Film

IÑÁRRITU IN THE WILDERNESS Frontiersman Hugh Glass was attacked by a bear in 1823, deep in the Dakota Territory. Given his broken leg and exposed ribs, Glass’s friends didn’t think he’d make it. Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald took his rifle and left him for dead, spooked that scalp-hunting Arikara warriors were on their trail….

I SEE, YOU SAW Goodnight Mommy, the creepy 2014 film from Austrian husband and wife team Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, takes over an hour to turn into an American horror movie. Before that, the story of adolescent twins trapped in a country house with their bandage-swathed mother sustains a nice tonal drive through territory…

LISTEN TO HIM Besides the enormous acting talent, a wonderful tertiary gift delivered by the presence on Earth of Marlon Brando is the Marlon Brando story. Everybody who knew him or ran into him in a drugstore has at least one. One of the best that does not involve sleeping with him is frequently told…

GETTING INSIDE FIRST Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head? Disney’¢Pixar’s original new film Inside Out ventures inside the mind to find out. The film opens in theaters nationwide on June 19, 2015, but Fathom Events and Disney are working together to present a special screening in…

GIVE SOME GREEN ON PINK FOR THE QUEENDOM Pinkstart, part of Kickstarter, is the new global LGBT crowdfunding website. The Queendom of Tonga,  a fascinating 50-minute documentary now in post-production, seeks funding to complete short animation sequences by Tess Martin. Follow a Peace Corps volunteer, directed to stay in the closet, as he navigates how to…

HYENA DROPS ITS BALLS Michael (a sympathetic Peter Ferdinando) is a coke-addled member of a violent four-man narcotics taskforce that goes about robbing, beating, intimidating, cooperating with, working for, and sometimes arresting drug gangs. But with internal affairs on his back, and having been put under the command of a former partner he’d fallen out…

THE SUN DOESN’T RISE Set in Mumbai, Partho Sen-Gupta’s Sunrise seems ostensibly to be about the child sex trade in India; in fact it appears to be more concerned with exploring the mental state of Lakshman Joshi (Adil Hussain from Life of Pi), a law enforcement officer in charge of finding missing/kidnapped children, whose own…

MORTENSEN SHINES IN FAR FROM MEN The more I watch Viggo Mortensen act the more I enjoy his performances; there is something inherently compelling about the dichotomy between his ruggedly handsome leading-man shell and the awkwardness and vulnerability one senses on second glance coming from within. I empathize with his characters as I would with…

TASTY POISONOUS APPLESAUCE Written, directed and starring the delightful and multitalented Onur Tukel, the dark comedy Applesauce centers on the conflicts that arise between two hip married Brooklyn couples in their 30s after the spouses make the mistake of revealing to each other “the worst thing they’ve ever done.” Oh, and somebody is sending one…

AS DULL AS ITS SUBJECTS Necktie Youth, scripted and directed by Sibs Shongwe-La Mer and shot in black and white, follows aimless 20-something acquaintances from upper-middle-class families in a South African suburb as they hang out, party, get high, and talk and talk and talk about how nobody really cares about anybody else; all of…

PASSIVE APPROACH MAKES FOR SUPERFICIAL DOCUMENTARY We are a fly on the wall in Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary Ballet 422, which follows 25-year-old New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancer and emerging choreographer Justin Peck as he stages his first ballet for that company. From first rehearsal to world premiere, there are no talking heads, no…

WARMTH FROM SNOW A photogenic family on a skiing holiday makes a terrible discovery during an avalanche, when one of the parents reveals a potentially dangerous lack of character. The kids are traumatized, and the family undergoes a crisis of faith. The shamed one and the frightened partner are counseled if not comforted by friends…

EVERYTHING NEW WAVE IS OLD AGAIN I have never enjoyed watching a dog roll in shit as much as I did in the middle of Goodbye to Language. Every other time, I’ve been as horrified as any anal retentive bourgeois. But this Jean-Luc Godard essay, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and the National…