Todd Haynes’s multilinear treatment of Bob Dylan’s early career encompasses no less than six actors and characters: an 11-year-old black musician calling himself Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), a white folksinger (Christian Bale), an actor who plays the folksinger in a movie (Heath Ledger), a poet who invokes Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), a rock icon in swinging London (Cate Blanchett), and a western outlaw known as Billy the Kid (Richard Gehr). What emerges is a speculative, critical essay about the 60s, weighted down in spots by political correctness and a conflicted desire to mock Dylan’s denseness while catering to his hard-core fans, but otherwise lively, fluid, and watchable. Even if Haynes never comes up with anything as fleet or as funny as the Subterranean Homesick Blues sequence at the beginning of Don’t Look Back (a source he plunders repeatedly), he gives us plenty to chew on. With Charlotte Gainsbourg and Julianne Moore. R, 135 min. (JR) Read more
After his charmingly painful Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1998) and his more painfully autobiographical The Squid and the Whale (2005), writer-director Noah Baumbach announces No more Mr. Nice Guy in this hysterically hyperbolic and unpleasant if still witty dissection of family traumas. The neurotically judgmental title heroine (Nicole Kidman), a successful fiction writer, takes her son (Zane Pais) to the country to attend the wedding of her estranged, New Agey sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to a confused slacker she’s recently met (Jack Black). Apart from John Turturro in a cameo, all the characters are monsters and/or basket cases (and the next-door neighbors are a nightmare projection of the family’s class and ethnic fears). Though no family on earth is likely to be as dysfunctional as this one, realism is no longer Baumbach’s register. It’s almost as if Woody Allen had shifted his allegiance from Bergman to Strindberg while tripling his skill in handling actors. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
Pedro Costa’s longest and most challenging film (2000) is also the one in which he most fully discovers his present method (shooting beautifully composed tableaux without camera movement in digital video, with scripted dialogue) and subject matter (immigrants from Cape Verde and junkies, all nonprofessional actors playing themselves, inhabiting hovels in a Lisbon slum that are audibly and visibly being razed). The title heroine, who lives with her mother and sister, spends most of her time getting stoned or selling vegetables door-to-door, and we get to know the daily rituals of many of her neighbors equally well. Sandwiched between Costa’s Bones (1997) and Colossal Youth (2006), which feature some of the same people and settings, as well as comparably exquisite lighting and employment of color, this is passionate and demanding chamber cinema of a very special kind. In Portuguese with subtitles. 178 min. (JR) Read more
