Cinema International

AUG.  23-24-25  MARGIN CALL    SWK 250     
    USA  2011
    Dir. J.C. Chandor  
    With Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons
    English, Rated R, 108 Min.

Make no mistake about it; Margin Call is a thriller that generates all the adrenalin of any chase scene, shootout or cliff hanging. It’s also a film that provokes thought about money or what happened to it in the world of high finance in the summer of 2008. Money may have begun as system of symbolic value to simplify commerce, but for the fictional brokers money is a game played with numbers on a screen. The winners win because they can predict when to get out from under the house of cards of their own construction before it falls. Guess who the losers are.

AUG.  30-31-SEPT. 1  THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER IFC 300 
    FRANCE, GERMANY  2010
    Dir. Bertrand Tavernier
    With Mélanie Thierry, Lambert Wilson, Grégorie Leprince-Ringuet
    French with English subtitles, Not Rated, 139 Min.

Bertrand Tavernier gives us a historical epic set in sixteenth-century France during the French wars of religion when Catholics battled Protestants over subtle religious differences. The gorgeous Marie de Mézières loves one man but her calculating father marries her off to another for political advantage. Marie is a headstrong beauty who feels no commitment to arrangements made with no regard for her own passions. “Mr. Tavernier brings to life with racing cameras, sweeping vistas, lofty words bawdy deeds and some hard truths.”—Manohla Dargis, New York Times.

SEPT.  6-7-8   THE SKIN I LIVE IN   SONY 300  
    SPAIN  2011
    Director: Pedro Almodovar
    With Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Blanca Suarez
    Spanish with English subtitles, Rated R, 117 Min.

Pedro Almodovar loves to dismantle the conventional structure of a genre and reconstruct it in a novel way. The Skin I Live In is his treatment of the horror genre.  The mad scientist, the creepy assistant, the beautiful captive, all the usual characters populate the macabre setting of a mansion in Toledo, Spain, during the masquerading of Carnival.  What lies at the heart of Dr. Legard’s obsession with his beautiful patient/prisoner Vera?  The worst you can imagine. “With a Pedro Almodovar film, we expect voluptuous sexual perversion, devious plot twists, a snaky interweaving of past and present, all painted on a canvas of bright colors with bold art and clothing. “The Skin I Live does not disappoint.” — Roger Ebert , Chicago Sun-Times.

SEPT.  13-14-15  JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI SWK 250 
    JAPAN 2012     
    Dir. David Gelb
    With Jiro Ono
    Japanese with English subtitles. Rated PG, 81 Min.

Follow your Bliss and you will end up making your living doing something you love. But what is your bliss? For eighty-five-year-old Jiro Ono it’s making sushi. He ran away as a boy to apprentice to a chef and has been making sushi for last seventy years. His ten-seat counter in a Tokyo basement has garnered a three star rating in the Michelin Guide, a price tag of  $300, and a reservation wait-list of three months. Every imaginable effort is expended on  the ingredients, the confection and the customer’s experience.  No detail is too miniscule. Is this bliss or obsession with perfection? “As a documentary about world-class sushi, this film is definitive.” — Roger Ebert , Chicago Sun-Times.

 
SEPT.  20-21-22  PINA BAUSCH     IFC 300
      GERMANY 2012 
      Dir. Wim Wenders
     With Malou Airaudo, Jorge Puerta Armenta, Andrey Berezin,
     German and others with English subtitles, Rated PG, 103 Min.

Modern dance has always maintained a strong connection to the art of cinema—a connection not only to musicals, with their brilliant song and dance numbers, but to films that highlight the pure lyricism of movement, such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique.  Pina, by Wim Wenders, captures the magic of this lyrical tradition.  Taking as its subject Pina Bausch, an influential German dance choreographer who died, unexpectedly, during production, Wenders’s film showcases some of Bausch’s most audacious and beautiful work.  While a “documentary, devoid of plot, narration, and chronological structure,” Pina “is crammed to bursting with …short stories—character studies that jump out of nowhere, explode into action, then stop”--Anthony Lane, The New Yorker.

SEPT.  27-28-29  BIG SHOT’S FUNERAL   SONY 175       
    CHINA 2001
    Dir. Xiaogang Feng
    With Donald Sutherland, Rosamund Kwan, You Ge
    Chinese and English, with English subtitles, Rated PG, 100 Min.

In this oddball comedy and globalization mash-up, Hollywood hubris receives an unlikely Beijing makeover.  When pompous director Donald Sutherland, filming in China, falls into a coma, the lauded actor You Ge takes over the project.  As the movie-within-a-movie conceit wildly shifts, finally settling on a genre that might be called “comedy funeral,” the results are often hilarious.  Xiaogang’s Feng’s comic approach inevitably sticks because “the sense of humor is so unusual and unexpected”--Rich Cline, Film Threat.

OCT.  4-5-6   FALL BREAK NO FILM  

OCT.  11-12-13  4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS IFC 300   
    ROMANIA  2007
    Dir. Cristian Mungiu  
    With Anamaria Marinca, Vlad Ivanov, Laura Vasiliu
    Romanian with English subtitles, Rated R, 113 Min.

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, Cristian Mungui’s unforgettable film tells the story of a pair of young Romanian women attempting to arrange an illegal abortion during the final years of Ceausescu dictatorship.   The film’s controversial subject matter becomes a pretext for a remarkable exploration of life under Ceausescu’s regime.  At Peter Bradshaw noted in his five-star Guardian review, the “film is a nightmare of social-realist suspense…The 39-year-old Mungiu has created a masterpiece of intimate desperation.”

OCT. 18-19-20  A SEPARATION   SONY 400
    IRAN, 2011
    Director: Asghar Farhadi
    With: Leila Hatami, Peyman Moadi, Sareh Bayat
    Farsi with English subtitles, PG-13, 123 min.

On the surface, A Separation examines the messy break-up of a marriage and, more broadly, aspects of law and guilt in contemporary Iran.   Yet the scope of this marvelous, complex, award winning film (Golden Bear at Berlin; Academy Award for Best Foreign Film) extends well beyond these superficial dimensions.  As Lee Marshall (Screen Daily) observes, by demonstrating a “control of investigative pacing that recalls classic Hitchcock and a feel for ethical nuance that is all his own, Farhadi has hit upon a story that is not only about men and women, children and parents, justice and religion in today’s Iran, but that raises complex and globally relevant questions of responsibility, of the subjectivity and contingency of ‘telling the truth’, and of how thin the line can be between inflexibility and pride.”

OCT. 25-26-27     MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE CRIT 300 
      USA 2011  
      Dir. Sean Dirkin
      With Elizabeth Olsen, Christopher Abbott, Brady Corbet
      English, Rated R, 120 Min.

An escaped cult member experiences paranoia and isolation while attempting to start a new life with her sister's family.... Try as Martha might to blend into her new upper-middle-class surroundings, she can't help but be haunted by nightmares of the time she spent under the control of a malevolent cult leader, or the fear that the group is watching her every move and awaiting the perfect moment to take their revenge “This is a good movie from a masterful novel … What is happening is implied, not spelled out. We are required to observe.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.
  

NOV. 1-2-3      TROLL HUNTER   SWK 250   
      NORWAY 2011
      Dir.Andre Ovredal 
     With Thomas Glen Erland Tosterud,  Hans Otto Jespersen, Hohanna Johanna Morck
     Norwegian with English subtitles, Rated PG-13, 99 Min.

Shot in the icy forests of western Norway, and compared by some critics to The Blair Witch Project, Andre Ovredal’s movie chronicles the making of a documentary about bear poachers.  When the filmmakers come across weird looking tracks in the snow, things get really strange.  How strange?  Trolls!  Combining elements of sci-fi fantasy, mockumentary, Norwegian mythology, and paranormal activity, Trollhunter “lives up to its ridiculous name and premise [in] every sense”--Sean Gandert, Paste Magazine.