Pictureland

Death, the most common of human experiences, is refracted through billions of individualized nightmares. Perhaps in time, when the reality settles with an inexorable gravity, when the dark dream is proven to be waking reality, grace comes.  Perhaps in time; perhaps for some. There's a sense of nightmare about the initial scenes and images in Dallas Buyers' Club .  These occur at the bull riding portion of sparsely attended Texas rodeo.  In a darkened, unused stall just off the rodeo floor, a man is seen having sex with one and then a second woman against the wooden planks of the enclosure.  This hardly seems a life-affirming exercise.  Rather a desperate, shadowy rutting.  Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), the cowboy in question with the very active libido, gazes between the boards onto the dirt of the ring to see another cowboy lying motionless after feeling the wrath of the bull he had just attempted to ride.  A rodeo clown comes into fo...

Through the vagaries of 21st century film distribution, I happened to see Mud at one of Chicago's god-forsaken multiplexes.  This occurred after the heavy bombardment in Dolby Digital sound of coming attractions for the likes of Iron Man 3 and Pacific Rim  practically shook the bones and before the more genteel trailers for Roadside Attractions - the company distributing Mud - followed:  a documentary from Sarah Polley; Joss Whedon's update of Much Ado About Nothing . With writer/director Jeff Nichol's Mud, we're dealing with something far more subtle than most of those thundering mainstream films.  And yet, there's no lack of story with Mud .  Over the course of his three features, Mr. Nichols has established himself as someone who seems more of a skilled writer that directs than a director who just insists on filming his own stories.  Not a bad thing at all.  So Mud is ground in specifics of character and place as any good writer would d...

You may never look at your K-Fry-C quite the same again.   The strange, salacious fate of a chicken leg in Killer Joe is but the sharpest note in a kind of white trash opera written by Tracy Letts, based on his 1993 play of the same name.  The lurid proceedings are directed with grim energy (and little else) by veteran William Friedkin. Killer Joe  will be referred to elsewhere as a Southern Gothic.  But let us not demean the many dark, bold and original works of art that properly fall under that heading by associating it with the clumsily lurid film at hand.  Such ventures, southern gothic stories, are often strange and not without intervals of sharp violence, but usually there's a point, some truth around which the weirdness revolves.  Ultimately, Killer Joe has no more to say about trailer parks, hired killers, or socio-economics than it does about the proper use of fried chicken.  And despite Mr. Letts' Oklahoma origins and the story's Texa...

Richard Linklater's most impressive accomplishment with Bernie , his 14th (or so) full-length feature, might well be wrangling the outsized persona of Jack Black into a distinct, watchable character.  The success of this endeavor, beyond the considerable credit due to Mr. Black himself, may have something to do with the responsibility of portraying a living person.  That living person, Bernie Tiede, happens to be serving a life sentence in Texas.  In 1996, Tiede murdered his 81-year-old employer and companion, Marjorie Nugent.  Among images of the real-life principals of the case we see during the closing credits is a photo of Black meeting Tiede.   At the outset of Bernie , there is the faux folksiness of a title card which reads, "What you're fixin' to see is a true story."  Given Mr. Linklater's typically impressive handling of actors, professional and amateur alike, as well as the gentle comedy which ensues, it's hard to say whether one should ta...