Our Picks

For anyone eager to understand Russia’s depressing 20-year slide from one version of cynical totalitarianism into another, with a brief stop-off in between for giddy, wide-open, largely dysfunctional democracy, “Putin’s Kiss” is required viewing. Of course Pedersen can’t explain all the conundrums of contemporary Russia in 85 minutes, but in profiling two singularly important young Russians — pro-Putin youth activist Masha Drokova and leading opposition journalist Oleg Kashin — she captures some essential drama in the nation’s recent political life. (If you read Russian, Kashin’s site is here.)

Born at the tail end of the Soviet era, Drokova was a fresh-faced teenage girl from suburban Moscow when she suddenly became famous in the mid-2000s after giving Putin a worshipful smooch on national TV. She assured interviewers that she could tell he was a strong, charismatic and kind man, and that whomever she spent her life with would have to follow his example. Poised and pleasant, pretty without being drop-dead Natasha gorgeous, Drokova rapidly became a major public face of Nashi, the “anti-fascist and democratic” youth organization founded by prominent Putin supporters to channel adolescent energy and quell dissent.

As opposition leader Ilya Yashin tells Pedersen, Putin’s regime grew increasingly restless and paranoid after the 2005 “Orange Revolution” threw the post-Soviet autocrats out of power in neighboring Ukraine. (Arguably, the Orange Revolution has itself been largely undone by current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, but that’s another story.) Nashi was initially led by shadowy Putin lieutenant Vasily Yakemenko, perhaps operating at the behest of Vladislav Surkov, a guy who seems like a boring, puffy-faced Kremlin apparatchik but is widely described as the “gray cardinal” or ideological puppet-master behind Putin’s regime. (At the risk of derailing this whole review, the more you read about Surkov the weirder he gets. He may have written or co-written a satirical novel making fun of the system he helped create, and reportedly has portraits of Che Guevara and Tupac Shakur, alongside Putin, in his Kremlin office.)

As we see from Pedersen’s often chilling footage inside Nashi rallies and summer camps, Surkov and Yakemenko created a two-faced organization on a familiar and unfortunate 20th-century model, one part calisthenics and canoeing classes and ritualized teen romance, one part ultra-nationalist ideology. Older Russians of course liken it to the Soviet-era Komsomol, by all accounts one of the communist state’s more successful endeavors. Other people have simply started calling it the “Putinjugend” (a reference to the German name of the Hitler Youth). At any rate, saying that the group is pro-democratic and anti-fascist doesn’t make it so; Nashi has frequently been used to humiliate and harass opposition politicians, journalists and human-rights activists, and is at least circumstantially connected to racist violence against Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris and other minority groups.

Nobody knows for sure — or nobody who’s talking — whether it was Nashi activists who beat Oleg Kashin into a coma in the fall of 2010, breaking both his legs and both his jaws, after he wrote a series of investigative pieces critical of Putin’s business dealings. And nobody knows exactly who the two guys were who took a crap on top of Ilya Yashin’s car, right on a Moscow street. (We see both incidents, via grainy surveillance footage. Russia is just that kind of place.) The ingenuity of the political system engineered by Surkov lies precisely in the fact that orders to quash the opposition often don’t have to come from the top, and the people in power can pay lip service to freedom and democracy and wring their hands over violent incidents. Unlike in Soviet times, dissent is not illegal, and it’s tolerated as long as it stays limited to marginal political parties and elite Moscow publications. But it isn’t good for your health or your public reputation.

Nobody suggests that Masha Drokova had anything to do with the dirty side of Nashi. She was the organization’s happy face, giving speeches against official corruption, hosting a pro-Putin talk show and leading demonstrations against supermarkets that sold expired meat. But as her mentor-protégé relationship with Nashi founder Yakemenko becomes more troubled and she gets to know Kashin and other liberal journalists, this naive but likable young woman visibly begins to struggle with the cognitive dissonance of contemporary Russian political life. No one could accuse “Putin’s Kiss” of painting an encouraging portrait of Russia, but there are some signs that the opposition has been revitalized, and Drokova’s story of apostasy is one small part of that. Ilya Yashin laments the way that Nashi has turned an entire generation toward conformity and cynicism, but it was idealism that made Masha kiss Putin in the first place, and that same idealism made her walk away from him.

“Putin’s Kiss” opens this week at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities and home-video release to follow.

Mind you, Harrelson is one of those actors who frequently upstages his material. His performance as Justin Timberlake’s ferociously gay co-worker is the only thing I can remember about “Friends With Benefits.” In fact, that role deserves special mention in the pantheon of straight actors playing gay, because Harrelson makes no effort to score political points or deliver messages. It’s a Woody Harrelson character, a slouchy, funny, irresistible horndog dude who chases guys rather than girls. When Timberlake’s character awkwardly informs him that he’d be happy to go out drinking but he’s not actually gay, Harrelson shrugs it off with an eager grin: “Means more pipe for me!”

I could go on: “Zombieland,” “Transsiberian,” “North Country,” “She Hate Me” — all movies that have pretty much been erased from my memory, except for the oddly sticky Harrelson moments. “Rampart” is quite a different matter, because Harrelson is in every scene of the film, and indeed almost every shot. Co-written by director Moverman (who also made “The Messenger” with Harrelson) and L.A. noir novelist James Ellroy, this is an ambitious voyage into the heart of darkness, LAPD style, that suggests both Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” and the intense, semi-improvised character studies of John Cassavetes. Some of it’s brilliant and some of it set my teeth on edge, but Harrelson gives a moving, terrifying, titanic performance as the most compelling dirty cop since Denzel Washington in “Training Day.”

If you live in Southern California or have otherwise followed the Los Angeles Police Department’s extensive history of corruption and abuse, you may remember the Rampart scandal of the late ’90s, in which an entire anti-gang squad of 70-some cops was implicated in numerous kinds of misconduct. (Typically, no cops were convicted of anything, and only a handful were fired, but the city wound up paying out more than $125 million in the resulting civil suits.) This movie doesn’t even try to tell that story, but the Rampart Division and the scandal serves as backdrop to the tale of Officer Dave “Date Rape” Brown (Harrelson), an old-school LAPD warrior who enforces a “military occupation” (his term) on the black and brown streets of East L.A.

I won’t explain the origins of Dave’s cop “monicker,” except to say that it isn’t exactly what you’re thinking. (Could be better, could be worse; that’s up to you.) Dave breaks the law every day and doesn’t care, but hews closely to his own private version of the cop code: He’s doing the “people’s dirty work,” and if you’re a bad guy who crosses his path, you had it coming. His home life is a bewildering semi-bohemian mélange involving his current, somewhat estranged wife (Anne Heche), his ex-wife (Cynthia Nixon), who happens to be the first wife’s sister, and two daughters, one of them a righteously pissed-off teen lesbian played by Brie Larson. None of this stops him from randomly hooking up with women in bars, including a steamy liaison with Audra McDonald and an even steamier one with a lying, slutty, drunken lawyer played by Robin Wright. (“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Dave tells her — one, two, three — “in this bar.”)

As you can tell, Moverman has assembled a terrific ensemble (also included are Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Ice Cube and Steve Buscemi), and the intimate, eye-level cinematography of Bobby Bukowski and staccato editing of Jay Rabinowitz create a seductive, threatening atmosphere that pushes right to the edge between realism and total head-trip. But what “Rampart” doesn’t really offer is a story worthy of its tremendous antihero, who almost convinces us of his essential honor, until we notice that he’s actually a sociopath inflicting pain on everyone around him. Dave gets dragged into some kind of murky, sub-”Chinatown” conspiracy, and may be the LAPD brass’ designated fall guy for the entire Rampart snafu, but that’s about all I understand.

But if Dave’s slide into alcohol and drug abuse and worsening criminality seems a bit foreordained, Harrelson remains mind-bendingly magnetic, so much so that you’ll keep rooting for Dave to straighten things out long after that’s become impossible. Harrelson himself, of course, is a noted left-wing activist who would probably despise Dave Brown in real life, but that doesn’t stop him from infusing the guy with unquenchable humanity and his own brand of Sinatra-style doomed dignity. Moverman is an intriguing talent who may yet make a great film; if this isn’t quite it, it’s still a memorable and distinctive showcase for one of our greatest actors.

“Rampart” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, and Feb. 17 in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, with wider release to follow.

In more than a decade of writing about film for Salon, I’ve made only a few glancing references to Tarr’s work — not because anyone was stopping me, but because there didn’t seem to be much point. Most people likely to be interested in his masterfully constructed, time-stretching, profoundly enigmatic fables or allegories (even to say that Tarr’s films have stories is somewhat misleading) probably already knew about them. Furthermore, his films screened only sporadically at a handful of big-city venues — only one, “Werckmeister Harmonies” from 2000, received an official American theatrical release — and until recently were largely unavailable on Region 1 DVD or Blu-ray. But now, with the theatrical release of “The Turin Horse,” a bracing, downbeat and even devastating work that will supposedly be Tarr’s final film — he’s very much alive and only 56, but has announced that he’s shifting to producing and running a film school — and a complete career retrospective at New York’s Lincoln Center, you too can follow along at home if you’re curious.

All eight of Tarr’s previous films — from the documentary-style realism of Communist-era dramas like “Family Nest” (1977) and “The Prefab People” (1982) to “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000), easily his best-known picture, and “The Man From London” (2007), which is, of all things, a film noir starring Tilda Swinton — can now be found on home video through the usual channels. “The Turin Horse” will play in honest-to-God movie theaters in at least half a dozen cities (see below), and it’s quite likely that the Lincoln Center retrospective will be exported to other venues as well. That leads us to the inescapable question of what it’s like to watch Tarr’s films — and if most movies are difficult to describe in words, his are trebly so. How can I possibly convince you to watch a film that features a 10-minute traveling shot amid a roaming herd of cows? (“Sátántangó” again.) Nobody can; you’re either game to try something like that or you’re not. Comparisons and parallels will do no good. Tarr’s best films are beautiful, forbidding, strange, often laced with black humor and almost always deeply pessimistic. Watching them is an experience unlike any other.

Tarr has been written about quite a bit, but I don’t think most of that writing gets us anywhere. (Here’s a 2001 essay by film scholar Peter Hames that provides a good overview of Tarr’s career to that point.) He’s been variously compared to such big names as Bergman, Tarkovsky, John Cassavetes, Theo Angelopoulos and Jim Jarmusch, but that’s such a motley crew as to be meaningless. It’s more about marking out territory and saying, “If you like those drugs, try this one too.” Tarr himself mostly rejects such comparisons, and has said his favorite filmmaker is the famously decadent and prolific R.W. Fassbinder, whose pictures could hardly be more different from his. Except, and it’s a big except, for the fact that both directors are primarily focused on the look and atmosphere of the film. Both want to show us the world as it is — or at least as they see it — and aren’t much interested in conventional psychological drama or spiritual speculation.

One way of explaining Tarr’s moral vision, I think, is to say that he grew up in the Eastern bloc learning that communism was total crap, found out after 1989 that capitalism was crap too, and knew all along that religion was crap. Mix that earned cynicism with the lushness and severity of his cinematographic vision, and his famous penchant for ultra-long, elaborately choreographed deep-focus takes — “Werckmeister Harmonies” is 149 minutes long, and consists of 39 shots — and you get some of the most beautiful and most melancholy images you’ll ever see on-screen. Tarr was never going to have a mainstream crossover moment because he doesn’t tell stories (and his attempts to do so, including “The Man From London” and 1987′s “Damnation,” are arguably weaker films). I find his films moving and involving — and much less “challenging” than, say, the most slow-moving of Tarkovsky’s or Angelopoulos’ films — but in a completely different direction from a conventional, plot-centric entertainment. They are literally “moving pictures,” paintings or photographs that move from one spectacular episode and image to another, hinting at narrative possibility or metaphysical significance but never laying it out.

In “The Turin Horse,” Tarr and his customary ensemble of collaborators — these include co-writer László Krasznahorkai (himself a prominent Hungarian novelist), composer Mihály Vig and editor/co-director Ágnes Hranitzky (who is Tarr’s wife) — use a mysterious episode from the history of philosophy as the jumping-off point for an apocalyptic saga that suggests Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” by way of Samuel Beckett. In March 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown after witnessing a cab driver whipping his reluctant horse on the streets of Turin, Italy. I can see why this story appeals to Tarr — the man who pronounced God dead, laid low by a routine act of cruelty — but if the horse and driver in this movie are meant to be the same ones, that’s only because Tarr says so.

Nietzsche is nowhere to be found in this movie (although you could argue that his spirit is all over it, I guess), and neither is Italy. An elderly man, apparently named Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi), and his battered but somewhat young daughter (Erika Bók), live in a miserable stone hut on some blasted, windswept Thomas Hardy-style heath, which seems more like the surface of Mars than the outskirts of Turin. They eat potatoes, struggle out to the well for water, drive the recalcitrant horse out of her stall for another futile effort to harness her, lock her up again, go back inside and eat more potatoes. (Tarr, who can be quite genial in person, told New York Film Festival audiences last year that the real-life horse was unharmed, and had recently given birth to a foal.) The only sound is the incessant howling of the wind, with intermittent interruptions from Vig’s haunting, minimalist musical score. The man and woman hardly speak, and indeed the sheer brutality of their struggle for survival requires no explanation. The silence is broken when a drunken neighbor stops by, unleashing a bitter monologue about how everything good and decent and noble in the world has been destroyed. A band of gypsies pass by in a cart, bringing a moment of vivacity but trailing chaos and darkness in their wake. The horse stops eating, the well dries up, and the last points of light in the world seem to go out.

A laugh riot, as you can tell. But I left the theater oddly exhilarated — to see daylight again was so great! — and, odder still, eager to see it again (although perhaps not today). Tarr’s films can be arduous, even wrenching, but they’re not boring. Watching them is something like visiting the world’s most fantastic art museum and taking an ice-cold shower, both at the same time. Tarr claims never to watch mainstream movies and to despise Hollywood, but he has more in common with, say, Martin Scorsese than he’d like to admit. He wants to dazzle us and hypnotize us while we sit there in the dark; he doesn’t care about whether we search our souls for deeper meaning. In his own deep, dark, post-Nietzschean, post-Marxist and post-Christian way, he’s a showman, and he has rung down his own final curtain with a bang. I’ll let him have the last word, from a fine interview he did last year with Peter Sbrizzi of Hammer to Nail:

I remember when I did my “Sátántangó,” this seven hour, 15 minute-long movie, everybody said, ‘You are totally crazy, nobody wants to see this stupid movie,’ and I didn’t care, and you know what is happening? This movie is still running around the world since 16 years — and I do not remember the movies that were started and released at the same moment that we did this. [Note: The top grossers of 1994 were "The Lion King," "Forrest Gump" and "True Lies."] I don’t remember that because you forget them; after two months they are finishing in the garbage and nobody remembers this because it’s just simple, stupid storytelling. If you have a real movie, you can watch it 20 or 25 years later or 50 years later; the time will judge it, OK? And by the end now we have more audience than this stupid box office hit.

“The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Bela Tarr” plays through Feb. 8 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York. “The Turin Horse” opens Feb. 10 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in New York; Feb. 17 at Webster University in St. Louis; March 2 at the Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles and the Miami Beach Cinematheque; March 9 at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Mass.; March 22 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; March 30 at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville; April 6 at the UWM Union Theater in Milwaukee; and April 20 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, with more cities to follow.

Wheatley’s debut feature, “Down Terrace,” was a bizarre, bleak and hilarious blend of genres, starting out as a Mike Leigh-style working-class family drama and ending up as an especially gruesome “Sopranos” episode, transported to the south coast of England. Let me introduce “Kill List,” Wheatley’s highly touted second film, by admitting that I’m infinitesimally disappointed that it’s not as funny as “Down Terrace” (though it definitely has its moments) and also that he’s gone so deep into the tradition of creepazoid British genre movies. (Rather than, you know, making the kind of depressing, no-audience films I like better.) But there’s no disputing the ingenuity and even the brilliance of this mind-bending mashup, which begins as a gritty recession-era marriage drama — the opening scene features a couple arguing about whether they have the money to get the Jacuzzi fixed — and then descends into ominous violence and finally total insanity.

I suppose you could say that the way Wheatley splices incompatible kinds of movies together into one story, like some demented mad scientist, has an Internet-age flavor to it. But that’s not something entirely new, and he actually comes off more as a hardcore fan of British independent and low-budget cinema, who loves the kitchen-sink realism of the ’60s and also loves a bunch of well-known horror movies and thrillers that I’d better not mention right now. Love it or hate it, “Kill List” is a definite widescreen cinematic experience loaded with delicious details, from the hotel clerk who holds a conversation without really listening to the sound of someone getting his brains beaten out against a concrete wall. He’s like a faux-Cockney Quentin Tarantino, passionate about the things he loves and also dedicated to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of “taking the piss” — and believe it or not, I mean that as a compliment.

The woman shrieking about the Jacuzzi money in the opening scene is named Shel (MyAnna Buring), the blond-bombshell Swedish wife of Jay (Neil Maskell), an unemployed ex-soldier who’s kicking around their suburban house outside Sheffield, in north central England. Jay at first seems like a hundred other unappealing husbands in British movies of this ilk — he’s a bit of a whiner and a bit of a drinker, he’s put on some weight around the middle, he’s much too hot-tempered and has a laddish London accent that seems halfway affected for a guy who has a Jacuzzi and a garage full of garden chemicals. It takes us a while to figure out that he doesn’t have some vague freelance I.T. gig, as he tells a friend’s visiting girlfriend. He was a private-security Mafioso during the Iraq war and is now a hit man, evidently suffering from the after-effects of a job that went wrong in Kiev a year ago.

Maskell is a well-known presence on British TV, and gives a fearless performance here, in the sense that Jay is the protagonist of “Kill List” and neither the actor, the director nor the screenplay (credited to Wheatley and his partner, Amy Jump, “with contributions by the cast”) ever tries to make him seem even remotely likable. As with “Down Terrace,” how you feel about this is likely to determine whether you can stand this movie or not. As you go deeper into the swirling maelstrom of “Kill List,” you’ll identify more and more with Jay’s struggle to remain afloat amid the bloodshed, madness and general atmosphere of malice. But you’re never going to admire the guy, and you’re always likely to conclude that whatever horrible fate befalls him is one he’s brought upon himself.

After eight months away from the game, Jay and his shaggy Irish partner in crime, Gal (the delicious Michael Smiley, who was also in “Down Terrace”), have received a mysterious commission from a sinister, leathery little man (only identified as The Client, and played by Struan Rodger) who seems to know way too much about what happened in Kiev. From the very beginning, this assignment seems loaded with mysterious significance, and wrapped in a feeling of unspeakable dread. Gal and Jay are sent to assassinate a Catholic priest in his church, and then a “librarian” who curates an especially repellent collection of pornography. What connects these two people — and why do they seem so eager to thank Jay, just before he kills them? And then there’s Gal’s ex-girlfriend, a wide-eyed brunette named Fiona (Emma Fryer), who keeps turning up in unexpected places — and who may not be the clueless corporate drone she appears to be.

Oh crap — I’ve almost told you way too much! But not quite. Here’s the key thing to understand: Every craft element of “Kill List,” from the acting to the cinematography (by Laurie Rose) to the cracked but seemingly inevitable downward progress of the narrative, is absolutely terrific. This movie is yet another testament to the thriving creativity of the British indie-film scene. It’s also the kind of movie designed to mess up your mind, like some unseen Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell picture out of 1981, and it will. As Gal and Jay descend further into mayhem and madness, uncertain whether they’re going crazy or being lured into a dreadful trap, you may want to consider the surprise ending of “Cunning Stunt,” and to get ready for something even worse here.

Whether the shocker final scene of “Kill List” has been earned — and whether it can survive a logical interrogation — is a conversation we’ll have to have after you’ve seen the film. I have my own questions about that matter, but to think in fatalistic terms, Jay’s odyssey can only end badly, and without question there’s a terrible karmic justice to what happens. This is the kind of movie you’ll want to work over with friends after you see it, unless you want to go straight to bed and vow never to take my recommendations ever again. I halfway want to get Ben Wheatley on the horn and have him explain the ending, and halfway suspect that it’s supposed to stem from an evil logic so deeply rooted in human society that it defies all explanation.

“Kill List” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York and the Cinefamily in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow. It’s also available on-demand from many cable and satellite providers.

Mind you, “Declaration of War” still is a profoundly affecting family drama, no matter how much artifice Donzelli piles on top of it. If you’re a parent of young children (as I am), you’ll have to use your own judgment about how much you can take. I understand why some people respond to the health catastrophes of other people’s kids by shutting them out, as if the bad juju might be infectious. That’s how the young father in the film (Jérémie Elkaïm, who is or was Donzelli’s real-life partner, and co-wrote the screenplay) reacts when another kid in their son’s hospital ward dies: Geez, that’s too bad; let’s move on. Let’s face it, every parent harbors these fears, and every time you’re waiting for a phone call from the doctor – even if it’s about allergy testing, or a strep-throat culture – you secretly prepare for the worst.

Although the story of “Declaration of War” apparently hews closely to the real-life saga that Donzelli and Elkaïm endured along with their son, Donzelli kicks it up to a mythic and slightly surreal level right away. When their two characters first meet, and click erotically, against the pounding dance-pop of a Parisian nightclub, they discover that their names are Roméo (Elkaïm) and Juliette (Donzelli). “Does this mean we’ll have a love story with a tragic ending?” he murmurs in her ear. You can view that choice as daring or way too precious; I kind of think it’s both, but by that point I had already been sucked in by the visual and auditory undertow of Donzelli’s style, and just went for the ride. (Full credit also to the spectacular cinematography of Sébastien Buchmann.)

Almost as soon as their son is born, Roméo and Juliette half-suspect something is wrong: He cries all the time, wants to feed constantly, and won’t let them get any sleep. (I would point out that most parents, especially first-time parents, go through some version of that.) But when Adam is 18 months old (and still not walking), their pediatrician notices an odd asymmetry to his facial expressions, and sends them for a neurological consultation and then a CAT scan and then an MRI. The results are pretty nearly as bad as they could be: Adam has a large tumor compressing his brain stem, which will require immediate surgery. And without giving away the whole story, the news doesn’t get any better after that.

That’s the story, and perhaps as an act of catharsis, Donzelli has chosen to tell it as a gorgeous, stylized and highly sensual motion picture. Both she and Elkaïm are gorgeous physical specimens and vividly kinetic performers, and “Declaration of War” finds delight in the most unlikely moments: Juliette sprinting down hospital corridors at high speed, as her son is being anesthetized for his MRI; the two parents riding a fairground Ferris wheel like teenage lovers, at a point when they’ve sold their apartment and quit their jobs to move into the hospital’s parents’ wing. They’re surrounded by a constellation of supporting characters who come together, Greek chorus-style, to support their struggle: Roméo’s working-class mom and her female partner, Juliette’s more bourgeois siblings and parents.

I recognize that the whole thing sounds self-indulgent, and may be so — playing a version of yourself in the arted-up story of your own child’s life-or-death battle with cancer. But the breadth and brio of “Declaration of War” are such that I never tried to resist, and I honestly believe any parent can identify with the ways Donzelli turns quotidian details – a drive to the train station, or a ringing phone at the dinner hour – into thriller-worthy moments of intense drama. Among other things, this movie is a comic and tragic exploration of contemporary European family values, one that makes clear how much is lost, and how much gained, when people are forced to face a crisis of this magnitude.

I’ll drop a big hint and say that while the ending of “Declaration of War” is heartbreaking in various ways, you don’t have to fear the most downbeat or tragic conclusion. (Donzelli and Elkaïm’s real-life son, Gabriel, appears in the film.) Instead, this is a story about two pampered young Parisians who had to grow up in one hell of a hurry and deal with something dreadful, and who were fortunate enough to live in an affluent Western country that still, even in straitened economic times, views healthcare as a right and not a privilege. (Yeah, hint, hint.) So they confronted every parent’s worst nightmare and made it through, more or less, without losing their passion for wine, sex, vigorous exercise and cheesy French love songs.

“Declaration of War” opens this week in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, with wider national release to follow. It will also be available on-demand nationwide through many cable and satellite providers, beginning Feb. 3.