Midnight in Paris

Written & Directed by: Woody Allen
Full credits at IMDb

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's hard to defend but easy to adore parable about nostalgia, opens with a coffee-table book's worth of postcard Paris views: the landmarks, the iconic tableaux, in sunshine and then in rain. But don't mistake the storm for a sly subversion of the city's allure. It just intensifies it. Owen Wilson takes the Woody Allen role—bringing a freshly wry and mellow charm to the neurotic archetype—a Hollywood hack with dreams of literary renown; he has a fixation with Paris, particularly during the 1920s (when it was lousy with American expats), particularly when it's raining. His cartoonishly unsupportive and materialistic fiancee (a misused Rachel MacAdams) would rather live in Malibu, live in the present, and take a taxi. It's unclear why they would've gone on a second date, let alone gotten engaged.

Allen's frantically paced output, maintained even as he ages, has resulted lately in scripts with lazy plot holes like that. But whatever mistakes he makes on the page—like indulging in the name-dropping that his script mocks through the pretentious character played by Michael Sheen—he makes up for with affecting themes and a host of talented actors impersonating dead celebrities. Traveling through time—without mumbo jumbo explanations, thankfully—Wilson lives his dream but also learns a lesson about nostalgia: it really is the denial of the painful present, as the pompous Sheen pontificates. In the 1920s, Wilson finds great modernists pining for Le Belle Epoque; in Le Belle Epoque, he find Epoqueans longing for the Renaissance. Truth is, all times are interesting times; great art is everywhere.

And still, Allen finds poignancy in the cold austerity of museums, which cage the past rather than live it, contrasted with the urbane, debonair, stylish party life in Paris after the first war. (A bar where Hemingway drank with Fitzgerald appears, in the present day, as a laundromat, illuminated by sickly green fluorescent light.) Staying close to the superficial glory of the City of Lights, Allen captures Paris' capacity to transport you through time, to contain the whole of its history in its streets and stones. ("The past is not dead," Wilson says, quoting Faulkner. "It's not even past.") For all its flaws, Midnight in Paris is steeped in romance that, though simple, is easy to get swept up in. Grade: B+


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The Woman

Directed by: Lucky McKee
Written by: Lucky McKee & Jack Ketchum

Lucky McKee's gory latest lambasts conservatives; it's also a girl-power allegory, a cheeky genre-twister, and exploitation cinema par excellence. Sean Bridgers stars as the patriarch of an ostensibly ordinary American family who abducts from the forest a feral woman (Pollyanna McIntosh)—who seems to be possessed by the Exorcist demon when she utters her guttural, Germanic-sounding growls—and enlists his family in civilizing her: washing off decades of grime, disinfecting and bandaging her wounds. The rape he handles by himself.

It's the kind of story Tarantino would adore: men mistreating women, then getting their comeuppance through spectacularly graphic violence. Initially, the movie playfully reverses horror's typical captor and captive dynamic: the nice-seeming people are the wardens; the "monster," the detainee. There's a joke here too about how basic care might seem, to the unfamiliar or uncomprehending, assaultive, like when you take a dog to get shots: hot water and hydrogen peroxide could be implements of torture even when used correctly.

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This is Not a Film

Directed by: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi
Written by: Jafar Panahi
Full credits at IMDb

This is Not a Film is a documentary about not making a movie. Jafar Panahi, after all, was barred by the Iranian government from directing movies following a recent arrest for "colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." He's appealing his case but could face six years in prison; for now, he's under house arrest. So, in his latest movie, shot over the course of a day, he invites over his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb to video record him while he reads, acts, and goes about his daily life—including fielding phone calls about his case and dog-sitting for 20 seconds—thus circumventing the 20-year ban on directing. (At one point Panahi tells Mirtahmasb to cut but he playfully refuses, noting that Panahi cannot direct the movie.)

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

Written & Directed by: Sean Durkin
Full credits at IMDb

Sean Durkin's exceptionally well-made but emotionally distant debut offers a subjective view of contemporary culthood—the initial seduction, the blind-eyed devotion, the gradual disillusionment, the post-membership paranoia, the lingering appeal. Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister to Mary-Kate and Ashley, stars as the title character—that's her Christian name, her cult name, and her cult alias—and hers is a breakthrough as striking as Durkin's: as the title suggests, she's a multifaceted character, and Olsen not only embodies those divergent personalities—amiable idealist, nerve-wracked coper—but does so simultaneously, hopping organically between them within single scenes.

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The Ides of March

Directed by: George Clooney
Written by: George Clooney, Grant Heslov & Beau Willimon
Full credits at IMDb

Smart and steady, The Ides of March is story of political disillusionment that ends where it began—except in a far, far darker mood. Working out of a corner campaign-office right out of Taxi Driver, Stephen (Ryan Gosling) is a young and brilliant assistant campaign director trying to lock the Democratic presidential nomination for Gov. Mike Morris (George Clooney), an impossible candidate—impossible not to love, maybe!—who's pro-gay marriage, admits to having no religion with the line "I am not a Christian," and thinks we should try to understand why our enemies hate us. Plus, he's played by George Clooney.

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The Loneliest Planet

Written & Directed by: Julia Loktev
Full credits at IMDb


One thing happens in The Loneliest Planet, a single incident that divides the film in half and unbalances the relationships of its central characters. Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg play an engaged couple pre-honeymooning through the wilderness of Georgia (the former Soviet satellite); non-professional Bidzina Gujabidze is their guide across the grassy valleys and hillsides. (Director Loktev shoots the landscape with a weirdly abstracting telephoto lens, flattening the space to reflect the intimacy of the storytelling.) A vague menace hovers around our characters as they tromp down trails (their status as hikers unfavorably reminding me of those Americans who walked into Iran). Music on the soundtrack quickly cuts out, snapping the audience out of its lull like violence does to the characters: trouble finally comes in the form of a few local hunters, who provoke Bernal to commit either an act of instinctual self-preservation or of revealing cowardice. Either way, it's shaming—and unsettling thereafter to all who were present.

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Melancholia

Written & Directed by: Lars von Trier
Full credits at IMDb

Lars von Trier is depressed. He said as much while promoting his last film, Antichrist, and he has said as much in his latest, Melancholia, in which a big ball of doldrums takes the literalized form of a big blue planet from which the movie takes its title, which was hidden behind the sun but is now on a crash course for Earth. Get it? It's a metaphor—for depression's volatile nature, its unpredictable effects, its inescapability, its enormity, and the way it tears apart families because depressed people are so fucking difficult to deal with.

But the film is in two parts, with this epic allegory saved for last. First, von Trier looks at depression straight: Kirsten Dunst, in a role that won her an award at Cannes, plays Justine, who spends the first act celebrating—or not—her wedding to True Blood's Eric. It's Dogme-founder von Trier's turn at a Celebration, and he handles it with comic aplomb (Udo Keir nearly steals the movie as the wedding planner), crafting a haphazardly filmed farce that's jovial and funny until it isn't—like life for everyone else, Justine ruins her wedding.

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Carnage

Directed by: Roman Polanski
Written by: Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski
Full credits at IMDb

Roman Polanski's terrific screwball adaptation of a Yasmina Reza play begins with four adults trying peaceably to settle a problem between their sons; it ends with four creatures drunk, exhausted and reverted to a primal state of hostility. Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play dippy liberals, the parents of a boy who got two teeth knocked out in a fight at Brooklyn Bridge Park (they're also residents of an apartment, with a working fireplace, too large and lovely for their income level); Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz are well-dressed professionals, parents of the skirmish's stick-swinging aggressor. They spend most of the movie with their coats on, motioning to go but never making it farther than the hallway, the souring summit a kind of no-exit nightmare as all four slowly shed the put-on signifiers of maturity and indulge instead puerile impulses, effectively adopting their kids' conflict and de-evolving into children.

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The Burning

Directed by: Tony Maylam
Written by: Peter Lawrence & Bob Weinstein
Full credits at IMDb

Released almost to the day a year after Friday the 13th—and the weekend after Friday the 13th Part 2—The Burning is a conspicuous cash-in on the new box-office formula that franchise spawned: in it, the victim of a summer-camp accident—this time a burning, not a drowning!—impossibly survives to wreak vengeance on the kinds of campers who did him in. (The killer's name, by the way, is Cropsy.) But aesthetically, this cult favorite exhibits more of the flair of Halloween or its underrated sequel, showcasing a refined style—trailing POV shots, stalking tracking shots—that's more pleasurable than the routine comeuppance the movie metes out to its randy teens. The Burning expertly balances its artful accruals of tension with its copious T&A and adolescent bonhomie.

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