Remember the remake of Casino Royale? Remember the Danish actor named Mads Mikkelsen who portrayed “Le Chiffre,” Orson Welles’ part in the original? Mikkelsen recently opened in Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky and comes now in a bizarre movie called Valhalla Rising. Set in Scotland in 1,000 A.D., his starring but wordless role is that of a one-eyed slave fighter who eventually frees himself from bondage. Then he treks aimlessly around the gorgeous but treacherous mountainous countryside followed by a boy who’d presumably been the son of one of his captors.
I say “presumably” because nothing is very clear in this strange, but oddly fascinating movie. They fall in with a band of Viking warriors, determined to return to The Holy Land on what would, a century or so later, become the Second Crusade. But their ship sails into a huge dense fog and they wind up lost. Along the way, the dialogue is stark, the landscape barren and the violence sudden and shocking. But the use of hand-held cameras puts us right alongside this warrior of almost supernatural strength and his odd relationship with the boy. Director/co-screenwriter Nicholas Winding Refn isn’t yet thirty but he’s already directed another stunning movie, Bronson, based on England’s most violent, notorious prisoner. He knows how to shock an audience and that he does here.
This is a stunning, amazing experience, unlike any movie you’ve seen in recent years. But it’s not for the squeamish. Those were violent times.
Night Catches Us is one of those movies which starts off in a familiar manner; a young man returns to his old neighborhood to see things have changed and comes to realize how he too is different. However, some convincing performances and an intelligent script make this exceptional.
Anthony Mackie, last seen in The Hurt Locker as one of the bomb disposal soldiers in Iraq, here returns to his long-ago haunts in South Philadelphia. He’s come home to attend his father’s funeral. The year is 1976 and his neighborhood is still in turmoil. Soon, through use of flashbacks, we learn this is a movie set against the backdrop of the Black Panther movement and a community’s hatred and fear of the police.
Kerry Washington, seen in recent weeks in a pivotal role in Mother and Child, plays his ex-lover, a single parent and widow of a fellow Panther Mackie’s character may have betrayed. Occasionally, the low budget of the movie is evident, but this is a film which concentrates on character, and everyone in this powerful drama is well drawn. Shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the movie also has a poignant performance from Amari Cheatom, as a homeless denizen of the neighborhood, who still acts as if the Panthers are a viable political movement. This is a powerful saga about dealing with ancient demons.
It is the mark of an effective documentary if it can tackle a subject which seems obvious, but uncover shocking facts which makes the situation described even more shocking. That’s what happens with Countdown to Zero, a mesmerizing look at the state of the world’s nuclear arsenal and how all of us live under a ticking clock inching ever forward toward Armageddon.
Directed skillfully by British filmmaker Lucy Walker, the movie traces the dawn of the nuclear age, the time of Enrico Fermi and J.Robert Oppenheimer through the Cold War and then concentrates on the lax security of nuclear weapons which prevails in post-Soviet Russia. Walker’s most memorable film before this was Blindsight, which captured the first ascent of Mt. Everest by a brave blind climber. It’s ironic because her current film opens our eyes to the ever-present danger of nuclear holocaust.
Interviews with world leaders from Jimmy Carter to Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair and others explain their part in the effort to contain the spread of nuclear weapons. This movie couldn’t be timelier, with the just-imposed additional UN sanctions on Iran and continued efforts to contain the nuclear program of North Korea. You will come away from this movie cognizant of the lax security at our ports, of the ease with which a bomb might be assembled and with the chilling statement by one scientist that there is always a first time for the unexpected to come true.
Any movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio is an event. He can make a film solely by his presence—but even he can’t save Inception—a maddeningly complex tale involving levels of dreams and recrimination, with more violence than almost any movie in recent memory.
DiCaprio portrays Dom Cobb, a thief who heads a small group of confederates skilled in extraction and kidnapping. By manipulating dreams of others—and his own—he gets into the psyche of his marks in order to gain secrets, or the combination to a safe, presumably containing a fortune. Several times in this convoluted movie, Cobb and his associates are placed in deep sleep modes as the camera hops from one scene to another, trying to replicate a journey from one action dream to the next.
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who single-handedly re-invented the Batman franchise (with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight), the movie evokes Nolan’s far superior Memento, which was much more subtle in the way it glided through various timelines. Here, it’s just a loud, violent mess.
