Ron Howard's ode to a town that caught fire

     On Nov. 8, 2018, a raging fire destroyed nearly all of Paradise, Ca. Dubbed the Camp Fire, the conflagration resulted in 85 deaths and the destruction of 18,804 buildings.
     It's hardly surprising that director Ron Howard begins the documentary Rebuilding Paradise with compelling footage taken by those who were fleeing the blaze, in many cases leaving everything behind. Howard and his team do a terrific job of assembling the footage in ways that provide a feeling for an experience none of us would ever want to live through.
    As Howard's movie develops, issues begin to clarify. Climate change helped fuel the fire, as did the negligence of the Pacific Gas & Electric Company.
    But rather than make an issue-oriented film, Howard has chosen to focus on the courage and determination of those Paradise residents who were determined to rebuild their much-loved community.
    Rebuilding Paradise can't be taken as a definitive look at what happened in 2018. It would have been nice, for example, to hear a bit more about the wisdom of attempts to recreate idyllic small-town life in an area that's become fire-prone.
    Moreover, Howard doesn't dwell on Pacific Gas & Electric, showing a town meeting at which a company representative offers an apology. Erin Brockovich shows up, urging people to sue.*
   Still, there's enough sadness and anger among displaced residents to convey the monumental difficulties faced by those whose lives were uprooted; the movie's at its best when conveying the emotions of those who yearn to recover some lost portion of their lives.
     Howard introduces us to a town cop whose marriage takes a hit when he transitions to endless post-fire shifts. The superintendent of Paradise's schools desperately hopes to stage high-school graduation on the school's football field. A town resident who says that he reclaimed his wayward life in Paradise and is among the first to rebuild.
     If Howard doesn't fully engage the scope of the story suggested by the Paradise debacle, he certainly puts a human face on it. Rebuilding Paradise may not dot every "i" and cross every "t," but it takes aim at the heart. Let's face it: There are many worse targets.
*(PG&E eventually offered a $13. 6 million settlement.)

A story that yields to sentiment

Take it as a tribute to actress Gemma Arterton that a movie as contrived and maudlin as Summerland could be even the least bit watchable. Theater director Jessica Swale makes her big-screen debut with a story about an academic writer (Arterton) living in a remote coastal town in England.  Set mostly in the 1940s, the story begins in earnest when Arterton's Alice Lamb is taken by surprise: An escort brings a boy (Lucas Bond) to her home. The reclusive, acerbic Lamb has no interest in the boy who has been shipped from London as part of a program to save the city's children from the Blitz.  Eventually, Alice warms to the boy and him to her with Arterton doing her best to keep Alice from becoming a one-note character. As the story proceeds, we see flashbacks to a time when Alice established a relationship with a young woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) awakened Alice to life's possibilities before declining the invitation to a long-term relationship. Mbatha-Raw's character couldn't imagine a life without children. More an emblem than a character, Mbatha-Raw has little to do beyond looking luminous. The interactions between Alice and Frank -- her new charge -- are well-handled but the movie concludes with a couple of dubious twists, one that milks emotions and the other that strains credibility. Penelope Wilton portrays the aging Alice in opening and closing scenes and the movie features Tom Courtenay as a gentle, compassionate small-town man. Swale mostly ignores social responses to lesbian love during less tolerant days, makes little reference to race, and seems most interested in providing a cinematic massage to soothe troubled spirits. I kept wondering whether the thorny, evidence-driven character Arterton creates possibly could have made it through the soggy third act.

He goes on-line to destroy others

 

   Director Jan Komasa’s Corpus Christi made its mark as one of the best movies of 2019, landing an Oscar nomination in the best-international-feature category. Komasa follows his story about a former convict who poses as a priest with a thriller about a young man who manipulates information to sway elections.

     Tomasz (Maciej Musialowski) flunks out of law school after being accused of plagiarism. When meeting with a review board before his expulsion, Tomasz faces the charge with a mixture of posturing and pleading.     
     Plagiarism? What’s the big deal? He knows the material.

     Significantly, Tomasz argues for fluidity in determining what constitutes plagiarism to a panel of older professors who believe words have meaning. Plagiarism is plagiarism, as one of the professors puts it.

     As we’ll learn, Tomasz understands the malleability of perception all too well, particularly in an online world where fraudulent claims are easily manufactured. And you wonder whether Komasa wants us to see Tomasz as emblematic of a generation that respects nothing but its own ambition and, as such, has no moral center.

    With a law career off the table, Tomasz goes to work for a woman (Agatha Kulesza) who runs a firm specializing in discrediting political candidates. Kulesza turns her character into a specialist in breezy amorality, a talent that Tomasz already seems to have mastered.

     I’ve read that Kulesza’s character appeared in a Komasa previous movie — Suicide Room — and that those who’ve seen that movie (I haven’t) will pick up details that relate to the link The Hater to the previous movie.

    Taken on its own, The Hater turns out to be a somewhat tangled affair that piles an awful lot on its plate, a farrago of contemporary concerns that sometimes feel as if they’ve been crammed into the story lest anything is overlooked.

     Begin with class antagonism. As it turns out, Tomasz’s law-school stint was being sponsored by a wealthy liberal family that knew him as a child. 
    Tomasz, who hails from rural Poland, has his eye on Gabi (Vanessa Aleksander), one of the wealthy family’s daughters. The family’s politics lean left and, at least initially, they treat Tomasz with the kind of mocking condescension only elites can manage. 

    The movie sets out to show that Tomasz is more formidable than others suspect. Tomasz’s key deception involves Pawel (Maciej Stuhr), a liberal candidate for mayor who keeps his gayness secret.

      Tomasz even goes so far as to be seductive with Pawel, taking him to a gay club where the trusting candidate can be photographed on the dance floor. Outing himself as a gay might be tantamount to political suicide in contemporary Poland, which -- of course -- Tomasz knows.

      The Hater tries to unite its many themes toward the end when  —  motivated by Sun Tzu quotes — Tomasz becomes a kind of “lost agent,” a spy who ingratiates himself with his opponent before moving to destroy. 
     He carries his “oppo” tactics to an extreme, hacking into a video game so that he can push a potential assailant toward an unspeakable act of violence. Unafraid of either irony or overstatement, Komasa uses Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a counterpoint to the bloodshed that finally erupts.
     And to add one more ironic fillip to the story, Tomasz engages in the ultimate outrage, turning himself into a hero in the evil drama he has created.
     Of course, it’s all too much. But I suppose that’s what Komasa had in mind — mass murder as the catastrophic consequence of the many themes he has put in play.
     By the movie's end, we, of course, are asking ourselves whether Tomasz has learned anything? The smart money won't be betting heavily on remorse and rebirth.

'Radioactive' lacks the charge of authenticity

      Who knew?

     In the film Radioactive, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre go skinny dipping.

     I don’t know whether the real Madame Curie — winner of two Nobel Prizes — enjoyed such liberated pursuits, but little about director Marjane Satrapi's movie convinced me that I was watching something real. 
    In addition to being mired in period trappings, the movie strains (does it ever) to show both the healthy and devastating impacts of radiation. Scenes of Hiroshima, nuclear bomb tests, and a meltdown at a nuclear plant disrupt Curie's story, as does a hospital visit during the 1950s in which radiation helps a boy with cancer.
     The movie was adapted from a graphic novel by Lauren Redniss; a sweeping, time-shattering approach may have worked on the page. Here, it becomes awkward, even a trifle ludicrous at times.

     As played by Rosamund Pike, Marie Curie stands as an obvious avatar for female brainpower. Sam Riley portrays Pierre Curie, Marie's husband. Also a scientist, Pierre helps Marie with her landmark discoveries of radium and polonium. 

    Radioactive can be groan-inducing, falling prey to creative overreach in scenes such as a dream sequence in which Marie views the future of radioactivity, a replay of an already stated theme: Radiation can be used for good or evil.

     Satrapi, who directed the animated film Persepolis, begins by introducing us to the feisty Maria Sklodowska, a fiercely independent Polish emigre living in France, where she battles with the scientific establishment for lab space. Ms. Sklodowska, of course, becomes Mrs. Curie.

     What the movie doesn't underline, it telegraphs. Consider poor Pierre’s fate. He handles large amounts of pitchblende in the attempt to produce radium. We know it’s only a matter of time until he coughs some telltale blood into his handkerchief. 

     Pierre, as history demands, doesn't succumb because of the dangerous substances with which the Curie team worked. He's run over by a horse and wagon while crossing a Parisian street.
     Health-wise, it can’t be a good sign that Marie insists on taking a glowing green vial to bed with her. 

     The movie also spends time showing that Marie wasn’t afraid of being deemed a social outcast. After Pierre’s death, she had an affair with a married lab assistant (Aneurin Barnard), appalling even the live-and-let-live French.

    But wait. There’s more. 
    Late in the movie, Curie accompanies her by-then-grown daughter (Anya Taylor-Joy) to the battlefields of World War I, where the two hope to save wounded soldiers by using Curie’s X-Ray machine, shown here in a cumbersome portable version. Curie's daughter Irene went on to win a Nobel Prize of her own in physics and chemistry.
     If you grew up watching black-and-white TV, you probably remember that Greer Garson played Marie Curie in Madame Curie, a sanitized 1943 version of the Curie story. 

     No one likely will accuse Satrapi of trying to turn Marie Curie into a saint, but the movie's attempts to maintain a serious, high-stakes tone often spills into crippling melodrama or, worse, didacticism.
     In trying to be more than a standard-issue biography, Radioactive winds up being much less.

'Rental' can't quite subvert genre limits

   

      Two brothers and the women in their lives decide it would be great to spend a weekend in a beautiful home perched on the edge of an oceanside cliff in the Pacific Northwest.

     This foursome spends a delightful weekend escaping from daily worries, enjoying one another’s company, and having the kind of stimulating conversations that would turn anyone into an eager eavesdropper.

     By now, you probably know that I’m not talking about a movie because in movies when people head to an isolated coastal house — no matter how scenic the setting — trouble awaits. 

     So you won’t be surprised by The Rental when the couples under consideration encounter the home's weird, slightly hostile caretaker (Toby Huss). You’ll also be prepped for danger by the alternately creepy and ominous score.

     In his first directorial effort, Dave Franco tries to upset the genre apple cart but only partially succeeds. 
    Franco plays on friction between the brothers based on personal history, an ill-advised sexual encounter, and a hidden video camera that records it — although it’s not clear what purpose such video might serve. Blackmail? Turning these weekenders against one another? Providing kinky kicks for the person who put the camera there in the first place?

     Dan Stevens plays Charlie, a successful guy who’s married to Michelle (Alison Brie). Charlie’s brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White) expresses massive insecurity about his relationship with Charlie’s business partner (Shiela Vand). 

      Josh plays the group’s outlier, a college dropout who served time in jail for beating up a guy outside his frat house. Josh seems more addled than violent, but appearances can be deceiving. 
     Vand’s Mina, a woman of Middle Eastern descent, raises objections to the property manger’s apparent racism. The others seem to want to focus on fun, having planned to hike, down some Ecstasy and party. 
     As the story advances, secrets must be protected amid what we take to be a growing threat that eventually dips into mayhem at the hands of a figure who seems to have wandered into the proceedings from a Wes Craven movie.

     Your tolerance for The Rental depends a lot on how intriguing you find the movie’s four main characters, who might be refugees from any number of indie films. Mumblecore veteran Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies) co-scripted the movie with Franco.
      The screenplay flirts with issues about the tendency of the privileged to evade consequences, but these turn out be glancing blows.          
      Personally, I didn’t find this millennial foursome all that captivating and I certainly could have done without the movie’s horror elements, which arrive … well … because all that ominous music says they must.

Bob's Cinema Diary: July 22 — ‘Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful’

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful

Whatever You think of the iconic photographer Helmut Newton, you'd be hard-pressed to say that the adventurous -- some would say outrageous -- Newton didn't have fun. As Grace Jones, one of Newton's subjects, aptly puts it in the documentary Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful, "He was a little perverse, but so am I." As a photographer, Newton was attracted to nudity, eroticism, and outre poses. A rarefied group of bold-faced names discusses the late photographer's work. Included are Anna Wintour, Charlotte Rampling, Claudia Schiffer, Isabella Rosellini, and most revealingly, Marianne Faithful. Director Gero von Boehm also provides bits of interviews with Newton himself, a devoted husband whose wife June turns up, as well. A Jew who left Germany for China prior to World War II, Helmut expresses no bitterness toward his home country. His work was influenced by the free-flying liberalism of the Weimar Republic in Berlin and by its controlled opposite, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, a chronicle of the 1936 Olympics. I wish the film had done more to explore this strange split. Boehm doesn't include much by way of negative criticism, although he does show a clip in which Susan Sontag accuses Newton of misogyny. Others, it should be noted, see the women in Newton's photograph as domineering and even defiant. Mostly, the film's interviewees present Newton as more committed to putting his stamp on his images. That's a commendable stance for a photographer whose work often reached the level of art but I wondered whether the movie had gotten deep enough into Newton's psyche to be considered the last word on a man who set his own standards and whose work defied convention. Newton died in a car crash in Los Angeles in 2004.

A war-time ordeal brought to the screen

     A few minutes into Czech director Vaclav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird you may think you have fallen back into the 1970s and 1980s, a time when Eastern European cinema indulged itself in stark black-and-white imagery while dipping into bowlfuls of philosophical gloom. 

     Actually, The Painted Bird is a belated adaptation of         Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel, a book initially hailed as a harrowing semi-autobiographical account of Kosinski’s war-time experiences as a child and later thought to be more a work of the author's febrile imagination.

     On film, the imagery by cinematographer Vladimir Smutny practically begs to be seen as masterpiece-level work, calling attention to its dark beauty and substantial compositional virtues. And at nearly three hours in length, The Painted Bird proves a movie with a divided soul, part horrifying war-time drama and part endurance test.

     The story involves a boy (Petr Kotlar) whose father deposits him with a neighbor when the war begins, hoping to keep the boy from perishing in German death camps. It’s clear that the boy — unnamed until nearly the movie’s end — is Jewish but Marhoul treats him as a kind of generic outsider during cascading episodes of murder, rape, torment, and even bestiality. Marhoul tells his story in segments, each titled for a character the boy encounters.

     You know you’re in for a rough ride when, early on, the boy is beaten by his anti-Semitic peers, and taken in by an aging woman named Marta (Nina Sunevic) whom he eventually discovers sitting dead in her chair.

     As the boy forges on, he encounters one horror after another.  A miller (Udo Kier) becomes insanely violent, plucking out the eyes of a man he suspects of sleeping with his wife.  
    Another character (Lech Dyblik) explains the movie’s title. With the boy watching, he paints a small bird’s wings white and then releases it. Quickly, the bird is torn apart by a flock of blackbirds, an inescapable metaphor for the savagery of bigotry that has engulfed the world.

     A seemingly kindly priest (Harvey Keitel) tries to help the boy but places him with a parishioner who sexually abuses the boy and torments him in other ways. 

     When he lands with a young woman (Julia Valentova), we initially believe that the boy finally may have found someone who will treat him kindly. No way. Among other things, the woman turns out to be so lust-ridden she has sex with goats.

     The movie’s international cast also includes Stellan Skarsgard as a German soldier who helps the boy escape. Barry Pepper turns up as a Russian soldier who takes the boy underwing.

     Although the story takes place during World War II, the boy’s encounters with Eastern European peasants seem reminiscent of the Middle Ages, a world of misery and thatched-roof hovels.

    Marhoul infuses the movie with an abundance of brutality as he vivifies the hellish impact of war and deprivation on people whose lives already were mean and insufficient.

    The Painted Bird deserves credit for diving into such deeply disturbing waters, but the line between artistry and ordeal becomes so fuzzy here that by the time the movie concluded, I no longer could distinguish between the two.

A biographical look at author Flannery O'Connor

     Flannery, a documentary from directors Elizabeth Coffman and Mark Bosco, deals with the life of Flannery O’Connor, regarded by many as a master of short stories and, by some, as an essential voice of the South.

     Working in a straightforward style, the directors explore Flannery’s short career (she died in 1964 at the age of 39) and the peculiarities of her personality and her work. 

     In many ways, Flannery serves as a kind of biographical highlight reel, making use of interviews, historical footage, and illustrations that accompany brief readings from Flannery’s work. We follow O’Connor from her childhood to her death with stops at an Iowa writers’ workshop, Yaddo and New York City.

     The interview list includes critic Hilton Als, novelist Alice Walker, and publisher Robert Giroux; the filmmakers also include portions of an interview in which O’Connor talks about her approach to fiction.

     The directors never lose sight of Flannery’s faith. She was a devout Catholic but her work didn’t always convince readers of her faith. She focused on characters she called “freaks” and had a taste for the grotesque reflected in a story — referenced in the film — about a Bible salesman who steals the wooden leg of a woman who thought he might be a lover.

     O’Connor, we learn, began her creative career as a cartoonist — and some of the work we see is quite good. She thought that cartooning would provide her with a means of supporting herself as a novelist.

     It takes about an hour for the movie to reach the subject of race. You’ll have to make up your own mind whether O’Connor was conveying the language and attitude of the people she observed or whether some of that language reflects the author’s views. She did not shy from the “n” word.

     O’ Connor also found herself siding with poet Robert Lowell, with whom she spent time at Yaddo,  during a time when the Red Scare of the 1950s was wrecking lives. Lowell was a staunch anti-Communist. 

    Toward the end of her life, O’Connor lived with her mother on a farm in Georgia where she kept pet peacocks, had an almost “love” relationship, and developed friendships that lasted until the end of her life.

     We hear pieces of O’Connor’s stories and actress Mary Steenburgen, unseen, supplies O'Connor's voice.

     Although informative and sometimes reflective, Flannery never generates much excitement, although it does provide a picture of a segment of the American South and some of its denizens during a time before the toppling of Jim Crow. 

     It might be best to think of Flannery as a conventional documentary about a very unconventional author.

These warriors are immortal ... well ... almost

     The Old Guard tempers generic superhero ploys with an undercurrent of sadness — not the sadness caused by witnessing casualties in the battle of good against evil, but the sorrow of warriors who are killed in battle and then are reborn as immortals. After a few centuries, not being able to die can become a drag.
     But unlike Tithonus, about whom Lord Alfred  Tennyson, wrote a great poem, these immortals don't age. Tennyson's Tithonus suffered from an oversight: He was granted immortality but forgot to include eternal youth.
     Victorian poetry aside, the immortals of Old Guard are curious creations: Although they can’t die, they do feel pain when they’re shot or stabbed. It takes a few moments for them to revive as their wounds, no matter how grave, miraculously heal. 

     And about that immortality: It comes with a proviso. Eventually, the ability to survive any attack wears off. So these “immortals” eventually will die -- not so much at the hands of a foe, but at the bidding of the relentless fate that chose them in the first place.

     Members of The Old Guard tend to be lonely, having long ago lost their closest loved ones and having endured hundreds of years of human history. 

     Led by Charlize Theron — as Andromache of Scythia or Andy, if you prefer — we meet this group of stalwarts when a CIA agent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) hires The Old Guard to carry out a dangerous mission in Somalia. 

     A group of male companions from different historical eras assists Andy; these include two men (Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli) who once killed each other in battle but who since have become deep friends and lovers. A fourth man (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a bit of a loner.

    The group’s dynamics are shaken up when a new member appears. A Marine brought to death's door in Afghanistan, Nile (Kiki Layne) plays an Old Guard newbie, a woman who must adjust to life as an immortal, as well as to the demands of her new colleagues.

     A bit cynical after centuries of being disappointed by humans, Theron’s Andy — also the oldest of the immortals — is clearly in charge.
    Director Gina-Prince Bythewood  (Love & Basketball) includes enough globe-hopping action to add summer blockbuster aura to the proceedings. (Old Guard  bows on Netflix on July 10).

     The movie falters when it comes to a screenplay that includes a profit-driven character who runs a big pharmaceutical company. Harry Melling plays Merrick, an egomaniac who wants to capture the entire Guard, extract DNA samples from them, and make a fortune with the miracle drug he's sure he can develop.

     A sense of fatigue marks the long-lived Andy, appropriate for the character, but a bit enervating, and some of the dialogue could have withstood rewriting.

     Having said all that, The Old Guard is the closest you can get these days to typical summer-movie fare -- and not feel bad about it.
     By the way, if you like Old Guard, the movie’s ending paves the way for a sequel that, I imagine, might surpass the original by finding something better for its surprisingly soulful characters to do than escape the clutches of a greedy corporate menace.

Tom Hanks fights furious battles at sea

     Tom Hanks goes to sea in Greyhound, a drama consisting almost entirely of action sequences built around  Hanks's ability to project steadfastness and decency. The movie pretty much skips everything else.
      Hanks, who wrote the screenplay, and director Aaron Schneider dive headlong into a sleekly mounted 92 minutes of  World War II action, notably, the Battle of the Atlantic.
     Schneider serves up another salute to Greatest Generation valor but -- to be fair -- it's impossible to watch Greyhound without being stunned by the fury of ocean battles in which Hanks's Capt. Ernest Krause takes charge of a destroyer, his first command. The ship -- named The Greyhound -- serves as part of a convoy guarding ships that carry supplies from the US to England.
     Making the journey requires crossing a stretch of the Atlantic dubbed The Black Pit, a section of ocean in which air support for the mission vanishes and Nazi U-Boats appear.
     Schneider begins with a more or less irrelevant prologue set in San Francisco.  Before departing for training, Krause proposes marriage to Evelyn (Elisabeth Shue). She wants to wait until he returns from battle. Shue then vanishes from the story, and we're aboard the Greyhound.
     Sonar beeps, tension, and genuine fear give the movie an aura of realism not always apparent in the digital effects as ships ply rough waters.
     Perhaps remembering such gut-wrenching movies as Das Boot, Hanks and Schneider streamline everything to the point where the other characters hardly matter. But unlike Das Boot, the unrelenting action -- streaming torpedoes and dropped depth charges -- can't help but lose some of its steam.
     So, yes, The Greyhound offers full immersion in the unnerving ferocity of combat at sea, but I sometimes felt as though I were watching an unsatisfying half a movie. Hanks and his director have given us a war-time procedural. They throw character and story development overboard, almost as if keeping more than traces of either might sink the whole ship.

The horror in 'Relic' has some depth

     If you look at the Australian horror movie Relic as an allegory, it becomes considerably more unnerving than you might expect for a movie with haunted house tropes in its DNA.

     Imagine an aging grandmother who sometimes acts exactly like the grandma to whom everyone in her family has been accustomed -- smart, independent, and feisty. 
     But then there are those other times, the occasions when, for no apparent reason, grandma erupts in fits of irrationally, even becoming violent.

     As you might have surmised by now, grandma suffers from advancing dementia, a condition that's alienating her from her relatives and from herself.
     That's the basic set-up of Relic,  but the movie isn't a medical drama. 
     For most of Relic's economical 89 minutes, first-time director Natalie Erika James walks the fine line between demonic horror and a more realistic terror, the horror of dealing with a demented loved one.

     Fortunately for James, an able cast takes the walk with her. Emily Mortimer portrays Kay. Early on, Kay and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) visit Edna (Robyn Nevin), mother to Kay and grandmother to Sam.

     We're prepared for the worst because the movie's opening already has suggested that Edna is in the grips of something weird and unsettling. When Kay and Sam arrive, Edna is nowhere to be found.

     True to genre form, Edna's house has fallen into disordered decay: badly stained walls, as well as a variety of creaks, groans, and eerily projected sounds. 
     A Post-it note Kay finds reads, "Don't follow it," leaving us to presume that the "it" to which the note refers could be an evil presence that comes and goes, haunting the house as it pleases.

     Marrying familiar horror ploys to psychological tensions between mothers and daughters adds to the effectiveness of James's mysterious brew.

     The movie's ending relies a bit more on horror than psychology but also will leave viewers with something about which to argue. More can’t be said without spoilers.  

     Overall, Relic makes its mark as a superior slice of horror that's eerie enough to give you the jitters, and then there's that sobering allegory: the idea that someone we love suddenly can turn into someone else.

Bob's Cinema Diary: July 8 -- 'The Tobacconist' and 'Guest of Honor'

The Tobacconist

The late Bruno Ganz, the great German actor who played Adolf Hitler in the explosive Downfall, makes one of his last screen appearances in The Tobacconist, a movie in which he portrays Sigmund Freud during the psychiatrist's final days in pre-war Vienna. It’s unfortunate in a way that Freud isn’t the main character in a story that focuses on 17-year-old Franz (Simon Morze), a young man whose mother sends him to Vienna to become an apprentice to Otto (Johannes Krisch), a World War I veteran who owns a small neighborhood tobacco shop where Freud buys his newspapers and cigars. Initially interested mostly in losing his virginity, Franz is smitten by Anezka (Emma Drogunova), a woman who — when compared to the sexually inexperienced Franz — already is doing graduate work in the bedroom. Gradually, the story absorbs the gathering doom that precedes the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Anti-Semitism and contempt for left-wing politics divide the city’s population as the independent-minded Otto heads for an inevitable run-in with the Gestapo. Otto doesn't discriminate; he sells to Jews and Communists. Director Nikolaus Leytner’s re-creation of pre-war Vienna sometimes feels as artificial as a stage set. Moreover,  the increasingly disturbing political climate that invades Franz’s dreams, which we see, becomes repetitive.  You also have to buy the notion that a young man from the German countryside would regard Freud as something of a mentor and that Freud would respond. But Ganz gives Freud the weary charm of a man who has lost the certitude of his earlier years as his whole world unravels. The Tobacconist sometimes stays a little too close to the surface, but the movie has just  enough weight to make it worth a look.

Guest of Honor

Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat) has a knack for going his own way and the trend continues with the director’s latest, Guest of Honor. David Thewlis portrays Jim, a restaurant health inspector whose music-teacher daughter Veronica (Layla De Oliveira) willingly serves time in prison for a sexual offense with one of her teenage students.  The catch: She’s doing the time, but didn’t commit the crime. In a screenplay full of guilt and accusation, Guest of Honor touches on a long-ago affair that Thewlis’s character had with his daughter’s music teacher during the time when his wife was terminally ill. Thewlis never has had difficulty conveying the complexities of the characters he plays. But a muddled story and a framing device in which Veronica meets with the priest (Luke Wilson) who’s about to preside over her father’s funeral keep Guest of Honor from catching hold. Moving among various storylines and employing flashbacks, Egoyan never finds enough dramatic momentum and Veronica's encounter with a school bus driver (Rossif Sutherland) who’s obsessed with her takes an unlikely turn. Considering the rich emotional terrain at Egoyan's disposal, it's odd that the most interesting parts of the movie involve Jim’s restaurant inspections, which include a strange encounter with a couple that's preparing a meal in which rabbit will be the main course, preceded by a dish that may not whet your appetite: fried rabbit ears. Did I mention that Jim also takes care of his daughter's pet rabbit? Little about Guest of Honor made we want to subject any of this to further contemplation. If you do wish to give it additional thought  ... well ... that's what comment sections are for.

Deneuve goes full diva in 'The Truth'

Director Hirokazu Koreeda leaves Japan to direct The Truth, a movie about the relationship between an aging actress (Catherine Deneuve) and her grown daughter (Juliette Binoche).  Setting his story in Paris, Koreeda focuses on characters struggling to live with years of lies and resentments — all while simply trying to survive a family visit.

The story centers on Deneuve’s Fabienne Dangeville, a celebrated French actress who’s no longer landing the great roles. It seems as if Fabienne was written for Deneuve who takes over the part with easy command and flashes of callous wit. Accustomed to getting her way, Fabienne refuses to be anything less than the center of attention, even when she’s playing a supporting role in a movie featuring an up-and-coming new actress (Manon Clavel).

Koreeda embeds the story's familial tensions in a typical scenario. Binoche’s Lumir, her American husband Hank (Ethan Hawke), and their young daughter (Clementine Grenier) arrive from the US to help celebrate the publication of Fabienne’s memoir. 

By trade, daughter and son-in-law instantly find themselves in competition with Fabienne. Lumir writes screenplays: Hank acts — although his career seems to be going nowhere and his battles with the bottle have made trips to rehab a regular feature on his calendar.

Lumir regards her mother’s autobiography as a self-aggrandizing work of fiction. Lumir finds Fabienne's attempts to portray herself as a devoted mother laughable. Fabienne never cared as much about her daughter as she did about her career.

Fabienne clearly expresses the priorities that govern her life; i.e., the truths that never made it into her book, which ironically she has entitled The Truth. Fabienne would rather be regarded as a good actress than a good mother, for example. She doesn’t allow for the possibility that one might be both.

The atmosphere isn't venomous, but no one escapes Fabienne's tendency to regard others as instruments of her will. Fabienne's long-time agent and adviser (Alain Libolt) must suffer the shame of never being mentioned in his client's book, for example.

To add a mirror-like twist, Koreeda takes us to the set of the new sci-fi movie on which Fabienne has begun work. She's playing the daughter of a mother who travels into space to avoid dying from a terminal disease. Fabienne portrays the daughter when she’s old, near death, and still dealing with a youthful mother who’s only able to visit Earth periodically. The neglectful mother is playing the neglected daughter.

A running theme of accusation also emerges. Fabienne once out-maneuvered a close friend — now deceased — out of a part that brought Fabienne a coveted Cesar Award. Lumir presses her mother to feel something akin to guilt. Fabienne will have none of it. For her, the world and its occupants exist primarily as source material for her work.

Those familiar with Koreeda’s movies (Shoplifters, After Life) know that he favors an unhurried style that allows an audience to get to know his characters. I wouldn’t say that The Truth represents Koreeda’s best work, but Koreeda knows how to put teeth into a drama that seldom erupts, bleeds, or screams. He may not go for the kill, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know where the wounds are.