The needlessly underseen Rush– one of director Ron Howard’s very best films – gets a second chance at an audience today as it’s released to DVD and BluRay. So do yourself a favor and see it. Character driven without sacrificing sport spectacle, the film proves an engrossing drama and boasts an award-worthy performance by Daniel Bruhl. Plus you get to look at Chris Hemsworth, which is never a bad thing.
Speaking of non-Thor Hemsworth, we’d recommend pairing this with a fun and surprisingly well written if little seen 2009 thriller A Perfect Getaway. The film follows Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich on their Hawaiian honeymoon, where tourists are being murdered. It’s a slick, well-paced and fun flick with great turns from Zahn, Hemsworth, and the always reliable Timothy Olyphant.
We’re buckling under blustery weather and offensive temperatures. I require more degrees! Why not just embrace the White Death? These five films certainly do, so snuggle in with a big blanket and look at how much worse you could have it in this wintery weather.
6. Frozen
No, not the Disney film. In this skiing mishap, three friends hit the slopes one afternoon. They con their way onto the lift for one last run up the hill. But they didn’t really have a ticket to ride, you see, and the guy who let them take that last lift gets called away and asks a less reliable colleague to take over. That colleague has to pee. One thing leads to another. So, three college kids get left on a ski lift. It’s Sunday night, and the resort won’t reopen until Friday. Wolves come out at night. This is a brisk and usually believable flick. Sure, it’s Open Water at a ski resort, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
5. 30 Days of Night
If vampires can only come out at night, wouldn’t it make sense for them to head to the parts of the globe that remain under cover of darkness for weeks on end? Like the Arctic circle? The first potential downfall here is that Josh Hartnett plays our lead, the small town sheriff whose ‘burg goes haywire just after the last flight for a month leaves town. A drifter blows into town. Dogs die viciously. Vehicles are disabled. Power is disrupted. You know what that means…the hunt’s begun. Much of the film’s his success is due to the always spectacular Danny Huston as the leader of the bloodsuckers. His whole gang takes a novel, unwholesome approach to the idea of vampire, and it works marvelously.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xAJGjPQpOM
4. Let the Right One In
Honestly, you can’t go wrong with either the 2008 Swedish original or its 2010 American reboot Let Me In. We’re leaning toward the original here only because director Tomas Alfredson made such effective use of the Swedish winter. Young social misfit befriends the mysterious new girl in his apartment complex. A sweet yet bloody romance blossoms. Whether you choose the original or the remake, a brilliantly told, often genuinely scary vampire flick emerges.
3. Dead Snow
You had us at “Nazi zombies.” A fun twist on cabin-in-the-woods horror, this film sees a handful of college kids heading into a remote mountain cabin for some winter sport fun and maybe a little lovin’. Dead Snowboasts some of the tongue-in-cheek referential comedy of the outstanding flick Cabin in the Woods, but with a great deal more actual horror. It’s grisly, bloody, hilarious fun.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJkd5X2aG34
2. The Thing
For our money, this is John Carpenter’s best film – isolated, claustrophobic, beardtastic, and you can get frostbite just watching. A group of Arctic scientists take in a dog, but he’s not a dog at all. And soon, most of the scientists are not scientists, either, but which ones?! The FX still hold up and so does the chilly terror.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoAuJaN78Hk
1. The Shining
Because that’s what could happen if you wander outside right now. You might find yourself lost in a maze, icicles hanging from your eyebrows, your bloody axe frozen to your cold, dead hand. Not that anyone inside is much better off. Enjoy Stanly Kubrick’s masterpiece of family dysfunction, Gatsby-style partying, Big Wheel love and bad carpeting. It’s never a bad time to watch The Shining.
If you watched the film Prisoners and thought, wow, this could only be better if it were more graphic and a little funnier, then have I got the movie for you! (Also, get some psychiatric help.)
A mixture of disturbing fairy tale and ugly reality, Israel’s Big Bad Wolves takes you places you really don’t want to go, but damn if it doesn’t keep you mesmerized every minute.
The particularly vulgar slaughter of several little girls sets events in motion. One teacher is suspected. One cop is driven. One father suffers from grief-stricken mania. It’s going to get really ugly.
Filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado implicate everyone, audience included. They create intentional parallels among the three men, pointing to the hypocrisy of the chase and making accusations all around of a taste for the intoxicating bloodlust that comes from dominating a weaker person.
Their taut and twisty script keeps surprises coming, but it’s the humor that’s most unexpected. Handled with dark, dry grace by Lior Ashkenazi (the cop) and Tzahi Grad (the father) – not to mention Doval’e Glickman (the grandfather) – this script elicits shamefaced but magnetic interest. You cannot look away, even when the blowtorch comes out. And God help you, it’s hard not to laugh now and again.
The violence is not shot to amuse. It is jarring and awful. But the subdued lunacy of the perpetrators allows a complicated kind of respite from the ugliness in the basement. Complicated because it pulls you back over to the side of men torturing another who – for all we, the audience, know – is as innocent as he claims to be.
Clearly the filmmakers are interested in the toxic ineffectiveness of torture as a method of interrogation, but the film never feels preachy. The characters are too well drawn, the performances too compelling, and the writing too full of misdirection.
The duo abandon the dark and dreamy camerawork that gave the early reels its menacingly hypnotic feel, and while the straightforward grit of later material suits the content, it’s hard not to miss the Goth poetry of Act I. But these two know how to develop dread, punctuate the darkness with almost absurdly beautiful images, and deliver a punishing blow. Big Bad Wolves will haunt your sleep.
Love, loss, spirituality, tattoos and music – indeed some of the very bedrocks of life -take on a sublime urgency in The Broken Circle Breakdown, a 2014 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.
No matter how effectively a story may work onstage, a successful transition to the screen is far from guaranteed (i.e. August: Osage County). Though TBCB began as a stage play, the filmmakers recognize the different challenges a film adaptation creates, and they rise to the occasion with an achingly beautiful film.
The setting is Belgium, where Didier (Johan Heidenbergh, star and co-writer of the play) showcases his love for American bluegrass music by leading a popular local band. Though he’s pragmatic, technical, and verbose, he falls hard for the emotional, quietly intense Elise (Veerle Baetens), a tattoo artist who just happens to have a pretty sweet singing voice.
They begin a passionate relationship, she joins the band, and the couple soon welcomes daughter Maybelle.
When Maybelle is diagnosed with cancer, the differing world views held by Didier and Elise begin to clash. Didier’s atheism and Elise’s spirituality personify the ongoing debate over science and religion, and the couple soon question themselves and each other.
Director/co-writer Felix Van Groeningen presents the relationship as a graceful circle. The story cross-cuts between different stages in Didier and Elise’s life together, letting emotion trump chronology as a connective device, a strategy that pays off wonderfully.
That emotion often resonates through the music they both love. In the way its songs are deftly woven into the very fabric of the story arc, TBCB recalls both Once and Inside Llewyn Davis. The most obvious difference is that TBCB utilizes English lyrics even though the dialog is in Flemish, which is a tad jarring at first but soon serves to underscore the effect that America has on these characters, and indeed the rest of the world.
Both Heidenbergh (who will very much remind country music fans of singer Ronnie Dunn) and Baetens handle their own vocal duties, which seems only fitting, as there isn’t a false note in either performance.
Awash in authenticity, The Broken Circle Breakdown soars on joy and heartache, tenderness and defiance, ultimately leaving you tearful, but inspired.
A handful of befuddled but beautifully realized characters fall through the tears in the cultural fabric of a too-rapidly modernizing China in Zhangke Jia’s A Touch of Sin.
The film sets four tales spinning simultaneously, each uncovering the unpredictable challenges and opportunities facing four characters who are dealing with capitalistic expansion, an unprecedented and often unstructured change in more than just their economic reality. As each grapples with the task of making a living among the unscrupulous who’ve already learned to exploit the fledgling economy, bloodshed becomes ever more appealing.
Jia’s imagination and scope are epic, but his film remains intimate. Though his pacing is slower and his dialog certainly more restrained, Jia’s film draws on some of Tarantino’s staging preferences when push comes to puncture wounds and bullet holes. Like Tarantino, though, Jia never abandons his characters.
He remains invested in each one, whether it’s the disgruntled miner hoping to hold village officials responsible for community welfare, the young woman defending her honor to herself as well as her unwelcome suitors, the transient who enjoys his freedom and his handgun, or the adolescent thrashing desperately against a lifelong outlook of meager wages and soul-crushing employers.
The physical environment is as unforgiving as anything in this bleak, colorless winter where everyone looks cold and uncomfortable – not abjectly miserable, just utterly unhappy. It’s a perfect backdrop for these lost souls, although Jia seems to be suggesting that these outcasts may not be all that atypical. Not one is in an entirely unique situation, and only the gun-happy transient even seems like an odd duck. No, these are very regular people who finally, irrevocably react rather than submit.
This is the real brilliance in his film. With each passing storyline, the line between “he just snapped” and “would I have done the same” blurs. Jia wonders throughout how an intelligent, rational person is supposed to manage with no future.
The Rocket, an Australian film set in Laos, is a deviously familiar movie. It deposits a well-worn storyline in an unusual context, not to prove the universality of the human condition, but to draw attention to our cultural differences.
According to his tribe’s beliefs, Ahlo (the vibrant talent Sitthiphon Disamoe) should have been killed at birth. He is a twin – the brother of a stillborn – and one twin is always cursed, though there’s no telling which is which. But Ahlo’s mother convinces his grandmother the baby should be spared and his secret kept.
Well, that secret gets spilled when Ahlo becomes the convenient scapegoat for tremendous family upheaval, tumult and tragedy. What is there for a plucky kid to do but prove he is not bad luck?
The casting director got lucky, that’s certain. Disamoe is more than adorable – although he certainly is that. His childlike logic, stubbornness and heartbreaking hope capture your imagination.
Troubling for other reasons entirely is the outcast Ahlo adopts as his “Uncle Purple,” a James Brown fanatic and village drunk played with swagger and heartache by Suthep Po-ngam. Cinema has offered many a pairing of unaccepted youngster and unappreciated oldster, but the bitter magic these two generate is something unique. Their damage is no run-of-the-mill angst and their collaboration is surprisingly moving.
There is certainly something familiar in the plotting: an uplifting story, a ragtag bunch of misfits, and a competition that could win them their future. But the context and setting are so wildly unpredictable that nothing about The Rocket ever feels stale.
Deftly maneuvering through a series of culturally saturated, often politically charged mishaps, Mordaunt uses the Laotian backdrop to give weight to what might otherwise have been a simple tale of the boundless optimism of youth. And yes, sentimentality flavors every scene, but what’s unexpected is that the presence of death is a constant shadow.
The Rocket is a film littered with motherless children, refugees of progress, and the ghosts of war. It’s a scruffy, haunted, vivid charmer about displaced souls, of all things. But it’s with this damaged but hearty population that Mordaunt spins a memorable and satisfying tale of resilience.
“Emotions are like works of art…they can be forged.”
That line from writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore‘s The Best Offerstrikes at the heart of an often captivating mystery that becomes hampered by contrivance.
Geoffrey Rush plays Virgil Oldman, a leading figure in the Vienna art world. A master auctioneer, Virgil is also frequently called upon to appraise various items set for auction, and to distinguish actual treasures from clever forgeries.
From the opening scenes, Rush draws us to his character, inviting curiosity about Virgil’s fussy, fastidious nature, and his strange inability to look any female in the eye for more than a fleeting moment (“Virgil Oldman” is but one letter removed from “virgin old man,” you see).
A mystery begins when Virgil takes a call from Claire (Sylvia Hoeks), an heiress who invites him to inventory the entire contents of her family estate. Slowly, Virgil becomes obsessed with the reclusive Claire, and he turns to his young friend Robert (Jim Sturgess) for help in relating to the fairer sex.
Saying anything more may be revealing too much, though there is a good chance you’ll guess what’s going on before the final reveal.
Tornatore displays nice pacing early on, and some sublime camerawork throughout, but the film begins to unravel as events require too much suspension of disbelief.
The filmmaker again shows his penchant for metaphor, with odes to deception and authenticity that will be impossible to miss, and a dark psychological tone miles away from his wistfully nostalgic Oscar-winner Cinema Paradiso.
There’s nothing wistful about this film, in fact it could have used more of the winking, mischievous spirit Donald Sutherland brings to his few scenes as an art collector.
Still, Rush is (surprise) a joy to watch, and The Best Offer will keep you engaged just from waiting to see how far “out there” it’s willing to go before Tornatore regains his footing for a nicely understated postscript as the gavel finally drops.
Lake Bell makes her feature directing debut with a clever and insightful look at the world of voiceover talent, In a World… , which is available today on DVD. Also writing and starring, she plays Carol, quirky vocal coach and daughter to a buttery-voiced industry legend who doesn’t believe women belong in his business. Boasting finely drawn characters as well as wit and charm to spare, Bell’s unique debut will leave you smiling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZHBjLFu5is
Pair it with Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s debut behind the camera and pen, Don Jon. Both newbie filmmakers show surprising confidence and genuine aptitude. JGL plays a Jersey player who has either found the girl of his dreams or is facing a harsh reality about his intimacy problems. A witty and honest and insightful observation of our times.
