Guru

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

In Five Minutes Of Heaven, director Oliver Hirschbiegel (who has given us the fine films Downfall and The Experiment) and award-winning Brit TV writer Guy Hibbert join forces to create a surprisingly effective combination of real characters and invented scenario. Having seen a number of films (the not-very-good drama In My Countryand the very good documentary My Neighbor, My Killer come immediately to mind) that deal with or glance off the now-popular "Truth and Reconciliation" motif -- which first took hold in post-Apartheid South Africa then to Rwanda, the states formed from the former Yugoslavia, and apparently Ireland -- I can truthfully say that Five Minutes of Heaven (the title refers to what one of the two characters hopes desperately to experience) is not simply the best of this “T&R” lot but a remarkable film in every way.

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): ****

Wikipedia reports that Taxidermia, a 2006 Hungarian film that was released in the United States belatedly and briefly last August, earned a total American box office of $11,408. Hardly surprising, given this is an incredibly challenging film to market. Even though it has abundant elements of gross-out body horror, it's really not something that would be promoted as a horror film. And though it is often shriekingly funny in the most disturbed and perverse ways, it might be a cruel joke indeed to lure audiences with the promise of comedy. Plus, it's a Magyar art film. Who goes out to see those in August, besides characters in Woody Allen movies?

And yet, Taxidermia is awfully easy to describe. If the Farrelly Brothers were Viennese Aktionists vine-ripened on a steady diet of subversive Eastern Bloc satire - early Forman, early Makavejev, and the like - and possessed of a highly formal visual style, then this is the movie they would make.

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

Joe Berlinger's (Paradise Lost, Some Kind of Monster, Brother's Keeper) seventh film Crude follows the class-action lawsuit filed by a small group of Ecuadorians residing in the Amazon rainforest, as they go after Chevron for massive industrial pollution that has driven entire tribes of native people out of their homeland.

The litigation is spearheaded by Pablo Fajardo, a young man who grew up in one of the affected villages. Just three years out of law school, he's been put in charge of the fate of his people's customs, land and safety. Assisting him is brash US attorney Steven Donziger and advocacy group Amazon Watch. Filling out the story is a merry-go-round of oil corporation attorneys and scientists. As is the case in so much of Latin America's biography, rampant government corruption is a recurring character.

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

Disgrace is a profound experience. If the motion picture is indeed a collaborative art form, I suspect that this film -- directed by Steve Jacobs, with a screenplay adapted from J.M. Coetzee's novel by Anna-Maria Monticelli, and starring John Malkovich -- is as good an example of a successful collaboration as I have seen in some time (and I have seen it twice).

The collaborators place us in the shoes of an intelligent, smiling racist and misogynist, a South African professor named David Lurie (played by Malkovich), who makes a soul-and-body journey that changes him -- and maybe some of the people around him -- and allows us to witness, experience and believe in the change. That we are able to do this and understand it, even haltingly, is where the movie's profundity lies. Many things happen here -- some subtle, some shocking. We're privy to them all, piecing them together, trying to understand how they connect, what they signify -- and why.

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

Director Rob Marshall is just as clueless as ever in his latest musical. He has taken Federico Fellini's 8½ -- a film about being lost and confused and indecisive -- and turned it into a problem to be solved. And hence we actually get a happy ending! Moreover, in a film about "being Italian," he has cast only one real Italian actor (Sophia Loren), much as his Memoirs of a Geisha used mostly Chinese actors (and of course, the movie is in English). Aside from all that, however, Nine has an appealingly nutty energy that plays out with more clarity and purpose than the choppy, frenetic Chicago.

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

Scott Cooper's Crazy Heart snuck out in the middle of awards season in 2009 when it became clear that Jeff Bridges had done some award-worthy work. It's not so much that he had done his greatest work, however. It must have suddenly dawned on someone that Bridges had been nominated four times over the course of four decades and had never won. In his new film, he plays an alcoholic, which counts as a disability, which goes a long way in winning a Best Actor trophy (Ray Milland and Nicolas Cage both won for doing the same). Likewise, he plays a country singer, which carries a little bit more sadness and dignity than a rock 'n' roll singer, and Robert Duvall won his 1983 Oscar for the same combination in Tender Mercies. (Moreover, Duvall is a producer on Crazy Heart and plays a small role.) They may as well have just handed Bridges the Oscar when he signed on to the movie.

Bridges plays "Bad" Blake, a veteran country singer who once had a hit song and is now languishing in obscurity, playing bowling alleys and dive bars, and getting rip-roaring drunk during his set. To make matters worse, his one time protégé Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell, with American accent) has gone on to a highly successful career, selling lots of records and playing huge stadiums. After a show, "Bad" meets a music journalist, Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and agrees to an interview. They click with one another, and "Bad" also makes a connection with Jean's 4 year-old son Buddy. "Bad" decides to make something of himself and agrees to be the warm-up act for Tommy Sweet, but can't keep his drinking under control.

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

André Téchiné is not given to spelling out his themes and connections -- not the theme nor the moral nor even sometimes the plot itself -- so you have to work to piece them together. It's usually worth the effort, however, and his latest, The Girl on The Train, is no exception. Class, prejudice, religion, violence, guilt and other of life's little delights rear their heads in odd ways throughout this very interesting, though perhaps not completely satisfying, film. Girl on The Train is based upon an incident that occurred some time back in France, but since that incident does not occur in the film itself until halfway through, there is no need to go into details here and set you up for something that ought to come more naturally, as a surprise.

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

Almost all of the Iraq War movies of the past seven years share the same fate; they open with a small measure of critical approval, and then quietly disappear into box office oblivion. Even a masterpiece like The Hurt Locker, with its near-unanimous critical ranking as the best movie of 2009, as well as six Oscars -- including Best Picture and a landmark Best Director -- took in a mere $16.4 million in the U.S. This makes it the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner in decades; Woody Allen used to boast that his Annie Hall had that honor, but no longer. That aside, if there's one other Iraq movie that deserves a little more attention, it's Oren Moverman's The Messenger, which also -- at the very least -- came away with two Oscar nominations of its own.

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

This happens about halfway through the German film North Face, in the dining room of a swank hotel in the Swiss alps. Several waiters enter with a giant brown cake on a trolley, adorned with sparklers. This misshapen and thoroughly unappetizing lump of confectionery is a reproduction of the mountain just outside. The head waiter announces that the cake commemorates the imminent conquest of the murderous north face of the Eiger. The diners, nearly all reporters here to cover just such a momentous event, politely applaud.

Outside, perched on the frozen face of the mountain, are diners of a very different kind. Bundled in sleeping bags in near pitch darkness, buffeted by high winds, awkwardly arranged on a frozen ledge from which one could easily slip and fall to certain death, they have somehow managed to make soup and are carefully slurping it down.

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

Modesty can be quite a virtue where independent film is concerned. You'd think, by their very nature, most indies could not help but be modest, considering their highly limited budgets and the fledgling state of their often first-time filmmakers. Even so, movies that bite off more than can be chewed and pack in everything on a filmmaker's mind pop up with alarming regularity in the independent field. All of which makes The Lost Coast, a film written and directed by Gabriel Fleming which made its DVD debut a few weeks back, something of a quiet, pleasant surprise.

Reviewer: Jonathan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): **

Edge of Darkness, a remake of the highly regarded British miniseries, in the American version is essentially a Michael Clayton-meets-Taken action film that can't capture the best of either of those films. The fun in action movies is less the detailed backstory that leads the villain to do their dastardly deeds and more in figuring out which way the protagonist will lean. Unfortunately, the overly convoluted plot of Edge takes forever to unfold and our hero, Mel Gibson as Boston detective Thomas Craven, is surprisingly one-dimensional.