boys with less fortunate backgrounds, and if it doesn’t quite seem to make the point the movie thinks it does, it still leaves plenty to mull over. —Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse)
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR | ASee Sean Burns’ review on p. 25. (Ritz Five)
DIANA Read Shaun Brady’s review at citypaper.net/movies. (Ritz at the Bourse)
ENDER’S GAME Read Marc Snitzer’s review at citypaper.net/movies. (Wide release)
LAST VEGAS | C Seniors say the darndest things in director Jon Turtletaub’s calculated crowd-pleaser. Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline star as childhood pals reunited in Sin City for one last bachelor party. Douglas’ aging lothario aims to finally tie the knot with a bimbo half his age, much to the consternation of the teasing geezers in his entourage. (“I have a hemorrhoid older than her,” Freeman exclaims, in a line emblematic of Dan Fogelman’s underachieving screenplay.) Don’t expect any Hangover-styled hijinks, as these four not-so-bad grandpas stroll through a few family-friendly, mildly amusing comic interludes largely predicated upon product placement and the gang’s
antiquated notions of Rat Pack cool. What passes for conflict concerns an ancient grudge between Douglas and De Niro, here finally hashed out at not inconsiderable length, leaving Freeman and Kline to yuk it up in the background. Douglas gamely sends up his spray-tanned vanity, but the moment he makes eyes at Mary Steenburgen’s sassy lounge singer we know there’s no chance he’s making it to the altar. Freeman busts some graceful moves on the dance floor, Kline shoulders the film’s blessedly few Viagra jokes, and De Niro is a bit more alert than his late-career somnambulist standard. It’s a cast of relaxed old pros with easy chemistry, all of whom seem to be having a great deal of fun. The feeling is almost mutual. —Sean Burns (Wide release)
Mayor Frank Rizzo’s (barely veiled) racist appeals to the law-and-order vote hang thick in the air; MOVE, by most accounts, earned the enmity of their (mostly black) neighbors, but that doesn’t account for what now seems like the insane decision to let the MOVE house burn while fire trucks with water cannons pointed at the site stood idle. As the clamorous panel that followed the film’s screening at the Philadelphia Film Festival showed, the emotions the bombing stirred up are still too raw for polite discussion: In Let the Fire Burn, as well as in Philadelphia, it’s still 1985. —SA (Ritz at the Bourse)
LET THE FIRE BURN | A-
12 YEARS A SLAVE | B+ The most painful portrait in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, based on the true story of a criminally enslaved freeman, is one of its stillest. Noosed to a low-hanging tree branch after scrapping with cruel overseer Tibeats (Paul Dano), Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) struggles to draw breath, his mud-dug tiptoes the only force preventing his trachea from being crushed. All the while, McQueen’s staid wide shot reveals Northup’s fellow slaves in the background, dillydallying through their daily chores, aware of their friend’s plight, but too physically and psychologically fettered to doing anything about it. It’s these difficult observations of powerless people that give McQueen’s third feature such teeth. John Ridley’s screenplay, largely faithful to the 1853 source material, follows Northup’s journey, from blissful Saratoga family man to beaten-raw Louisiana field hand,
The most critical decision Jason Osder made in his MOVE documentary Let the Fire Burn is one you never see on screen. Osder, who grew up just outside the city and remembers seeing the smoke rising above Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985, filmed new interviews with Ramona Africa and Michael Moses Ward (then 13-yearold Birdie Africa), the only people to leave the MOVE house alive, but after discussion with editor Nels Bangerter, he decided not to use them, constructing his film entirely from stock footage. The result is like living through those horrific, city-scarring events in real time, framed by the televised hearings of a special commission convened to examine how a confrontation between police and a tiny but determined political organization ended with 11 dead and an entire block of row houses burned to the ground. The ghost of armed 1960s militancy and former
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at a pace that seems to disregard the rudimentary passage of time. While both his captors (Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassender) and companions (standout Lupita Nyong’o) prove fragile and impressionable, the steadiness of Northup’s humanity is almost superhuman. McQueen is not a perfect filmmaker, but he’s succeeded in his goal of building an unflinching visualization of America at its most shameful. —Drew Lazor (Ritz Five)
ALL IS LOST | A J.C. Chandor’s 2011 debut, Margin Call, took an incisive look at the moral bankruptcy of the banking industry, but was hobbled by its tendency to sit back while actors chewed on page after page of expository dialogue. That makes his follow-up all the more surprising: Aside from a brief opening narration, a few desperate cries for help and a single explosive expletive, Robert Redford remains resolutely silent throughout All Is Lost. It’s a bold decision that even the year’s other movie-star-alone-in-a-hostileenvironment film Gravity didn’t brave. Casting Redford in the lead role undoubtedly gave him a boost, as the 77-year-old actor creates a character out of pure action. Even in his farewell letter we learn nothing of his background or his past; we have no idea why he’s on a boat in the middle of nowhere alone, how long he’s been there or what his plans may be. Redford’s character never panics or makes huge mistakes; he is simply overwhelmed by the indifference of nature. Chandor captures this struggle with an austere classicism, finishing the film with an ending as decisive or ambiguous as the viewer desires. This is, after all, not a film about one man’s fate, but about his learning to face it. —SB (Ritz Five) THE FIFTH ESTATE | BIt’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history. The Fifth Estate, released three years after the disclosure of classified U.S. government documents that brought Julian Assange’s muckraking website WikiLeaks to the world’s attention, is at best the second draft. Working from a script by West Wing alum Josh Singer, itself an adaptation of a book by former Assange associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg, director Bill Condon’s film is something of an info-dump itself, a collection of incidents without an animating point of view. As Assange, Benedict Cumberbatch is only slightly more human than his Star Trek villain, a cunning megalomaniac bent on shining sunlight into
[ movie shorts ]
the darkest of government hidey-holes. On WikiLeaks itself, Assange posted a version of the movie’s script with extensive annotations purporting to clear up its misrepresentations, but there’s little danger of anyone taking The Fifth Estate as fact. —SA (Ritz Five)
✚ REPERTORY FILM EAKINS OVAL 26th Street and Ben Franklin Parkway, theawesomefest.com. Awesome Fest Drive-In: The Car (1977, U.S., 96 min.), Christine (1983, U.S., 110 min.): A night of possessed cars. Fri., Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m., cars $19.33, pedestrians free.
INTERNATIONAL HOUSE 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org. Aziz Ayse (2012, France/Turkey, 78 min.): A reporter befriends a transvestite garbage picker. Fri., Nov. 1, 5:30 p.m., free. Facing Mirrors (2011, Iran, 102 min.): Iran’s first narrative film to feature a transgender character. Fri., Nov. 1, 8:30 p.m., free. Rags & Tatters (2013, Egypt, 87 min.): A prisoner makes his escape during the Tahrir Square uprisings. Sat., Nov. 2, 8:30 p.m., free. Caesar Must Die (2012, Italy, 76 min.): In this Golden Bear winner, prison inmates act out Shakespeare. Wed., Nov. 6, 7 p.m., $9.
PHILAMOCA 531 N. 12th St., 267-519-9651, philamoca.org. Halloween DoubleFeature: Black Devil Doll from Hell
(1984, U.S., 70 min.) and Tales from the Quadead Zone (1987, U.S., 62
min.): Cult horror director Chester N. Turner makes his first in-the-flesh appearance in Philadelphia to present two of his films. It’s kind of a big deal. Thu., Oct. 31, 7 p.m., $12. Animals (2012, Spain, 94 min.): A nightmarish and fantastical coming-of-age story. Wed., Nov. 6, 8 p.m., $10.
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