SPRING 2009
February 20
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March 6
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March 20
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April 3
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April 17
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May 1
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May 15
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May 29
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In his third feature, director Noah Baumbach scores a triumph with an autobiographical coming-of-age story about a teenager whose writer-parents are divorcing. The father (Jeff Daniels) and mother (Laura Linney) duke it out in half-civilized, half-savage fashion, while their two sons adapt in different ways, shifting allegiances between parents. The film is squirmy-funny and nakedly honest about the rationalizations and compensatory snobbisms of artistic failure as well as the conflicted desires of adolescents for sex and status. In detailing bohemian-bourgeois life in brownstone Brooklyn, Baumbach is spot on. Everyone proceeds from good intentions and acts rather badly, in spite or because of their manifest intelligence. Fulfilling the best traditions of the American independent film, this quirky, wisely written feature explores the gulf between sexes, generations, art and commerce, Brooklyn and Manhattan.
--Official Website
Awards: 13 wins and 25 nominations, including Academy Award nomination (Best Original Screenplay).
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The work of director Guy Maddin, who created My Winnipeg, is difficult to describe and worth going out of one's way to experience. Roger Ebert writes:
"If you love movies in the very sinews of your imagination, you should experience the work of Guy Maddin. If you have never heard of him, I am not surprised. Now you have. A new Maddin movie doesn't play in every multiplex, city or state. If you hear of one opening, seize the day. . .
[Maddin uses the dated editing devices of old movies] to tell stories that begin with the improbable and march boldly into the inconceivable. . . Consider his film "My Winnipeg." The city fathers commissioned it as a documentary, to be made by "the mad poet of Manitoba," as a Canadian magazine termed him. Maddin has never left his hometown, although judging by this film, it has left him. It has abandoned its retail landmarks, its sports traditions, and even the daily local soap opera, "Ledge Man," which ran for 50 years and starred Maddin's mother. As every episode opened, a man was found standing on a ledge and threatening to jump, and Maddin's mother talked him out of it. . .
Maddin was raised in this city, which he says has "10 times the sleepwalking rate" of any other. His childhood occurred in a house built as three white squares, one for his mother's beauty parlor, one for his aunt's family, one for his own. The scents of the parlor drifted up into his bedroom, and "every word of conversation swirled up out of that gynocracy." He attended a convent school named the Academy of the Super Vixens, ruled by "ever-opiating nuns."
Many of these facts are glimpsed through the windows of a train that seems headed out of town but never gets there."
Toronto Film Critics Association Award (Best Canadian Film). Toronto International Film Festival Award (Best Canadian Feature Film).
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It’s been said that even Howard Hawks, the director of The Big Sleep, and Raymond Chandler, who wrote the novel that it was based on, were never entirely sure if its plot made sense. The result was the most fabled and mesmerizing labyrinth in Hollywood history — a movie in which confusion, and the promise that it will all become clear, wires you to the screen. Tell No One, a French psychosexual thriller (it's based on an American novel by Harlan Coben), has some of that same strategy of narrative murk employed as a suspense narcotic. It’s The Big Sleep meets Vertigo with a dash of CSI.
François Cluzet, who's like a terse Gallic Dustin Hoffman, plays a pediatrician who got knocked into a coma the night his wife (Marie-Josée Croze) was killed, apparently by the same goons. Eight years later, when the case is reopened (due to a pair of corpses dug up in a nearby wood), Cluzet receives a series of anonymous video e-mails indicating that his wife may still be alive. He also finds himself a suspect on the run. At a certain point, you're forced to hang on to the events for dear life and leave your desire for crystalline logic behind. What makes this cathartic, not confounding, is that here, as in Vertigo, the possibility of a woman who died and now lives all but demands a complication a bit out of our grasp. Tell No One's plot thickens in about five ways at once, but they're all connected. The issue of how is a riddle that does more than tease — it gives you an itch you won't want to stop scratching. A- --Excerpted from a review by Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly.
Awards: 8 wins and 10 nominations, including winning 4 Césars (Best Actor, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Music Written for Film).
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"A richly textured, thoughtful exploration of the hypocrisies inherent when fundamentalists engage in commercial ventures, Takva: A Man's Fear of God reps a strong new voice in Turkish cinema. Focusing on a simple man whose administrative job within an Islamic sect sets him spinning adrift from his previously unquestioned moral compass, pic benefits from a stand-out central perf and a finely tuned script (supervised by Fatih Akin, whose Corazon Intl. co-produced) that refuses to condescend to anyone. Helmer Ozer Kiziltan's bigscreen debut deservedly bagged the lion's share of prizes at Antalya's national fest; awards are possible off-shore as well." --Excerpted from a review in Variety.
Awards: 17 wins and 6 nominations, including Best Screenplay (Festival de Cannes) and Best Screenwriter (European Film Awards), nominated for Academy Award (Best Foreign Film).
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The Milagro Beanfield War
The Milagro Beanfield War is a charming, fanciful little fable built around weighty issues concerning the environment, the preservation of a cultural heritage and the rights of citizens versus the might of the dollar.
Robert Redford and his screenwriters, who adapted John Nichols' 1974 novel, adeptly juggle at least a dozen major characters in telling the story of how one man's decision to cultivate his land, which is coveted by outside developers intent upon building a resort, leads to a standoff between natives of the area and the big boys. Redford and company have put a quirky twist on the material, investing it with a quasi-mystical aspect as well as some raw comedy.
Set in modern-day New Mexico, the tale is set in motion when improverished farmer Joe Mondrago (Chick Vennera) improperly diverts some water from a main irrigation channel onto his own modest plot of land in order to start up a beanfield. This little act of defiance stirs up the handful of activists in the affected village, notably garage owner Ruby Archuleta (Sonia Braga), who recruits dropped out radical attorney and newspaperman Charley Bloom (John Heard) to rally 'round the cause. --Variety.com
Awards: Academy Award and Golden Globe Award winners for Best Music -- Original Score. 1 other win and 1 other nomination.
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Once
The Irish romance Once may be a musical, but it is miles away from the traditional Hollywood idea of people bursting into song. Glen Hansard (frontman for indie rock band The Frames) plays the guy, a street musician who is playing for change when he meets the girl (Marketa Irglova), an immigrant from the Czech Republic. The pair immediately bond over their shared love of music (he is a guitarist, and she plays the piano), and the film chronicles their tentative relationship. Both are weighed down by plenty of baggage: his songs are fueled by a painful breakup, and she is a young mother who left her husband behind in her native country. Like the independent favorite Before Sunrise, Once is a simple, sweet drama that doesn't rely on an elaborate plot. With its use of digital video and handheld cameras, Once matches its spare visual style to its intimate mood. Each moment feels stolen from real life, and the story is at once familiar and fresh. Driven more by music than by dialogue, Once features a stirring soundtrack of heartfelt indie rock sung by Hansard and Irglova. Before his foray into film, director John Carney (On the Edge) played bass in The Frames, and his passion for music is clear in this modern musical that hits every note perfectly. --Rotten Tomatoes
Awards: 14 wins, including Academy Award (Best Original Song), Audience Award Winner at Sundance International Film Festival; 18 other nominations.
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The Red Violin
There is a kind of ideal beauty that reduces us all to yearning for perfection. The Red Violin is about that yearning. It traces the story of a violin (``the single most perfect acoustical machine I've ever seen,'' says a restorer) from its maker in 17th century Italy to an auction room in modern Montreal. The violin passes from the rich to the poor, from Italy to Poland to England to China to Canada. It is shot, buried, almost burned and stolen more than once. It produces music so beautiful that it makes you want to cry. . . .[This] brief outline doesn't begin to suggest the intelligence and appeal of the film. --Roger Ebert
The film score was composed by John Corigliano and performed by the London Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen, with Joshua Bell on solo violin.
Awards: Academy Awards for Best Busic and Best Original Score, a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, 19 additional wins and 12 nominations.
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This film is being presented as part of the Tri-Cities' May Festival. For more information about May Festival events, see the website of the Mid-Columbia Mastersingers or email
The Last Emperor
Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated — quite a feat for a challenging, multilayered epic directed by an Italian and starring an international cast. Yet the power and scope of the film was, and remains, undeniable — the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne at age three, in 1908, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval, within and without the walls of the Forbidden City. Recreating Ching dynasty China with astonishing detail and unparalleled craftsmanship by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, The Last Emperor is also an intimate character study of one man reconciling personal responsibility and political legacy. --Criterion Films
Awards: Nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Total of 39 wins and 12 nominations.
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