Category: Watch Movies!

By Joe Bendel. Thanks to Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, art lovers around the world will instantly recognize Maria Altmann’s beloved aunt and her iconic choker necklace. After the annexation of Austria, Bloch-Bauer’s necklace found its way into the possession of Herman Goering’s wife, while her stunning portrait was plundered by Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery. For years, it was the cornerstone of their collection, but Altmann filed a restitution claim as the last surviving Bloch-Bauer heir that ultimately forced Austria to confront its National Socialist past. Altmann’s dramatic early years in Austria and her protracted legal battle are chronicled in Simon Curtis’s The Woman in Gold, which opens this Wednesday in New York.

The Bloch-Bauers were a wealthy, assimilated Jewish Austrian family with a reputation for supporting the arts. This was especially true of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Altmann’s childless aunt. The Bauer sisters had married the Bloch brothers, so the entire family lived together in their elegant Elisabethstrasse home during Adele’s lifetime. Sadly, Adele Bloch-Bauer died tragically prematurely from meningitis in 1925, but she would be spared the horrors that her family would face. She also made quite an impression on young Altmann, which is why her portrait meant more to the niece than its mere one hundred million dollar-plus estimated value.

For years, the Belvedere simply dubbed the painting “The Woman in Gold” to disguise its Jewish provenance, but the world knew it for what it was. Eventually, Austria announced a new restitution process, in hopes of improving its post-Waldheim image, but it was mostly just for show. Altmann and her initially reluctant lawyer Randol Schoenberg (grandson of the composer) make a good faith try to work within the Austrian legal framework, but soon find a more hospitable reception in the U.S. Federal court system. Whether or not Altmann even has standing to sue the Belvedere, an agency of a foreign government, becomes the crux of the litigation dramatized in the film.

Curtis and screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell nicely illuminate the various legal technicalities of the case without getting bogged down in excessive detail. Curtis also juggles the 1938 Austrian timeline with the more contemporary legal drama rather adroitly. He was particularly fortunate to find such a convincing younger analog for Dame Helen Mirren in Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany, who grew up listening to her German language speaking parents in their Canadian household.

Of course, Dame Helen dominates the film and she is terrific as usual. She projects Altmann’s regal bearing as well as her no-nonsense pragmatism. While Schoenberg’s character is somewhat underwritten in the first two acts, Ryan Reynolds capitalizes on some crucial humanizing moments down the stretch. He gives some bite to what might otherwise been a relatively milquetoast role.

On the other hand, Katie Holmes really has nothing interesting to do as Schoenberg’s wife, Pam—and never elevates the thankless part either. However, Jonathan Pryce absolutely kills it in his too brief scene as Chief Justice William Rehnquist, portraying the jurist as quite a witty and gracious gentleman, which is rather sporting of the film, considering he ruled against Altmann in his dissent.

With Gold, Curtis does justice to a fascinating story with far reaching political and cultural implications. He helms with a sensitive hand, while maintaining a healthy pace. Frankly, it represents a marked improvement over My Week with Marilyn, which always seemed to focus on the blandest actor in any given scene. That never happens in a Dame Helen film. Still, the documentary The Rape of Europa remains the most authoritative and comprehensive cinematic word on the disputed ownership of Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer and the systematic National Socialist looting of Jewish property in general (catch up with it now, if you haven’t already). Highly recommended (in its own right) for general audiences, Woman in Gold opens nationwide this Wednesday (4/1), including the venerable single-screen Paris Theatre in New York.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on March 31st, 2015 at 3:34pm.

By Joe Bendel. In 1998, people still talked about independent filmmaking as a movement, while keeping a straight face. You could also get away with characters named “Henry Fool” and “Simon Grim” without being dismissed for clumsy pretension. It was therefore the perfect time to release Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool, which remains his biggest hit to date. The dramedic fable hardly seemed to lend itself to a sequel treatment, yet Hartley delivered Fay Grim anyway. The Grim family is now a full-fledged franchise, with Hartley’s third installment, Ned Rifle opening this Wednesday in New York.

If you remember the first Fool, but skipped the second Grim, you are not alone. Apparently, at the end of her eponymous film, Fay Grim was unjustly convicted of terrorism and her son, Ned Rifle as he is now known, went into witness relocation. Needless to say, this fine state of affairs is all the fault of her husband, Rifle’s father, the jerkweed literary poseur and degenerate drunkard Henry Fool. After seven years, Rifle is finally allowed to see his mother. Aging out of witness protection, he will soon leave Rev. Daniel Gardner’s family to set out on his own. His plan is simple. Kill Henry Fool for ruining his mother’s life.

This would seem run somewhat counter to the Christian faith Rifle adopted under Rev. Gardner’s tutelage, but sometimes a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. To find Fool, Rifle will drop in on his uncle, Nobel Prize winning poet Simon Grim. That is how he crosses paths with Susan Weber, a graduate student sort of stalking Grim. However, as Weber attaches herself to Rifle, it becomes clear she has her own mysterious reasons for wanting to track down Fool.

Despite Rifle’s rather problematic mission, Hartley treats his Evangelical faith rather respectfully. It is very clear he and Rev. Gardner are flawed, but we are supposed to consider them basically good people nonetheless. Fool on the other hand, remains an intentionally Mephistolean figure, as well as an annoying blowhard. Again, there is something hugely compelling about Simon Grim’s idiosyncratically humanistic perspective, but Hartley shortchanges him on screen time this go round.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to take one’s eyes off James Urbaniak when he is on screen. He continues to deepen Grim’s cynical but forgiving everyman persona. Martin Donovan is suitably earnest as Rev. Gardner, while Thomas Jay Ryan continues to be wildly obnoxious and somewhat menacing as Fool. Parker Posey makes the most of her limited scenes, playing Fay Grim like a jailhouse Norma Desmond. However, Aiken (who has played Rifle since he was a mere lad of seven years) grows into the neurotic lead role quite nicely. He also develops some appealingly off-kilter chemistry with series newcomer Aubrey Plaza, who manages to be simultaneously awkward and sultry as Weber.

The problem with the misconceived war-on-terror middle film is that the Grim family is now stuck with a lot of clunky mythology. Hartley does his best to minimize it, reaching back to a scandal furtively referenced in the first film for the film’s big shocking reveal. It all works better than you might expect, even though the characters all seem slightly embarrassed by their continuing longevity. After all, Henry Fool was the sort of you want to seal into a climate controlled vault, lest it be contaminated by a stray ironic remark from outside its ecosystem.

Although billed as the final chapter, if there is a fourth film, it has to focus on Urbaniak again and be called Simon Grim. Of course, we have to deal with what we have before us—Ned Rifle, which manages to get into your head thanks to some eccentric but forceful performances and Hartley’s soothing electric soundtrack. Recommended for fans of Hartley and Plaza, Ned Rifle opens this Wednesday (4/1) at the IFC Center, in New York.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on March 31st, 2015 at 3:33pm.

By Joe Bendel. As a former firefighter, Jeon-mo was briefly famous for saving a group of children. Even though he now runs a florist shop, he still likes to think of himself as one of the good guys. However, when his daughter is abducted, her captor’s ominous demands will push him to his breaking point and fundamentally shake his comfortable self-image. Instead of ransom, Jeon-mo is instructed to kidnap another child to exchange for her in Yoo Won-sang’s Guardian, which screens this Tuesday as part of the free Korean Movie Night series at New York’s Asia Society.

Jeon-mo and his wife are generally happy managing their shop and running a singing telegram business on the side. He dotes on his bratty young son and frets over his older sister as she approaches middle school years. Initially, a strange caller claims to have snatched their son, but it turns out the cruel game-player actually has their daughter. After stringing Jeon-mo along on a ransom drop that never happens, the kidnapper final reveals his real demand. Jeon-mo is to take a very specific little boy who will be at an appointed place at a certain time and wait to swap him for his daughter.

Given no choice by the kidnapper, Jeon-mo is forced to take the frightened boy to his home for the night. He was already feeling profoundly guilty, but matters get even more complicated when his son recognizes the boy as one of his classmates. However, Yoo has an even more sinister twist in store for viewers.

Kidnapping thrillers tend be rather murky affairs, but Guardian takes its long dark night of the soul to new levels of blackness. Characters in the film do some truly awful things, but it is difficult to pass judgement, given their circumstances. Perhaps most disturbing is what happens when they try to do the right thing. Still, Yoo does not leave the audience completely bereft of consolation, but he hardly ties the film up a neat sentimental bow.

It is pretty unsettling to watch Jeon-mo fall from a position of domestic tranquility and rectitude to utter desperation and self-loathing, but Kim Su-hyeon makes every step believable and painfully compelling. Likewise, Lee Joon-hyeok is quietly forceful as another player caught up in the game. However, the genuinely terrified-looking performances from Yoo Hae-jeong and No Kang-min as the young respective victims are what will really disturb viewers.

Guardian is a tough film with a decidedly dim view of human nature, but it reflects an uncompromising aesthetic vision from Yoo in his impressive feature directorial debut. He grabs the viewers by the lapels and drags them through the film at breakneck speed. Still, his decision to hint at but never fully explain the kidnapper’s motive is a mistake. After what he puts us through, he owes us some answers. Nevertheless, those who can digest a thriller marinated in bile will be impressed with his chops. Recommended for emotionally strong fans of Korean cinema, Guardian screens (for free) at the New York Asia Society this Tuesday (3/31), co-presented by the Korean Cultural Service.

Posted on March 31st, 2015 at 3:33pm.

By Joe Bendel. It was one of the worst cases of mass murder and ethnic cleansing in recorded history, yet the world never demanded the guilty be held to account. At least 590,000 Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians met a premature death as a result of the Soviet WWII era occupation of the Baltics and the resulting mass deportations to Siberia. While many would prefer to ignore the Communist crimes against humanity for ideological reasons, the testimony of survivors like Erna Nagel were an inconvenient indictment of the socialist system. To commemorate the victims, Martti Helde has adapted Nagel’s Siberian diary (written in the form of letters to her beloved husband Heldur) as the extraordinary cinematic hybrid In the Crosswind, which screened during the 18th Annual European Union Film Festival in Chicago.

Nagel’s domestic life with Heldur and their six-year-old daughter Eliide was so blissful, it blinded her to the mounting Soviet danger. Tragically, when the Red Army arrives, Heldur Nagel is one of the first to be rounded up, since he is a member of the Estonian Defense League. He and his colleagues will be sent directly to a gulag, where they will be tortured for months and then executed without trial. Erna and Eliide will be sent to a work camp in Siberia, where Estonian women are forced to perform slave labor. Food rations are meager and only given to adults who meet their quotas. Estonian children like Eliide get nothing (so much for “each according to his need”). Having already contracted dysentery in the over-crowded cattle car that took them east, Eliide will slowly expire from disease and starvation, while Nagel is helpless to comfort her.

Nagel’s own words will tell her story through Laura Peterson’s sensitive voiceovers, but during her period of Siberian exile, they are accompanied by a series of thirteen black-and-white frozen tableaux, in which Helde suspends time for his cast, amid their snarls and cowering. Realized in excruciating detail, cinematographer Erik Pőllumaa slowly surveys each living picture, often revealing greater horrors as his perspective changes. These are not freeze frames, because the wind and elements, as well as ambient noise and background chatter waft through Helde’s carefully composed images. It is a bold aesthetic strategy, but Crosswind cannot be called non-narrative filmmaking, because Nagel’s entire life unfolds through the narration.

While Nagel’s before and after scenes in Estonia are more conventionally live action in their execution, the tableau vivants constitute the guts of the film. Eerily effective, they preclude any possible melodramatic excesses, distilling the essence of the terror and dehumanization of the Communist prison camps and collectives. As Nagel, Peterson does more than hold her poses. Her deeply expressive face speaks volumes and her voiceovers reach into the soul.

There are not a lot of precedents for Crosswind. In some ways, its vibe is somewhat akin to that of German’s Hard to be a God or Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross, but Helde’s film hits viewers on a deeper, more primal level. It is also more urgently topical, given Russian imperialist expansionism in Georgia and Ukraine. This is an exceptional work of cinematic craftsmanship that is viscerally chilling and hauntingly arresting. Very highly recommended, In the Crosswind screened at the Siskel Film Center as part of this year’s Chicago edition of the EUFF.

LFM GRADE: A+

Posted on March 30th, 2015 at 11:00pm.

By Joe Bendel. One problem with off-the-books building projects is they make it dashed difficult to come clean when trouble goes down. The same is doubly true of secret affairs. A hot shot real estate developer, his fiancée, and his somewhat estranged best friend will learn these truths first hand over the course of a long fateful night of the soul in Ozan Açiktan’s Consequences, which screened during the 2015 New York Turkish Film Festival.

Cenk was once deeply involved with Ece, but he hasn’t seen her since his stints in rehab and trying to find himself in America. He thought he could handle seeing her again, but evidently not. She is now engaged to his old pal Faruk, who is putting up the architectural designer in a building he is illegally renovating in the gentrifying neighborhood of Karaköy. After an awkward meeting at Faruk’s party, Cenk beats a hasty retreat, but Ece soon follows. It does not take long for things to get hot and heavy, before they are inconveniently interrupted by a pair of intruders, who turn out to be two of Faruk’s undocumented laborers. One thing leads to another, resulting in the older man tumbling down the stairs and cracking his head.

To protect Ece, Cenk sends her off into the night, facing Faruk by himself. The developer and his lawyer Merve quickly take charge of the situation, hoping to minimize everyone’s exposure. It seems Faruk does not have the required permits or even a clear title to the property. Merve also smells something fishy about Cenk’s story, but she doesn’t have much time to worry about it. Unfortunately, the situation escalates precipitously when the man’s companion returns with about a dozen of his belligerent colleagues.

Açiktan and his co-writers, Cem Akas and Faruk, Ozerton, do a nice job keeping one darned thing happening after another. Reportedly, the noir thriller is under-represented in Turkish cinema, especially those that are sexually charged to any extent, but they have crafted a distinctly stylish one. It is also rather intriguing to speculate about its beyond-the-screen meaning in an increasingly Islamist and less secular Turkey. On one hand, faithlessness holds potentially dire consequences, so to speak, for the characters. Yet, we sort of get the sense the film regrets Cenk and Ece were not able to get more sinning in before the situation started spiraling out of control. The film also resists class conscious interpretations, depicting the outraged workers in unflattering, thuggish terms.

Ilker Kaleli and Nehir Erdoğan are all kinds of angsty as Cenk and Ece, respectively, but Tardu Flordun really steals the show as the roguish Faruk. He might be insufferably arrogant and a corrupting influence on everyone around him, but it is hard to root against such a colorful figure. Likewise, Esra Bezen Bilgin matches him step for step as the shrewd and cynical Merve. It is nice to see a Turkish film that features a woman as its smartest character, by far.

Ahmet Sesigürgil’s noir cinematography looks terrific and Açiktan perfectly captures the sketchy urban after hours vibe. Everything about this film screams that it will end badly, but it is still entertaining watching matters plummet from bad to worse. Recommended for fans of assignations-gone-wrong thrillers in the Fatal Attraction tradition, Consequences screened at the SVA Theatre as part of this year’s NY Turkish Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on March 30th, 2015 at 10:59pm.