Wild Tales (***1/2)

With so few venues for shorts, there should be more films like this. The aptly titled Wild Tales is a anthology film that brings together half a dozen stories, otherwise unrelated, that all stem from the brain of Argentinian director Damián Szifron. To be sure, some elements show up in multiple stories — revenge, characters turning smaller problems into larger ones, violent reactions, issues surrounding motor vehicles — but the only thing that truly ties them together is Szifron, whose penchant for creative plot turns and mordant humor makes this a tasty cinematic buffet.

Typical is the brief pre-credit story: A model meets a music professor on a plane, and it turns out they have a common acquaintance…but maybe that’s no coincidence. In a later episode, perhaps the most clever and visually arresting, a minor road rage incident also turns into something more. In each case, Szifron dispenses with lengthy set-ups and puts the viewer right into the story.

The plot twists and humor in each of them takes nothing away from the emotions of the main characters. Even if you wouldn’t go as far as they do to resolve their problems, you’ll identify a little bit with them, or at any rate laugh at them. One actor, Ricardo Darín, has also starred in Nine Queens and The Secret in Their Eyes, two other excellent Argentinian films.

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viewed 4/29/15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/29/15

The Secret in Their Eyes (***1/2)

The first half of this Argentinian foreign-language film Oscar winner is a reasonably conventional mystery-thriller, with a retiring court investigator (Ricardo Darín) revisiting a murder case from decades earlier that he can’t let go of. (American or British viewers will notice that the civil law legal system used in Latin America and much of Europe works differently than the common law system that evolved in England and its former colonies.) The second half, when the mystery seems to have been solved, delves into the personal, the political, and the nature of justice. The climactic scene is far more haunting than the usual revenge thriller that it’s set up to be.

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viewed 5/27/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/3/10

Tetro (**3/4)

Right from the getgo, this movie gets your attention with black-and-white credits that look like something out of the French new wave. Only it takes place in Buenos Aires. Not what you expect from Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, to say nothing of the 1996 Robin Williams dramedy Jack. Vincent Gallo, who once wrote, directed, and starred in the very entertaining Buffalo ’66 (as well as 2003’s notorious Brown Bunny), returns from near oblivion to star as the would-of-been writer sought out by a teenager (Alden Ehrenreich) looking for his brother. But the writer—now an underemployed lighting technician—wants nothing to do with any of his family, especially the father, a genius conductor played by Klaus Maria Brandauer in color flashbacks. (Coppola’s own father was conductor/composer Carmine Coppola.)

After 1997’s The Rainmaker, Coppola made no movies until 2007’s less-commercial Youth Without Youth, and this one is clearly also directed toward an art-house crowd. Even so, what starts out as a small sort of movie with three characters—the third being the live-in girlfriend, who insists on taking in the teenager—develops into a full-scale melodrama, complete with a scenery-chewing Ehrenreich nearly burning down an auditorium. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the big family-history revelations don’t pack the emotional punch intended. But the variation in moods, including light comedy at times, and the cinematic sweep of the end is not without its charms. It could be worth a look for those looking for something different.

IMDB link

viewed 7/1/09 at Ritz East (Landmark Theatres screening) and reviewed 7/9/09

Don’t Look Down (**3/4)

Sensuality reigns in this Argentine tale of a stilt-walking, sleepwalking young man whose chance meeting with a slightly older woman of the world changes his life. Or at least his sex life. As the above description suggests, there are a few quirks in both the story and the young man, who thinks his recently deceased father is writing messages in his diary while he sleeps. Death and sex are significant themes, mixing in a way I didn’t quite grasp. However, sex predominates, as the Spanish señorita teaches the young man how to thrust 81 times without climaxing, not to mention such positions as the “Monkey Coiling Around a Tree.” That this Jean Brodie of copulation is played by lovely Antonella Costa helps, since she’s naked in half of her scenes. (Fairly, lead Leandro Stivelman also reveals “Marlon,” the nickname his appendage is given—yes, after Brando—in the movie.) Undoubtedly, this is a cut above the late-night pay cable flicks it comes close to resembling at times. But classy eroticism, light comic touches, and impressive visuals (not merely the sex, but the stilt-walking) don’t completely make up for the lack of any substantial plot.

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viewed at Ritz East 2 (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/6/09