Film

SOME LIKE IT WILDER [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons  and continuing here at  Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange concerns Billy Wilder. After we  run  the previously-published seven original entries, beginning with Part I below, new posts will appear in the coming…

FEMIWITCH Men are definitely the outsiders in director and writer Anna Biller’s engrossing and increasingly strange film, a movie which frankly defies easy description; the  genre could very well be  designated as “feminist satire.” Set in the 1970s, and utilizing period costumes and sets, along with the wonderfully over-saturated colorful Technicolor hues of a Sirkian melodrama, The…

MIXED BUSINESS Vlad Yudin’s provocatively titled informational documentary The Hurt Business feels like a cinematic version of a survey course on the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA). For those in the dark but curious about MMA, Mr. Yudin’s film, narrated by longtime MMA fan Kevin Costner, can serve as a useful introduction. But even…

ONE IN A MINYAN In Daniel Burman’s brisk and sharp human comedy The Tenth Man, Ariel (Alan Sabbagh) returns to Once, the Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires where he grew up, to visit his father Usher for Purim. A 30-something irreligious Jew who resides in Manhattan and has a dancer girlfriend, Ariel left his home…

A GREAT SESSION, BUT THERAPY SHOULD CONTINUE “So, what brings you here?” asks the Professor of his newest patient, in David Ruehm’s Therapy for a Vampire, a stylized romantic comedy fairy tale set in 1932 Vienna. “I’m not good at self-reflection,” replies Count Geza von Kozsnom (a mesmerizing Tobias Moretti). “I feel old and tired….

LEAR: KING OF THE 1970s SITCOM “Maybe [people] continued to agree with Archie Bunker – as I said earlier, you can’t change people’s minds, but you can get them to think.”   – Norman Lear When you think of words to describe 1960s television, one word that won’t come to mind is “edgy”.   It’s almost hard…

BACK TO BLACK Naïve and primitive in style, Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 feature debut Black Girl is a political statement regarding some of the aftereffects of French colonialism on Senegal. The simple, if not simplistic, story concerns a young African woman, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who is invited to France by a white family to take…

ALMOST TRUSTWORTHY The collapse of the Soviet Union led to, among other things, an epidemic of child homelessness in its former republics. Whether orphaned, escaping impossible domestic situations or poorly run government institutions, on the streets these children become junkies, prostitutes, criminals. They are used and abused, raped, beaten and murdered. Officials’â€assuming they are not…

HOW THE SAUSAGE IS UNMADE Upton Sinclair said of industrial meat packers that “[t]hey use everything about the hog except the squeal.” When the press ties a politician to his penis it goes Farmer John one better: the louder the squeal, the higher the ratings. The mechanics of governance gets scant coverage. What politicians do…

SARACIDE After the picture fades at the end of Jeppe Rønde’s Bridgend a title appears: “From 2007 to 2012 there were 79 recorded suicides in Bridgend, Wales. Most victims were teenagers. They hanged themselves and left no suicide notes. To this day the suicides haven’t stopped.” Mr. Rønde’s narrative feature attempts to delve into the…

THE WAIT FOR THIS FILM TO BE OVER Francesco Di Giacomo’s gorgeous cinematography, an excellent cast headed by Juliette Binoche, who delivers an emotionally taut performance, a beautiful old Sicilian villa, a picturesque countryside ’” all these are on offer in Piero Messina’s The Wait, about a mother concealing the fact of her son’s recent…

SHADOW  DOCUMENTARY Johan Grimonprez’s documentary, based on Andrew Feinstein’s 2011 book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, attempts to delve into the murky relationships between politicians and arms manufacturers, proposing that the former are mere representatives of the latter, and that to a great extent war is a manufactured, for-profit enterprise. We get to…

OUT OF COURTED Christian Vincent’s Courted tells of a separated judge, Michel Racine (Fabrice Luchini), presiding over a child murder trial, who discovers that one of the jurors is Ditte (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a nurse he fell in love with during a hospital stay years ago. On the one hand this movie, which Mr. Vincent…

EAT BUGS AND LIKE IT! By 2050 the world’s population will reach 9 billion people and food production will need to increase by 70% to feed them, we are informed by titles at the beginning of Andreas Johnsen’s breezy info-documentary Bugs. One plentiful and underexploited food source is insects. Will these be the key to…

YOUR MOUNTAIN IS WAITING Reading the synopsis of Children of the Mountain in the Tribeca Film Festival  catalogue I fully expected the film to be a sentimental, agenda-driven disaster; the only reason I ended up watching it was because I was unable to watch the movie I had wanted to see. As it turned out, this…

CUT TO THE CHASE When we meet Ann (Lucy Walters) in Rod Blackhurst’s zombie horror thriller Here Alone she’s been surviving in the woods of upstate New York for about six months, ever since a virus turned most of the population into flesh-eating crazies. We learn from flashbacks that when the virus hit she had…

SQUINTING AT THE GRANDEUR The champion American auteurs of the last thirty years have made it difficult to accept anything from them but greatness. Of seventeen movies Joel and Ethan Coen have written and directed since 1984, at least ten resonate with extraordinary moral power. Three or four are as good as any movie ever…