Here’s a look at the notable films that are opening or expanding this weekend, with links, where applicable, to our previous coverage:
- No Country For Old Men: If every Coen Brothers film is never anything less than a perfectly-wrought genre exercise, is it ever anything more? That’s the question that I’ve been grappling with since seeing the Coen Brothers’ ultra-violent revisionist Western. Judging from No Country For Old Men’s almost-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, I’m alone in thinking it’s anything less than a masterpiece. I don’t want to spoil the party–I do think, just as a thriller, it’s technically above critique–but there’s something about the Coens’ need to turn genre into a joke that, for me, undermines the desperate nihilism of the material. I sometimes wonder if I have something of a Coen Brothers block; I’m compiling my findings to that end and will issue a report before the film hits wide release.
- Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead: Sidney Lumet’s totally serviceable late career comeback has been performing astonishingly well in limited release; this weekend it expands to a slightly-wider 122 screens. Check out our NYFF review here.
- Steal a Pencil For Me: Michele Ohayon’s Holocaust docu-romance opens in New York today and expands in the coming weeks; read our review here.
- Lions For Lambs: With this review and this podcast, we’ve already given Robert Redford’s long-awaited follow-up to The Legend of Bagger Vance more airtime than it deserves.
Several movies that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are opening in theaters today:
- Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, has been widely hailed as a “return to form” for director Sidney Lumet. That’s probably not inaccurate, but the last thing Devil feels like is the work of an old man recycling old tricks. Ballsy and occasionally incredulous in its illustration of extreme, self-manufactured desperation, Devil’s not exactly a masterpiece, but if can roll with its plot contortions, it’s a deeply satisfying bit of pulp melodrama. And it’s got the opening sex scene to end all opening sex scenes. Read my NYFF review here, and listen to Lumet talk about his late-career embrace of digital video here.
- The Darjeeling Limited expands yet again this weekend, but the real news is the theatrical unveiling of Hotel Chevalier. See a review of the feature here, and coverage of Wes Anderson’s short here, here and here.
- Saw IV’s opening box office has been positioned as a test of the lasting allure of the torture porn genre. But it’s also a test of the power of sex to sell blood.
“Those devil horns and that crooked arrow strongly suggest that the ghost of legendary art director Saul Bass created the new one-sheet.” Jeff Wells breaks down the elements of ThinkFilm’s very old-school new poster for Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. See my NYFF review of the film here, and to listen to Lumet talk about his newfound love of HD, click this.
Day 3 of NYFF 2007 brought surprisingly strong late-career efforts from two esteemed filmmakers previously thought to be several decades past their prime. To my mind, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon is a greater creative success than Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, although I suppose there’s no doubt as to which film will manage the greater commercial success (it’s not even a contest, really–the Rohmer has no U.S. distributor). Lumet’s film is a proper comeback, the work of a filmmaker returning to familiar themes and, if not exactly reinventing them, then certainly doing his most solid and engaging work in some time. But the Rohmer picture feels like a true farewell, and as final films go, I can’t imagine a more poignant send off.
Céladon won quite a few hearts in Toronto, but it didn’t seem to go over so well here in New York. I know more than a few members of the press corps didn’t make it to the final frame, and after the screening, I heard a lot of “awful”s and “interminable”s. I’ll admit that it may not be Rohmer’s finest hour in terms of filmmaking craft; when Alison Willmore compares the film to a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s not entirely wrong. But I would argue that the plotting needs to be as deliberate as it is, and the overall technique as rudimentary, in order for the film to work as a romantic fable.
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