| New Films on DVD |
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| Written by Kevin Filipski | |
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Page 1 of 4  Bella (LionsGate)The Audience Award winner at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, Bella is proof that even supposedly sophisticated film festival audiences are duped by shameless, manipulative, heart-tugging melodramas. Tying the death of an innocent child with the fate of an unborn baby, writer-director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde knows how to tug on the heartstrings, which he does ever more blatantly until the feel-good, lump-in-the-throat climax. As the woman deciding whether to keep her baby, Tammy Blanchard gives an enormously sympathetic performance that seems out of place in Monteverde’s sappy world. EXTRAS: Behind-the-scenes featurette; distribution featurette; music video.  Cassandra’s Dream (Weinstein)London brings out the beast in Woody Allen: this is another drama about murder, as two down-on-their-luck brothers agree to kill a stranger for much-needed cash. Not as amoral and nihilistic as Match Point, Cassandra's Dream unfolds more casually, even undramatically. But Allen’s low-key tone is part of its dramatic strength. Each scene has a narrow focus; once its lone point is made, along comes the next. Colin Farrell and Ewan MacGregor are perfect brotherly foils, and stunning newcomer Hayley Atwell plays a thoroughly sexual creature far more persuasively than Scarlett Johansson did in Match Point. The lone misstep is Philip Glass's music, whose wearying, repetitious rhythmic surges are at odds with the clean, clear elegance of Allen's filmmaking.  Control and Joy Division (Genius/Weinstein)The 1980 suicide of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis at age 23 still hangs over British music; these two films attempt to come to terms with his death. Photographer Anton Corbijn’s first feature, Control looks at Joy Division’s beginnings and Curtis’s difficult life -- he was an epileptic and a neurotic pessimist, a lethal combination -- through rose-colored lenses, though it's filmed in immaculate black and white. Curtis’s widow was a consultant on the film. Still, Corbijn’s enthusiasm for the Manchester scene, the band and Curtis himself (wonderfully played by an eerie Curtis lookalike, Sam Riley), comes through. Joy Division is a 95-minute documentary full of interviews with surviving band members and others. Together, these films paint a portrait of a specific time and place in rock history. EXTRAS (with Control): Corbijn commentary and interviews; making-of featurette; music videos; extended musical performances from the film; (on Joy Division) music video; 75 minutes of additional interviews. .jpg "Image") Frontier(s) (LionsGate)Xavier Gans’ gorefest proves that the French can make movies as bloody and splatter-filled as our own Saw, Hostel, et al. A group of thugs fleeing race riots in Paris takes shelter in a country farmhouse, which is a big mistake: they meet up with gleefully cannibalistic murderers who enjoy torturing their victims before killing them and turning them into stew meat. It’s as disgusting as it sounds, as Gans unblinkingly presents these unrelentingly violent events with the illogic of a snuff film. It’s too bad there are no special features: it would have been fun seeing how all those heads explode.  The Golden Compass (New Line)Based on the first in Philip Pullman’s series of novels, The Golden Compass is an attempt to create another fantastic Lord of the Rings/Chronicles of Narnia franchise. Unfortunately, the film is limply directed by Chris Weitz (of American Pie/About a Boy fame, and lacking fantasy-action credentials) and indifferently acted by a cast led by ice queen Nicole Kidman. Some of the visuals–notably the bear fight–are effective and Dakota Blue Richards makes a believable young heroine, but The Golden Compass is otherwise moribund. EXTRAS: Weitz commentary; several making-of featurettes. |