Kiyoshi Kurosawa is best known stateside for his end-times horror movie, Pulse. Tonight at BAM Rose Cinemas, you can watch him working in a slightly different key with his recent family drama, Tokyo Sonata. Our own Joshua Rothkopf praised the film upon its initial release, noting that:

“Kurosawa is growing up, modulating his formula, successfully moving into Magnolia-like domestic-meltdown territory. That is, of course, until he reverts to the Cassandra we know and love.”

So it’s a potent mix of the old and the new. Whether you’re a Kurosawa regular or newcomer, what better choice for an evening out?

The French Institute Alliance Française is dedicating every Tuesday night in June and July to the great French actor Michel Piccoli. He’s built an impressive body of work over his long career, collaborating with such directors as Jean-Luc Godard, Manoel de Oliveira and Luis Buñuel. Tonight at 7:30pm, you can catch him in the intriguingly titled The Prude (1986), directed by Jacques Doillon, in which he plays a theater director whose estranged daughter is about to pay him a visit. He rehearses their encounter with his theater troupe, but things go terribly wrong when the girl finally shows up. Also starring in the film is the fine, fine, fine Sandrine Bonnaire, fresh off her turn in Agnès Varda’s 1985 masterpiece, Vagabond. And director Doillon is best known stateside for his award-winning 1996 feature, Ponette.

Joan Crawford acted the hell out of every role she played, but there’s something particularly special about her work in Mildred Pierce, which unspools tonight at the Clearview Chelsea at 7pm and 9:30pm as part of their Chelsea Classics series. Maybe it’s the sheer hunger of her performance as the title character. Crawford had spent several years in the “box office poison” quarantine, to the point that she was required to do a screen test for the role that would win her an Oscar. After a memorable murder-by-gunshot opening, Mildred’s story is told via flashbacks: She divorces her unemployed husband and goes into business for herself so that she can support her two daughters, Veda (Ann Blyth) and Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe). That’s just the setup to this emotional melodrama with a noirish tinge, courtesy of Casablanca director Michael Curtiz. Let the trailer embedded below tease your senses a bit more, then clear your evening schedule.

Following up on my prior post about Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Tetro: I’ve just come across the film’s theatrical trailer (embedded below, and also available at the official Tetro site). I’d already heard raves about the movie, especially the black-and-white cinematography, the beauty of which is quite evident here. Myself, I’m most excited by what appears to be a dance sequence in the Powell-Pressburger vein, with eye-popping levels of Technicolor saturation. And I can’t help but think that the first series of images, in which introverted bad boy Vincent Gallo stares intently at an insect buzzing around his desk lamp, is an homage to Stan Brakhage’s experimental Mothlight (1963). Bring it on, Francis.

Let the hype begin: USA Today has an exclusive first look at Iron Man 2 that includes an image from the film, reprinted above. Tony Stark’s looking sleek and serious nowadays, though there’s no word on whether his postcredits meeting in the first movie with agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) will be fleshed out in this second installment. What we do know is that IM2 (whoa, it’s the John Woo Mission: Impossible II backward!) has been shooting for about three weeks now, with IM director Jon Favreau at the helm. Don Cheadle has replaced Terrence Howard as Stark’s partner, Col. James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes, and joining the cast this time out are Mickey Rourke as Whiplash, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow and Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer. The film is set for release on May 7, 2010. Like, a year from now.

Variety reports that Miramax and Focus Features have snapped up the remake rights to the French thriller Tell No One, which was a hit both in its country of origin and stateside. (Click here for the original TONY review.) It’s something of a homecoming as writer-director Guillaume Canet adapted his 2006 film from Harlan Coben’s U.S.-set novel of the same name, about a doctor who learns his deceased wife may not be quite so dead after all. No director or cast has been named yet, though the plan is for shooting to begin in the spring of 2010, with Miramax handling the domestic rights and Focus the international. Do the opposite of what the title tells you and spread the word.

Here’s some news to perk up all the beleaguered financiers out there. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Wall Street 2 has been greenlit, with Oliver Stone helming and Michael Douglas reprising his role as slick trader Gordon Gekko. Shia LaBeouf is either “in talks” or definitely costarring as a Gekko protégé, and Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire, 21) is penning the script. Seems only Latino Review has story details, and Ain’t It Cool News‘ “Mr. Beaks” has some choice thoughts on the direction Loeb, Stone and everyone else are taking Gekko and company. Charlie Sheen, alas, won’t be attending the reunion. Two and a Half Men beckons, after all.

With Righteous Kill a not-so-distant memory and a third Meet the Parents entry (Little Fockers) on the horizon, it’s fair to say that Robert De Niro’s glory days are long behind him. What a perfect time, then, for the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to unveil the “Robert De Niro Film Collection,” an extensive assemblage of props, papers, costumes and other memorabilia that recall a time when Bobby D was taking bold chances instead of mugging over lie detectors at Ben Stiller. The image above should stoke every cinephile’s giddy gland—it’s the hack license used by De Niro during his prep work for Taxi Driver (1976). You can see a few more selections from the nearly 8,500 items at the ArtsBeat blog, and the museum itself has a multimedia presentation on the exhibit.

The previous Quentin Crisp biopic, The Naked Civil Servant, bore all the grain-and-blur hallmarks of British television circa 1975. Its almost-four-decades later sequel, An Englishman in New York (click here for tonight’s screening details), is similarly indebted to the small screen, this time to the low-budget, hi-def gloss of American TV. This isn’t a criticism, exactly. As with Civil Servant, the underwhelming artifice helps to highlight John Hurt’s terrific central performance. Revisiting the role that made him a star in his native England, Hurt slips back easily into Crisp’s polite, effeminate rhythms. Englishman begins just after Civil Servant’s TV premiere, when Crisp found himself a sudden celebrity, for good and for ill. He receives as much praise as he does derision—when a seething homophobe calls him up in the middle of the night, Crisp quite kindly asks him if he’d like to schedule an appointment to beat him up. Read more »

Cinematographer extraordinaire Jack Cardiff (September 18, 1914–April 22, 2009) had what I like to call a “Tilda Swinton résumé.” Just as that great actor can claim to have worked back-to-back with both George Clooney and Béla Tarr, Cardiff shot for both the arty Powell/Pressburger combine (1947’s Black Narcissus, among others) and George Pan Cosmatos (1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II). There’s so much to call attention to, from the astonishing Technicolor dreamscapes of The Red Shoes (1948) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchmen (1951), to Cardiff’s own work as a director (a 1960 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers).

If I were to single out one film as an essential, however, it would be Under Capricorn (1949). This is Cardiff’s sole collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, who was riding high on the single-take fumes of Rope when he made this period melodrama/character study starring Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten and Margaret Leighton. Capricorn is an even more outlandish long-shot experiment: Cardiff’s camera practically stalks the characters through the dusky tropical mansion that is the film’s primary setting, moving in for intimate close-ups and tracking back for oppressive wide shots without a cut. It lends the proceedings a palpable sense of atmosphere and psychological insight, the highlight of which is a nearly ten-minute confessional monologue delivered by Bergman in which she scales the heights and depths of insanity. (A detailed analysis of this sequence can be found here at Reverse Shot.) It’s one of Cardiff’s finest pieces of work, his camera totally in sync with Bergman’s performance and Hitchcock’s direction—as if we are gazing directly into a tortured soul. Here it is:

Author Dan Brown is as much of an institution as the Catholic Church that frequently attacks him. So with the impending release of the Tom Hanks–starring Angels & Demons adaptation, it was probably inevitable that spokesmen for each side would come out swinging.

No surprise that Catholic League president William A. Donohue is in the anti-Brown corner. Now available for $5: Angels & Demons: More Demonic Than Angelic, a booklet that “details the myths, lies and smears that are made against the Catholic Church. It also provides evidence of the anti-Catholic animus harbored by those associated with the film.” (You go, Mother Mary!)

Coming out in Brown’s defense, however—and persuasively—is a rather shocking contender: Angels & Demons’ Academy Award–winning director, Ron Howard. In an entry on The Huffington Post titled “Angels & Demons: It’s a Thriller, Not a Crusade,” Howard lucidly lays into Donohue:

He’s been making these assertions for years, going back to the theatrical release of The Da Vinci Code. He stepped up his campaign more than a month ago with a series of press releases. And there he goes again, in a Daily News op-ed last Friday, saying that Dan Brown and I “have collaborated in smearing the Catholic Church…”

And it goes on from there, with a directness and resonance that, frankly, is not a hallmark of Howard’s mostly mediocre-to-awful oeuvre. Should Opie ever put away his pictorial toys, he’d make a damn fine op-ed columnist.

Here are the first two stills from hobbit master Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones. Over the weekend, Empire magazine broke the news with the image found here—now thankfully sans proprietary watermark—of young Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) in the afterlife. USA Today, meanwhile, just published the image above of Stanley Tucci as Salmon’s murderer, George Harvey (that’s not a spoiler). Seems like a return to Frighteners/Heavenly Creatures territory for P.J. before he embarks on the good ship Tintin. Our interest is more than piqued.

Variety reports that Sofia Coppola is returning to the director’s chair for Somewhere, a tale of a bad-boy actor, played by Stephen Dorff, living it up in the Chateau Marmont. Turns out he fathered a Fanning somewhere along the line: Elle, younger sister of Dakota, plays Dorff’s 11-year-old daughter, whose surprise visit forces him to reevaluate his life. Sounds like Coppola is continuing to explore the cloistering effects of wealth and celebrity, a recurrent theme in her work that tends to invite plenty of harsh scrutiny (”Spoiled brat, heal thyself!”). It’ll be interesting to see what transpires this time. The film is set to lens in Los Angeles and Italy this June and July.

One of the 2009 films I’m most anticipating is Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, a predominantly black-and-white feature that the Godfather auteur shot in Argentina this past year. I stumbled across this YouTube clip over the weekend, wherein Coppola dons a Requiem for a Dream–style bodycam to welcome us to the film’s official website. The site’s become a favorite stop, mainly because its highly personal content—which is slowly being added to as the June 11 release date approaches—stands head and shoulders above the typical promotional jibber-jabber.

“I’m the most documented movie director in history,” notes the writer-director in a behind-the-scenes video, entitled “My Boys,” though the observation is more amused than self-aggrandizing, the statement of a man with nothing left to lose and tons more to share. And share he does, as Coppola mostly cedes the scene to star Vincent Gallo, who says that the movie he loves the most is his director’s own The Rain People (1969), a lesser-known effort well worth seeking out (it’s currently available through the Warner Bros. archive project). Gallo’s praise for Coppola always comes out a bit off-kilter, and his train of thought, especially in another video entitled “Vincent Gallo—Transcending the Father,” is a trip. My favorite section of the site, though, is Coppola’s self-authored biography in which he promises to “tell you some things you may not have read.” Among the bons mots:

“I was a camp counselor and loved it. I love kids—every child is a little Picasso, they are bundles of creativity. I’m always in touch with the child inside of me.”

And my personal favorite:

“Learn to cook. They may not like your films, but everybody loves a good meal.”

According to this report from HitFix, Liam Neeson (and, as it’s said in Taken, his “very particular set of skills”) will soon be in the Acropolis for Incredible Hulk–helmer Louis Leterrier’s remake of Clash of the Titans. He’ll play King of the Gods, Zeus, while Ralph Fiennes will essay Lord of the Underworld Hades, the demonic yang to Neeson’s holy yin. The 1981 original’s Medusa is not amused.

According to a recent poll (per the IMDb), the best movie moment ever is the discovery of a magical train platform in Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. The folks behind the survey? The film authorities at Oreo Cookies™, who surely know their cinema from their sugar. I couldn’t find any further information on the brand’s official website, but this report from In the News UK has all the details, including a list of runner-up scenes from The Lion King, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (go, Dick Van Dyke!). Coming up just shy of the top ten were the climactic explosion montage from Zabriskie Point and the turtle-slaughtering sequence from Cannibal Holocaust.

The movies linger. Best of the fest for me was Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day, which follows a Korean artist (Kim Yeong-ho) who exiles himself to Paris to escape a drug charge. It’s a piercing character study, one with a lulling, low-key surface suggestive of the space between waking and dreaming. That’s wholly appropriate, considering the film enters (often without warning) into its protagonist’s subconscious, a place where the women in his life switch roles with Buñuelian abandon. A single viewing is simply not enough. I look forward to seeing it again, probably on DVD, though I hope it gets a few more theatrical dates, as it only benefits from a big screen. Read more »

The 2009 Sarasota Film Festival is over—now to the recapping. First, some words about Revanche, coming to IFC Center May 1 and, despite being one of the festival’s most beloved offerings, a film I wasn’t too keen on. Götz Spielmann’s Oscar-nominated thriller is typically Teutonic, the story and characters existing purely as intellectual constructs to be broken down into disconnected philosophical subelements. It’s the Michael Haneke school of filmmaking-as-science-experiment. When a seemingly kindhearted and religious wife (Ursula Strauss) reveals herself as a bad-boy-desiring slut, she comes off as more amoeba than human being. Even the unborn aren’t safe from the contrived dictates of Spielmann’s screenplay. Revanche is an “idea” of a Hitchcock potboiler, complete with the midmovie death of a major character and a “murderer lives among us” undercurrent straight out of Shadow of a Doubt. Spielmann lets the tension generated by his setup slowly dissipate—the rhythm of movies gradually gives way to the rhythm of life—though this only points up the overall shallowness of his mock morality play. Hitch, at least, had a heart. (Honest, I did like some stuff. That’s coming soon.)

I have to drive about 30 miles each day from my parents’ house in suburban Englewood to the Sarasota Film Festival venues, so I often flip on the car radio to pass the time. It’s a predictable mix of ’60s–’90s theme stations and Southern-twanged religious proselytizers, though I’ve developed a real fondness for “The New Z-100!” (as the between-song bumpers comically emphasize). This has less to do with its music selection—bass-thumping club singles played head-to-head with oldies but goodies like “Stayin’ Alive”—than with the technical glitches that keep popping up. Read more »

The 1,736-seat Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall played host to Sarasota’s opening night presentation, The Messenger, the impressive directorial debut of screenwriter Oren Moverman (Jesus’ Son, I’m Not There, Married Life). It was an inspired choice, not least because of the tonal similarities to the work of Hal Ashby, the subject of one of the festival’s retrospective sidebars. Ashby is a key figure of 1970s American cinema, and I suspect many will note the shared qualities of Moverman’s film (which is on track for an autumn release) with the supposedly long-lost strain of subdued, character-driven storytelling represented by Ashby and his peers. A lesser director would stoke such mournful nostalgia; Moverman goes beyond it, reconstituting his influences, however recognizable, into a vivid present tense. Read more »