Category: Narrative

By Joe Bendel. Katherine is the doctor in her family and her husband Richard is the nurse. This is a fact she never lets him forget, especially when they disagree over the treatment of their congenitally ill son, Andy. It would seem Andy’s relentlessly domineering mother has lost sight of the forest for the trees in her zeal to care for Andy’s ailments, but their new pre-teen neighbor soon suspects Dr. K has a more sinister agenda in John McNaughton’s The Harvest, which opens midnight-ish this Friday in New York, at the IFC Center.

Recently orphaned, Maryann was forced to move in with her grandparents, who quietly reside in an exurban Upstate New York farm house. There are not a lot of neighbors around, so when she sees wheelchair-bound Andy through his window, she feels compelled to introduce herself, in reverse Romeo and Juliet style. Poor Andy is completely unaccustomed to talking with kids his age. Nonetheless, Maryann senses a kindred underdog spirit. While Andy’s father is willing to turn a blind eye to their friendship, his excessively controlling mother simply will not have it.

Frankly, at least half the film is devoted to the youngsters budding friendship and Maryann’s industrious efforts to circumvent Dr. Feelbad’s roadblocks. When Andy’s mother really starts playing hardball, it starts to ignite Maryann’s suspicions. After a little internet searching and a bit of snooping around the house, she becomes convinced Andy is in profoundly grave danger.

That patience is what really distinguishes the film. In all honesty, viewers should form a pretty accurate hypothesis simply from the film’s title and the general lack of agriculture depicted therein. However, the earnest and innocent chemistry of the two leads, Natasha Calis and Charlie Tahan, along with Samantha Morton’s absolutely ferocious turn as the monstrous mom are quite impressive. As usual, Michael Shannon is dependably understated as Andy’s conflicted father, instilling the film with further ambiguity. It is also rather mind-blowing to see Peter Fonda turn up as Maryann’s kindly grandfather, but he plays the part with suitably earthy dignity.

Maybe it is a little far-fetched to believe Dr. Katherine could take matters as far as she does in Harvest, but Calis and Tahan are completely believable together. Since we buy into them, we also get caught up in their peril. It might seem like an unlikely vehicle for McNaughton’s return to big screen horror, but he shrewdly de-emphasizes the genre aspects, in favor of the character and relationship development. Arguably, it is one of the more consistently watchable and strangely human films in a body of work that includes Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Wild Things, each of which is quite notorious in it is own way. Recommended for fans of horror and dark thriller films with mommy issues, The Harvest screens late nights this weekend (4/10 and 4/11) at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 8th, 2015 at 10:11pm.

By Joe Bendel. Their parents ought to be thrilled when five teenage girls swear off Facebook and social networking, but they react with the same suspicion and paranoia that sweeps through their Hudson Valley hamlet. For reasons only they understand, the girls refuse to explain themselves, leaving a void to be filled by the worst high school and the digital era have to offer. The Salem witch hysteria is revisited through the contemporary lens of cyber-stalking and conventional school bullying in Caryn Waechter’s The Sisterhood of Night, which opens this Friday in New York.

In retrospect, the pentagram-like insignia of the so-called Sisterhood of the Night was probably a mistake. It just makes it too easy for those so inclined to suggest they are some kind of satanic cult. Emily Parris will be their first accuser. She always yearned for social acceptance and envied Mary Warren’s outsider coolness. Unfortunately, when Warren starts recruiting members for her secret society, she decidedly passes over the desperate Parris. Instead, she picks unlikely candidates like Catherine Huang and Lavinia Hall.

Although the Sisterhood guards its secrets from the audience nearly as long as it does from the easily manipulated citizens of Kingston, New York, it seems obvious right from the start they are merely engaged in some ritualized forms of female bonding. Yet again, their midnight initiation ceremonies in the woods are ripe for willful misinterpretation. Hence, when Warren catches Parris enviously spying on them, the shunned teen starts making wild accusations online. Her blog quickly picks up followers, as she becomes a media sensation. Unfortunately, the story soon snowballs out of control, especially when other students start escalating the situation for their own amusement. Although their painfully slow-on-the-uptake counselor Gordy Gambhir tries to get them to explain themselves, the Sisterhood clings to their silence.

Granted, Sisterhood is far from perfect. Waechter’s execution has its share of tonal issues, including a bizarrely upbeat ending that seems more appropriate for an Up with People production. The periodic if-I-had-only-known narration from Gambhir and Lavinia’s mother Rose is often beyond heavy-handed. Yet, somehow none of that fatally detracts from the totality of the film. For the most part, screenwriter Marilyn Fu’s adaptation of Steven Millhauser’s short story is mysteriously allegorical, while evoking a sense it is based on very real incidents. It captures the madness of the media feeding frenzy, which has only been intensified by the internet, as well as timeless crumminess of peer pressure and teen alienation.

The young ensemble is also quite remarkable, starting with Narnia’s Georgie Henley, who is both fiercely intimidating and nakedly vulnerable as Warren. Yet, Willa Cuthrell is even more poignant, depicting Huang’s desperately confused responses to her family crisis. It is downright painful watching Kara Hayward’s Parris trying too hard, but in a way that is all too believable. Unfortunately, former Obama administration stone-waller Kal Penn is embarrassingly awkward as Gambhir, the wannabe cool hipster. Can’t we just send him back to White Castle?

Despite its zeitgeisty elements, Sisterhood taps into some deep archetypes. There is something powerfully unsettling about its vision of human natures, regardless of its closing musical flag-waving number. Recommended warts-and-all as a cautionary fable, The Sisterhood of Night opens this Friday (4/10) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 8th, 2015 at 10:11pm.

By Joe Bendel. The shooshing of wind turbines should be felt more than heard, but that is not the case with a rusty hulk rattling away outside the provincial Czech town of Crimeleva. It never worked properly, but the German power company has finally dispatched an engineer to fix it. Since Julius Schmitke practically invented the model, he ought to be able to fix it. However, it might not be a purely mechanical problem that plagues the turbine in Stepan Altrichter’s Schmitke, which screens as part of Kino! 2015, the festival of German Films in New York City.

Schmitke is temporarily on the outs with his boss and overdue for a midlife crisis, so he might as well be the one assigned to fixing the temperamental turbine. A quick break from the New Agey daughter recently returned from a commune will not kill him, either. Unfortunately, he will have to take his incompetent hipster colleague Thomas Gruber along for the ride, but the world weary Schmitke can put up with a lot.

However, the turbine turns out to be a trickier case than Schmitke assumed. Strangely enough, fans in heating and ventilation units all over Crimeleva have a tendency to break down. A rationalist like Schmitke is not inclined to blame the legendary Marzebilla spirit that supposedly inhabits the woods. Nevertheless, Schmitke finds himself slowly sinking into some kind of rabbit hole when the useless Gruber inexplicably vanishes.

Schmitke is a devilishly hard film to classify, because it starts out as sort of a quiet observational film about the modest challenges faced by a mildly quirky late middle-aged fuddy-duddy in the tradition of Alexander Payne, but deliberately evolves into an ambiguously eerie David Lynch film. For the most part, Altrichter sticks to Twin Peaks territory, but he sort of loses the handle on the excessively Lynchian conclusion.

Just like nearly every film, Schmitke slightly overstays its welcome, but it is still worth getting lost in its clever and mysterious mid-section. Veteran German thesp Peter Kurth perfectly anchors the film as the rigidly rational Schmitke, who can hardly believe the weirdness unfolding around him. He nicely counterbalances the restrained lunacy of the assorted villagers, especially the mystical geologist Kryspin, played with manic relish by Peter Vrsek. Helena Dvoráková also makes quite the impression on Schmitke and on-screen as Julie Řeřichová, the sophisticated resort owner, whose last name is an unpronounceable Czech in-joke.

For long stretches, it is unclear just what sort of film Schmitke is and how weird it might ultimately get. In this case, that is rather cool. It is even odder for local German and Czech audiences, who might find the rustic Czech villagers reportedly speaking flawless German another strong indicator something is off here. In fact, there are many subtle call backs and hat tips that Altrichter chooses not to belabor. It is a very EU film, shot in German, by a Czech filmmaker, but there is no mistaking the Teutonic reserve of the title character. Strange but intriguingly low key, Schmitke is well worth experiencing when it screens this Sunday (4/12) and Wednesday (4/15) at the Cinema Village, as part of the 2015 edition of Kino! in New York.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 8th, 2015 at 10:10pm.

By Joe Bendel. On the one hand, you have the Sondereinsatzkommando (the SEK), the German version of SWAT. On the other, you have neighborhood punks, who are barely organized enough to be considered a gang. Yet, they are both as tribal as they can be. They have socialized together in a drunken brawling kind of way, but serious hostilities will flare when an outsider plants the wrong gun on the wrong innocent suspect in Philipp Leinemann’s The Kings Surrender, which screens as part of Kino! 2015, the festival of German Films in New York City.

The SEK of an unnamed but clearly economically depressed German city are going through a rough patch. When raiding a drug dealer’s flat, an officer is badly shot. One of the presumed shooters gets away. This is particularly bad news for the SEK, because the local politicians are considering doing away with one of the squads, because the city is so obviously safe and secure. Bad press like this does not help. Nor does it lead to clear-headed decision-making by Kevin, the hot-headed squad leader.

Meanwhile, in a storyline soon to intersect with the SEK officers, charismatic Thorsten leads a group of local toughs that is nearly as much a social thing as it is a criminal enterprise. Let’s just say, they do a lot of drinking. For some reason, Nassim the son of an immigrant grocer idolizes Thorsten, despite being at least a full generation younger than his idol. To curry favor, Nassim arranges a job for Thorsten’s best bud Ioannis at his father’s store. Unfortunately, in a fit of juvenile jealousy, Nassim plants a gun he found in Ioannis’s locker and drops a dime with the cops. Yes, that would be the gun from before. Soon, both groups are caught up in a wave of vengeance-taking, while a few skeptical beat officers try to protect Ioannis from their more prominent colleagues.

Casting for Surrender probably included a mandatory swagger test. Yet, even with all the testosterone in the mix, the film’s vibe is more reminiscent of the moody thrillers of the 1970s that often featured morally ambiguous antiheroes and a preoccupation with institutional corruption. There is a lot of rottenness in Surrender, but there is no denying the gritty atmosphere and the power of the ensemble performances, particularly Ronald Zehrfeld as the unraveling Kevin and Samia Muriel Chancrin, as one of the few women characters of note—Nadine, the street cop who refuses to be intimidated by the SEK’s posturing.

Perhaps what most distinguishes Surrender is the way it depicts the full spectrum of police corruption, from just a smidge to absolute crookedness, representing just about every point in between. You could assign each character a unique number value for their individual level of moral compromise. Unfortunately, Leinemann gives audience far more of Nassim’s adolescent angst than we really need, but otherwise it is quite a compelling, far reaching copper morality play. Recommended for fans of Sidney Lumet’s New York movies, The Kings Surrender screens this Friday (4/10) and Monday (4/13) at the Cinema Village, as part of this year’s Kino! in New York.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 8th, 2015 at 10:09pm.

By Joe Bendel. Fabian Groys is a journalist and a compulsive gambler, so nobody should place their trust in him. Nevertheless, he will play the role of crusader for truth, when he is not pawning his Porsche to pay off gambling debts (evidently that is pretty easy to do in Germany). We are not supposed to find it suspicious that this lefty journo drives such an expensive sports car, either. All our mistrust should be reserved for the shadowy “them” in Christoph Hochhäusler’s The Lies of the Victors, which screens as part of Kino! 2015, the festival of German Films in New York City.

In between binge drinking and losing his shirt at the craps tables, Groys has been working on an expose—something about German veterans from Afghanistan getting shunted into crummy jobs at a super-connected waste disposal facility. The details are about as hazy as his head and his Deep Throat source just bailed, for obvious reasons. However, he stumbles across a backdoor into the story when he has Nadja Koltes – the cute but naïve intern – chase down some information on a vet who committed suicide by throwing himself into the local zoo’s lion habitat. Okay, that bit is pretty original, but guess where he worked.

Despite this rather damning revelation, the shadowy conspirators manage to manipulate Groys’ investigation. Eventually, Groys and Koltes land a cover story, but it is a rather toothless bit of moralizing compared to the muck-raking he originally intended. Unfortunately, once Groys realizes he has been played, it is dashed difficult to get un-played.

Since we see Groys inject his insulin within the first five minutes, everyone should know it is a lead pipe cinch there will be some sort of blood sugar misadventure before the film is out. Frankly, the entire film is like that. Many characters simply exist to represent the military, corporations, and media, with all the baggage that presumably entails. Arguably, Hochhäusler and co-writer Ulrich Peltzer are so concerned with scoring points, they lose sight of the narrative just as much as Groys does. Anyone who has been paying attention will wonder about obvious loose ends he and Koltes apparently forget about when they grind out their piece.

As Groys, Florian David Fitz admirably dives into the film, never shying away from the journalist’s self-absorbed nature and self-destructive tendencies. He also develops some believably ambiguous chemistry with Lilith Strangenberg’s Koltes. However, there are few legitimate characters to be found in the sprawling supporting ensemble, rather mostly just stock figures.

Lies is a stylish film, but not nearly as distinctive as Hochhäusler’s previous film, The City Below. While sharing certain thematic similarities, the prior film was also unusually intelligent and subtle. Neither are adjectives that easily fit Lies. Even the title, taken from a didactic Ferlinghetti quote, looks and sounds awkward. Very standard issue, The Lies of the Victors need not be a priority when it screens this Friday (4/10) and Saturday (4/11) at the Cinema Village, as part of this year’s Kino! in New York.

LFM GRADE: C-

Posted on April 8th, 2015 at 10:08pm.

By Joe Bendel. The ‘Ndrangheta is to Calabria what the Camorra is to Naples. Although they are considered more provincial amongst Italian criminal networks, they have an international reach and a presumed alliance with the Sicilian Mafia. Nonetheless, there are still organized along familial lines. Consequently, past grievances often lead to violence and normal family dysfunction can cause long term destabilization in Francesco Munzi’s decidedly un-romanticized Black Souls, which opens this Friday in New York.

Luciano is the oldest of the Carbone brothers, but he largely rejected the family business, preferring to keep a herd of goats and a modest farm in remote Africo, the ancient seat of the ‘Ndrangheta syndicate. His younger brother Luigi is the swaggering public face of the Carbones, while the youngest brother Rocco handles all the dodgy accounting. Luciano’s rebellious son Leo looks up to his uncles, particularly Luigi, the charismatic tough guy.

Impulsively, Leo shoots up a bar aligned with the Carbones’ long-standing rivals, the Barracas, who were responsible for the murder of the brothers’ father. Luigi knows this for a fact, because he was there when it happened. Naturally, Leo’s hasty actions will have serious implications. While Luciano and Rocco are inclined to keep a lid on things, Luigi is sympathetic to Luigi’s injured pride. He has also been planning against the Barracas, but unfortunately, they are way ahead of him.

Inspired by real life events described in Gioacchino Criaco’s novel, Black Souls combines the naturalistic ethnographic detail of Gomorrah with the honor-driven tragedy of a Puzo novel. It reminds us both the word and the concept of “vendetta” came from Italy. For Munzi, it is all about the ‘Ndrangheta’s tribalism and the tension between their old world traditionalism and New World commerce. What happens in Africo directly reverberates in Milan. Despite Rocco’s sophistication and Luigi’s indulgent lifestyle, there are never very far removed from Luciano’s goats. In fact, Luigi’s loyal deputy Nicola can butcher purloined livestock with the best of them.

As Luigi, Marco Leonardi struts like he means business, but Peppino Mazzotta is even more compelling as the bean-counting Rocco, suddenly thrust into a family leadership role. Barbora Bobulova is also terrific as his elegant trophy wife forced to confront the old school realities of the Africo clan. However, Giuseppe Fumo’s Leo is just another petulant teen, who seems to exist simply to move the narrative along with each successive poor decision.

Black Souls is not exactly a groundbreaking Italian gangster movie, but it creates its own distinctive identity in the mountains of Calabria. Munzi builds tension in the right moments and gives viewers an intimate peak inside the ‘Ndrangheta world. Recommended for fans of mob movies, Black Souls opens this Friday (4/10) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 6th, 2015 at 9:22pm.