Guru

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

She has been for such a long while -- in my mind, at least -- a celebrity photographer (in both senses of the phrase) that, until I saw Annie Liebovitz: Life Through A Lens, I had pretty much forgotten her early work for Rolling Stone: the San Francisco hippie revolution, politics, police, even Nixon's resignation. So this new-to-DVD documentary, directed by Annie's sister Barbara Liebovitz, is a very good reminder of, shall we say, better times. First televised in 2006 via the PBS American Masters series, the 80-minute film is, yes, hagiography of sorts. Yet, to her credit, B. Liebovitz allows some criticism of A. Liebovitz to emerge from the mouths of a few of her interviews.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

Australian director Gillian Armstrong has had an interesting career in which she's tackled various genres (musical: Starstruck; wartime: Charlotte Gray; prison break/love story: Mrs Soffel; family dramas: High Tide, The Last Days of Chez Nous; classic adaptation: Little Women); all, except the latter classic, handled in her own interestingly off-kilter manner. Yet Armstrong has not made as immense an impression since her first big film – My Brilliant Career, which helped launch the international careers (one brilliant, the other very good) of Judy Davis and Sam Neill.

Here comes this talented director again, this time with a rather lavishly budgeted story that tracks the nearing of the end of Harry Houdini's career and the further burnishing of his legend. Death Defying Acts offers Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the lead roles and Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) and Timothy Spall lending their usual fine support, so you can’t fault the film for lack of star presence. It is generally quite beautiful to look at and written (by Tony Grisoni and Brian Ward) and directed with enough flair to keep you going.

What is finally missing -- and becomes apparent early on -- is a strong enough central concept. Instead it gives us a mash-up of the usual hooey about spiritualism and prescience (is it real or is it not?), Freudian mother fixation and a so-so love story. Still, as time-wasters go, this one has its moments, many of which are visual treats. Pearce is interesting, as always (though one continues to wish that he will eventually again find that magical combo: a good role in a good movie), while Zeta-Jones is surprisingly warm and real in a mostly underwritten role.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

For film fans looking for more of Daniel Craig, unclothed especially, the opening scene of Flashbacks of a Fool (dreadfully pretentious title!) should keep you happy, as the menage-a-trois shown is full of fire-lighted flesh and frisky lovemaking. But then it’s the morning after and the angst sets in. Writer/director Baillie Walsh's film is actually one large flashback that covers the character played by Craig in late adolescence, as he discovers sex, love and dancing, all of which leads him to become the has-been star we see at the film’s beginning. How his stardom happened, what it entailed and who this character is – these go completely unremarked upon, which makes the movie seem like a novel that’s been hacked to half-length and then given a TV-level treatment.

Two of our regular reviewers were both so excited by the release of the Boetticher set that we're taking the unusual course of having them both give their own takes on it. This week, we bring you Jeffrey Anderson's.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

There's little question that the release of the five films comprising the Budd Boetticher Collection is arguably the DVD event of the year. I've been waiting many years to see some of these films, and I'm absolutely thrilled and honored to have had the chance, at last.

Budd Boetticher (1916-2001) was a rare breed in Hollywood. At some point early in his life he drifted south and studied bullfighting, which won him a job as a consultant on a bullfighting picture. From there, he was assigned to direct a series of "B" pictures, then graduated to his own bullfighting picture, the Oscar-nominated Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). But undoubtedly his greatest achievement is this series of seven low-budget, quickly-made Westerns starring Randolph Scott and produced by Harry Joe Brown (hence the nickname the "Ranown" Cycle). These films have an intense, economic artistry almost otherwise unseen in any other films, then or since. I could go on about his flawless use of actors, compositions, editing, music and cinematographers, but that's probably fodder for an entire book. It's telling that we can count Clint Eastwood, Taylor Hackford, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese among his fans. Yet some might argue that Boetticher is just part of the reason for the films' success (and they were very financially successful), given that writer Burt Kennedy, Scott and Brown were also part of the equation, and that none of these artists did anything nearly as interesting on their own. The first film in the cycle, Seven Men from Now (1956), was produced at Paramount and is already available on an essential DVD. The other film, Westbound (1959), was produced at Warner Bros. and has never been released on video.

Reviewer: Walker Koppelman-Brown
Rating (out of 5): ***½

What We Do is Secret chronicles the story of the seminal Los Angeles punk rock band The Germs. With a style that combines traditional narrative with documentary qualities, the film delivers an intimate look inside the punk rock scene in the late seventies. Those without a deep knowledge of that world will find themselves illuminated, able to see the beauty in its darkness.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog's gorgeous documentary about the people (and creatures) who live at least some of the year on (and under) Antarctica, may not have the shock and drive of his Grizzly Man, but it's a poignant and even haunting work nonetheless. The film was created for the National Science Foundation, and was short around the NSF's headquarters at the McMurdo Station; home to eleven hundred people, it's the one community the continent has. Encounters is a bit episodic in structure as Herzog journeys around the area with the marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, truck drivers and other people into this surreal and often absurd world.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The name Roberto Rossellini generally brings to mind films such as Open City and Paisan, along with the phrase Italian neo-realism. Like most world-class filmmakers, Rossellini is more profound and complex than any label might indicate, as the recent Lionsgate release of two of his lesser-known works (to Americans) should make clear. One of these, Era Notte a Roma (Escape By Night), from 1960, is an interesting example of Rossellini's neo-realist style at work on a tale of Italy toward the end of WWII's German occupation. I've reviewed Notte in greater length on my blog TrustMovies, but it is the second – and earlier (1954) – movie, Dov' e La Libertà (Where Is Freedom)?, that most surprises.

Reviewer: Jeffrey Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

The 35 year-old filmmaker Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) co-wrote his long-awaited third feature film, Mister Lonely with his brother Avi, cast his wife Rachel in one of the lead roles and dedicated the film to his late grandmother. And so it goes that Mister Lonely is about a kind of family. Diego Luna plays a Michael Jackson impersonator, hereafter known as Michael. He works the streets of Paris, copying Michael's famous dance moves and wearing Michael's strange clothing (black fedora, glittery marching band shirts, high-water pants, etc.). He never sings, but the film's four segments are named after Jackson songs. Michael meets Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton), who invites him to stay at a kind of commune for celebrity impersonators. Her husband Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and their daughter Shirley Temple (Esme Creed-Miles) also live there. The rest of the "family" includes Buckwheat, of "The Little Rascals" fame (Michael-Joel Stuart), Sammy Davis Jr. (Jason Pennycooke), James Dean (Joseph Morgan), Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), Little Red Riding Hood (Rachel Korine), Madonna (Melita Morgan), The Pope (veteran British actor James Fox), Queen Elizabeth (Anita Pallenberg) and the Three Stooges: Moe (Daniel Rovai), Larry (Mal Whiteley) and Curly (Nigel Cooper). (Incidentally, Fox and Pallenberg are reunited for the first time since Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's 1970 film Performance, no doubt on purpose.) Lincoln uses the "F" word a lot, Buckwheat is obsessed with chickens and the Pope doesn't like to bathe.