of this extraordinary film, which Disney and Tarantino might have collaborated on--a sort of canine Spartacus. I'm glad I'd read a good deal about the film beforehand, so that I knew that the sequences of countless dogs racing down the streets of Budapest benefited from zero digital enhancement and (even more important) that the 2 participants in the dogfight are best friends and were playing as dogs will play, editing and fake blood fully responsible for the horror of it.

It's a film that so immerses you in a foreign idiom--yes, even more than the first 2 films of the day--that standard critical judgments seem suspect, even as you can't help asking yourself questions like: does knowing from the start that the filmmakers found adoptive owners for every street dog used in the film make it a better film? Well, no, of course not: but it makes it impossible not to cut them every slack.

Fortunately, little slack is needed; the worst problem I had with the film was that one of the two dogs sharing the lead role of Hagen has a bit more Shar Pei in him, and thus a wrinklier forehead. The dogs' work is brilliant, amazing even, and the humans aren't bad, either, especially Zsófia Psotta (maybe 12? I read a lot about the film, but I learned little about anyone on two legs) as Lili, the only trustworthy human in Budapest.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

IFC

Based on a debunked Japanese legend (appropriately enough), the film follows a young Tokyo woman who is convinced that the brothers Coen were serious in the caption in the opening frames of Fargo that brands the story as true.

Rinko Kukichi, barely more verbal than in Babel and equally riveting, plays the titular adventurer, whose adventures take her to snowy Minnesota, an Oz of mostly well-meaning nonwizards. (Huh! True fact: while I was writing that sentence, "Upon Closer Inspection" by Christina Abbott came up in the iPod mix of music discovered on the New Haven Green, the song containing the line "This sure isn't Kansas; you sure ain't the Scarecrow.")

It's an engaging film, and I'm a fan of the source (whose very score seems to be mined for this one), but I'm not sure how much there is actually there. Also, is the debt to Fargo and the Coens so obvious that they (they: brothers David and Nathan Zellner, who cowrote, David directing) don't even need to mention it in the credits? 'Cause I didn't notice any thanks for, say, letting them use considerable footage.

Oh, and one other cranky note: twice Kumiko phones her mother in Japan, the first time before her mother has any idea that her daughter isn't in Tokyo. It's the middle of the night in Minnesota, so let's say 3am. Kumiko tells her mother she called because she couldn't sleep. Now if your kid calls you at 5pm your time and says she can't sleep, wouldn't you ask why she's trying to sleep at that hour? And if she calls you a few days later at 2 or 3am your time, wouldn't that seem noteworthy? Apparently this film exists in a world without time zones.

Trailers

• About Elly--Kinda like Laura, but in the Middle East instead of on the Upper East Side. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Past).
• Dior and I--High fashion doc; whee.
• Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock & Roll--That pretty much says it.
• I Am Big Bird--I hope this doc isn't followed by embarrassing revelations like the Elmo one was.
• Das große Museum (The great museum)--Specifically the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna.
• Salad Days--Well, hell, I gotta see this, 'cause I didn't even know D.C. had a punk scene.
• Clouds of Sils Maria--All About Eve, with Juliette Binoche as Margo, Chloë Grace Moretz as Eve, and Kristen Stewart splitting the difference.
• Soul Boys of the Western World--Admit it: you've been praying for a Spandau Ballet doc.

Untimely ripp'd

Ho/NoHo M5

Subway platform, steel drum, familiar tune . . . Recognition (for full appreciation of irony, think about the pitch of a typical steel drum): "All about That Bass." Smile.

Macbeth (1948)

FF

The most praise I can give Orson Welles's film of one of the top 4 Shakespearean tragedies (top 5 if you include Antony and Cleopatra) is that the look of it is a match for the language. Every frame (shot not by Welles's go-to guy Gregg Toland, who died the year the film was made, but by John L. Russell) is like a rich charcoal drawing. The worst criticism I can level is that the wildly overacting Jeanette Nolan, playing a Lady Macbeth who seems constantly on the cusp of orgasm, should have gone over a cliff much earlier.

Streamlined to a sub-2-hour runtime, the film sacrifices virtually all of the play's comedy, including the wonderful porter scene. And I gather the studio originally dubbed out the Scottish accents, though they're intact in this version.

Il capitale umano (Human capital)

FF

A lush, beautiful Italian Rashomon, wherein greed is not good, sanity is tenuous, and love may our may not be redemptive.

Nothing very groundbreaking or earthshaking there, but it has an effective momentum and enough mystery to carry you along, though the way a critical discovery is plotted will make you scream out in annoyance at the unbelievable manipulation.

Garbanzo Gas (2007)

AFA

My first trip ever to Anthology Film Archives, at Second and 2nd. Why, I'm not sure. The venue has two theaters and a sort of rec center lobby. Downstairs is a standard NYC art-house screening room; upstairs is a cavernous, rakeless auditorium (though the screen is hung high enough that the lack of rake is not problematic).

This movie took me back to the days when I used to screen entries for Film Fest New Haven, except that apart from the sheer fascination with how bad a picture could be for 75 whole minutes, I probably not have gotten past the first 10 or so.

Then again, if I'd stopped that early, I'd have encountered only 2 of the plots, the one about the cow selected by lot to win an all-expenses-paid one-day "vacation" in a crappy motel before going to the slaughterhouse, and the one about 2 pathetic gigolos who ripped off their meal ticket so that they could see a boxing kangaroo on the motel TV but missed the match because they were fighting over the remote and are now going to kill themselves at checkout time. 

I could tell you the other 2 plots, but then I'll have to lobotomize you. But I will say that every dollar of the budget is visible on the screen, and I'm pretty sure that number runs into 3 figures. Oh, and there's a Message: eat your vegetables, not your cows.

Que ta joie demeure (Joy of man's desiring)

AFA

The hell was that? It was sorta like if Frederick Wiseman made Modern Times. Or not.

Factory workers in Montreal work, and things get made, and on rare occasion someone says something, and that something is always worth listening to. And then the little boy comes in and plays the violin, and smiles, and then it's over, and though you were sometimes bored, now you wish there were more.

Giuseppe Makes a Movie

AFA

A wonderful look at Giuseppe Andrews, the quasi-brilliant lunatic responsible for Garbanzo Gas. Say what you will about the laughably bad production values, dialogue, plotting, music, and acting, you can't question Andrews's enthusiasm or his dedication--Scorsese, I'm guessing, never cleaned up the ass of an incontinent senior actor, for example; Andrews apparently does so at least once a picture.

And the acting: well, most of his actors are jobless, some are homeless, most have issues with alcohol and/or other drugs, one has demons from multiple stints in Southeast Asia (Vietnam Ron, with long gray scraggly hair, a long gray scraggly beard, and no upper from teeth, plays Cow in Gas), and one craps his pants with some regularity (as it were). That this troupe is a de facto loving family made me think of the movie gang in Scary Normal, of course, and that made me a lot fonder of Giuseppe than I could have been from just seeing his own work.

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!

Persian white

Popcorn-for-Thanksgiving M3

OK, don't worry about my state of mind (or don't worry about it any more than usual), but after 3 movies that I enjoyed, I decided I'd rather head home and watch the Illini game only a couple of hours after it occurred than hang around for the 3D Godard film, especially since I realized that I'd thrown away my chance of using MoviePass, since 3D flicks aren't covered.

Why hadn't I already used MP on one of the 2 earlier films I'd seen at IFC, you ask? Because I was running so late that I entered the theater for the first one moments after the feature had begun, and the second while the short was in progress. Given my experiences with MP, I decided that using it for the one film of the day for which I wouldn't be rushed was the (as it were) ticket, but then I remembered the restriction too late.

Of course, I thought I'd try anyway, but the app informed me that it didn't have the theater's showtimes, and the thought of navigating that kink in the system--to try for a ticket to which I wasn't entitled--was more than I could contemplate

But hey, good news/bad news re ticket costs: when I checked my ticket stubs, I found that the cashier had TWICE assumed me to be eligible for the senior price of $10, so I saved $10 even without MP

And that's about all I have to say about my M3. Oh, wait, right: the movies:

Citizenfour

IFC

All right, I'm convinced: Edward Snowden may technically be a traitor, but that doesn't stop him from being a patriot in spirit. An extraordinarily static documentary that somehow manages to be fascinating, largely by playing on the tension between secrecy and transparency.

Le Jour se lève (Daybreak)

FF

Yes, Jean Gabin had a great face, and it's hard to imagine a better victim-of-circumstances protagonist, but it was hard for me to get past the implausibility that the police would let a killer hole up in his room long enough to flash back through the entire narrative that brought him to his fatal circumstance.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

IFC

I'm sorry to announce that this will not be Iran's submission to the Academy in the Best Foreign Film category. But damn, it oughta be.

The Girl, for whom no name is ever heard, has no explicit backstory, though it's clear that she likes rock & roll and prides herself on maintaining standards of morality consistent with being a vampire.

Beautiful black & white cinematography, strong soundtrack (including someone called Kiosk, who can fairly be described as the Farsi Tom Waits), a stunning, almost silent star (Sheila Vand, who undoubtedly spoke more words in the history lecture that opens Argo), and a touching love story with a Graduate final shot. Oh, and a character with some seriously badass tattoos. Oh! And a great damn cat!

Trailers

• Zero Motivation--A comedy about female Israeli soldiers.
• Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will)--Mathieu Amalric + Emmanuelle Devos = hell yeah.
• Leviafan (Leviathan)--Angry Russians.
• Risate di gioia (The passionate thief)--Mario Monicelli retrospective at Film Forum.
• Song of the Sea--Selkies, animated.
• Yume to kyôki no ôkoku (Kingdom of dreams and madness)--Documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.
• The Babadook--Hfs! The trailer scared the crap out of me. In!
• Goodbye to All That--Divorced dad has girlfriends.

Father knows best

An all-IFC, pre-opening day characterization M4

What a beautiful spring day in Manhattan, which I know because I had a half-hour to get outside between movies 2 and 3.

Gimme the Loot

IFC

Note to self: find Marion Williams's cover of "I Shall Be Released."

This wasn't a front-runner for the program today until I was reminded that it's about a pair of graffitist buddies bent on "bombing" the home run apple at Citi Field. Since I'm gonna be at Citi on Monday (and Thursday, and Sunday week, and repeatedly thereafter), and since I hope to see that apple appear with some regularity, how could I skip it?

Glad I didn't. A sweet buddy movie, like Butch and Sundance if one of them had actually been female, thus rendering the existing sexual tension both more and less (because secondary to the partnership) conventional. Nothing amazing or profound, but thoroughly likable and almost certain not to play in New Haven, and that pretty much defines the M4 flick.

The We and the I

IFC

Repeat last sentence from previous review.

My spoiler-avoidance policy kept me from reading much about this, but Michel Gondry seems to have written a script that lets some actual high schoolers portray versions of themselves on the ride home from school--the hour-and-a-half odyssey for some--on the Bx66 bus. What that gives us is a reasonably convincing simulacrum of the life, the cruelty, the confusion, and the innocence-in-spite-of-itself of youth. Ballsy thing for a French dude to attempt, one that could have failed laughably, but it works.

Leviathan

IFC

Whoa, that wasn't Iron Man 3, was it? Often lightless, mostly wordless, this challenges us to know just what is going on on this New Bedford fishing boat. I was sort of under the impression there would be whales (see earlier note about obsessive spoiler avoidance), but even with just various fish (including sea scallops that made me reconsider my all-but-vegetarianism), sea birds, and, oh yeah, some humans, it's a fascinating slice of a foreign life. In retrospect, however, a pic with little light or language is maybe not ideal for the midafternoon slot in an M4 being conducted on < 7 hours' sleep; battled the drowsies from beginning almost to end, and I confess that from time to time I found myself wondering whether any of my Mets tickets were selling on StubHub (they weren't).

Nice Times-underwritten short, Allergy to Originality, riffing on the nothing-new-under-the-sun trope via Wikipedia.

După dealuri (Beyond the hills)

IFC

It's a nice quiet monastery until Alina shows up, intent on rekindling romance with Voichita, who opted for nunhood when Alina split for work and a non-Romanian life in Germany. But Alina doesn't fit, won't fit, doesn't want to fit (except perhaps as a means of getting Voichita back), and the charismatic priest who runs the joint ain't having her evil influence screwing up his good thing. Ugliness, up to and including an exorcism-cum-crucifixion, ensues. A brutal, remarkable watch.

Trailers

• One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das--Doc about a chanter.
• Portrait of Jason--Gay hustlerand champion drinker, circa 1965, I'm guessing. (Good guess: the film is '67.)
• Upstream Color--From Shane Carruth, director of Primer; I'm a yes here.
• Simon Killer--Funny, I already don't remember this clearly, but I remember that it looked promising.

Dial E for espionage

MLK and Inauguration weekend M4

Bonuses, bonuses! First, I got into Grand Central plenty early, and it was a sunny day in the 50s (a perfect day to spend inside in a dark room, I like to say), so I got to take a pleasant mile-and-a-half downtown stroll before settling into the program. The the cashier at Cinema Village charged my credit card only 6 bucks--senior price (yeah, OK, that's not an altogether good thing)--and by the time I noticed, it wasn't worth going back and insisting on paying more.

Later I saved even more money when I discovered that the two noirs from the years just before my birth were being treated as an old-fashioned double feature--one $12.50 admission for the pair! Finally, I unexpectedly made the 9:34 train (cutting it so close that I had no time to buy my usual cookie and soda before board, thus saving me another 5 bucks or so, against my will) and was thus snug in my bed before midnight.

Oh, and in addition to the nice bonuses, the movies were good too.

Fairhaven

CV

Yes, this is the sort of indy film that has bringing me here for a dozen years or so: quiet without being soporific, heartfelt without being goopy, human and engaging and sad and funny.

Three buddies from a nowhere town, Dave (Chris Messina), the lone escapee, returning for his father's funeral; Jon (Tom O'Brien), a writer chafing against his job on a fishing boat; and Sam (Rich Sommer), a real-estate agent with a daughter and an ex-wife--an ex-wife with whom, Jon is upended to learn, Dave had an affair years earlier when the couple was struggling.

So no: no new narrative trails blazed here. Doesn't matter; the well-worn trails are driven with intelligence, grace, and sensitivity.

Barbara

Ang

Geez, hadn't been to the Angelika in . . . well, let's just see . . . in almost 5 years, since seeing Paranoid Park there on Easter weekend 2008. And apart from showing me an excellent movie, they didn't do anything to make me want to come back soon: their computers were down, so no credit card purchases--OK, unavoidable perhaps, but what was not unavoidable was making us stand in a long line snaking down the Houston Street sidewalk in conditions that had become a little cooler and lots windier because only one cashier was working the two-window booth.

So why was I there? Because this seems a film that might slip through the New Haven cracks, and (duh) I didn't want to risk missing it. Good call, and I won't second-guess myself if it does come to town. It's East Germany in the '80s, and the title character (Nina Hoss) is a sullen doctor exiled to a provincial clinic for unspecified irregularities (though it later becomes clear to the audience that the authorities are right to suspect her devotion to the communist cause).

There she meets André (Ronald Zehrfeld), a colleague who confesses to her the transgression that got him there--to which her reaction is to ask, "Is that the story they told you to tell me?" André is simultaneously puppy-dog infatuated with a woman he sense will be even more beautiful if she ever smiles and determined to encourage her to trust, to become a willing part of the community and the medical team that he has come to love, notwithstanding the circumstances and forces that put him there.

This is a very good film that forfeits its chance to be a great one with a stage-managed conclusion straight out of Hollywood.

The Thief (1952)

FF

Allan Fields (Ray Milland) is America's dumbest nuclear physicist, insufficiently sharp to realize that you don't escape the FBI agent tailing you by climbing the stairs up from the 88th floor of the Empire State.

Fields has been sending secrets to the commies, though why is unclear: he obviously hates himself for doing it and would stop if he could, but he can't. It would be a gripping Cold War spy drama without the gimmick, but the gimmick raises it a couple of notches: it's silent. Well, sans dialogue. There's plenty of sound: traffic noise, jazz from the apartment of the sultry and seemingly randy neighbor (played by the aptly named Rita Gam), and--especially--the phone, ringing three times and stopping, the signal from his handler.

Why silence is brilliant is that it encapsulates the isolation of a man who has betrayed his country and his vocation, who has no friends or family in evidence, whose relationships even with colleagues is nodding at best--whose relationship even with his spy handlers is limited to delivery of instructions and Minox film cassettes en passant. In films that could not but be silent, there is plenty of language, whether on title cards or simply in pantomime. This film recognizes that it is language more than anything that links us, and the silence here is a vacuum of language, making the story far darker and more discomfiting than it could otherwise be.

Until a presumably Hays-mandated ending that in fact punishes Fields less than the outcome toward which we seemed to be heading, one tough-minded piece of noir.

Blast of Silence (1961)

FF

The first time I saw this I was so involved in what was old and what was new that I didn't notice how much Allen Baron's visual idiom here influenced Francis Ford Coppola and David Chase when they painted their gangster hits. Interesting that this too has a conclusion that the Hays Committee would have approved, the difference being that the conclusion here is the only one the story could reasonably have reached.

Trailers

• Molly's Theory of Relativity--Earning power & marital solidarity; could be a gem, could be blah.
• Starbuck--Looks like one of those farces that encourages us that the French can be just as stupid as us.
• A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III--Roman Coppola wrote and directs Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, and Bill Murray.
• No--Gael García Bernal is an ad man charged with bringing down Pinochet. Oh yes.
• Blancanieves--Director Pablo Berger has clearly studied Almodóvar and del Toro.
• Yossi--Sequel to Yossi and Jagger, which I wanted to like more than I actually did.

Different drum

Gift of time M4

Starting on East Houston and circling clockwise, as I always do, I was close to deciding there wasn't anything on the docket to compel me to make an interholiday movie trip to the city. That was before I got to the Cinema Village schedule, containing a film about a rock icon of my youth, a film that had opened right after my Thanksgiving-weekend M4, so I hadn't even considered the possibility of its hanging around for my next trip. Mr. Baker is the raison d'être; the others are just garnishing raisins.

Keep the Lights On

CV

Someday I'll go to a film about a same-sex relationship and not feel compelled to mention that element in the first sentence. But not yet, obviously.

Still, this film makes me optimistic, because it's really a lot less about the lovers being of the same sex than about one of them being a crackhead. Which means an entirely different set of clichés. Writer-director Ira Sachs finesses the clichés by making the narrative telegraphic and non-sequitur-prone, as it leaps from 1998 to 2000 to 2003 to 2006, always returning to the question of whether Paul (Zachary Booth) has changed and whether Erik (Thure Lindhardt) can keep (or restart) loving him. And we care because the people move us.

Beware of Mr. Baker

CV

For those of us who knew Cream and Blind Faith back in the day, the biggest surprise should be that the best and most volatile (tall cotton, that) drummer in rock history would have been around to celebrate a 40th and a 50th and a 60th and bless his cantankerous soul even a 70th birthday. But since I already knew he was still alive, the biggest surprise for me was his passion for polo. Right, like with horses. Seriously. Otherwise, what we have here is a piece of remarkable found art with a kickass soundtrack.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

CV

Huh, go figure: there's no indication that Ms. Vreeland shared Ginger Baker's enthusiasm for polo (though it was certainly much more a part of her milieu than of his), but horses meant at least as much to her idiom. This was one of those I-couldn't-care-less-about-topic-but-golly-look-at-those-Rotten Tomatoes-numbers picks, and as usual with such pics, I'm glad I paid a visit to this alien bedazzling world. And now, back to my unfashionable monde . . .

Tabu

FF

An odd Portuguese melodrama about love, infidelity, murder, and girl-group pop songs in colonial Mozambique. I think I have to confess that I was pretty much M'd out by this point, though that seems dangerously close to admitting that I'm not as young as when I started doing this.

Trailers

• Fairhaven--Black sheep son comes home, unwillingly, for Dad's funeral. Problems ensure.
• Generation P--Oddly, I saw two very different trailers; looks Russianly interesting.
• A Royal Affair--Even odder that they should still be showing the trailer of a film I've already passed on at home.
• Amour--Now showing at FF, so skipping it is a bit of a risk, I suppose, but Michael Haneke's last three films have shown downtown, and the buzz on this one is huge. Of course it'll be a little annoying not to see it until after it wins the foreign-film Oscar®, but I'll survive.
• The Gatekeepers--Shin Bet badasses! Who ya gonna call?

Quintessence of dust

Black Saturday M4

The most awe-inspiring element of my first Manhattan movie trip in months came about via a film I didn't see, a Japanese animated feature called The Mystical Law, which had a couple of young woman (including the director, I suspect) at Cinema Village in support of its weeklong run. As I waited for the film I was there for to seat, one of the women interviewed a 13-year-old audience member from their film's previous screening.

She started off the young man (who looked much younger than 13, in fact) with a softball, "How did you like it?" He gave the hoped for response, but with a spin at the end, commenting that the conclusion was unconvincing, declaring as it did that we must pray for the world to be saved. It seems the idea that holding your hands in a certain way while reciting prescribed words didn't resonate with him.

OK, I'm with him, and I'm impressed. But it gets better. She asked another simplistic question, "What was your favorite part?" and again he refused to give a simplistic answer. "My favorite idea was the oneness of the world." OK, seriously? Thirteen?

Finally, she asked whether he believes in aliens. He considered the question a moment, then began, "I believe in extraterrestrials, but . . . " and I'm thinking, no, he's not going to make that distinction. Yes, yes, he was: "I believe in extraterrestrials, but to call them 'alien' makes it sound like they don't belong."

Jesus! I hope I'm that smart and sophisticated if I ever get to be 13 again. Also, I'm really glad this wasn't at the start of the day, because the films on the agenda would have had a hard act to follow. As it was, while there were no Hall of Famers, the lineup was full of good, solid players, maybe an All-Star or two. And it seems extremely unlikely that any will ever reach New Haven. So a successful day.

Barrymore

VE

First, let me say: SIX DOLLARS! SIX FREAKIN' DOLLARS for your ticket before noon! (Though they will then get $ 13.75 from you for your large corn & soda.)

This is one of those odd stage-cinema mergers the point of which is perhaps less to tell you something about the subject than to reconfirm your appreciation of the actor embodying that subject. In which case, mission accomplished. Funny, this is the first time in ages I've seen Christopher Plummer in a film and been reminded of what I saw him in first, repeatedly. We've discussed this before, right? I don't have to go into it again, right? Suffice it to say, Catholic kid, early '60s, OK?

Anyway, I'm guessing no one would have guessed then that he'd have the chops to play a Barrymore (multiple Barrymores, actually--John mimics the old man and Ethel, too, and while I have no way to gauge the accuracy of those takes, or of Plummer's John, for that matter, I can testify that Plummer's John Barrymore does a bangup Lionel Barrymore. A limited film, but a fine one of its ilk.

Price Check

IFC

Ah, Ms. Posey, you have come back to indy, and indy still loves you. A potentially conventional story of a good man and good husband seduced in more ways than one by his crazy, obsessive boss, but the film is smart enough to use the potential for conventionality only as a tease en route to something more interesting and infinitely sadder (though conventionally happy, too).

The Central Park Five

IFC

The notorious gang-rape case that gave crypto-racists the word "wilding" as a convenient label for savage "urban" depredation gets the justice-deferred treatment from the second-generation documentarian Sarah Burns.

There's a lot of angry-making here, but I think the angriest-making point is one articulated by the history professor Craig Steven Wilder (disconcerting surname, that, in this context) that "Their innocence never got the attention that their 'guilt' got." Which, as a onetime journalist, I heard on corrections with much lower stakes. Police, prosecutors, press, even the majority of the Harlem community, were all so invested in what Ed Koch called "a test of our legal system," and on mutual congratulations for passing that test, that "we walked away from our guilt."

Chasing Ice

CV

Photographer James Balog's frustrating, exhilarating, heroic quest to document the deterioration of the Northern Hemisphere's glaciers into Slushies. That quest is challenged by brutal weather, equipment that can't stand up to said weather, and a gimpy knee that shouldn't stand up, full stop.

The point is climate change, of course, but the surprise is the terrible beauty--"the miracle, the horror," he says--that the planet's literal meltdown displays.

Trailers

• Waiting for Lightning--Yeah, that sounds like a good idea: dude's gonna jump the Great Wall on a skateboard.
• In Our Nature--Fathers, sons, and their lovers.
• Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet--Rocking in spite of ALS.

Holy crap! A postscript

Sunday morning, and, ahead of making a return trip to the city to meet an author/friend for lunch, I'm getting a Diet Dr Pepper and preparing to read a bit of the Times when my doorbell rings. "What the what?" I think. "I don't do 'social' on Sunday a.m." I go to the door, expecting to see Sunday-dressed Jehovah's witnesses, but there's just one man, in casual dress, unknown to me.

I feign welcome as I open the door, and he greets me warmly and says, holding up something that looks a lot like my wallet and my driver's license, "This is you, right?"

Well, yes. I had no idea it was missing, but it must have slid out of my hip pocket on the train. Funny, I'd almost gone back to check to see whether I'd left anything on the seat, but it was one of the new cars, and the big Amtrak-style restroom was between the door I was standing at and the seat I'd occupied, and I didn't.

Naturally, I was gobsmacked, so much so that I turned into my mother and hugged the guy, so much so that though I gave him all the money that was in the wallet, which was only about eight bucks, it didn't occur to me to get his name & address so I could send him more. Best I could do was to wish him an extra Thanksgiving, because he had certainly given me one. Now I feel bad about rewarding him so lightly--but not, I confess, as good as I feel to have come through this apparently unscathed.

Saints' day

MLK weekend M4

It's unusual to encounter the word "hagiography" in two reviews in a single Friday Times, and even more unusual for me to go see both films thus characterized. As I said my good-byes on my way out of work that day, I told some of my colleagues, "Do something to honor Dr. King this weekend," which was sort of a joke and sort of not, and while I can't claim to have given the birthday boy any thought in framing my itinerary, it's undeniable that his spirit is present in half the films I saw--and even his image in one of them.

La Promesse (1996)

IFC

Igor is no saint (though he does share with Lula an apprenticeship as a machinist)--the first thing we see him do is steal a wallet from a customer at the gas station where he works, and he is clearly and uncomplainingly on his way to becoming his father, a construction contractor and slumlord who exploits his illegal immigrants/tenants perhaps slightly less that some such exploiters. But when one worker is fatally injured in a jobsite accident and extracts from him the titular promise--to take care of the wife and infant son he has just brought from their native Burkina Faso--Igor takes his responsibilities to heart, even at the expense of his complicated but loving relationship with Roger.

The film rises about its clichéd deathbed-promise premise on the the performances of Jérémie Renier as the adolescent Igor, Olivier Gourmet as his myopic father, and Assita Ouedraogo as the fiercely determined widow (whose widowhood is concealed from her).

Lula, o Filho do Brasil (Lula, the son of Brazil)

Quad

Not a documentary, but documentarish, as Stephen Colbert might say, this is a straight-line, episodic account of the rise of Luiz Inácio da Silva from the poverty first of the Brazilian back country and then of São Paulo to national prominence as a union activist, though it ends before his unlikely ascendancy to the presidency of the country and his brilliant tenure in that office.

He is depicted in saintly terms, but the brighter halo is worn--and arguably the central role of the fictionalized account borne--by his mother, Lindu (Glória Pires, a veteran of Brazilian TV). If Lula is, per the subtitle, Brazil's son, by the transitive principle his mother is Brazil, and Brazil could hardly ask for a more positive embodiment. When Lindu dies, the story is over.

Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A separation)

FF

No one and everyone is a saint in this extraordinary tale of moral complexity and personal tribulation: Simin's (Leila Hatami) imperative is to remove her 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, in a heartbreakingly perfect performance) from Iran (why is not made explicit, but the implication is that it is to escape the theocratic system of whose machinations we get more than a glimpse); Nader's (Peyman Moadi) is to care for his Alzheimer's-muddled father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi); these irreconcilable differences are the basis for divorce proceedings neither wants. So the story is impossible even before the woman Nader hires to care for his father leaves him tied to the bed for what we later learn was a medical emergency, and Nader as a result pushes her, she falls and miscarries, and each side sues the other in the shari'a courts.

Brutally painful and profoundly beautiful--the sort of film that makes you wish for a magic wand to wave and make everything turn out OK for everyone. But that's not going to happen, as the excruciatingly long final shot makes clear: we watch Simin and Nader wait to learn the results of the story's final Sophie's choice, Termeh's announcement of which parent she will live with.

Sing Your Song

IFC

Harry Belafonte has many virtues, but modesty is perhaps not the most prominent. It would be wrong to say that he takes credit for popularizing King and the civil rights movement, or that he claims to have sprung Nelson Mandela from Robben Island, or even that he believes that he ended hunger with "We Are the World," but it's probably fair to say he'd be disinclined to concede a greater role to anyone else.

Still, the man has been on the right side of just about every question in his three-quarters of a century, and he has given literal and figurative voice to his rightness, and if he wants to crow, well, he has earned the crowing.

The film itself is much stronger in the first half, showing his seemingly logical evolution from concerned entertainer to activist. After the terrible events of 1968--the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy, the self-destruction of the Democratic Party in Chicago--chronology becomes scrambled and activism becomes a bit of a smorgasbord, but never is there any hint that Belafonte's motives are not pure. And the fight goes on, now on behalf of children in prison. Lula's mother taught him, we are told, never to give up. Belafonte's mother had much more ambition for her son: to wake up every day with an agenda for making right something that is wrong.

Trailers

• Crazy Horse--Just read a feature about this in the Times: Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary, about the legendary Paris strip club. Hell, yeah!
• This Is Not a Film--A film about a film that can't be made by banned Irani filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Yes.
• Gianni e le donne (The salt of life)--Looks like a charming sequel to Pranzo di ferragosto.
• How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?--Potentially interesting architecture doc.
• La guerre est déclarée (Declaration of war)--Love, parenthood, and cancer.
• The Pruitt-Igoe Myth--The broken promises of urban renewal in St. Louis's most notorious project.

Mass transit, authority

Marked-down interholiday M3

As you know, I like to give logistical tips to readers contemplating their own excessive cineManhattan trips, so here's what I can pass along from yesterday: if you think that the Thursday between Sunday holidays will be a sort of lull time, affording you elbow room on the train and a vacant seat for your coat and hat and backpack at the theaters, well, uh, no. True, my 1:05 show in Cinema Village's tiny theater 2 was not packed, but the 3:50 show in CV's spacious theater 3 was uncomfortably so, and my 7:45 at IFC was nonexistent, for me, at least: my first ever SOLD OUT on the ticket machine.

I had intended to see Porco Rosso, but being denied was just a disappointment, not a disaster, as the nearby Film Forum had 3 worthy candidates at 8 or 8:20. In retrospect I wish I'd opted for a 2nd FF screening of Alain Resnais' weirdly wonderful L'Année dernière à Marienbad or my first-ever big-screen viewing of The Gold Rush, but that M lesson was learned long ago: every yes means one or more nos. I did at least get to discuss Marienbad with a couple of other lobby riders, one of whom had seen it a few days ago and was about to see it again for what she calculated was her 5th or 6th time ever. She insisted that the film demands intense, constant thought, while I perversely suggested just the opposite, that it better rewards passive acceptance of all its absurdities and self-contradictions. Anyway . . .

Miss Minoes

CV

I expected this to be whimsical, but I didn't realize that it's actually a '60s-Disney-type kids romance--that it might be something to give the grandkids, notwithstanding the occurrence of the word "shit" in the dubbed-over-the-Dutch soundtrack, including once from the third-banana little girl. I'll stack up my resistance to foul language against anyone's, but the word is really shocking in a context that is otherwise as G-ratable as can be.

The premise predates Ovid--cat metamorphoses into (extremely cute) human woman--but with an eco spin, the trigger being waste from the deodorant plant of the local sweet-smelling, foul-souled capitalist. In Disney style, what has to be done is (1) exposure of the villain and undermining of his villainous scheme and (2) marriage of the odd couple. But why it works is that we also have what I'm tempted to call a cats of thousands, except that it's really only a dozen or so: real cats with real acting chops. Resist them if you can; I couldn't.

Margaret

CV

Spoiled Upper West Side teen distracts bus driver and causes fatal accident, and her guilt and compulsion to make the driver acknowledge his own dominates every one of the 135 or so remaining minutes of the 150 total. No, wait, that would be a lot duller and less truthful movie. In fact, what happens is that while the accident is ever-present at some level of the psychological substrata of Lisa (Anna Paquin; "Margaret" is from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read in her English class), she also is preoccupied by school, by sex, by getting high, by getting high and having sex with schoolmates, by getting high in the presence of and maybe having sex with teachers, by her absent father (writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, who gave himself a similarly feckless authority figure to play in his wonderful first film, You Can Count on Me), by her mother whom she often wishes absent.

It is, in short, a big picture about a big moment in a life that already has an unbearable amount of bigness about it. Neither Lisa nor anyone else in the film (well, OK, two exceptions, I guess: Jean Reno as mother Joan's suitor and Jake O'Connor as Lisa's) tries to grab our affection, and so we like them for their prickliness as much as anything (exhibit A: the remarkable Jeannie Berlin as the accident victim's best friend, Emily).

But the big picture has many small pleasures, too: Matthew Broderick channeling that bad teacher who knew no other way of dealing with a provocative but wrong-headed student remark than by declaring the wrongness without giving any credit for the ingeniousness; Mark Ruffalo as the bus driver, cast as villain by Lisa and Emily but as yet another victim by Lonergan; even Renée Fleming, who gives a convincing performance as a Met soprano.

The film opened and closed in a week in the fall to critical and popular resistance, but late in the year critics started to rethink, and the film got a second life when it appeared on some top ten lists. I understand both the resistance and the reassessment. I doubt that this will ever join You Can Count on Me in my DVD library, but I'm glad to have given it 2½ hours of cramped moviegoing--it was as much work as play, but it was rewarding work.

El Sicario: Room 164

FF

My initial plan was for whimsy on either side of the grit of Margaret, but instead I shifted to a quasi-documntary confession of a drug runner who graduated to enforcer and hit man. What's interesting about this is what the filmmakers do to try to make interesting a static disquisition in a motel room. One obvious choice would have been reenactments of the brutal crimes, but that would have risked accusations of torture porn and raised questions about the intent.

So what they do instead is have the actor (I presume) playing the sicario doodle compulsively on an artist's sketchpad, jotting outlines of steps involved in training, for example, or illustrating the proper gunshot pattern for the assassination of the driver of a car, or mapping the logistics of a kidnapping. He is no less compulsive about conserving the pages he's filling at fever pitch--more than once he starts to flip 2 pages at once, but makes a point of turning one page back lest a page be wasted. Odd.

And then Jesus came.

Trailers

• Angels Crest--They do? That missing apostrophe in place names always annoys me. Good cast, including Elizabeth McGovern, always welcome.
• Once upon a Time in Anatolia--Yeah, OK, maybe--but why is IMDb so freakin' slow?