As headlines remind us daily, nations throughout the world are still struggling to emerge from underneath the control of totalitarian regimes. But Jan Hrebejk explores a deep conundrum: what happens after the revolution, when the light shines on all the things that happened in the dark times?
A famous Czech psychologist is about to receive a national honor for his brave dissidence during the bad old days, but his resentful son-in-law, who works for the TV show that will profile the honoree, uncovers something that casts the hero in a very different light.
A tale of love, loss, politics, family tensions, pain, fear and forgiveness, “Kawasaki’s Rose” is made with dreamy craft and a sharp, unblinking eye. Dense, profound and impressive.
A-minus; Czech Republic; 100 minutes (6 p.m. Friday, Whitsell; 3:30 p.m. Sunday, Broadway; 6:45 p.m. Monday, Broadway) -- Shawn Levy
Aleksei Fedorchenko’s elegiac, visually rich picture mourns not only the loss of life and love, but also the fading embers of the Merja, a Finnish ethnic group that has been dispersed and assimilated to near non-existence during centuries of Russian rule, yet whose elemental rites and traditions survive.
Dreamy and meditative almost to a fault — its signature scene is a single five-minute shot of two Merja men lovingly washing a female corpse — most of the film concerns an unusual road trip these stoic men, a paper-factory director and his best friend, take after the former’s young wife dies. Details about the characters, including the dead wife, are gleaned through “smoking,” in which a Merja widower speaks frankly of the intimacies he shared with his beloved.
B; Russia; 75 minutes (6:15 p.m. Friday, Broadway; 4:45 p.m. Sunday, Whitsell) -- Stan Hall
“Son of Babylon”
Iraqi director Mohamed Al-Daradji’s film eschews the political for the personal as it looks back at Saddam Hussein’s regime with an anguished cry. Just after the dictator’s fall, an elderly Kurdish woman and her grandson make a long, dangerous journey across Iraq trying to locate the boy’s father, a long-lost soldier who, logic would dictate, is almost certainly dead, probably murdered. They are helped by an ex-Republican Guardsman seeking forgiveness for what he did to Kurds at Saddam’s behest.
Al-Daradji ably captures the smoking, rubble-strewn chaos of post-invasion Iraq, where trouble is everywhere and hope is in short supply. Sometimes the story has a pro forma feel, but intricate plotting is hardly the point. “Son of Babylon” works best as a collective symbol of trauma and loss.
B; Iraq; 91 minutes (6:45 p.m. Friday, Broadway; 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Broadway; 8:15 p.m. Sunday, Broadway) -- SH
Much of this Canadian film, which is nominated for a best foreign-language film Oscar, is set in the late ‘70s in Lebanon, the homeland of Nawal, a young woman caught up in the sectarian hatreds that led to the Lebanese civil war. Upon her death in Montreal some 30 years later, her son and daughter learn that they have a long-lost brother AND a father who is still alive, and they set off to the old country to find them.
What follows is a melodramatic tale of social upheaval, racial hatred, vicious violence, torture, and worse (trust me: worse). There’s a lurid, even twisted air to the proceedings, which derive from a play by Wajdi Mouawad, and director Denis Villeneuve isn’t shy about milking it. You wish he had more formidable central characters -- Nawal’s children are, really, ciphers. But you won’t wish that the film were any stronger or more stark.
B-minus; Canada; 130 minutes (8:30 p.m. Friday, Whitsell; 4:15 p.m. Sunday, Broadway) -- SL
Paolo Virzí’s bittersweet comedy-drama teeters toward sudsy melodrama yet manages to remain genuine and emotionally compelling. It covers nearly 40 years of family disarray and scandal, starting when a gorgeous, blithely sexual young mother wins a beauty pageant, delighting her little girl but horrifying her son and sending her husband into a jealous rage.
Virzí avoids soap-opera mush by telling the story from the perspective of the adult son, who’s sarcastic, chemically dependent and still conflicted by love and embarrassment for his now terminally ill mother. The final act quite improbably combines unexpected reunions, tearful rapprochements, a wedding and a death. But by then, these finely shaped characters have become so dear that you might as well laugh and cry, too.
B-plus; Italy; 122 minutes (8:45 p.m. Friday, Broadway; 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Broadway; 6 p.m. Wednesday, Broadway) -- SH
Robb Topolski, who has sometimes called Hillsboro, Oregon home, seems a decent fellow: smart, hardworking, family-oriented, a veteran and former law enforcement officer, a barbershop quartet singer.
He’s also an experienced software/network engineer/tester who noticed something funny about his home connection to the internet: whenever he tried -- (ital) legally (ital) -- to share music files, his internet provider, Comcast, apparently crippled his broadband access on purpose. Being a tester, Topolski tested, and he came up with a smoking gun that lead to a nationwide inquiry into Comcast’s activities and opened a window on the struggle to keep the internet unmonitored and free.
“Barbershop Punk” is a scattershot and heavy-handed documentary about the issues of net neutrality as seen through the lens of Topolski’s case. The film has an adamant point of view, but it never makes its points particularly clearly or with any of the wit or verve that might help make a dry subject more engaging. You can be on Topolski’s side and still not enjoy this clumsy film.
C-plus; US; 93 minutes (1 p.m. Saturday, Broadway; 6 p.m. Thursday, Broadway) -- SL
In the first feature he’s made outside his native Iran, director Abbas Kiarostami explores some of the same intellectual terrain he’s mined repeatedly since “Close-Up,” the 1990 film which first brought him to international attention. Lines between fact and fiction, representation and reality, are blurred as a French journalist (Juliette Binoche) accompanies British author-philosopher James Miller (William Shimell) on a day trip through Tuscany.
His new book argues that reproductions of works of art can be just as valid as originals, and the pair wanders, playfully but combatively discussing this provocative theme. At one point, a passerby mistakes them for a married couple, and Binoche’s character maintains this façade, drawing Miller into role-playing the scenario as the day progresses. No solid resolution ensues, but it’s a fun mental workout nonetheless.
B-plus; France; 106 min. (2 p.m. Saturday, Whitsell; 8:45 p.m. Monday, Whitsell) – Marc Mohan
A close-knit family comes undone when its strong-willed patriarch, a baker who is a purveyor to the Danish Royal Court, finds out he has inoperable cancer and has no one poised to take over the business. When he pushes his daughter to take the reins, she struggles her ambitions as a fast-rising art dealer, and her personal relationship with her artist boyfriend suffers over sacrifices she’s already made to achieve success.
Director Pernille Fischer Christensendraws strong performances out of the lead characters, particularly Jesper Christensen, who plays the ailing baker. He has several harrowing scenes where you see the cancer taking its toll in every crease of his face. But the script is punishingly dark, with an ending that, like real life, leaves many threads dangling in the wind.
B; Denmark; 102 min. (3:15 and 8:45 p.m. Saturday, Broadway; 9 p.m. Monday, Broadway) -- Grant Butler
Here’s a documentary that manages, in a precious 80 minutes, to tell the entire story of human life -- or, rather, half of it. Director Ken Wardrop starts with an infant girl then focuses on gradually older female subjects -- toddlers, school-agers, teens, and young, mature and, finally, aged women -- who share their feelings about the men in their lives.
One by one, 70 of them, covering 90 years of life, they talk (those who can, anyhow) in lovely Irish brogues about dads and brothers and boys at school and sweethearts and husbands, living and dead, and sons. It’s the full and varied panoply of life as boiled down to the details of ordinary male-female relationships.
There’s humor and heart and wisdom and cunningly simple craft, and it’s utterly delightful. But there is something missing: Mr. Wardrop, the world now awaits -- nay, (ital) demands (ital) -- “Hers & His,” in which you ask a similar range of men about their womenfolk.
A-minus; Ireland; 80 minutes (5:45 p.m. Saturday, Broadway; 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Whitsell; 6:15 p.m. Tuesday, Broadway) -- SL
“Of Gods and Men”
A spare but relentless mood of inevitable tragedy suffuses this slowly paced drama based on the true story of a small group of French monks in Algeria in 1996. When violent, fundamentalist Muslim revolutionaries threaten their placid existence, the eight brothers must decide whether to close their doors and leave the country, or remain despite the danger.
Led by the stoic, resolute Christian (Lambert Wilson), they debate whether to abandon the villagers they provide with medical care and neighborly advice, or to hold fast despite their pacifistic vulnerability. Veteran French star Michel Lonsdale gives a memorable performance as the most avuncular of the bunch, which isn’t saying much, and writer-director Xavier Beauvois provides an illuminating look at life inside the monastery.
B; France; 122 min. (8:15 p.m. Saturday, Whitsell) – MM
Writer/director/costar Taika Waititi's charming second feature is a massive improvement on his first, 2007's try-too-hard quirkfest "Eagle vs Shark." Waititi is still telling stories of offbeat, semi-delusional New Zealanders, and he's still sprinkling his work with cartoonish flights of fancy -- but this time he grounds the comedy in a warm, bittersweet story of a boy craving a father.
James Rolleston is terrific as the title character, a Michael Jackson-obsessed 11-year-old who holds down the fort on a houseful of children while his nana's away -- only to get horrible parental guidance when his idiot ex-con father (Waititi) shows up looking for buried money.
Waititi does a nice tonal juggling act, balancing eccentric characters, child-drawn animation and even Maori-inflected re-stagings of Michael Jackson videos with the painful consequences of parental neglect. "Boy" was a huge crowd-pleasing hit in New Zealand. It's not hard to see why.
B; New Zealand; 87 min. (1:45 p.m. Sunday, Broadway; 6:45 p.m. Thursday, Broadway; 6 p.m. Friday [Feb. 18], Broadway; 8:15 p.m. Saturday [Feb. 19], Broadway) -- Mike Russell
The aftershocks in this epic Chinese melodrama are entirely of the emotional variety, although they arrive with the inevitability of the tectonic sort. The film opens with a harrowing recreation of the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, </CQ>which killed some 240,000 people. It’s a far cry from the sensationalistic treatment you’d expect in a Hollywood blockbuster, as a young mother, after seeing her husband crushed to death, must choose which of her children to save from beneath a mammoth concrete slab.
She chooses her son, but his twin sister, unknown to them, miraculously survives. The rest of the two-plus-hour running time follows their lives in tandem over the next three decades. If it had been told with surer pacing and a sense of genuine tension, this could have been a genuine crowd-pleaser, but it wasn’t.
C; China; 135 min. (7 p.m. Sunday, Whitsell; 7 p.m. Monday, Broadway; 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Whitsell) -- MM
"Circo" is a beautifully shot, profoundly sad documentary about a family-run traveling circus that seems to be crumbling before your eyes.
Documentarian Aaron Schock introduces us to "Circo Mexico" ringmaster Tino Ponce -- who works himself and his family to the bone as he hauls his heartbreaking little circus around the Mexican countryside. The tension is quiet but unyielding: Tino's wife wants to leave the road and educate her overworked, near-illiterate, eerily graceful children; older family members supervising Tino distrust anyone who stays in one place or isn't completely loyal to the family business; and eternal financial pressure keeps Circo Mexico on a desperate, endless tour.
Schock respectfully captures these lives, and gets you thinking hard about the costs of loyalty, youthful choices and early indoctrination.
B; Mexico; 85 min. ( 8:45 p.m. Monday, Broadway; 5:45 p.m. Saturday [Feb. 19], Broadway; 3:30 p.m. Thursday [Feb. 24], Broadway) -- MR
This terse adaptation of a novel (based on the exploits of real-life Austrian criminal Johann Kastenberger) is fascinating for how little it chooses to reveal about its antihero. Johann (Andreas Lust) is an Austrian ex-con who strips his life down to exactly two activities: training for marathons and robbing banks. An affair with a social worker (Franziska Weisz) puts a hitch in his rhythm.
By design, director Benjamin Heisenberger tells us almost nothing about the near-mute Johann's motivations. "What I do has nothing to do with what you call life," Johann mutters; a scene where he downloads his heart-rate training data and finds it only spiked during a robbery is the closest we get to a hint. He's an existential shark, and the filmmakers rivet you with his long silences and relentless momentum.
B-plus; Austria; 96 min. (7 p.m. Tuesday, Broadway; 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, Broadway; 7 p.m. Friday [Feb. 18], Broadway; 9:30 p.m. Friday [Feb. 18], Broadway) -- MR
There’s something deeply strange going on around Uncle Boonmee’s farm in remote Thailand. A number of monkey spirits and ghosts and beasts inhabited by humans — or maybe gods — have been awakened and aroused by the sense that Boonmee is dying. The chance to interact with the living is irresistible to those in other worlds, so they emerge: Boonmee’s wife, gone 19 years; their son, missing almost as long; and echoes from the dying man’s past lives, which unfold like narratives indistinguishable from real life (whatever that is ...).
In this Cannes Palme d’Or-winning film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who goes, conveniently, by 'Joe'), a cool and still aesthetic is applied to a storytelling bent that might cause even surrealists to scratch their heads. There’s an unsteadiness throughout, and a meandering air, but these are purposeful, and they’re achieved through simple means: natural sound, long takes, a pervasive sense of calm amid metaphysical turmoil. You wouldn’t recommend this film to everyone, but it blossoms inside you the longer you allow it to.
B; Thailand; 114 min. (8:45 p.m. Wednesday, Whitsell; 9 p.m. Friday, February 18, Cinemagic) -- SL