Recent and recommended

After stuffing a wide variety of films into a grab bag of commentary on movies that you might like but I can’t quite recommend, here I offer up some films you really should see.

With home viewing of such high quality and wide availability, it takes a lot to get me out of the house and into a theater (other than the Clark auditorium, which I take as a high-tech extension of home).  Gravity (MC-96, Images Cinema) easily passed the test, arriving in 3-D to rapturous reviews, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and starring George Clooney, particular favorites of mine.  Sandra Bullock ain’t bad either.  And it really becomes her movie, to share with the head-spinning special effects.  Driving a bus that will blow up if it drops below 50 mph is a Sunday picnic compared to this.  Gravity lands as a space adventure that is intimate and epic at the same time, realistic and utterly fantastical.  An accident leaves astronauts Clooney and Bullock adrift in space, and they embark on an improbable but impressively detailed quest to return to earth.  As a somatic joyride, this film can hardly be beat – only at the end did I realize my body had been clenched in tension the whole time.  As to characterizations and backstory, Cuaron’s script, written with his son, is a bit formulaic and unconvincing.  But the technical achievement is so convincing, any story deficiencies hardly matter.  Of all the visual wonders, I cite one in particular:  We see Bullock tumbling over and over through empty space, and then we drift closer and see the earth doing flips in the visor of her helmet, and then we pass right through the visor, and get her view looking out, all in seamless deep perspective.  Emmanuel Lubezki cements himself as one of the most amazing cinematographers working today.  This one has to be seen to be believed (though not thought about too much afterwards).

What Maisie Knew (MC-74, NFX) is a transposition of the Henry James novel to modern Manhattan, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel.  In telling the story of a divorce from the perspective of a child, they were dependent on the performance of a six-year-old and scored big with Onata Aprile, a grave and watchful little girl completely unaware of how adorable she is, with a rare gift for behaving naturally on camera.  Her parents are an aging rock star (Julianne Moore) and an irresponsible art dealer (Steve Coogan), who use Maisie as a pawn in a messy custody battle.  The daddy marries the nanny, and the mommy marries a bartender, both more attuned to the child’s needs, but with lives of their own, so the child is passed from hand to hand and frequently left alone, pampered and neglected by turn.  There’s suspense in the risks Maisie faces, and hope in her resilience and resourcefulness, what she knows and what she doesn’t.  The city itself is an important character in the film, with a nice little cameo for the High Line.  This is a small but well-calibrated film, with an absolutely riveting central performance.

Another overlooked little gem is In the House (MC-72, NFX).  The combination of Fabrice Luchini and Kristin Scott Thomas was plenty to hook me, though I’ve found director Francois Ozon’s previous work unmemorable.   I’ll remember this one, however, as a neat balance of wit and suspense, in the vein of a Gallic Charlie Kaufman, with a penetrating view of the writing process.  Luchini, a high school literature teacher (and frustrated writer), finds a rare gem of a student, whose writing exercises draw him and his gallerist wife (KST) into the world of the poor boy’s obsession with the perfect middle-class family of a classmate.  Under Luchini’s encouragement (and a good deal more), the boy (slyly played by Ernst Umhauer) draws them (and us) into his quest to get inside the house and into the bedrooms of that domestic haven.  Pleasingly saturated with allusions to literature and other films, with an abundance of clever reference and first-rate performances, this film really tickled my fancy.

If you’d like a fascinating look inside an exotic subculture, but with enough universal emotions to make the proceedings intelligible and moving, then the Israeli film Fill the Void (MC-81, NFX) fills the bill.  Rama Burshtein’s first directorial effort is quite an accomplishment, a taken-for-granted (though utterly unpolitical) view from inside an Ultra-Orthodox community, which registered on me as a testament to the power of women in a super-patriarchal society.  It’s Jane Austen-ish in its focus on authentic matrimonial choice.  Shira (compellingly played by Hadas Yaron) is an 18-year-old daughter of an elder, who is faced with a number of potential matches, in which she has to weigh her own feelings and the needs of her family and community.  Shot mostly in extreme close-up, the film focuses on faces in a way that enhances nuance, and elicits attention, extending one’s sympathies to an unfamiliar situation. 

Recommended with reservations

Completeness compels me to take note of a large number of new films released in the past year that I’ve seen but do not urgently recommend that you see.  Even the first, which I liked best of all, requires a willing receptivity by the viewer.  Still, there’s a good chance that you will find something in this bunch that you might like, if you can triangulate from my taste to yours.  (As usual, I include links to Metacritic for more info and Netflix for availability.)

One has to give Patrick Wang credit for the courage of his convictions with In the Family (MC-82, NFX).  Not only writing, directing, and starring, he undertook, after many festival rejections, his own distribution.  He definitely put himself out there, and didn’t compromise with the audience either, at a length of nearly three hours.   The film plays out with a whispery intimacy in prolonged scenes from fixed Ozu-like angles.  But if you give it your attention, this anti-polemic ultimately packs a punch.  We open very matter-of-factly on a gay couple with Tennessee accents and a young son, and we quietly share some of their daily rituals.  It’s an ordinary yet idyllic family, until the unthinkable happens, a death and a custody battle, which ultimately plays out like a Buddhist parable.  This film may put you to sleep, or it may wake you up, but for me it’s definitely the pick of this litter. 

I could almost recommend Mud (MC-76, NFX) except for the literal overkill of its ending.  Up till then, I liked Jeff Nichols’ latest better than his previous Take Shelter, or the highly-praised Beasts of the Southern Wild, with which it shares a lower Mississippi setting amongst an eccentric riverside community.  The Huck and Tom of this tale are called Ellis (a wonderful Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone, who go in search of a boat up a tree on a deserted island in the middle of the river, where it was tossed by a recent flood.  That magical occurrence heralds others, including first love for the 14-year-old Ellis, but mostly the meeting with the title character, marvelously embodied by Matthew McConaughey in another of the flavorful performances that allow one to forgive him for his “sexiest man alive” days.  Mud claims to be a lover, and a killer on the run, and enlists the boys in his quest to retrieve his darling Juniper (Reese Witherspoon, with not a lot to do) and escape down the river.  There are a number of other well-known faces in Nichols’ good-looking indie-turned-Hollywood, Michael Shannon and Sam Shepard for two, and it’s enjoyable to watch, until a few formulaic implausibilities intrude on a thoughtful and attentive portrait of an exotic subculture, and the immemorial pleasure of a boy’s own adventure.

I’d like to recommend To the Wonder (MC-58, NFX), but in truth it’s for Terence Malick fans only, an obsessive sketchbook of his favorite images.  If you want to a see beautiful young women dancing away from you through tall waving grasses while the music soars, then this is the film for you.  No one can deny the pictorial delight wrought by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki from Paris or Mont Saint-Michel, or most remarkably, from a suburban housing development in Oklahoma.  Malick has his own visual syntax, which you get or you don’t, but here he’s mainly repeating himself, beautifully and eloquently, but not to every taste.  You’ve got to give Ben Affleck credit for balancing the ego-trip of Argo with his submission to Malick here; he barely gets to utter a line of dialogue and is more likely to be caught making an inadvertent gesture than “acting.”  Same for Rachel MacAdam as an old rancher girl friend with whom he reconnects.  Javier Bardem gets a good deal of portentous narration, but not much chance to build his character, a priest having a crisis of disbelief but retaining his sorrowful sympathy with humanity and the mysteries of love.  But Olga Kurylenko is the darling of Malick’s eye, dancing before our eyes as she bewitches, then bewilders Affleck, and us too, with her high-flown voiceovers.  I could tell you the story, but the story is not the point.  The point is the celebration of the numinous qualities of nature and light.  If you’re yawning already, pass this by.  If your eyes and your heart are open, then watch it for its wonder and forgive its pondering ponderousness.

I have to give a “maybe yes” to No (MC-81, NFX), which is the opposite of ponderous, taking a surprisingly light-hearted and light-footed approach to the endgame of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.  Always a pleasure to watch, Gael Garcia Bernal is a mostly apolitical ad man commissioned by the opposition in a plebiscite, which Pinochet offered as thumbs up or down on his tenure in office.  Shot on 1988-vintage video equipment that meshes seamlessly with news footage from that time, Pablo Larrain’s film mixes Mad Men antics with serious political commentary, as the protagonists try to sell revolutionary change like a new brand of soda.  Can you overthrow a dictator with ad jingles featuring rainbows and sexy girls singing and romping?  According to this droll film, you can – a pyrrhic victory for freedom and market values.  I might have preferred a good documentary on the subject, but this Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film was worthy, and in its own way informative.

Since it was also shot on vintage video, this a good spot to mention Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (MC-74, NFX) a film on which I have to recuse myself as reviewer, because my daughter’s boyfriend is the producer.  This film is set a decade earlier than No, so the video image is even scuzzier, but if like me you used to cart around a Sony PortaPak, you will get a huge kick out of watching the flaring and ghosting of grainy black & white pictures, while within the frame we see some poor suckers lugging around those cumbersome machines.  Sometime around 1980, a convention of big-time geeks, from Caltech to MIT, is gathering at a nowheresville motel to pit their refrigerator-sized computers against each other in a chess tournament.  Meanwhile at the same motel, an encounter group weekend is touching and feeling its way to release, while the nerds remain attached to their machines.  In its witty, low-key manner, this film offers a neat retrospective prophecy of Facebook, Internet hook-ups, and a host of other human interactions with technology.  Don’t take my word for it, take that of A.O. Scott in the New YorkTimes.

[Click through for a score of recent films, not without merit, but for which my reservations exceed my recommendation.]