Circumstance is a powerful movie set in the repressive world of Iran, where two young women are best friends and secret lovers. This in a country whose nutty president claims Iran has no gays! The tension is unrelenting with the threat of the religious police crackdowns on those who deviate from Islamic law. Director/screenwriter Maryam Keshavarz, a second-generation Iranian-American, depicts a terrifying world of fear and suspicion. The story deals with an arranged marriage, clandestine meetings between the free-spirited teenagers, and hidden cameras, all amid a deeply repressive society.
Ambitious best describes a sometimes self-important French film called Gainsbourg, depicting the influential French songwriter-singer-director-actor Serge Gainsbourg, who sired respected actress Charlotte Gainsbourg and who died at 62 in 1991. The movie begins with Gainsbourg’s life during Vichy France, where his audaciousness saved him from deportation to a concentration camp, unlike thousands of other French Jews.
Director Joann Sfar, from whose graphic novel the movie is adapted, weaves a long story of Gainsbourg’s relationship with his parents, his growing popularity, his affairs with Brigitte Bardot and sultry French singer Juliette Greco, and his eventual health problems leading to his premature death.
Eric Elmosnino, who vaguely resembles Gainsbourg, evokes a man plagued by self-doubt who lived by the credo “Life is chance working against destiny.” From time to time, his alter-ego appears, depicted as a grotesque live-action cartoon figure who tries-usually in vain-to keep him on the straight path. This is a very “French” film in style and temperament, which flirts with pretentiousness. The movie includes nearly a dozen performances of Gainsbourg’s songs; thus, you begin to wonder if you’re watching a concert movie interspersed with dramatic exposition, or a biographical film stretched to an unnecessary length by too many musical interludes.
Our Idiot Brother is one of those movies where you like the cast more than the script. Title player Paul Rudd has evolved into a gifted screen comic, well cast as a likeable layabout sent to jail when an overly friendly policeman entraps him into producing a stash of marijuana. Once he’s served his time, he moves between the homes of his three sisters, disrupting the lives of each along the way. Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, and English actress Emily Mortimer portray the sisters, with varying degrees of patience for a sibling who refuses to grow up, get a job, and move out on his own. Shirley Knight is their tolerant mother. The movie has aspirations of being profound when it posits the idea that those who confront the truth will be better for it, but this is a tepid screenplay at best.
It’s always risky writing a movie about a dysfunctional family. There is the ever-present temptation to show too many examples of why it is indeed dysfunctional so that you’re soon thinking: “I get it! I get it! These people are crazy.” That’s the case with The Family Tree, a rather ordinary attempt at bizarre comedy. Hope Davis and Dermot Mulroney are the parents of children who have their own issues, played by Max Thieriot and Brittany Robertson. The mother suffers short-term memory loss after an accident during a clandestine sexual encounter with a family friend, portrayed by veteran character Chi McBride. Costarring are Keith Carradine as a minister who teaches pistol safety and Selma Blair as a teacher who uses the school bathroom for trysts with her student girlfriend.
This might be the elements of a dark comedy, but to what end? You won’t care about these misfits or the contrived story.
The Whale is an absorbing documentary about an Orca named Luna who, at the tender age of two, was separated from his pod, becoming lost on a fjord off British Columbia. Narrator Ryan Reynolds takes us on an amazing journey that throws new light on these magnificent creatures that are at once beautiful and potentially deadly. It was co-produced by Reynolds and his then-wife Scarlett Johansson.
Chasing Madoff is a chilling documentary about the pursuit of one of the most infamous scoundrels of our time. A trio of whistleblowers, too long ignored, were wise to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme a decade before the Securities and Exchange Commission finally woke up and took belated action. “To catch a predator, you have to think like a predator,” primary whistleblower Harry Markopolos tells his twin sons, explaining the cold facts of finance. It was the collapsing economy that led to Madoff’s downfall, we’re told. Markopolos’s boys regard him as a hero, he says, although somewhat farther down the scale from Spider-man.
Five Days of War is an intense war drama depicting the invasion of the Republic of Georgia by Russian troops in 2008, largely ignored by the outside world. Rupert Friend portrays an American journalist who, with his cameraman and a Georgian schoolteacher, is caught in the middle of the combat zone. The bombs, tanks, and air strikes will have you ducking for cover.
Lastly, there’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, with Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, and Bailee Madison. This hokey movie uses every hackneyed horror device in the book, as creepy crawlers infest an old Rhode Island mansion. It’s never scary, just silly. Holmes and Pearce should’ve known better.
