Category: Trailers

LFM Reviews Möbius @ The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. In Russia, today’s captain of industry is tomorrow’s rogue oligarch. Even sponsoring the next head of the FSB is not enough to protect one tycoon. Instead, it makes him a liability. An agent specializing in sensitive assignments will target the shadowy money man through an attractive employee, leading to all sorts of complications in Eric Rochant’s Möbius, which screens at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Gregory Lioubov commands an FSB team pretending to be a Monaco police task force, attempting to turn Alice Redmund, a brilliant trader for with a scandalous past. Redmund works for Ivan Rostovski’s multi-national firm, but she also secretly reports to an American handler. Realizing the Russians are putting a play on Rostovski, the CIA instructs Redmund to play along with the task force she still assumes are local cops.

When Lioubov accidentally picks up Redmund to protect his cover[s], it compromises them both. Suddenly, Redmund is hiding their burgeoning affair from the jealous Rostovski while Moïse, as Lioubov calls himself, scrambles to keep his incompetent subordinates in the dark. Then things really get tricky.

Möbius is pretty steamy stuff by espionage movie standards. These spies definitely come in out of the cold. As Lioubov (or whoever) and Redmund, co-leads Jean Dujardin and Cécile de France have real chemistry and are not afraid to go all in. However, the rest of the cloak-and-daggering is not bad, either. While there seems to be a bit of an anti-American bias, at least it is rather muddled. The FSB on the other hand is clearly portrayed as a nest of vipers indistinguishable from its previous incarnation as the dreaded KGB.

In a change-up from his Oscar winning turn in The Artist, Dujardin brings a dark, brooding physicality to Lioubov. De France is a respectable femme fatale-anti-heroine, but Tim Roth nearly steals the show as the erratic, British-educated Rostovski.

Rochant nicely juggles all the feints and double-crosses as the film alternates between romanticism and cynicism – and cinematographer Pierre Novion gives it all a stylish noir polish that should satisfy genre fans. Recommended for patrons of French cinema and cerebral spy thrillers, Möbius screened this past weekend as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 29th, 2013 at 3:15pm.

LFM Reviews Whitewash @ The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Remember kids, don’t drink and plow. We’re especially talking to you up north. It causes plenty of grief for a sadsack countryman in Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais’s Whitewash, winner of the Best New Narrative Director Award at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.

Bruce Landry had a pretty depressing life to begin with. The alcoholic Canadian widower’s only source of income was the occasional freelance snowplowing gig. One dark and snowy night, he jumps into his plow with his flask and proceeds to run down a man trudging along the side of the road. In a drunken panic, Landry scoops up the body and drives into the woods, eventually crashing into a sturdy trunk of old growth.

While Landry stews over his predicament, we learn via flashbacks, Landry had some complicated history with the man on the business end of his plow. After Landry convinces the soon-to-be-late Paul Blackburn not to kill himself they sort of become friends—for a while.

One would think Landry could hole up in his plow for only so long, yet his self-imposed imprisonment never seems to end. Whitewash vividly illustrates the old adages about how the mind can create its own Hell. Unfortunately, the audience is condemned along with Landry.

Granted, Hoss-Desmarais masterfully sets the scene and maintains the mood of profound melancholy, but Whitewash is still agonizingly slow to watch. The understated Thomas Haden Church nicely fits the tone of the picture and excels in the odd comic interludes without undermining the overall existential vibe. Nevertheless, there is only so much he can do to punch-up the material while staying in character.

Whitewash bears comparison to trapped-men movies like Detour and Buried, but its claustrophobic setting makes much less dramatic sense. THC admirably rises to the challenge of carrying the film almost single-handedly, but how long do you really want to watch him muttering to himself?

Tribeca’s juried award winners are often head-scratchers and this year is no exception. One can understand the recognition bestowed on Hoss-Desmarais for the atmosphere he creates, but not necessarily for his sense of pacing. Mostly recommended for nationalistic Canadians, Whitewash screened over the weekend as an award winner at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on April 29th, 2013 at 3:14pm.

CIA Bingo: LFM Reviews The Numbers Station

By Joe Bendel. Forget about the jocks, the CIA prefers to recruit math geniuses. If they happen to be drop-outs with socialization issues, so much the better. Of course, they still need people who can kill – but any old losers can do that, even someone who looks like John Cusack. Unexpectedly, one such field agent babysitting a remote code transmitter will have to do what he does best in Kasper Barfoed’s The Numbers Station, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Short wave radio is untraceable, making it the perfect format to convey messages to operatives in the field. Periodically, conspiracy nuts and Democracy Now listeners get all worked up about mysterious “Number Station” broadcasts. Typically, they are simply a series of numbers that have no meaning to listeners without the code. After a dirty job gets downright ugly, Emerson Kent is reassigned to a station somewhere in the English countryside. He provides personal security to Katherine, who analyzes incoming code and reads out the resulting number sequences. Neither he nor she has any idea what any of it means.

Typically, they alternate with the other team every three days. However, when they arrive a few hours early in accordance with their new schedule, they find the station under siege. Thanks to Kent’s skills they are able to hole-up in the station. Ominously, though, they discover fifteen unauthorized messages have been sent.

A film like Numbers Station would do so much more business if it actually celebrated CIA agents’ service and sacrifice for their country. There are now 103 stars on the Memorial Wall in Langley commemorating officers who have fallen in the line of duty. However, screenwriter F. Scott Frazier is unmoved by that, preferring to represent as the Agency in the person of Kent’s boss, the ruthless Michael Grey, who constantly growls euphemistically about tying up loose ends. Those 103 stars deserve better than that, Mr. Frazier.

It is a shame too, because Numbers Station is a pretty tightly executed cat-and-mouse-game thriller. Barfoeld uses the claustrophobic constraints of the station bunker to build tension, shying away from conventional action sequences. Both couples’ developing extracurricular attractions also ring true, given the intimacy of their working environment.

Frankly, John Cusack is pretty convincing as the guilt-ridden, clinically depressed black ops agent. Perhaps Barfoed was reading a list of his recent direct-to-DVD credits to him off-camera. Likewise, Malin Akerman proves she can credibly play smart and attractive simultaneously, which should put her on a short list for bigger and better roles. Unfortunately, the usually super-cool Liam Cunningham is largely wasted as the generically villainous Grey.

Numbers Station features some better than average chemistry and respectable thriller mechanics. However, the constant demonization of the intelligence service is clumsy, didactic, and clichéd. Frankly, it is so familiar it makes a film with a few new ideas still feel old hat. The victim of its own self-sabotage, The Numbers Station opens tomorrow (4/26) in New York at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: C

Posted on April 25th, 2013 at 11:12am.

Stephen Fung Brings the Family Values: LFM Reviews Tai Chi Hero

By Joe Bendel. “Pushing Hands” style kung fu is an important Chen family tradition. For complicated reasons, Chen village is forbidden to teach their kung fu to outsiders. While they do not break this rule, they bend it considerably in Stephen Fung’s Tai Chi Hero, which opens this Friday in New York.

Yang Lu Chan, “the Freak,” sought to learn Chen-style kung fu to balance his karma and counteract the mutant berserker horn on his temple sapping his vital energy. Of course, everyone said no, but the earnest plodder kept trying. However, when Yang nearly dies defending Chen village from invaders, the Master’s daughter, Chen Yu Niang, takes pity on Yang, marrying him into the clan.

Initially, it is not much of a marriage, but he sure takes to Master Chen’s instructions. Yang should most likely live and thrive, but the future of Chen village is soon threatened again. Teaming up with a rogue British officer and the Chinese Imperial army, Yu Niang’s ex Fang Zijing (a Chen village outsider himself) means to capture Master Chen and his daughter and son-in-law. They are willing to give themselves up for the sake of the village, but not without a fight, which is spectacular.

In his follow-up to Tai Chi Zero, Fung doubles down on the steampunk trappings, introducing Master Chen’s prodigal son Zai – who never properly paid his kung fu dues, but has these flying machine inventions, a la Da Vinci’s Demons. While Hero lacks the breakneck lunacy of Zero, it is surprisingly warm and endearing. This is the family values installment of the franchise, featuring reconcilements between fathers and sons and wives and husbands—and it all works somehow. Of course, there is also the massive showdown with the Imperial Army.

Jayden Yuan comes into his own as the innocent Yang this time around, nicely portraying the maturation of the Freak’s character and his kung fu. Angelababy does not quite have as much screen time in Hero, which is a pity considering how charismatic she is as Yu Niang. Still, she has some dynamic action sequences in the big battle and should become a truly international superstar on the basis of her work in the franchise.

“Big” Tony Leung Ka Fai keeps doing his Zen thing as Master Chen and he’s as cool as ever. Somewhat bizarrely, though, as Duke Fleming, Swedish actor Peter Stormare (who has been reasonable comprehensible in English language features like Fargo and The Big Lebowski) seems to be channeling the sort of weird, affected sounding white-devil heavies of kung fu movie tradition.

Tai Chi Hero is nearly as much outrageous fun as Zero, but it has more heart. With the final film of the trilogy in the pipeline, Fung’s Tai Chi series should become a fan favorite. Enthusiastically recommended for martial arts fans, Tai Chi Hero opens this Friday (4/26) in New York at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 24th, 2013 at 2:42pm.

LFM Reviews Reporting on the Times: The New York Times and The Holocaust @ The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. In the 1930’s, Walter Duranty, The New York Times man in Moscow, systemically misreported or ignored Stalin’s crimes, including the notorious show trials and the Ukrainian famine. He is considered an unfortunate but isolated case. Yet, throughout the war, the Times consistently buried stories about the Holocaust. Emily Harrald examines the “Paper of Record’s” questionable coverage (again as a discrete phenomenon) in the documentary short Reporting on the Times, which screens as part of the History Lessons short film program at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.

Harrald’s opening graphics speak volumes. From 1939 to 1945, the Times ran 23,000 front page stories—11,500 of which were about World War II. 26 were about the Holocaust. What is most disturbing is the nature of the coverage that did run, typically relegated to the middle of the paper. Midway through European round-up pieces, the Times would matter-of-factly report on the “liquidation” of the ghettoes, with no illusions regarding what that euphemism meant.

Rather bizarrely, Harrald spends a good portion of Reporting excusing the Times’ dubious Holocaust reportage. Viewers will never forget publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was himself Jewish, but presented a fully Americanized and secularized image to readers and the press, partly out of concern over the rise of anti-Semitism. Perhaps this explains why he would be personally reluctant to run front page stories on the plight of European Jewry. However, he employed a full editorial staff to make sure the paper did not bury its lede.

Throughout Reporting, moral clarity is provided by a Holocaust survivor whose mother was convinced the world would come to their aid once they knew the magnitude of the National Socialists’ crimes. For whatever reason, the Times obviously did not do its part. Yet, when considered in light of Duranty’s Moscow dispatches, the under-reporting of the Holocaust appears more systemic than Reporting would like to consider. Harrald’s film earns credit for beginning the conversation, but its interpretations of media history are far from definitive. It screens again today (4/23), Friday (4/26), and Sunday (4/28) as part of the History Lessons short film block at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C

Posted on April 23rd, 2013 at 1:42pm.

From Peru to Polynesia, the Hard Way: LFM Reviews Kon-Tiki

By Joe Bendel. In 1947 memories of WWII were still fresh, especially in once occupied Norway. However, the reckless courage of a Norwegian explorer would inspire not just his homeland, but generations of adventurers around the world (reportedly including American test pilots and astronauts). Thor Heyerdahl and his crew set sail from Peru to Polynesia without any modern technology in Joachim Roenning & Espen Sandberg’s Kon-Tiki, which opens this Friday in New York.

Although naturally restless, the time Thor Heyerdahl and his first wife Liv spend living among the Marquesas is quite happy. During this period, Heyerdahl becomes convinced the South Pacific islander’s original ancestors ventured east from Latin America rather than west from Asia. Yet, the academic establishment dismisses his theory (sadly, not excluding the fuddy-duddies at the Brooklyn Museum). Having absolute conviction in his research, Heyerdahl sets out to prove it – by sailing over 4,000 nautical miles from Peru on a balsawood raft, using no modern instruments except a radio to inform the media of their progress.

Somehow Heyerdahl recruits a crew of his countrymen for his dubious mission, including a dying-on-the-inside expat engineer and a conscience-plagued veteran of the resistance. They also have a parrot. The plan is pretty simple: launch the Kon-Tiki into the Pacific and hope the currents carry it to Polynesia. Of course, those waters are far from empty. Heyerdahl’s crew will contend with sharks, whales, and the greater dangers of stormy weather and dwindling supplies.

Filmed in both English and Norwegian versions, Kon-Tiki is old fashioned in a good way. It celebrates rather than apologizes for the daring-do of Heyerdahl and his mates. These are not average men, but they are unquestionably mortals. Watching Roenning & Sandberg (best known for the stirring war drama Max Manus) present their courage and camaraderie without hipster irony is quite refreshing.

Kon-Tiki also looks great, particularly the shark and whale sequences. The clarity of the underwater cinematography is quite striking, as is the sense of scale. Frankly, this is the perfect film for viewers intrigued by Life of Pi’s premise but put-off by its New Agey-ness.

It is well worth noting Kon-Tiki was produced by Jeremy Thomas, whose name in the credits means something to discerning viewers, having shepherded ambitious films like The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and 13 Assassins through development to art house screens. Similarly, Kon-Tiki is an international production that is large in scope.

Nonetheless, it is easily accessible, not merely because of the English dialogue (which the Norwegian actors handle relatively well). This is a classic sea-faring adventure, vividly rendered by a talented cast and crew. Recommended for general audiences, particularly those who fondly remember Heyerdahl’s bestselling book and 1951 Academy Award winning documentary, Kon-Tiki opens this Friday (4/26) in New York at the Paris Theatre uptown and the Landmark Sunshine downtown.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 22nd, 2013 at 12:50pm.