Film

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…

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…