Pictureland

There's no more sadly appropriate, self-defeating gesture in Asghar Farhadi's celebrated A Separation than that of Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) repeatedly striking himself.  Hodjat is, by his own admission, a hot-tempered man.  But at that moment of supreme frustration, he's also been unemployed for months, beseiged by creditors and his wife, Razieh (Sareh Bayat),  has recently lost their unborn child after a dispute with a man with whom she was working to bring some money into the household. The separation of the film's title refers to that of Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami).  The couple have been married fourteen years when we first see them.  Prospects for a fifteenth year are not encouraging.  As A Separation begins, the two are in family court owing to Simin's petition for divorce.  She wants to leave Iran so their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director's daughter) can grow up elsewhere.  "I don't want my child to gr...

If you close your eyes during Steven Soderbergh's Haywire , you might think yourself at a screening of one of his "Oceans" films, or even last year's slightly scary but ultimately uninvolving Contagion .  Unless your period of darkness happens to coincide with one of many intervals during which grunts are issued, bodies and objects are heard to crash, like aural exclamation marks, all telltale sounds of asses being kicked by the film's heroine, Mallory Kane (Gina Carano).  Otherwise, there is a good bit of slinky electronica provided by composer David Holmes, the man responsible for the soundtrack of the three "Oceans" films.   Contagion's soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, while a little harder-edged, pulsated with a similarly synthesized score, its background music much closer to the dance floor than the concert hall. With their modern music sensibilities and and travelog tendencies, Oceans 11 , 12 and 13 , along with Contagion and Haywire , are...

In baseball, at least at the Major League level, one encounters an almost paradoxical mix of poetry and mathematics.  Perhaps to those who can wield and see the patterns in numbers as impressively as a big leaguer pivots to complete a double play or manages to hit a breaking pitch that's moving at 90 miles per hour, the math and poetry are one in the same.  Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Bradd Pitt) as portrayed in Moneyball is not exactly one of these savants, but he tries to bring off the marriage of seeming opposites out of necessity.  He's aided by the much more statistically-inclined Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a young economics graduate of Yale University, whom he acquires from the Cleveland Indians after he practically gets laughed out of the Indians' offices after trying to bring off trades for actual players with the depleted stock of his ball club after the 2001 season. Moneball, based of the book of the same title by Michael Lewis, chronicl...

You may not have heard of Pina Bausch before seeing Wim Wenders' Academy-Award-nominated documentary, Pina.  Even after seeing the film, you will be in posession of virtually no biographical information about the German dancer and choreographer, not even her surname.  Nonetheless, what becomes quite clear throughout the 103 loving, bracing minutes of Pina is what an extraordinary influence Ms. Bausch had on seemingly everyone with whom she worked. The members of her Tantztheater Wuppertal company, as diverse in age as is in nationality, speak of her in near-mystical terms.  "I'm not interested in how my dancers move. I'm interested in what moves them," she once said.  By all accounts offered by her dancers in the documentary, Pina was able to see in them and elicit from them their best, often with a minimum of direction.  "Be more crazy," she implored one member of her company; "keep searching," was her ambiguous instruction to anot...

In glancing at a few reviews prior to seeing A Dangerous Method , I recall one that noted audiences  finding the film "too talky."  While this seems tantamount to finding The Artist a tad too silent, it does point out the difficultly facing David Cronenberg and his accomplished screenwriter, Christopher Hampton (adapting his 2002 play, The Talking Cure, based on the novel by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method:  the story of Jung, Freud and  Sabina Spielrein ).  Just how do you create something cinematic about the early days of psychoanalysis and a few of its leading figures?  Do you attempt to flesh out these extremely complex historical figures and do justice to most of the intellectual issues with which they grappled, at the risk of producing something that is too...well, clinical?  Or do you go the more florid, Ken Russel route with these august personages?  Freudomania, anyone? A kind of middle ground is achieved,which goes back to Mr. ...

"As Ohio goes, so goes America."  This the pronouncement from a political commentator in George Clooney's latest film, The Ides of March.   The setting for the Ides of March is the Ohio Democratic presidential primary.  It's an appropriate enough place to set a political thriller, Ohio being one of those proverbial battleground states, as the political pundits like to remind us.  The state usually does figure large in primaries and general elections.  Just ask John Kerry, whose presidential aspirations found their graveyard in Ohio in 2004. The Ides of March is based on the play Farragut North , by Beau Willimon.  The playwright was apparently a staffer on another 2004 campaign, that of Howard Dean, which fizzled out after a big showing in Iowa.  In adapting Willimon's play, Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov have added the character of presidential candidate and standing governor, Mike Morris (Clooney).  Morris is something...

George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), not so long ago a movie star, finds himself an anonymous figure in a crowd filling the lobby after an afternoon matinee, a talkie entitled "Guardian Angel", starring America's newest cinematic sweetheart, Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo).  Poor George, as ever in the company of his loyal Jack Russel Terrier, is like a defrocked priest milling about this cathedral of the motion picture.  Young people in the crowd pass Valentin by, oblivious to his fame as a star of silent cinema.  Finally, an older woman smiles in recognition.  George returns the smile, one of significantly of lower wattage than those he beamed during his heyday, but still enough to signify his gratitude at  the acknowledgement.  But no, he quickly realizes, the woman isn't responding to him, but the adorable pooch in his arms.  After she expresses her admiration, George says, "If only he could talk!" No need to worry about the cute dog, but much of Th...