Salon.com > Our Picks: Movies

Must-do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 25 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

New Yorker writer George Packer's “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" is a journalistic marvel, examining 35 years worth of history to reveal the slow transformation of American institutions. Laura Miller writes:

Alex Gibney: Julian Assange has become like “those he despises”

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:30:00 +0000

So Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and many other political and social documentaries, has made a fascinating film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks that has already pissed off a lot of people on the left – and is about to piss off a bunch more. “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” portrays the Australian hacker-hero Assange as a flawed and complicated figure. As British journalist Nick Davies puts it in the film, the same extraordinary personality who created WikiLeaks is also the one who destroyed it. On one hand, Assange has led the fight for freedom of information in the asymmetrical conflict between the world’s citizens and fearsome Goliaths like the CIA and the Pentagon. On the other, he has allowed his alarming personal failings and his persecution complex to become much too large a part of the story, and has succumbed to what one source in the film calls “noble cause corruption.”

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller was captivated by the story of journalist Emma Brockes' mother, Pauline, who as a young woman worked to get her father arrested for incest:

It took less than a chapter of “She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me” for me to fall for Emma Brockes’ mother, Pauline. First and foremost, there’s Pauline’s tart, post-colonial sangfroid. An émigré from South Africa, where she spent the first 28 years of her life, she wound up raising her only child in Britain, in what Brockes, a journalist, describes as “a gentle kind of place, leafy and green, with the customary features of a nice English village.” Pauline was unimpressed. “The English,” she was fond of pronouncing, “are a people who cook their fruit.” She regaled her daughter with tales of growing up in what was then Zululand, where even snakes and scorpions were nothing to fuss about. “Whining was not permissible. Undervaluing oneself was not permissible,” Brockes writes of her mother’s attitude toward life. Another tenet: “Look lively, or die.”

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 11 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

The American Psychiatric Association gears up to deliver the new DSM-5, the manual that serves as the mental health industry's bible, but with "The Book of Woe," psychotherapist Gary Greenberg cautions Americans to question the authority of a guide that is largely "built on fiction." Laura Miller writes:

“Psychiatric diagnosis is built on fiction and sold to the public as fact.” So writes psychotherapist Gary Greenberg in “The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry.” That’s an explosive assertion but also one that doesn’t quite mean what most of you are probably thinking. Scientologists, settle down: Greenberg is not on your side. And talk-therapy pooh-poohers, spare us all those chortles of vindicated scorn; he doesn’t agree with you, either.

Pick of the week: Sarah Polley’s family secrets

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:55:00 +0000

Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” is two or maybe three dangerous kinds of movies all at the same time, and handled so brilliantly that the result is a transformative, unforgettable work of art. This documentary about Polley’s own surprising family secrets -- which includes some sneaky fictional or imaginative elements -- might sound at first like a personal indulgence but becomes something much larger and subtler: A gripping investigation of the ultimately unknowable past, a meditation on how and whether we can actually know anything, and an act of profound love and generosity. That generosity extends not just to the members of Polley’s WASPy Canadian family – although you certainly feel that – but also to the audience. I left the theater thinking not just about Polley’s family secrets but my own, for which of us truly knows where we came from, or what unrecoverable stories of love and heartbreak lie in our prehistory?

What we missed: Steve Coogan and Julianne Moore’s bitter divorce

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It’s probably best to approach Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s intimate, unnerving and entirely addictive drama “What Maisie Knew” by not leaning too hard on its Henry James source material. While readers of James’ brief and brilliant 1897 novel will surely spot and enjoy the numerous parallels and points of connection, this is an absorbing 21st-century childhood thriller – not a contradiction in terms, I promise – that requires no literary study.

Maisie (the remarkable Onata Aprile, who has just the right combination of slyness and shyness) is a girl of 7 or 8, of the pampered yet neglected sort that’s entirely too common in Manhattan and other metropolitan locales. Her parents are a debauched rock star named Susanna (ruthlessly nailed by Julianne Moore), who has slid past her expiration date without noticing it, and a pompous English art dealer named Beale (Steve Coogan), who may be worse, since he’s wilier and more manipulative. Their custody battle drags Maisie through a half-understood world of nannies, private schools and courtrooms, mostly seen from her perspective.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Told through the self-aware but not entirely reliable voice of Nora Eldridge, Laura Miller calls Claire Messud’s main character in “The Woman Upstairs” the counterpart to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man:

As Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Claire Messud’s claustrophobically hypnotic new novel would have it, we are all of us surrounded by reservoirs of invisible rage. “The Woman Upstairs” purports to be the story of one of the ragers, although Nora both does and doesn’t wish to be identified with the archetypal figure in the novel’s title. The counterpart to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, the Woman Upstairs, in Nora’s formulation, is a recessive, barely noticed neighbor, “whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.” Her “day’s great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog.” She strives not to cause any inconvenience and is resigned to always coming second (or third) in other people’s lives.

Pick of the week: I was a teenage anarchist!

Thu, 02 May 2013 23:30:00 +0000

“Something in the Air” tells the story of a French teenager caught up in the half-crazy early-‘70s climate of political radicalism and artistic experimentation, an era that can seem so far from our own as to be a science-fiction alternate reality. It’s a terrific film, wonderfully atmospheric and alive, but also a curiously appropriate one to encounter right now, as we deal with the aftermath of a cruel and pointless crime apparently committed in the name of some abstract revolutionary ideal. Writer-director Olivier Assayas (of “Summer Hours” and the terrific terrorist miniseries “Carlos”), one of the leading figures in French cinema, has described this movie as generally autobiographical. While Assayas’ young protagonist and his anarchist pals never come to the point of blowing up civilians, they get pretty close, and indeed avoid committing murder mostly through luck. Is this a true story? I obviously have no idea, but it’s a convincing and disturbing one.

“Post Tenebras Lux”: A perverse, dreamlike masterpiece

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:15:00 +0000

A mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller, Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ “Post Tenebras Lux” casts a strange and powerful spell. While this is certainly a challenging film on many levels, and one rooted in observation of the natural world, it isn’t one of those drifty contemplative Terrence Malick spectacles where nothing much happens. It’s just that many of the events are puzzling and disconnected, and you have to work out for yourself the allusive or subterranean relationship between them. There’s a neon-red animated demon who invades a family’s home at night, a shooting, a hilarious and heartbreaking rural A.A. meeting, a visit to a perverted sex club and a guilt-ridden killer who commits suicide in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. It’s as if we were sometimes in the world of David Lynch, sometimes in the world of Stanley Kubrick and a whole lot of the time in the world of Andrei Tarkovsky, with the complicated social tragedy of Mexico ladled on top.

“Love Is All You Need”: Pierce Brosnan’s lovely, lightweight rom-com

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:00:00 +0000

Danish director Susanne Bier has spent her career stuck in the mushy European middle, halfway between Ingmar Bergman and Hollywood. She has a tremendous gift for character and storytelling, coupled with a penchant for preachy, melodramatic message delivery in the Paul Haggis vein, especially as her films have attracted a global audience. She won the foreign-language Oscar for the Euro-guilt odyssey “In a Better World” in 2010 – a picture that was conspicuously trying to be meaningful – and has made one semi-unsuccessful American venture, the 2007 “Things We Lost in the Fire,” with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller, who generally does not have “patience for the touchstones of foodie literature,” was pleasantly surprised by Michael Pollan’s “Cooked,” written from the perspective of a journalist and gardener rather than a celebrity chef:

His effort to deepen his understanding of the process of turning food into meals is the subject of his latest book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” I wish I could say “Cooked” is entirely free of moments of flabby philosophizing (“Isn’t it always precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm shore that is nature?”), but they are rare. Admittedly, the book’s thematic structure is also a shade precious. It’s divided into four sections according to what the ancients perceived to be the four elements — fire, water, air and earth — each attributed to a different cooking method — grilling, braising and other forms of cooking in liquids, baking and fermentation. As ever, Pollan makes each of these themes the occasion for real thought as well as some energetic reporting.

Pick of the week: Michael Bay’s self-mocking crime farce

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

With his pumped-up and violent crime farce “Pain & Gain” – a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality and self-regard -- Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who’ve been making fun of him: He’s been in on the joke the whole time. I can think of a variety of responses to this, but they all basically boil down to “Yeah, so what else is new?”

There has always been a powerful current of self-mockery, or at least self-awareness, in Bay’s ludicrous “Transformers” movies, which embraced bigness, loudness, dumbness, visual incoherence and cartoonish female pulchritude (see: Fox, Megan, entire career of) as central formal elements and stylistic first principles. I wasn’t the only critic to observe that Bay’s enormous 2011 hit, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” had elements of avant-garde surrealism and elements of high camp, and could be described as a “performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment.”

“At Any Price”: Zac Efron and Dennis Quaid’s Corn Belt thriller

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Movies about so-called ordinary people in the American heartland, even when they’re pretty good, tend to be driven by a reflexive and almost guilty sentimentality. Even the hardened, cynical coastal types who make films don’t want to challenge the national myth that life in rural America possesses a realness absent in more metropolitan surroundings. There’s some genuine history behind that myth, in the sense that over the course of the 20th century the nation’s population and economy permanently shifted away from the agrarian republic imagined by the founders, but a great many of us have rural roots in the not-too-distant past. One of my grandfathers was an Irish immigrant, but the other was born in a prairie town I’ve never even visited, to a father who sold Case tractors.

One of the best things about Ramin Bahrani’s bracing farmland thriller “At Any Price” is its refusal to condescend to the Iowa farm family at its center by depicting them as nobler, more innocent and less sophisticated than other people. Many people who see this movie will be understandably focused on Zac Efron’s intense performance as Dean Whipple, the family’s handsome but embittered youngest son who yearns to be a stock-car driver. But for me the breakthrough in “At Any Price” comes from 59-year-old Dennis Quaid, cementing his character-actor renaissance with what may be the nastiest role of his career.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller recommends the memoir of Alexandra Aldrich, a descendent of the prominent Astor family, which provides a glimpse into a less privileged, less happy childhood than one would expect:

In premise alone, “The Astor Orphan” sounds like some delicious children’s novel, the kind of thing you’d gobble a dozen times over by the age of 8. In reality it’s a mournful, curious tale of an anxious child’s longing for security. Aldrich, who kept a diary from an early age, apparently sticks closely to it; her book has a halting, episodic rhythm. It lacks the fluency of truly accomplished storytelling, but the story it tells is so extraordinary, and Aldrich’s tone is so baldly honest, that the reader’s attention will not flag.

Pick of the week: “Oblivion,” Tom Cruise’s gorgeous sci-fi allegory

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:00:00 +0000

Science fiction is always more about the present, and even the past, than it is about the future, which by definition we don’t know anything about. That’s certainly true of “Oblivion,” the sly, surprising and visually magnificent Tom Cruise vehicle that has forced me – and many other people, I suspect – to revise my first opinion of director Joseph Kosinski. In fact, on some bizarre level “Oblivion” feels like a more grown-up and vastly improved version of Kosinski’s murky and ludicrous “TRON: Legacy,” a movie I compared to sticking your head into a barrel of ink full of fluorescent glow-sticks.

Tribeca Film Festival: The 10 hottest movies

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:15:00 +0000

Born a dozen years ago in the wake of a major tragedy, the Tribeca Film Festival finds its opening week this year tinged with trauma as well. Yes, the show will go on, with the glitz and the headlines more than a little subdued by the painful news from Boston – but what kind of show is it? Tribeca is now established as a cornerstone event of New York’s spring cultural season, but still lacks a clear role in the movie world’s ecology. It’s not a major market festival where films are bought and sold, in the vein of Cannes or Sundance, it’s not a Hollywood/Indiewood showcase, like Toronto, and it’s not a celebration of DIY or low-budget ingenuity, like South by Southwest. In part, Tribeca has always been a hometown festival for the Manhattan-centric indie film world, but that’s no longer the same hot concept it was in 2001, when Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff announced a new film festival aimed at getting downtown Manhattan back on its feet in the wake of 9/11.

Must do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller was transfixed by Wendy Moore’s “How to Create the Perfect Wife,” which exlores the hidden life of 18th century abolitionist Thomas Day. Day would have been considered a catch during his time -- except that he didn't believe in love, and surreptitiously groomed a wife:

Throughout history, men convinced that women exist solely to serve their needs have been flummoxed to discover that women see things otherwise. Day, however, believed that he had reason and Rousseau on his side. If he could not find an already-grown woman who possessed every quality he required in a spouse, why not make one to order? In 1769, he visited a foundling home and, pretending to be seeking maidservant apprentices for a married friend, secured two girls, aged 12 and 11. His aim: educating and training them to meet his precise specifications in a wife, then marrying the one who best suited him. He even renamed his experimental subjects: Sabrina and Lucretia.

Pick of the week: Terrence Malick’s rapturous, religious love story

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:59:00 +0000

Terrence Malick has followed the six-year creative struggle of his universe-spanning, would-be masterpiece “The Tree of Life” with a period of unprecedented, unexpected and indeed unexplained productivity. For whatever set of reasons, the famously reclusive director who had made five feature films in the previous 38 years has apparently completed four more since 2011. The first of these to reach the public is an abstract and perhaps allegorical story of love and heartbreak called “To the Wonder,” and even in beginning to speak about it I run the risk of leading you down the wrong path. Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko are in the movie, as a man and woman who meet in Paris, fall in love and move to America, and then drift apart, for reasons we (and they) only partly understand.

“Fists of Legend”: Ludicrous (and delicious) action extravaganza

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:15:00 +0000

Not to indulge in cultural stereotypes about how Asian movies involve several different genres at once, along with a lot of ass-kicking – but that’s exactly what the overloaded and outrageous Korean martial-arts saga “Fists of Legend” is like. One of the mini-stories of global movie distribution in the last year has been the sudden emergence of Korean pop cinema in the American market, which is partly about the fact that the Asian-American audience is now spread across the continent and partly about the fact that Korean movies tend to draw so heavily on a blend of familiar Western and Eastern references, and aren’t likely to strike anyone as incomprehensible. Like the recent gangland thriller “New World,” “Fists of Legend” will open in numerous cities before moving rapidly to home video.

“Antiviral”: New perversity from a new Cronenberg

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:05:00 +0000

With its clinical, anonymous interiors, its icily sardonic manner and its vision of a profoundly disordered human future in which celebrity worship merges with cutting-edge biotechnology, the Canadian horror-thriller “Antiviral” would remind viewers of David Cronenberg’s early films no matter who had directed it. But since it’s the debut feature from writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, the comparison immediately gets complicated. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s ingenious or foolhardy of the younger Cronenberg to go right at his dad’s legacy this way – quite likely it’s both. At any rate, he’s created an interesting decoding problem for viewers, along with an intriguing low-budget chiller that deserves to be seen on its own terms.