A major Coen brothers movie drawn from a minor Cormac McCarthy novel, this is a highly accomplished thriller that’s also rather hypocritical when it tries to get moralistic about its bloodbaths. (Even more than its source, it taps into fundamentalist religious despair as an alibi for the violence.) Javier Bardem plays a psycho killer with a cattle stun gun, and Tommy Lee Jones costars as a Texas sheriff nearing retirement who wonders what the world’s coming to. Josh Brolin is a welder who stumbles upon $2 million left in the wake of a blown drug deal and gets tracked by Jones, Bardem, and Woody Harrelson (a hired gun and comic relief). The storytelling is fluid, especially when directors Joel and Ethan Coen start eliding some of the murders and ask us to imagine them for ourselves. R, 122 min. (JR) Read more
Alienated from his professional life in the city, a young architect retreats to the wilds and builds an idyllic glass house in a tree, where he lives alone and fantasizes about gradually becoming an aboriginal. Before starting this project, he has a one-night stand with a divorced friend, and later he becomes briefly acquainted with a vacationer who’s visiting some of her friends across the lake. The most curious aspect of this leisurely story (2006) by Lithuanian writer-director Kristijonas Vildziunas is that it almost isn’t a story at all, apart from the concentration on the natural setting and the building of the housethough the film temporarily shifts focus midway to the more conventional vacationers across the lake. In Lithuanian with subtitles. 90 min. (JR) Read more
In his first feature (2006), Lithuanian video maker and former adman Ignas Miskinis picks his previous profession as a satiric target. But his premise is so straineda hustler muscles his way into an ad agency by seducing two women who work there and bamboozles everyone into thinking he has a hot new product to sell called Diringasthat none of this proves to be very funny. And his characters are so uniformly unpleasant that the seemingly homophobic treatment of a couple of them ultimately seems incidental; Miskinis’s scorn is sufficiently democratic to encompass everyone. In Lithuanian with subtitles. 95 min. (JR) Read more
Apart from some apocalyptic violence at the end, next to nothing happens in this eighth feature (2005) by Sarunas Bartas, Lithuania’s most prestigious filmmaker, but that’s nothing new. The title characters are small-time criminals, outcasts, and idlers (their backgrounds remain vague) who wind up in a run-down farm near the Crimean Sea along with a few wives or girlfriends, hanging out with the locals and drinking and smoking. As frequently happens in his work, Bartas is largely concerned with somber moods and dark visual textures (the cinematography is exquisite), brooding landscapes and quiet desperation. In Russian with subtitles. 110 min. (JR) Read more
Popular during the silent and early sound eras, German actor-director Harry Piel specialized in action thrillers, nearly all of which were destroyed during World War II. In this nocturnal mystery, restored from a tinted nitrate print recently discovered in Italy, he plays a debonair Douglas Fairbanks type named Harry Piel who Read more
