Guru

Can a movie that begins in today's Iraq and then tracks the furlough of two American soldiers, along with another who's actually finished his tours of duty, possibly be apolitical? Can it refuse to address whether Iraq was right or wrong -- except via the eyes of some of the home-front folk, and even then so glancingly that their opinions seem paltry? Or is that the point? "What do you think we're doing over there? What were you doing over there?" asks the nasty, confronting character played by John Heard, to the tired, quiet one played so resonantly by Tim Robbins. "Trying to stay alive," comes the reply.

Director/co-writer (with Dirk Wittenborn) Neil Burger (The Illusionist) has created something special with The Lucky Ones: a road/buddy movie in which one of those buddies is a gal; a film about self-discovery that makes the journey achingly real even as the destination remains ongoing; a story that quietly indicts us Americans who gave up not a thing while our countrymen died and killed fighting an "enemy" who had never attacked us. (We're giving things up now, of course: an unhappy continuation of the saga of our past eight-years.) All of the above is implicit in this movie, by the way. I have no idea on which side of the red/blue spectrum Burger resides, nor does it matter. Explicitly, he and Wittenborn (Fierce People) have given us a consistently interesting story inhabited by three wonderful characters -- funny sad, real and rich -- each of whom grows richer as the movie proceeds.

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

Right around the time of his break with Mia Farrow, Woody Allen began a journey down a new path. It was a journey that earned many new detractors. He had been a filmmaker that kept people happy and comfortable by doing the same thing again and again. Losing that stable, working relationship with Farrow and entering into a new one with Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn caused an uproar. Fans could no longer see him in the same way, and his public persona -- which had been so inextricably entwined with the onscreen one -- soon became tarnished.

Starting with Husbands and Wives (his last film with Farrow), Allen began experimenting with hand-held cameras. He tried out new cinematographers, mainly from Europe and Asia, whose work he had admired in art house films. In Deconstructing Harry (1997), he began using copious foul language. From that point on his films had an angry, sour tone. Sometimes it felt as if something were repressed; his usual neurotically funny dialogue began to sound stiff and abrasive. Finally, in 2005 he left his beloved New York for the England of Match Point, and he left behind his skinny, intellectual heroines for the voluptuous, sensual Scarlett Johansson. Critics came to his side for that one, but they soon abandoned him again as his subsequent English films failed to please them once more. He was accused too many times of returning to the themes of his 1989 masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now, for the first time, Allen both looks ahead and settles down with his new film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I have usually found more to admire in Allen's late-period films than many of my colleagues, so my words may not mean much here, but I believe this film is Allen's newest masterpiece, and his greatest film in at least a decade.

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

In the nearly fifteen since the death of black filmmaker Marlon Riggs, a whole lot has happened in and to America -- most remarkably the election of a mixed-race President -- an event about which Riggs would have been immensely pleased, I think. Probably best known, at least in gay circles, for his documentary Tongues Untied, Riggs died of AIDS-related causes while making his final film, Black Is...Black Ain't, which strikes me as the superior work due to its immense reach and enormous humanity. Released to coincide with last month's' Black History week, the movie should find a lot of new, young fans, while proving a rich trove of memory and deeper meaning for those who've already seen it.

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

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released two "lost" gems on a new two-DVD set: The Films of Michael Powell. Released in America as Stairway to Heaven, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is one of the most enchanting movies you'll ever have the pleasure to see. The imagination of the writing/directing/producing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger -- the men behind such brilliant classics as I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) and The Red Shoes (1948) -- knew no bounds. A Matter of Life and Death can finally tingle the synapses once again, now that it's available on DVD. The British Ministry of Information commissioned Powell and Pressburger, also known as the Archers, to make this miraculous movie in an attempt to beef up Anglo-American relations, so it has a strange nationalist slant, with certain characters preaching the superiority of one nation over another. Yet it is so plainly human that it crosses all boundaries.

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): ****½

It's not so easy to find sophisticated anime made for adults. Not that such anime doesn't get made, it's just that it usually isn't licensed in the U.S. Luckily, Paranoia Agent - a TV series created by one of anime's few internationally known auteurs Satoshi Kon - is available here, and it is absolutely not to be missed by anyone who appreciates story-telling with a philosophical bent.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½ (adding half a star for the cinematography)

When you are suddenly confronted with some gorgeous, widescreen, black-and-white cinematography in a new movie -- as in Santiago Otheguy's La Leon -- do you experience, as I do, something like "the shock of the old"? This happens as you're simultaneously whisked back in time to those pre-color films of the 30s, 40s and 50s and are now suddenly re-experiencing them via all the current technology available to today's cinematographers. It can be a marvelous thing, even if, and this is unfortunately true to some extent of La León, you're watching an example of the "less is less" school of moviemaking.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet (4 mosche di velluto grigio)
Directed by Dario Argento
1972, 102 minutes, In Italian (no subtitles) or English dubbed
Maya Entertainment

When Dario Argento's ultra-nutty horror spectacle Mother of Tears was released last year, I was far from alone in believing it to be the first watchable film of the Italian maestro's in two decades, which perhaps isn't the grandest of compliments if you've seen what came before. On the other end of his career, however, before hitting his zenith (everything from 1975's Deep Red through 1987's Opera), even his hokier-plotted giallos like Four Flies on Grey Velvet (his third feature and last leg in the so-called "animal trilogy," following The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat O' Nine Tails) bare more suspense, panache and memorable sequences than most of what passes for modern American horror and crime thrillers. Never before available as a legitimate home video release in any format until today, the uncut, vividly photographed Four Flies on Grey Velvet deserves a new cult following in your living room, the more friends and booze the merrier. Don't worry about twisting the arms of the squeamish either, as the bloody mayhem is so implicit that when originally released theatrically by Paramount, the film only carried a PG-rating.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****½

Margaret Brown's documentary The Order of Myths examines the social labyrinth of Mardi Gras carnivals in Mobile, Alabama. The oldest celebration of its kind in the country is dominated by two racially segregated organizations that have held separate coronations and parades for over 300 years. To an outsider, the divide, so rigidly defended yet cloaked in hospitality, is an incredibly costumed prism to look at race relations as a whole in America. Brown follows the white queen Helen, an inarticulate but gracious debutante that the film tacitly acknowledges has been elected more due to bloodlines than royal qualities; and the black queen Stephanie, a schoolteacher who is scraping to pay for the elaborate dress and festivities (upwards of $20,000) but holds the tradition in equally high esteem. Adding a layer of unease to the proceedings, both queens know off hand that Helen's direct ancestors were involved with one of the final slave transactions in Mobile, which brought Stephanie's family to this country. Explaining how a black neighborhood now known as "Africatown" was formed, a white woman cautiously recounts the story of a shipful of captured Africans who were forced to flee into the woods while the boat was torched in an effort to destroy evidence.