Thriller meets thinker in Eye in the Sky, a parable from modern drone warfare starring Helen Mirren and with a wonderful final performance from the late Alan Rickman.
I also really liked the gripping Norwegian disaster movie The Wave, with its ticking clock tension and cool disaster effects. (Now hard to find.)
You have to look hard to find it now, but you should still try to see the awesome and authentic survival tale The Revenant on the BIG SCREEN.
In honor of the recently concluded Cinequest, my DVD/Stream of the Week is from the 2013 fest: The Sapphires, a triumph of a Feel Good Movie. The Sapphires is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, GooglePlay and Flixster.
The best movie pick on TV this week will come on March 20, when Turner Classic Movies will present Touch of Evil(1958). This Orson Welles masterpiece begins with one of cinema’s great opening scenes, as our lead characters walk from a Mexican border town into an American border town in a single tracking shot of well over 3 minutes. Unbeknownst to them, they are being shadowed by a car bomb. There’s a lot to enjoy here in this cesspool of corruption: a repellent sheriff-gone-bad played by Welles himself, one of Joseph Calleia’s finest supporting turns, one of Dennis Weaver’s first roles (written just for him by Welles) and Charlton Heston as a Mexican.
I really liked the gripping Norwegian disaster movie The Wave, with its ticking clock tension and cool disaster effects. I saw The Wave last week at Cinequest, and it opens in theaters this weekend. I also liked Cinequest’s Eye in the Sky, with Helen Mirren, and I’ll be writing about that by next week before it opens widely in the Bay Area.
I remain completely absorbed with Silicon Valley’s own film festival, Cinequest. Check out my up-to-the-moment coverage both on my Cinequest page and follow me on Twitter for the latest. I especially recommend the exquisite Chilean contemplation of grief The Memory of Water, which plays Cinequest tomorrow evening; I’ve seen 25 Cinequest movies so far, and this is the best one. Tomorrow night, I’ll be checking out two movies I haven’t seen yet: The Adderall Diarieswith James Franco, Ed Harris and Amber Heard, Christian Slater and Cynthia Nixon and February, a horror flick with Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka.
Then there are the Oscar winners and contenders, whose theatrical runs are winding down but still out in theaters:
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn, an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
The deserved Oscar winner for Screenplay, The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
The Italian drama My Mother is a deeply personal film about loss with some comedic highlights from John Turturro. The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.
In honor of Cinequest, my Stream of the Week is the delightful dark comedy Gemma Bovery from last year’s festival. Gemma Bovery is available to stream from Amazon Video (free with Amazon Prime), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
This week, watch for two wonderfully fun gender-crossing comedies on Turner Classic Movies on March 13: Victor/Victoria and Tootsie. TCM is playing Blow-up on March 17. Set in the Mod London of the mid-60s, a fashion photographer (David Hemmings) is living a fun but shallow life filled with sports cars, discos and and scoring with supermodels (think Jane Birkin, Sarah Miles and Verushka). Then he discovers that his random photograph of a landscape may contain a clue in a murder and meets a mystery woman (Vanessa Redgrave). After taking us into a vivid depiction of the Mod world, director Michelangelo Antonioni brilliantly turns the story into a suspenseful story of spiraling obsession. His L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse made Antonioni an icon of cinema, but Blow-up is his most accessible and enjoyable masterwork. There’s also a cameo performance by the Jeff Beck/Jimmy Page version of the Yardbirds and a quick sighting of Michael Palin in a nightclub.
Saoirse Ronan in BROOKLYN – it ain’t going to win an Oscar, but you should see it while it’s on the big screen
Here’s your last chance to watch the Oscar nominees before the awards broadcast:
45 Years with Charlotte Rampling’s enthralling Oscar-nominated performance.
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.
Silicon Valley’s own film festival Cinequest is around the corner – make plans now to attend between March 1 and March 13.
My Stream/VOD of the Week is DRUNK STONED BRILLIANT DEAD: The Story of the National Lampoon, which takes us through an engaging and comprehensive history of the groundbreaking and seminal satirical magazine. You can stream it from iTunes or the Showtime VOD service (and you can catch it on the Showtime channel).
The Movie Gourmet features Overlooked Noir, but Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is anything but overlooked – it’s justifiably recognized as one of the two or three most iconic film noir. I’ve included it as the prototypical noir in my A Classic American Movie Primer. It’s about a guy who is just selling insurance until he meets a woman he can’t resist…Double Indemnity plays on Turner Classic Movies on February 28.
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Check out her ankle bracelet.
Get ready for the Oscars by seeing these nominated films and performances, all on my Best Movies of 2015, all with some Oscar nominations:
45 Years with Charlotte Rampling’s enthralling Oscar-nominated performance.
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN. I predict that The Revenant will be the biggest winner at the Oscars.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
The Coen Brothers’ disappointingly empty comedy Hail, Caesar contains some cool Hollywood parodies.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the brilliant psychological drama 99 Homes, which illustrates the life-and-death stakes of our nation’s foreclosure crisis. It’s a topical film, but 99 Homes is emotionally raw and as intense as any thriller. The DVD is available to rent from Netflix and Redbox, and 99 Homes can be streamed from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, and Playstation Video.
For just a fun time at the movies, try Richard Lester’s 1974 The Four Musketeers, coming up February 21 on Turner Classic Movies. Watch Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York and Frank Finlay swashbuckle away against Bad Guys Christopher Lee, Faye Dunaway and Charlton Heston. Geraldine Chaplin and Raquel Welch adorn the action.
Christopher Lee and Faye Dunaway in THE FOUR MUSKETEERSOliver Reed in THE FOUR MUSKETEERS
This weekend 45 Years becomes the final film on my Best Movies of 2015 to have been released in the Bay Area. Don’t miss Charlotte Rampling’s enthralling Oscar-nominated performance. And five more from my 2015 list:
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN.
Creed, the newest and entirely fresh chapter in the Rocky franchise; it’s about the internal struggle of three people, not just The Big Fight.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
Plus two more good choices:
The Hateful Eight, a Quentin Tarantino showcase for Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins and Jennifer Jason Leigh, but a movie that’s not for everyone.
My Stream of the Week is the riveting German psychodrama Phoenix with its WOWZER ending. Phoenix is one of my Best Movies of 2015. It is available to stream from Netflix Instant, Amazon Video, YouTube and Google Play.
This Sunday, January 31, Turner Classic Movies presents the ultra-suspenseful Diabolique from “the French Hitchcock” Henri-Georges Clouzot and the American film noir Phantom Lady, with Elisha Cook, Jr.’s orgasmic drumming scene – how did they get THAT by the censors?
Also this week on TCM: Lawrence of Arabia, The Sting, The Third Man, Cool Hand Luke, East of Eden, The Dirty Dozen.
Elisha Cook, Jr. and some nice gams in PHANTOM LADY
You can see five movies from my final list of Best Movies of 2015 in theaters this week. This is a list of the very best 21 of the 155 2015 movies that I’ve seen.
The Revenant, an awesome and authentic survival tale that must be seen on the BIG SCREEN.
Creed, the newest and entirely fresh chapter in the Rocky franchise; it’s about the internal struggle of three people, not just The Big Fight.
The Irish romantic drama Brooklyn is an audience-pleaser with a superb performance by Saoirse Ronan.
Spotlight – a riveting, edge-of-your-seat drama with some especially compelling performances.
The Big Short – a supremely entertaining thriller – both funny and anger-provoking.
(a sixth top film, 45 Years, will be released in the Bay Area next week.)
Two more choices:
The Hateful Eight, a Quentin Tarantino showcase for Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins and Jennifer Jason Leigh, but a movie that’s not for everyone.
My DVD/Stream of the week is the space adventure The Martian – with all the best that a Hollywood movie can offer. You can rent The Martian on DVD from Netflix now and from Redbox on February 9. You can stream it on Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
On January 26, Turner Classic Movies screens Spike Lee’s debut feature She’s Gotta Have It. Watch for Spike himself supplying the comic relief as the unforgettable Mars Blackmon. I still remember going to the theater in 1986 on the recommendation of Siskel & Ebert and feeling so excited about discovering a talented new auteur.
Tracy Camilla Johns and Spike Lee in SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT
My DVDs of the Week celebrate the late cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. The Hired Hand is one of his overlooked masterpieces. Visions of Light is a documentary about his art of cinematography. Both are available on Netflix DVDs.
On January 21, Turner Classic Movies is playing Pushover, one of my Overlooked Noir. An amoral cop (Fred MacMurray) decides that, if he can double cross BOTH the other cops and the criminal, he can wind up with the loot AND the gangster’s girlfriend (“Introducing Kim Novak”).
Not just a compelling movie, The Revenant is an experience for the audience and a marvel of filmmaking. Oscar-winner Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, Birdman) may be the director doing the most groundbreaking work in today’s cinema, and The Revenant, with its long shoot in hostile conditions, is his triumph over the seemingly impossible.
The Revenant is based on the historical episode of mountain man Hugh Glass, who was fur trapping in the Missouri River watershed of the Dakotas in 1823, when the area was completely unspoiled and inhabited only by nomadic bands of Native Americans. Glass was severely injured in a bear attack, left for dead by his companions and crawled 200 miles to safety. A “revenant” is a re-animated corpse, and Glass essentially returned from the dead.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Glass, and his performance is extraordinary. For one thing – the most obvious – DiCaprio is a human piñata who actually must stand and then submerge in a freezing river, get bounced around by a CGI bear, chew on raw bison liver, crawl across uneven ground, and on and on; he takes a licking and keeps on ticking. And, in at least two-thirds of the movie, Glass either isn’t able to speak or has no one to talk to. So DiCaprio must convey his terror, grief, determination to survive and seek revenge with his physicality.
There are also solid performances by Tom Hardy (being villainous) Will Poulter and Domhnall Gleeson (a good year for him – also Ex Machina, Brooklyn and Star Wars).
There probably isn’t a more overused word in the current culture than “awesome”. But it’s precisely the right word to describe the depiction of Glass’ ordeal. The dazzling scenery as photographed Iñárritu‘s equally brilliant cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki is awesome, as is the overall filmmaking challenge. In particular, the bear attack and an extended one-shot of a Native American attack with the camera moving by and forth among the combatants are brilliant and unforgettable. Showing off, Iñárritu even throws in an actual avalanche as a background shot.
The result is an utterly authentic film. Now I think I know what it looks like when a bear attacks and when an Indian band raids. DiCaprio shows us convincingly how it looks when a man grieves.
The Revenant is also exhausting – in a good way. As the film opens, we see men creeping through a primordial forest that has been flooded by a river. They are tense and so are we. We can’t tell whether they are hunting or hunted or both. We soon come to understand that their heightened alertness and intense concentration is required to survive a dangerous environment. That level of intensity remains throughout the film, and it wears down the characters and the audience.
History buffs will appreciate that Glass was part of Ashley’s Hundred, an enterprise that included many mountain men (Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, Kit Carson) who would later become guides and explorers with central roses in the history of the American West.
I also recommend Sheila O’Malley’s insightful comments on survival movies, in particular the very compelling Touching the Void.
This is one of the very best survival movies. See The Revenant, and make sure that you see on the Big Screen.
