~Upstairs at the Savoy~
Academy Award Nominee ~
Best Picture, Best Actor & Best Director
The Artist
Coming Soon
Rated PG-13; 100 minutes
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone (excerpted)
The Artist is a total pleasure, written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius with a keen eye for detail. French actor Jean Dujardin, who collaborated with Hazanavicius on two OSS 117 spy satires, is simply marvelous as George Valentin, the dashing star of countless silent-movie epics. George resists the efforts of studio chief Al Zimmer (a wonderful John Goodman) to try talkies. Stuck in a loveless marriage, George is sparked by Peppy Miller (Argentine beauty Bérénice Bejo), a bit player who hits it big in the sound era while George's career crumbles.
Dujardin's face is a resonant reflection of George's subtitled rage ("I'm the one people come to see. They never needed to hear me"). Only Clifton (the peerless James Cromwell), his driver, and the star's dog Uggy (a scene-stealing Jack Russell terrier) stick with George through his fall. It takes Peppy – Bejo is dazzling in every particular – to save the man she loves.
It's A Star Is Born blended with Singin' in the Rain, and yet somehow bracingly fresh. Credit the tantalizing magic of Hazanavicius, who only twice breaks the no-sound rule (I'll never tell) and creates something unique and unforgettable. Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman and with a vivacious score by Ludovic Bource, The Artist encapsulates everything we go to movies for: action, laughs, tears and a chance to get lost in another world. It just might leave you speechless.
~Downstairs at the Savoy~
The Oscar-Nominated Short Films 2012
Animation & Live Action
Starts Friday, February 10
Short Films (Animated)
Dimanche/Sunday: A small boy's Sunday is filled with both ordinary and extraordinary events.
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore: A storm transports a young man to a place where books are living entities.
La Luna: A young boy accompanies his father and grandfather to their unusual nighttime job.
A Morning Stroll: A New Yorker passes a chicken out for its morning stroll.
Wild Life : A young Englishman with more enthusiasm than practical experience emigrates to Canada to become a rancher.
Short Films (Live Action)
Pentecost: A young Irish boy faces a difficult choice that may leave him at odds with his small community.
Raju: A German couple adopts an Indian orphan in Calcutta.
The Shore: Two boyhood best friends from Northern Ireland reunite after 25 years.
Time Freak: A neurotic inventor hopes to correct his past mistakes by creating a time machine.
Tuba Atlantic: With only six days left to live, 70-year-old Oskar wants to put things right with his brother.
~Downstairs at the Savoy~
Pina
Coming Soon
Rated PG; 106 minutes; In German w/English subtitles
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly (excerpted)
The Pina of the title is Pina Bausch, the late German neo-Expressionist choreographer whose fluid, monumental works are as strikingly theatrical as they are rigorously physical. In preproduction when the subject died (in 2009, at age 68), this thrilling documentary by countryman Wim Wenders now serves as a posthumous tribute, both from Wenders and from the devoted dancers in Bausch's troupe.
Just as nothing is linear in the choreographer's work, so Pina zigs and zags from performance excerpts of important pieces in the repertory (including the classic Café Müller, an obstacle course involving dancers in motion and café chairs, used in Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her) to reminiscences by those she worked with, then back again.
There's little in the way of explanation or background information about Bausch's life, career, and working methods. Yet rather than disorienting viewers, the result is a kind of liberation — a freedom from cultural homework assignments — that intensifies the power of Wenders' exciting, innovative film. The result, in Pina, is...wow.
~Downstairs at the Savoy~
Academy Award Nominee ~
Best Foreign Language Film, Best Original Screenplay
A Separation
Coming Soon
Rated PG-13; 123 minutes; In Persian w/English subtitles
A O Scott, New York Times (excerpted)
A tightly structured, emotionally astute new film from Iran, begins with a couple, at odds and in distress, arguing in front of a judge. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave the country with her daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), and Simin’s husband, Nader (Peyman Moadi), insists on staying at home in Tehran to care for his frail and elderly father, who suffers from dementia and needs constant attention. Quite possibly there is more at issue than practical domestic arrangements — there are hints of suppressed anger in Nader’s demeanor, of long-simmering exasperation in Simin’s — but an Iranian courtroom may not be the best place to discuss intimate marital matters.
Nor, given that country’s strict censorship codes, is an Iranian film. But “A Separation,” written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (and Iran’s official Oscar submission), does not feel especially constrained. It is a rigorously honest movie about the difficulties of being honest, a film that tries to be truthful about the slipperiness of truth. It also sketches a portrait — perhaps an unnervingly familiar picture for American audiences — of a society divided by sex, generation, religion and class.