SIBERIAN EDUCATION
Odeon: March 1–6
A drama based on the bestselling memoir by the Moldovan Nicolai Lilin, now living in Italy, about growing up as a member of the Urka community in the small republic of Transnistria in Siberia. This first release and Gabriele Salvatores’ first English language movie stars John Malkovich as Kuzja, the guru of the criminal underworld given to sententious pronouncements such as ‘We must respect all living creatures, except for the police, people who work in government, bankers, usurers, and anyone who has the power of money and exploits simple people. Stealing from these people is allowed. But remember it is crazy for a man to want too much. Because a man cannot possess more than his heart can love.’ The message is written on the body—and it’s in the tattoos that communication is coded and transmitted. ‘Our tattoos are our wounds, they are the trophies we have won for fighting. They tell the story of our lives.’
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD
Odeon: March 7–10 and 13–14
An extraordinary and affecting movie that will stay in the memory for a long time. Faced with both her hot-tempered father’s fading health and melting ice caps that flood her ramshackle bayou community and unleash ancient aurochs, six-year-old Hushpuppy must learn the ways of courage and love. ‘Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you’ve never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius …’ (Roger Ebert). ‘It’s hard not to see Beasts as an expression of post-affluent America. And here’s the surprise: the grinding Great Recession may never offer up a movie as happy, or as inspired by poetry and dream, as this one’ (New Yorker). ‘Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy’s name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized—if resolutely un-mythic—human beings’ (Washington Post).
ANNA KARENINA
Fulgor: February 28–March 6, Odeon: March 11 and 12
Joe Wright’s original adaptation of Tolstoy’s great novel tells the story in its original late-nineteenth-century Russia high-society setting and powerfully explores the capacity for love that surges through the human heart, from the passion between adulterers to the bond between a mother and her children. ‘Anna Karenina is different. It is risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly—wonderfully—crazy terms’ (New York Times). ‘While Wright’s self-conscious theatricality and dollhouse aesthetic conjure comparisons to Baz Luhrmann and Wes Anderson, he outstrips both those filmmakers in moral seriousness and maturity’ (Washington Post). ‘This latest iteration of the Tolstoy classic was clearly the product of audacious thinking, stylishly applied. Still, the thinking was as wrongheaded as it was hollow-hearted. Yet another elaborate production chases its audience away’ (Wall Street Journal).
GANGSTER SQUAD
Fulgor: March 7–13
Los Angeles, 1949. Ruthless, Brooklyn-born mob king Mickey Cohen runs the show in this town, reaping the ill-gotten gains from the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes and—if he has his way—every wire bet placed west of Chicago. ‘The cops play things as dirty as the crooks in Gangster Squad, an impressively pulpy underworld-plunger’ (Variety). ‘For all the guns and gore, it’s as breezy and uncritical as a tale from the True Detective magazine that the cops can’t help reading’ (The Guardian). ‘His [director Fleischer] first feature, Zombieland, was a half-witty genre parody. This one might be described as genre zombie-ism: the hysterical, brainless animation of dead clichés reduced to purposeless, compulsive killing. Too self-serious to succeed as pastiche, it has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies’ (New York Times). ‘Something to be ignored diligently’ (Slant Magazine).
HITCHCOCK
Fulgor: March 14–20
An amazingly cavalier recounting of the story behind the creation of Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho that plays loose with almost any facts anyone could care to assemble. The empty cliché that behind every great man there is a strong woman is full blown here to embarrassing effect—what is Helen Mirren doing in this mess? Anthony Hopkins never gets past being himself with Hitchcockian prosthetics. Feeble and disturbingly un-illuminating. Others may differ. ‘This is one of the best movies of 2012. With rich performances, a riveting and articulate screenplay, meticulous direction and enough grounded emotional intensity to keep your pulse pounding, Hitchcock grabs you by the lapels like a suspense classic by Hitch himself—a knockout from start to finish’ (New York Observer). ‘Hitchcock for dummies: brisk, jolly, well-played but oversimplified’ (Empire). ‘This is all a long way of saying that the best way to better understand the man who made those and dozens of other movies is simply to see them. There’s no case to be made for a mangy shortcut like Hitchcock. It’s all surface and formula’ (Boston Globe).
TOSCA
Wednesday, March 6, 8pm
With, for some, the surprising casting of Mel Gibson as the indecisive Danish prince, Zeffirelli’s Olivier-inspired Hamlet can hold its own in the ranks of the many screen adaptations. ‘Zeffirelli credits his success in adapting Shakespeare … to what he describes as a “radical return” to the original. For Zeffirelli, the “only revolutionary claim any director can make is to have seen what no one has bothered to see since the author compiled the work.” And while he comes to Shakespeare with a conservative reverence for “tradition”… his idea of the original involves recreating not the period in which the dramas were produced, but the earlier time and place in which they are set … However, it is not only his additions to the text, including spectacular sets reconstructing the period and place, which distinguishes his work. His manipulation of the camera, especially the gaze, adds another layer to Shakespeare’s narrative, a layer which can subvert or distort the actual words of the text… This knack for beguiling the eye … can be seen as his most significant achievement in his interpretations of Shakespeare’ (Deborah Cartmell).
JANE EYRE
Wednesday, March 13, 8pm
A somewhat bloodless adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s novel that nevertheless has many moments of psychological truth and a refinement that places it a cut above the usual reverent literary costume dramas. ‘Zeffirelli [who co-wrote the screenplay with Hugh Whitemore] gets the Dickensian gloom down pat but stints on the artless intimacy needed to fully thaw an otherwise icy gothic yarn’ (Entertainment Weekly). ‘A faithful adaptation aimed squarely at the middle ground. Its cinematic effects are generally banal—the elegant, slow dissolves that befit a prestige classic, hollow footsteps and an eerie laugh echoing through the Tower—but such restraint is welcome given what Zeffirelli is capable of. Mostly, he seems satisfied to let the actors get on with it, tacitly acknowledging that Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Jane is his strongest asset … In a way, that’s the problem with this adaptation. It’s too tame to stir the blood. We understand Jane’s pain but not her passion’ (Time Out).
