Netflix Picks 1/18/13-1/24/13

It's that time of week again, where Corey Atad and I pick our favorite offerings on Netflix Instant. My own picks for the week are an Oscar-nominated documentary, the theatrical debut of one of our greatest modern directors, and one of the best and most influential TV series of the last two decades. Check 'em out over at Movie Mezzanine.

Luv (Sheldon Candis, 2013)

I got an early surprise this year with a festival holdover from Sheldon Candis, the remarkable, intimate drama Luv. Tracking a prepubescent boy's harrowing journey of maturation, Luv announces itself quickly by dissipating a magic realist opening for the hard realities of Baltimore, and from there he crafts an affecting look at how violence traps men (in this case, specifically African-American men) in a perpetual drive to prove one's masculinity. As I say in my full review, you could almost run it with Cronenberg's A History of Violence.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

Over the weekend, I started a new column on Movie Mezzanine that picks a film a week for review, and my first selection was Robert Siodmak's dreamy noir Phantom Lady. Better, in my humble opinion, than Siodmak's later The Killers, Phantom Lady pushes Siodmak's use of shadow beyond the usual moral shadings of the genre and into an outright nightmare, where figures appear and disappear and a woman's quest to clear the name of the man she loves is gradually suggested to be the framework for what got him in trouble in the first place. Even its Hollywood ending takes on perverse, oneiric overtones, caught in a literal loop as the smiling face that closes the film starts to look leery rather than elated.

My full piece is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

The Tower (Kim Ji-hoon, 2013)

The Tower starts off agreeably enough, with shots of geometrically aligned staffers in an ostentatious but cheaply made high-rise apartment complex demonstrating that even the lowly workers are not allowed to be a hair out of place for the elite who will occupy the buildings. Once it turns into a disaster movie, however, The Tower loses much of its endearing character and begins to feel like a standard, American effects reel. This is shaping up to be a year in which some West-friendly Korean talent takes Hollywood by storm, yet movies like The Tower show how Hollywood's influence back on one of the most vital areas of contemporary world cinema may be a draining influence.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Netflix Picks 1/11/13-1/17/13

This week's Netflix picks are up at Movie Mezzanine. This week, I single out the unexpectedly rewarding fourth installment of an uneven spy-action franchise, the film that brought Ryan Gosling to my attention, and a stellar, heady comeback from Monte Hellman.

The full post (along with Corey Atad's Canadian Netflix choices) is up at Movie Mezzanine.

The Baytown Outlaws (Barry Battles, 2012)

I have no sensitivity to seeing the South depicted as a caricature, but the caricature in The Baytown Outlaws is so thin I kept wishing Billy Bob Thornton's drug lord would break character so the actor (also the scribe of several great films set in and tied to the South, most notably One False Move) could go behind the camera, do extensive rewrites, and start from the top. But then, who could be mad a film for failing to capture its milieu when it so quickly moves into a Road Warrior-esque travesty? Better to attack that plot development for its poor direction, lifeless action and insipid humor. Baytown slipped quietly through some festivals for a modest limited release, and it will be forgotten as quickly as it passed under everyone's radar.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Something Old, Something New: Lonesome / Girl Walk//All Day

I debuted a new weekly feature this morning at Movie Mezzanine called Something Old, Something New. In it, I take a film released within the last few years (and even more recent once the year gets underway some more and I have more to choose from than January offerings) and make it a double-feature of sorts with an older movie. My first post links Jacob Krupnick's infectious city symphony Girl Walk//All Day, with one of the first such movies New York received, Paul Fejos' sound-silent hybrid Lonesome. The two link up in a variety of ways, and I look forward to building out this feature.

My post is up at Movie Mezzanine.