Recent and recommended

After stuffing a wide variety of films into a grab bag of commentary on movies that you might like but I can’t quite recommend, here I offer up some films you really should see.

With home viewing of such high quality and wide availability, it takes a lot to get me out of the house and into a theater (other than the Clark auditorium, which I take as a high-tech extension of home).  Gravity (MC-96, Images Cinema) easily passed the test, arriving in 3-D to rapturous reviews, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and starring George Clooney, particular favorites of mine.  Sandra Bullock ain’t bad either.  And it really becomes her movie, to share with the head-spinning special effects.  Driving a bus that will blow up if it drops below 50 mph is a Sunday picnic compared to this.  Gravity lands as a space adventure that is intimate and epic at the same time, realistic and utterly fantastical.  An accident leaves astronauts Clooney and Bullock adrift in space, and they embark on an improbable but impressively detailed quest to return to earth.  As a somatic joyride, this film can hardly be beat – only at the end did I realize my body had been clenched in tension the whole time.  As to characterizations and backstory, Cuaron’s script, written with his son, is a bit formulaic and unconvincing.  But the technical achievement is so convincing, any story deficiencies hardly matter.  Of all the visual wonders, I cite one in particular:  We see Bullock tumbling over and over through empty space, and then we drift closer and see the earth doing flips in the visor of her helmet, and then we pass right through the visor, and get her view looking out, all in seamless deep perspective.  Emmanuel Lubezki cements himself as one of the most amazing cinematographers working today.  This one has to be seen to be believed (though not thought about too much afterwards).

What Maisie Knew (MC-74, NFX) is a transposition of the Henry James novel to modern Manhattan, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel.  In telling the story of a divorce from the perspective of a child, they were dependent on the performance of a six-year-old and scored big with Onata Aprile, a grave and watchful little girl completely unaware of how adorable she is, with a rare gift for behaving naturally on camera.  Her parents are an aging rock star (Julianne Moore) and an irresponsible art dealer (Steve Coogan), who use Maisie as a pawn in a messy custody battle.  The daddy marries the nanny, and the mommy marries a bartender, both more attuned to the child’s needs, but with lives of their own, so the child is passed from hand to hand and frequently left alone, pampered and neglected by turn.  There’s suspense in the risks Maisie faces, and hope in her resilience and resourcefulness, what she knows and what she doesn’t.  The city itself is an important character in the film, with a nice little cameo for the High Line.  This is a small but well-calibrated film, with an absolutely riveting central performance.

Another overlooked little gem is In the House (MC-72, NFX).  The combination of Fabrice Luchini and Kristin Scott Thomas was plenty to hook me, though I’ve found director Francois Ozon’s previous work unmemorable.   I’ll remember this one, however, as a neat balance of wit and suspense, in the vein of a Gallic Charlie Kaufman, with a penetrating view of the writing process.  Luchini, a high school literature teacher (and frustrated writer), finds a rare gem of a student, whose writing exercises draw him and his gallerist wife (KST) into the world of the poor boy’s obsession with the perfect middle-class family of a classmate.  Under Luchini’s encouragement (and a good deal more), the boy (slyly played by Ernst Umhauer) draws them (and us) into his quest to get inside the house and into the bedrooms of that domestic haven.  Pleasingly saturated with allusions to literature and other films, with an abundance of clever reference and first-rate performances, this film really tickled my fancy.

If you’d like a fascinating look inside an exotic subculture, but with enough universal emotions to make the proceedings intelligible and moving, then the Israeli film Fill the Void (MC-81, NFX) fills the bill.  Rama Burshtein’s first directorial effort is quite an accomplishment, a taken-for-granted (though utterly unpolitical) view from inside an Ultra-Orthodox community, which registered on me as a testament to the power of women in a super-patriarchal society.  It’s Jane Austen-ish in its focus on authentic matrimonial choice.  Shira (compellingly played by Hadas Yaron) is an 18-year-old daughter of an elder, who is faced with a number of potential matches, in which she has to weigh her own feelings and the needs of her family and community.  Shot mostly in extreme close-up, the film focuses on faces in a way that enhances nuance, and elicits attention, extending one’s sympathies to an unfamiliar situation.