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Reviews
Film Series: Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2025
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Saturday, 31 May 2025 03:13
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Battleground
Open Roads—New Italian Cinema 2025
Through June 6, 2025
Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65 Street, New York, NY
filmlinc.org
This year’s edition of Open Roads, Film at Lincoln Center’s annual survey of new films from Italy, includes the latest by master director Gianni Amelio, one of the mainstays of the festival circuit since arthouse hits Open Doors (1989), Stolen Children (1992) and Lamerica (1994). In Battleground, Amelio sets his sights on World War I, where two friends, both doctors in a hospital for wounded soldiers, take opposite tacks in treatment: Stefano looks for fakers to send back to the front line while Giulio tries to help patients desperate to go home. When the deadly Spanish flu breaks out, both men must deal with another unpredictable mortal danger. Amelio’s messy, complicated and disturbing exploration of human behavior provides no pat or easy answers.
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| The Time It Takes |
Francesca Comencini’s The Time It Takes is a touching if occasionally saccharine reminiscence about growing up the daughter of Luigi Comencini, one of the most successful filmmakers during Italy’s cinematic golden age. Francesca dramatizes life with a famous father as something that was simultaneously wondrous and strange, culminating in her drug addiction before straightening herself out and becoming a filmmaker in her own right. There are delightful moments on the set of Luigi’s films, and the splendid performances of Fabrizio Gifuni (Luigi), Anna Mangiocavallo (young Francesca) and Romana Maggiora Vergano (adult Francesca) help smooth over the film’s lapses into sentimentality.
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| Familia |
The horrific results of domestic abuse are harrowingly rendered in Familia, Francesco Costabile’s vivid adaptation of a memoir by Luigi Celeste, whose estranged father returns to continue brutalize his mother (a magnificently shellshocked Barbara Ronchi)—while Luigi joins a group of skinheads to separate himself from his awful home life. The film’s bluntness, culminating in a fatal meeting between father and son, is almost too on the nose, but Costabile’s unflinching depiction of the fallout from abuse is undeniably compelling.
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| The Great Ambition |
The Great Ambition, Andrea Segre’s absorbing political biopic about Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, is centered by an extraordinary performance by Elio Germano as Berlinguer, who was at present at the many upheavals in 1970s Italian politics, culminating in the kidnaping and murder of prime minister Aldo Moro.
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| Sicilian Letters |
Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia’s Sicilian Letters is a cleverly constructed crime drama, based on real events, that pits Carello (the great Toni Servillo), a disgraced former politico, against his godson Matteo (Elio Germano, excellent), a mob boss on the run, who begin corresponding and become friendly again—but their relationship is, as current parlance has it, very complicated.
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| Diamonds |
Ferzan Özpetek’s latest film, Diamonds, was a huge hit in Italy, and it’s not hard to see why. Luisa Ranieri and Jasmine Trinca—luminous actresses both—play sisters who run a successful fashion house in 1970s Rome, and the film follows their attempts, as often comic as dramatic, to deal with their most difficult client: an Oscar-winning costume designer. Although it’s an overstuffed 135 minutes, Diamonds is an entertainingly high-gloss soap opera that’s a valentine to cinematic costumes as well as the unbreakable bond among women. The large, mainly distaff ensemble is perfection, but Özpetek intrudes on his characters too often by appearing onscreen to diminishing returns.
May '25 Digital Week III
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 28 May 2025 22:34
- Written by Kevin Filipski
In-Theater Releases of the Week
Drop Dead City
(Pangloss Films)
The mid-’70s were anything but a glorious time for New York City: its finances were a mess, and when Abe Beame became mayor, it was discovered that the city was $6 billion in debt. Michael Rohatyn and Peter Yost’s engrossing documentary does a fine job telling the complex story of the complex machinery among local, state and federal government to try and correct the economic downturn before the city’s default would create a domino effect, taking down banks across the country and internationally.
The famous Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” is the impetus for the title; the directors—Michael Rohatyn is the son of Felix Rohatyn, who headed the committee to fix the city’s finances—make excellent use of archival footage to tell a complicated but straightforward story alongside new interviews with those present for the mess. (RIP, congressman Charles Rangel.)
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(First Run Features)
Irish architect Eileen Gray designed a house for herself in France’s Côte d’Azur in the 1920s, which is the focus of Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s intriguing but diffuse hybrid that alternates documentary footage with reenactments of Gray dealing with rivals like Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect who took it upon himself to “improve” her house by painting murals on the walls, something Gray considered an act of vandalism.
Although Minger and Straub marry nonfiction and fiction with aplomb—and Natalie Radmalle-Quirke makes a persuasive stand-in for Gray herself (who is also seen in actual interview clips)—the end result is more often opaque and on the surface rather than insightful.
Blu-ray Releases of the Week
The Alto Knights
(Warner Bros)
Despite firepower both in front of and behind the camera—Robert DeNiro plays mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, Barry Levinson directs, Nicholas Pileggi wrote the script, Irwin Winkler produces—this mob saga about infighting in the New York/New Jersey underworld never shakes the feeling that it’s déjà vu all over again. Levinson is no Scorsese, who breathed new life into shopworn material in The Irishman; Levinson lets DeNiro ham it up in both roles (and the actor’s prosthetic nose as Costello is unintentionally funny).
A game supporting cast led by Debra Messing as Costello’s wife and Kathrine Narducci as Genovese’s wife has little to do, and the two-hour drama moves along with little urgency. There’s a superior hi-def transfer, but no extras.
(Cult Epics)
Pim de la Parra, a Surimanese-Dutch director who died last year at age 84, made this 1976 drama about Roy, an Afro-Surimanese man, who’s in relationships with two women: Karina, who’s Dutch, and Rubia, who’s Hindu. Historically, the film is important, as the first feature made after Suriname’s 1975 independence.
But even if it’s crudely made, there’s an almost documentary-like realism to it, and it has superb performances by Willeke van Ammelrooy (Karina) and Diana Gangaram Panday (Rubia); Borger Breeveld, however, seems straitjacketed as Roy. There’s a nicely grainy texture on the Blu-ray; extras include a director intro, Ammelrooy interview and archival featurette.
The Woman in the Yard
(Universal)
A widowed mom living with her two children on a remote farm must deal with the sudden appearance of an elderly crone on their lawn who soon terrorizes the family in Jaume Collet-Serra’s glossy but one-note horror yarn written by Sam Stefanak, whose lean script is too obvious and—in its final reveal—risible.
Danielle Deadwyler is intensely unwound as the mom, Peyton Jackson and Estella Kahihaare are quite good as her kids, and Okwui Okpokwasili is properly scary as the title character, but the film is too familiar and not inspired enough, more like an overlong Twilight Zone episode that misses the mark. The film looks good on Blu; extras are two making-of featurettes.
Rautavaara—Complete Piano Works
(Piano Classics)
Although Finnish master Einojuhani Rautavaara—who died in 2016 at age 87—is probably best known for his symphonies and operas, he was prolific in all types of music, as this superb disc by the imposing Lithuanian pianist Morta Grigaliūnaitė demonstrates.
Rautavaara’s solo piano works spanned his entire composing career—indeed, his Op. 1, from 1952, is the vibrant piano suite titled The Fiddlers. Among the many gems are his two expressive piano sonatas—titled Christ and the Fishes and The Fire Sermon and written in 1969 and 1970, respectively—along with sets of Preludes and Etudes and even an arrangement of his otherworldly seventh symphony, Cantus Arcticus. Grigaliūnaitė holds all these varied pieces together with her formidable technique and eloquence.
May '25 Digital Week II
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 22 May 2025 01:28
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Film Series of the Week
Kira Muratova—Scenographies of Chaos
(Film at Lincoln Center, NYC)
One of Ukraine’s greatest directors, Kira Muratova toiled for much of her career under the oppressive Soviet system, and several of her films, pre-Glasnost, were banned or suppressed for years, even decades. This near-exhaustive survey of 16 of her features, made between 1964 and 2012 (she died in 2018 at age 83), shows Muratova as an uncompromising artist whose work artfully dissects quotidian lives with a pinpoint scalpel.
Her early classics Brief Encounters (1967) and The Long Farewell (1971) are messy in the best way, mirroring her female protagonists’ unstable personal and public lives. The Asthenic Syndrome, Muratova’s 1989 international breakthrough, is a profoundly cutting critique of the USSR’s last days told through her dazzling formalist technique. Some Muratova films will be released by Criterion, but to see them on the big screen, visit the Walter Reade Theater by May 25.
(Film Movement Plus)
Vicente Aranda—the best post-Bunuel Spanish director after Carlos Saura—made artfully erotic explorations of female sexuality for several decades (he died in 2015 at age 88). Film Movement Plus has resurrected a quartet of his films, a grab bag of his work that showcases his singular mix of seriousness, sleaziness and potent political commentary. The Girl in the Yellow Panties (1980) introduces a former Francoist writer who’s beguiled by his sexy young niece (played by Aranda’s muse, the great Victoria Abril, in one of her first—and most memorable—roles).
Abril returns majestically in Lovers (1991), an absorbing true-life adultery drama a la The Postman Always Rings Twice, as a widowed landlord who seduces her young tenant as he tries to navigate pre-married life with his virginal fiancée (Maribel Verdu, another superb Spanish actress in one of her earliest starring roles). The other two Aranda films, 1994’s The Turkish Passion and 1998’s The Naked Eye, are like late-night Cinemax softcore flicks distinguished by Aranda’s precise direction and the performances of his leading ladies Ana Belén (Turkish Passion) and Laura Morante (Naked Eye).
In-Theater Releases of the Week
The Kiss
(Juno Films/World Wide Motion Pictures Corporation)
Director Bille August, who made masterly character studies like Pelle the Conqueror and The Best Intentions early in his career, made a late-career classic with A Fortunate Man in 2018, while his latest, an adaptation of German/Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s only novel, is a well-mounted bittersweet romance between an army officer and a crippled but beautiful and headstrong woman.
It’s beautifully shot, compellingly acted and keeps one engaged from start to finish, but August allows a certain sentimentality to creep in that’s not present in Zweig’s more tough-minded novel, and the result is less than the sum of its considerable parts.
(Strand Releasing)
Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s triptych about forms of nontraditional intimacy—titled Love, Sex, and Dreams—comprises standalone works that can be seen in any order; the first being shown here, Love, introduces two colleagues at an Oslo hospital: Marianne, a single straight doctor, and Tor, a single gay nurse, who have conversations about pursuing sexual gratification without love or personal attachments.
Although a fascinating philosophical exercise, Haugerud’s film never achieves any emotional or dramatic resonance since it feels that the director is randomly moving his pieces on a chessboard, with little that’s organic or truly felt in the relationships or character motivation. It will be interesting to see if the other two films can avoid this self-inflicted impediment.
4K/UHD Releases of the Week
Dune Prophecy
(Warner Bros)
The Dune franchise, starting with Frank Herbert’s books, seems the most self-important and humorless of all sci-fi/fantasy worlds, and this prequel—which takes place more than 10,000 years (!) before the events of the original Dune—is another example.
It focuses on the women of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, who foretell the birth of hero Paul Atreides, but—at least in this six-episode telling—the dourness and violence of the protagonists (embodied without much distinction by eminent performers like Emily Watson and Olivia Williams) are dramatized with po-faced inscrutability. The UHD image looks excellent; extras are the featurette Building Worlds and five Behind the Veil featurettes.
(Warner Bros)
Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his ham-fisted but Oscar-winning Parasite is a sci-fi story set in 2054 during a space expedition where our eponymous hero is an “expendable,” taking on dangerous jobs and being cloned every time he dies. It’s a strangely inert, even risible black comedy that purloins Edward Ashton’s underlying novel (pointedly titled Mickey 7) to little effect but stultifying repetition. Bong’s direction—despite accomplished cinematography, editing, sets and costumes—is plodding and his actors follow suit, particularly a sleepy Robert Pattinson as Mickey and hammy Mark Ruffalo and Toni Colette as the colony’s leaders. The film looks quite impressive in UHD; extras comprise several on-set featurettes.
CD Release of the Week
Weinberg—Complete Music for Cello and Orchestra
(Naxos)
Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-96) died before his musical renaissance began with his emotionally shattering Holocaust opera The Passenger, several productions of which were soon followed by the dozens of recordings of his varied orchestral and chamber music. His symphonies and string quartets took precedence in several of these releases, his modest but still significant output of orchestral music for cello gets a hearing on this satisfying disc.
The Concertino for Cello and String Orchestra is an enticing run-through for his weighty Cello Concerto, which is one of Weinberg’s most eloquent large-scale pieces; rounding out this recording is the enchanting Fantasia. Cello soloist Nikolay Shugaev performs impressively, backed by the solid Tyumen Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Yuri Medianik.
Broadway Play Review—“The Picture of Dorian Gray” with Sarah Snook
- Details
- Parent Category: Film and the Arts
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 15 May 2025 02:56
- Written by Kevin Filipski
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Based on the novel by Oscar Wilde
Adapted and directed by Kip Williams
Performances through June 29, 2025
Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45th Street, New York, NY
doriangrayplay.com
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| Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray (photo: Marc Brenner) |
Sarah Snook gives an impressive tour de force of a performance in Kip Williams’ busy and basically anti-Wilde adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Williams has 26 characters in his script and Snook plays them all, many through technological tricks that allow her to play off herself in several roles, as screens show her pre-filmed portrayals of peripheral characters in the familiar story of a young man who wishes for his own portrait to age while he remains young—which happens to his initial enjoyment but later madness.
Using onstage cameras and onscreen video has been on our stages for awhile now, with varying degrees of success or irritation by the likes of Ivan van Hove. Williams joins the fray with his willing and able accomplice—for nearly two hours, Snook jumps in and out of various clothes, shoes, facial hair, wigs, accents. Williams’ staging would seem to be the perfect way to visualize Wilde’s themes of the meaning of art and beauty as well as the perils of vanity and narcissism.
Indeed, it’s initially great fun to watch Snook morph into the selfish young Dorian, the principled painter Basil Hallward and the pleasure-seeking Lord Henry, among many others. It’s also entertaining to watch the behind-the-scenes quick changes occur right onstage with the agile assistance of a half-dozen crew members who brandish cameras as well as paraphernalia Snook uses onstage like a cigarette or drink.
But that fun soon wears out its welcome and the show becomes trying, even enervating at times, as Williams favors cleverness and technology over the elegance and terrifying clarity of Wilde’s story. As bodies start piling up while Dorian indulges in every manner of hedonism and his portrait grows progressively more hideous to mirror his lifestyle, there’s very little of Wilde’s thematic cohesiveness that culminates in a perfectly pitched ironic ending. Instead, we watch Snook alternately overact and underplay several characters as crew members run around the stage with their cameras.
The opening shows Snook quickly becoming several characters in front of our eyes—and the cameras—but that’s merely a tease as the rest of the play pairs the onstage performer with her onscreen image, reaching its apex (or nadir) when several onscreen Snooks attend a dinner party alongside the stage performer. Williams and his talented crew have turned a classic piece of 19th-century Gothic horror into a buzzy 21st-century event, where everything that still makes Wilde’s story hauntingly relevant has been replaced by the superficial pleasures that are Dorian’s downfall.
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