Following, in alphabetical order, are reviews of selected films screening at this year’s festival. Scroll to the bottom of the page for information about venue, admission, and advance sales.
Chronic Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco is attracted to perverse relationships: his haunting Daniel & Ana, which screened at the 2009 festival, concerned a brother and sister in Mexico City who are kidnapped and forced to mate for a sex video, and this eerie drama stars Tim Roth as a private nurse in LA who’s incapable of setting boundaries with his patients. Moving from one charge to the next—a woman wasting away from AIDS, a family patriarch felled by a stroke, a woman suffering through chemo—he is, in some scenes, a study in devotion, tenderhearted and attentive, and in others, a seriously creepy individual, digging around in his patients’ private lives. (Naturally, his own private life is a mess.) Franco has created a memorable character, one whose extremes of behavior begin to merge in a gray area between selfless giving and selfish need. –J.R. Jones 92 min. Wed 10/21, 8:15 PM; Thu 10/22, 8:30 PM; and Mon 10/26, 12:30 PM.
Funny Girl Barbra Streisand in her 1968 film debut; she plays the Ziegfeld comedienne Fanny Brice, who also happened to be the mother-in-law of producer Ray Stark. Streisand is stunning, but the film is a trial, particularly when the music disappears somewhere around the 90-minute mark and all that’s left is leaden melodrama. William Wyler directed (it was his next-to-last film); the musical numbers were staged by Herbert Ross. With Omar Sharif, Walter Pidgeon, Kay Medford, and Anne Francis. —Dave Kehr 155 min. Sat 10/17, 11:15 AM.
Hugo “The movies are our special place,” remarks the title character, and his words go a long way toward explaining how Martin Scorsese came to make a 3-D children’s fantasy. Adapted from a Caldecott Medal-winning book by Brian Selznick, Hugo tells the story of an orphan (Asa Butterfield) who lives inside the walls of a Parisian train station in the early 1930s, tending to its giant clock and scheming to rehabilitate an antiquated automaton his father left him. The boy’s quest leads him to the angry old proprietor of a little toy shop, who turns out to be none other than the pioneering fantasy filmmaker Georges Melies (A Trip to the Moon). Scorsese transforms this innocent tale into an ardent love letter to the cinema and a moving plea for film preservation, and it’s no accident that a clock figures so prominently in the action: movies may have the power to stop time, but time has the power to erode and destroy celluloid. With Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Chloe Grace Moretz, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, and Christopher Lee. –J.R. Jones PG, 126 min. Sun 10/18, 2:15 PM.
Mia Madre Writer-director Nanni Moretti (The Son’s Room) drew on his own life experience for this study of an Italian filmmaker (Margherita Buy) trying to shoot a movie while, at home, her mother is slowly dying. The domestic scenes, which include Moretti himself as the filmmaker’s brother, are well played but familiar, giving way to ham-handed dream and reverie sequences that illustrate the heroine’s growing anxiety at her approaching loss. Fortunately the movie-production scenes deliver plenty of laughs, courtesy of John Turturro as a vain, temperamental American movie star who blows take after take and dines out on his stories of an imagined creative partnership with Stanley Kubrick. The movie within the movie, starring Turturro as a haughty factory owner clashing with his workers over layoffs, is Moretti’s little inside joke about his own left-leaning early features. In Italian with subtitles. –J.R. Jones 106 min. Screens as part of the opening-night program. Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, $23, VIP ticket $150.
Road to La Paz An unemployed man in Buenos Aries, trying his luck as a private driver, befriends one of his passengers, an old Muslim man with a variety of health problems, and agrees to take him on a trip to Bolivia so he can reunite with his brother. As with many road movies, this warm comedy is more about the journey than the destination, emphasizing the growing intimacy between the principal characters and treating viewers to some lovely images of the Argentinian countryside. Writer-director Francisco Varone sets an agreeably relaxed pace, and the characterizations resonate; by the end of the film, you might feel as though you’ve made a couple of new friends. In Spanish with subtitles. –Ben Sachs 89 min. Varone attends the Wednesday and Thursday screenings. Wed 10/21, 8 PM; Thu 10/22, 8 PM; and Tue 10/27, 12:30 PM.
