Reviews: "Desierto" and "Under the Shadow"

by Nathaniel R

Jeffrey Dean Morgan & Gael García Bernal in "Desierto"

Two more Oscar submissions are now in limited release in the US: Mexico's Desierto and the UK's Tehran set film Under the Shadows. Both are what you might call horror films though one suspects only the latter would accept the label. 

Desierto
We'll go anywhere with Gael García Bernal, who has blessed us with a number of fine road trip / travel movies in his career like Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Motorcycle Diaries , and The Loneliest Planet. In short, he's the perfect choice as a protagonist if you want us to sign up for a gruelling journey...

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Foreign Film Race Pt 5: "Hey, I know that face!"

"Everything u ever wanted to know about the foreign film category"
Pt 1 All the trailers (A-I) | Pt 2 All the trailers (J-Y) 
Pt 3 Debuts | Pt 4 Female Directors 

Pt 5. Actors You Know & Possibly Love
Successful actors really rack up the frequent flyer miles. Some pick up a second or third or fourth language and actually use those languages in their careers. Others merely stick to films in their native tongue but are magnetic or lucky enough to become well known all over the world.

So after surveying the 85 movies that are hoping to be nominated for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, here are 12 actors you may already know (or at least recognize) who star in one or more of the submissions this time around... 

Gael García Bernal made his feature film debut in the Oscar nominated Amores Perros (2000) and Oscar just kept right on gazing at him. As did we. To date he has starred in three Best Foreign Language Film nominees (Amores Perros, The Crime of Father Amaro, and No) and three other Oscar nominated films (Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Babel). He could add two more Academy stamped titles to that very impressive list this year since he headlines both the Chilean submission (Neruda, reviewed) and the Mexican submission (Desierto, which just opened in US theaters).

Fionnula Flanagan has been working in Irish, British and US TV and film since the mid 1960s and has won an Emmy (for the 1970s miniseries Rich Man Poor Man) as well as a lifetime achievement prize at the Irish Film and Television Awards over the course of her long career. She won lots of new fans and a Saturn Award for her role as the spooky housekeeper in The Others (2001) and this year she co-stars in the interlocking stories of Little Secrets, the Brazilian Oscar submission.  

Ten more famiiar faces after the jump...

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Review: Pablo Larraín's "Neruda" and "Jackie"

Nathaniel R reporting from the NYFF/TIFF as these films played at both fests... 

Fortieth birthdays don't get much better than this. In August Chile's most celebrated filmmaker Pablo Larraín turned the big 4-0 just after his excellent new film Neruda opened in his home country. One month later Jackie, his first English language picture, joined Neruda on the international festival circuit to even more excitement. Both are likely and deserving Oscar nominees come January. Pretty good year.

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Every Dog Has Its Day: Iñárritu, 16 Years and 2 Directing Oscars Later

Eric here to discuss cinema’s currently-most-celebrated director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. As Nathaniel has noted previously, all six of Inarritu’s feature films have gotten Oscar attention in one way or another, and of course much has been written about his being the first filmmaker since 1950 to win the Best Director Oscar two years in a row. He's also just been named to the Time 100 "Icons" List.  So there’s no better time than to look back to Inarritu’s first feature, 2000’s Amores Perros, to see where he started and where he’s landed.  

Watching Amores Perros (2000) for the first time since its initial release, I was struck by how even at the start of his career, Inarritu picked extraordinarily difficult environments to shoot in.  The logistics for Amores Perros can’t have practically been much easier than the ones we are all sick of hearing about with The Revenant.  His debut feature has him shooting all over Mexico City (inarguably one of the world’s most chaotic cities), with a colossally large group of actors, and constructing a large-scale and crucially precise car wreck sequence that pays off to all three of the film’s narratives in different ways.  Plus throw in a lot of very difficult (and legally tricky) scenes with huge groups of dogs fighting, bleeding, and getting shot.  Inarritu’s self-masochism was alive and well from the very start. [More...]

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Review: Rosewater

Michael C. with your weekly new release review...

A key part of Jon Stewart’s appeal is that no matter how maddening the news is he doesn’t lapse into ironic detachment. His isn’t someone throwing up his hands in surrender, but the guy who can’t help but marvel at the variety of ways government finds to sabotage our best intentions and allow stupidity to win out over rationality. So it should be no surprise to anyone familiar with Stewart that Rosewater, his directorial debut, is marked by the same earnest intellectual curiosity.

As director and screenwriter Stewart brings a sly complexity to material that could have been one note or overwrought in other hands. His trademark wit is not absent from the film but it has been restrained and left to simmer under the surface as Maziar Bahari’s months long imprisonment and torture at the hands of Iranian government steadily edges into the realm of absurdity. “Why would a spy have his own TV show?” Bahari protests when his interrogator presents a Daily Show appearance during which he is jokingly referred to as a spy as evidence. It’s a moment of indisputable logic that gets him nowhere, oppressive regimes not being famous for their sense of humor.

Of course, Bahari’s arrest, torture, and solitary confinement for over 100 days was not simply the matter of a joke gone awry. [More...]

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