Based on David Peace’s cult novels about the far-reaching tentacles of the corrupt West Yorkshire police force in the ’70s and ’80s, Red Riding hits theaters as an anomic, must-see trilogy.
“Dickens on bad acid” is the phrase used by screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to pithily describe the sprawling, paranoiac nature of the telefilms he wrote for Channel 4 in the UK. This inky triptych nears Bacon-esque nightmarishness and ravishment, with each part helmed by a different talent shooting in a different format. Together, Julian Jarrold (gritty 16mm), James Marsh (elegant 35mm), and Anand Tucker (immersive widescreen) magnificently exhume a past in which the cutthroat police have a members-only toast: “To the North, where we do what we want.”
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Harry Dean Stanton and the blue-skied expanses of the Southwest can be seen in all their splendor in Criterion’s restoration of Wim Wenders’ open-hearted look at ’80s America.
Four years after abandoning his family, a haunted, laconic Stanton mysteriously appears in the desert. Reconnecting with his precocious seven-year-old son, he sets out to find his long-gone wife in Texas. The film’s sublime effect lies in how Wenders lets the journey unfurl, unhurriedly and moodily, with his outsider’s camera taking in everything from California suburbia to middle-of-nowhere highways.
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André Téchiné’s moody character study springs from a recent cause célèbre in France: a young woman’s trumped-up story of an anti-Semitic assault on a train.
The act itself is of less importance than the before-and-after for the ever-curious French director, who sections his societal and psychological probe of the scandal into “Circumstances” and “Consequences.” Throughout both, the camera drifts along with the spacey, superficially carefree Jeanne (a magnetic Emilie Dequenne) as she rollerblades around the sun-dappled purlieus of Paris; falls in amour fou with a would-be Olympic wrestler; spends dutiful time with mom Catherine Deneuve; and riles up the country with her troubling make-believe.
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A trim online magazine from Amsterdam, Ilovethatphoto offers beautifully composed images and conversations with talented photographers from all shores.
With its eye-catching variety, the site is a repository of inspiration for both photo practitioners and enthusiasts. Each featured artist selects a handful of his or her images, which are contextualized with quotes about their influences, style, and a person-specific definition of the art. The site’s blog features a more interactive option, allowing user kudos and star ratings for everything from rare cameras to the ace photos in its Flickr group.
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Andrea Arnold’s terrific second feature is a clear-eyed portrait of a rebellious British teenager looking for that ever-fleeting taste of honey.
Set in the industrial landscape of Essex, this Cannes Jury Prize-winning entry captures every move and emotion of 15-year-old Mia — a classic case of youth adrift, at once vulgar and vulnerable. In her acting debut (she was “discovered” on a train platform), Katie Jarvis is a true knockout, carrying the film as it cycles through hip-hop dance rehearsals, somber home life, and instances of nascent sexuality, with both a local boy and mum’s handsome but troublesome new beau (Michael Fassbender).
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An ode to a bygone aspect of the West, Sweetgrass follows a pair of shepherds and the last, bleating drove of sheep to pass through Montana’s imposing Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains.
Without the false boost of special effects, Harvard spouses Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor convey the breathtaking scale and strain of marshaling of 3,000 creatures for three long months across 150 rugged miles. Although there are enough supreme panoramas of the Edenic lands to fill a coffee-table book, the camera never shies from the less pleasing but no less fascinating actualities of ovine life — whether it’s a ewe giving birth, or an assembly line to shear the fluff off.
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Michael Haneke’s gloomy Palme d’Or winner The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band) relates a series of disquieting blips in a small German village just before the shake-up of World War I.
Haneke masterfully evokes this authoritarian land and period by clocking a calendar year of suspicions, affairs, harvests, Sunday masses, and acts of community trauma — the latter being broad enough to include the mutilation of a cabbage field (as an act of revenge) and a fatal fall at the local sawmill.
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Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective brilliantly and clinically inspects language, bureaucratic runarounds, and the conscience of one noble, in-limbo cop.
Porumboiu sets this downtempo policier in his hometown of Vasliu, where plainclothes Cristi trails a student who supposedly slings hash. During the dry, real-time takes, Cristi follows his suspects, while hoping his bullheaded superior will turn the other cheek for the minor offense, rather than define it as a life-ruining crime.
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Belgian import A Town Called Panic is a wonderfully loopy stop-motion film that captures the many exploits of three plastic housemates: Horse, Cowboy, and Indian.
The panic starts immediately with Horse’s birthday. Instead of tried-and-true presents like chocolate hay bales and Mozart hats, Cowboy and Indian go online to order 50 bricks for a DIY barbecue. Unfortunately, the web-unsavvy duo order a million times the amount — a keystroke error that takes the three friends from their pastoral hometown to the Earth’s core and beyond.
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On the centenary of Akira Kurosawa’s birth, Criterion pays tribute to the Japanese cinema great with a monumental box set, AK 100.
The 25 films gathered in this treasury include Kurosawa’s ultimate whodunit and international breakthrough Rashomon; his ever-epiphanic masterpiece Seven Samurai; the princess-and-peasants caper that inspired Star Wars, The Hidden Fortress; and colorful, late-career opuses like Kagemusha.
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