Pictureland

Mia strides purposefully around her Essex housing estate and fairly bleak environs. The problem is that she’s desperately short on purpose. In the first few minutes of Fish Tank, the film’s heroine stalks about in a grey hooded track suit over a black sleeveless t-shirt, something of a second skin. She summons a neighbor girl by throwing rocks her window and then leaves an expletive of a calling card with the girl’s father. She confronts a group of hostile girls and head-butts one of them with force enough to draw blood. Finally, walking along a motorway, she notices a woebegone old white horse tethered in a vacant-seeming lot, which she tries to free by pounding a rock on its lock and chain. Those last two acts are alike in their futility and defiance. They tell us more than a little about Mia, who will clearly push back when provoked and longs to feel for or believe in something, much as the unlikely objects of her affection tend to disappoint her. Mia’s main source of disappointment...

*Spoiler alert - I give the big twist in the movie away. I like to think of it as a public service, but just so you know.... Shutter Island begins on a ferry bound for one of the Boston Harbor Islands on whose generally forbidding terrain is a hospital for the criminally insane. Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is seasick and just plain afraid of all the water he sees. He joins his partner (a consistently muted Mark Ruffalo ) on deck as the two U.S. marshals prepare to land on the island so they can investigate the disappearance of one of the hospitals murderous patients. As the boat lands and the two men are driven to the hospital complex, strings kick in like Bernard Hermann on way too many cups of coffee. It's the first blast of a score apparently cobbled together by old Scorsese pal Robbie Robertson, mainly from a selection of punishing twentieth-century classical music. As strings are raked to a near hysterical pitch, one expects the Atlantic to start boiling, or the walls o...

As Bad Blake says to his much younger paramour Jean Craddock while lying on her bed and picking a tune on his acoustic guitar, the best songs are the ones you’re sure you’ve heard before. So it is with Scott Cooper’s first directorial effort, Crazy Heart . There’s little new in the tale of this grizzled, bourbon-soaked country singer scuffling after long-sought success, often despite himself. But sometimes an older singer’s voice can often no longer distinguish itself so much with its overall quality as in its ability to squeeze a great deal of feeling out of a particular note.   Crazy Love is a tune we’ve heard before, but many of its notes ring resonant and true. Certain older performers, whether through age itself, hard living, or a toll-taking combination thereof, assume an almost elemental appearance. Jeff Bridges’ Bad Blake, face deeply ravined, sunglasses over the rings and wrinkles about the pale fire of his blue-grey eyes, a snowy growth of beard over weakening chin, ...

While it is usually Dutch provocateur Lars von Trier most quickly labeled a sadist amongst contemporary filmmakers, I’m not sure that he has anything on his more reserved Austrian colleague, Michael Haneke. Although von Trier certainly has the more audacious style and public persona, both men work within their prescribed codes. With von Trier, apparently it’s still Dogma 95, which dictates, among other rules for him and is Dogma cadre, location shooting, use of natural light and hand-held cameras. Haneke, more the formalist, tends to work in long takes and eschews the use of soundtracks and scores. There came a certain point in Haneke’s current film, The White Ribbon, at which I began to feel as I had at similar moment in von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark: maybe these guys enjoy the suffering of their characters a little too much. In The White Ribbon, we are told by the film’s narrator – the decent, youngish schoolteacher in the film, speaking with the remove of many decades, as hi...

I’m reminded of the last year or two of my trick or treating career. This was at some point during my junior high years, let’s say seventh or eighth grade. I started getting variations on “my, aren’t you a BIG trick or treater?” The implication, of course, being that it was time to make way for smaller, younger and probably cuter kids. I saw the proverbial writing on the wall and started acquiring my candy the hard way. Do you hear that bell, Michael Cera? It tolls for thee. Actually, I like Cera. I thought he was often hilarious and touching in Superbad and Juno, smart and sympathetic in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. But the window on his doe-eyed, sensitive youth franchise is closing, and Youth and Revolt might just have slammed it shut. The problem, however, goes way beyond our meek friend, who acquits himself well enough in the double role (although the Francois Dillinger alter ego comes along late enough in the game and is inserted so sporadically as to reveal itself a...