Pictureland

We have Austrians.  Handsome and blonde Austrians!  And they sing!   Goodnight Mommy begins in such a fashion, a large family (noticeably without father) singing Brahms' Lullaby, the lovely children in black velvet dresses and lederhosen.  At the conclusion of this doctored bit of graininess, a television show that probably never was, the mother bids us a tender, "Gute nacht."  At the conclusion of Goodnight Mommy , the film's main characters, a woman and her twin boys serenade us, arm in arm, with the German hymm, "Weisst Du wieviel Sternlein stehen."  Before you consider Goodnight Mommy for your next holiday film sing-along, know that there's actually very little song between those Austrian idylls that open and close the film.  And what transpires between is much closer in spirit to the Brothers Grimm than the family Von Trapp.   In counterpoint to the fair-haired wholesomeness on display in Goodnight Mommy , there is quickly establis...

It's admirable, Quentin Tarantino's continued advocacy of film.  The actual stuff.   As opposed to the digital format which the film industry has pretty well crammed down the throats of moviegoers and any theater hoping to get by.   It's slightly less admirable, the amount of celluloid that Tarantino is expending these days, his stories that are being pressed into that precious film stock.   The director's laudable resuscitation of careers given up for dead by Hollywood also continues to his credit.  Such is the case, to varying degrees, with Kurt Russell, Michael Madsen (the old charisma nearly extinguished) and Jennifer Jason Leigh in the writer/director's latest, Hateful Eight.   Alas, most of Hateful Eight transpires with Ms. Jason Leigh getting more punches (or bowls of stew) to the face than sentences to utter, made to lay about black-eyed and bloodied while the boys in the cast trade the auteur's curiously lifeless dialog, a lot o...

Only late in the proceedings of  writer/director Tom McCarthy's masterful Spotlight , not long before the two-hour mark of the 129-minute film, does a character really raise their voice.  Only shortly thereafter does the director make what could be construed as his first rhetorical flourish.  Given the drama inherent in Spotlight, that restraint is particularly admirable.  The sexual abuse of children on the part of Roman Catholic priests in the Boston Archdiocese as revealed and conveyed by reporters of the Boston Globe could hardly have been more damning, more outrageous.  The material could hardly be more dramatic.  And yet, a story that would seem to require the dimensions of opera is handled like a precise, heartbreaking piece of chamber music by McCarthy and his uniformly excellent cast. Sounding beneath Spotlight's slowly-building theme genuine tragedy - we're reminded prior to the closing credits that this was and is a global phenomenon - i...