| SEASON OPENER:
Tuesday, November 8, 2011, at 6:30 p.m.
The Pool (2007)
Directed by Chris Smith. It’s not unexpected that Venkatesh, a young laborer at a small hotel in Goa, India, would be mesmerized by a wealthy family’s swimming pool, which he quietly observes during his time off. Compared to his tedious routine of cleaning and odd jobs, the leisurely life of the educated bourgeoisie is alluring yet inscrutable, but Venkatesh, in his infinite resourcefulness, manages to bridge the gap between them and subtly transform his dead-end existence and the world of all those around him. Smith, an accomplished American documentary filmmaker (American Movie; The Yes Men) shows an astounding intimacy with this foreign milieu, and has assembled a fine cast of local nonprofessionals and seasoned Indian stars. There’s nothing patronizing about The Pool and the clash of classes it depicts; Smith manages to keep things light-hearted without sacrificing the authenticity of his observations. 95 minutes. In Hindi; subtitled.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011, at 6:30 p.m.
Brazil (1985)
Directed by Terry Gilliam. Imagine Brave New World as a surreal comedy of errors, seen through the rococo, smart-ass imagination of Gilliam, the only American member of the Monty Python troupe, and there you have Brazil. Jonathan Pryce stars as a bureaucrat in a hopelessly dysfunctional dystopia in the future who accidentally becomes aligned with a rebel faction (led by Robert De Niro), much to the chagrin of his plastic-surgery disaster of a mother (Katherine Helmond). Like many of Gilliam’s movies, Brazil is an extravagantly produced, utterly idiosyncratic fantasy, one that barely made it through the Hollywood entertainment apparatus and into theaters and never quite found the audience it deserved. It’s still a viewing experience that’s impossible to categorize — nightmarish, yet visually exhilarating — and its social satire is as relevant as ever. 132 minutes.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011, at 6:30 p.m.
Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
Directed by Banksy. A Frenchman living in Los Angeles, Thierry Guetta, decides he wants to make a documentary about street art, and gets some of the most internationally acclaimed graffiti warriors to collaborate, including Shepard Fairey and that ultrachic, stencil-crazed Brit, Banksy, who refuses to publicly show his face or use his real voice. After traveling around and filming endless reams of footage, Guetta never actually edits it, and ends up getting into the act himself, assisting artists in their creations. Ultimately, he decides to put on a show in L.A. of his own work, based purely on hype, and that’s when Banksy takes over the movie and does a 180, turning it into a documentary about Guetta. As only the deepest cynic might have foreseen, Guetta’s art show in L.A. is a raging success — financially, at least. Fascinating, arguably fraudulent, and often quite amusing in a field that takes itself very, very seriously, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a funhouse mirror held up to the state of art today. 87 minutes.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011, at 6:30 p.m.
Late Marriage (2001)
Directed by Dover Koshashvili. Set in contemporary Israel among Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, Late Marriage treats a familiar premise about changing mores in a very exotic, earthy, and sexually graphic way. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi), attractive and still unmarried at 31, is involved with a sensuous, divorced Moroccan woman (Ronit Elkabetz) who has a young daughter, but he goes along with a charade of arranged courtships, because he knows his old-world parents will only accept an eligible (and hopefully rich) virgin to be his bride. Koshashvili’s debut feature, writes J. Hoberman in The Village Voice, “is as boldly patterned as the carpets and wall hangings that dominate his characters’ apartments (and make explicit the tyranny of tradition). Late Marriage is loud and confrontational, full of love and despair.” 102 minutes. In Georgian and Hebrew; subtitled.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time (2001)
Directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer. “Watching this movie is like daydreaming,” writes Roger Ebert of Riedelsheimer’s documentary portrait of Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, which he had only heard about from readers because of its cult following in San Francisco. “It is a film about a man wholly absorbed in the moment. He wanders woods and riverbanks, finding materials and playing with them, fitting them together, piling them up, weaving them, creating beautiful arrangements that he photographs before they return to chaos.” Even more than still photographs, Rivers and Tides brings Goldsworthy’s art to vivid life, offering viewers a vantage point to witness his work as if it were an evanescent performance, following each piece from its creation to its destruction, and incorporating the entire journey. 90 minutes.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)
Directed by Sergio Leone. Hollywood Westerns used to be known dismissively as “horse operas,” but “operatic” is certainly an appropriate term to use in extolling the genius of Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, with their unforgettable musical motifs (by the great Ennio Morricone), their majestic, fluid cinematography, and their mythic, archetypal characters. Once Upon a Time in the West is a truly epic saga of how the railroads and capitalism tamed the wild frontier, as seen by an Italian Marxist like Leone (with baby auteurs Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento helping on the script), and intricately structured around one character’s quest for revenge. The movie is the culmination of the three Westerns Leone had made with Clint Eastwood, but here he casts the good-bad-and-ugly roles against type, with Charles Bronson as the taciturn hero, Henry Fonda as the black-hatted villain, and Jason Robards as the comic observer. Adding a woman with extraordinary resilience (Claudia Cardinale) to mix gives the movie emotional heft. This is arguably Leone’s masterpiece, a film that takes the Old West to a whole new dimension. 165 minutes.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
Police, Adjective (2009)
Directed by Corneliu Porumbolu. Here is another minor miracle from the Romanian New Wave, the recent mother lode of great European cinema, featuring films made with spartan budgets, unflashy technique, and subtle shades of biting humor and human misery. In the small, gritty city of Vaslui in Eastern Romania, an unremarkable police detective, Cristi (Dragos Bucur), is given an unremarkable assignment: to catch a particular teenage pot-smoker in the act and arrest him. After observing his perpetrator for hours on end, something seems wrong to Cristi — what’s the point of this exercise? The boy is not a dealer or a menace, so why strap him with a severe sentence for such a small infraction? But in post-totalitarian Romania, bureaucracy and corruption still have insidious influence. In a semantically dazzling climactic scene, Cristi and his supervisor (Vlad Ivanov) elliptically discuss the whys and why-nots, and the conclusion, in a typically deadpan way, is deeply unsettling. 115 minutes. In Romanian; subtitled.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)
Directed by Preston Sturges. Sturges was a Hollywood fluke: an irreverent, iconoclastic writer-director who loved screwball comedy—in both physical and verbal manifestations, and all of it hilarious—and who regarded the censors with outright contempt. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, in its entirety, is a sly subversion of the Hays Code rulebook. Charming Betty Hutton plays Trudy Kockenlocker, a sweet bobby-soxer who wakes up pregnant after slipping out to spend a night partying with soldiers on leave. Of course, Trudy couldn’t have been drunk (per Hays), so Sturges has it explained that she’d bumped her head and can’t remember much about the evening. Likewise, Trudy couldn’t have had sex outside of wedlock, so Sturges improvised that she’d actually married the soldier who knocked her up, a young man whom she thinks is named Ignatz Ratzkywatzky. She and a sad-sack friend (Eddie Bracken), who has a major crush on her, go on a search for the missing dad, and in the process, they prove beyond a doubt what fools these small-town American mortals be. 98 minutes.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
The Son (2002)
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The Dardenne brothers, whose films deal with the lives of working-class Walloons in Belgium, have developed an uncanny mix of documentary and fictional story-telling. Long, invisibly orchestrated takes with a handheld camera and fully inhabited performances give their work a penetrating, transcendent realism, and the Dardennes’ intense cinematic devotion to their characters expresses both a profound empathy for their flaws and a dogged faith in their redemption. In The Son, they patiently follow the daily routine of Olivier (Olivier Gourmet, who won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival), a woodworker who teaches his trade to young wards of the state — a meticulous craftsman who has suffered a grievous loss. He becomes obsessed with one of his apprentices, at first rejecting him, then accepting him, then creepily stalking him, the sense of which is slowly but surely revealed as the film builds toward its devastating, cathartic ending. “The Son is complete, self-contained and final,” writes Roger Ebert. “It is as assured and flawless a telling of sadness and joy as I have ever seen.” 103 minutes. In French; subtitled
Tuesday, March 13, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
The Architecture of Doom (1989)
Directed by Peter Cohen. It was not a coincidence that Adolf Hitler and other notable figures of the Nazi Party were failed artists. In this thoughtful yet chilling documentary, Cohen, the Swedish-born son of refugees of Nazi Germany, examines the catastrophe of the Third Reich through its aesthetics — how the concepts of a master race and a pre-eminent German empire were direct outgrowths of Hitler’s passion for ancient Greek architecture, Wagnerian opera, and the Nordic physical ideal. His obsession with purification and cleanliness dovetailed perfectly with his disdain for cubism and other modern movements, his revulsion for the mentally ill and physically deformed, and most consequentially, his anti-Semitism. An aesthetic that implicitly justifies genocide also sees beauty in the destruction of civilization; Hitler, Cohen writes in the film’s narration, “saw doom as art’s highest expression.” 119 minutes.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
Election (1999)
Directed by Alexander Payne. Woe unto anyone who crosses Tracy Flick. In this gleefully immoral comedy about a high-school election, Flick is the Nurse Ratched of student candidates. And as played by Reese Witherspoon, in a star-making performance, this tyrannically sunny, pragmatic, and shrewd young woman is the undoing of the washed-up teacher who supervises the election, played to abject perfection by Matthew Broderick. The only weapon Broderick’s teacher can come up with to stop Flick is the rushed candidacy of one Paul Metzler, a blissfully dumb, handsome jock (Chris Klein), but it’s a cynical move, and the result is anything but predictable. In his exemplary early career, Payne focused on his native Nebraska, and with Twain-like irony, savaged everyone and everything in sight. Election, based on Tom Perrotta’s novel, is his second film, and though it plays the Hollywood game by focusing on high school, it is much more than that: a brilliant allegory of American democracy. 103 minutes.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
Alice (1988)
Directed by Jan Svankmajer. Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is ostensibly for children, filled as it is with whimsy and fantasy and grotesquerie and dastardly acts. But adults are able to distill much more layered meanings and even satire from the work, and that is true as well of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s films. His adaptation of Carroll’s classic is fairly faithful in terms of plot, but it also manages to amply express Svankmajer’s gothic and macabre sensibility. The young actress Kristyna Kohoutova portrays Alice, but her toys and the denizens of her dreamlike journey are all puppets and props that are activated by the magic of stop-motion animation. Hal Hinson, in The Washington Post, sees what Svankmajer does as “more akin to alchemy than moviemaking. His is an art of dark conjuring, brought to life more by the wave of a wand than the slap of a clapper board…. It takes us back to a time in the history of movies when audiences responded to the images on screen with a combination of awe and fear.” 84 minutes. In Czech; subtitled.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
Forty Shades of Blue (2005)
Directed by Ira Sachs. Laura, the character at the center of this modern American family drama, is a tragic figure, and Dina Korzun, the Russian actress who plays her, gives her an almost unbearable sense of stone-faced dignity. Laura’s role is as the live-in girlfriend of Alan, a Memphis recording artist and producer twice her age — disturbingly played by Rip Torn as an egomaniacal bear of a man — who barely pays attention to her and their toddler son. Nonetheless, the poor Russian immigrant in Laura has adapted well to the life of an affluent suburban matron; it’s only when Michael (Darren E. Burrows), Alan’s grown son from a former marriage, shows up that her lonely peace is shattered. Michael, who is having marital difficulties of his own and who harbors a burning resentment for his father, awakens a long-suppressed flicker of passion in Laura, and from that point on, the charade of her existence becomes impossible to maintain. Sachs directs with extraordinary sensitivity to each character’s worldview, quietly detailing the culture clash, the familial strains, and the ocean of frustration that envelops them. 108 minutes.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
Me and Orson Welles (2008)
Directed by Richard Linklater. In the late 1930s, when Orson Welles ran the Mercury Theatre company in New York, he was still a creative wunderkind and an upstart, full of flash and dazzle and more than enough charm to win over suits and manipulate anyone to fill his needs. This is the theatrical circus that a teenager from New Jersey, played by heartthrob Zac Efron, wanders into, befriending the preternaturally worldly Sonja (Claire Danes), catching the eye of Welles, and nabbing a role in his production of Julius Caesar. British actor Christian McKay portrays Welles with grace and panache, and Linklater has assembled a marvelous, chaotic ensemble to surround him, all of whom resist the temptation to overdo the shtick. Indeed, Linklater has become such a polished director — of a period piece, no less — that one would never guess at his indie, low-budget roots. But then again, Me and Orson Welles is a meditation on how things are not always what they seem. 114 minutes.
SEASON CLOSE
Tuesday, May 22, 2012, at 6:30 p.m.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, a pillar of the new Mexican cinema, wrote the scripts for director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s highly fragmented, melodramatic films — Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel — as well as this lazy, quirky gem picked up by Tommy Lee Jones to direct and star in. The man of the title, Melquiades Estrada, is a ranch hand in Texas who is accidentally murdered by a cocky border patrol officer (Barry Pepper). When the officer tries to cover up his mistake, an American friend of Estrada’s (Jones) won’t stand for it. He kidnaps the officer, forces him to disinter Estrada’s body, and drags them both into Mexico to find the dead man’s home and bury him properly. Their journey from sun-baked Texas to the isolated villages of Mexico is punctuated with slightly surreal encounters, and the kidnapped officer, humbled by the realization of his moral transgression, eventually forms an understanding with his captor. It’s a beautifully told yarn, filled with tough-skinned women (January Jones and Melissa Leo) and wistful sentiments, and as first-time director and grizzled star, Tommy Lee Jones is nothing short of superb. 121 minutes.
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