Newcity Film

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02/13/12--13:22: Review: The Vow (chan 2799456)

One snowy night, a young Chicago couple exit the Music Box. On the drive home, Paige (Rachel McAdams, “Midnight In Paris”) wants to test the theory that making love in your car guarantees getting pregnant. On Roscoe, a Streets & Sanitation truck rear-ends them. Paige goes through the windshield in extreme slow motion. When she [...]


02/14/12--12:36: Review: Oscar Documentary Shorts (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED Of the fifteen short films nominated for Oscar this year, Lucy Walker’s “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” is as staggering as anything in feature competition. It begins on March 11, 2011, as the waters approach that left 15,372 dead and 7762 missing, as a cataclysm of “found” footage of onrushing waters, bursting fires, [...]


02/15/12--14:19: Review: The Secret World of Arrietty (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED For all the wise artistry in select U.S.-made animated features, typically from Pixar, most screen product targeting our kids and grandkids is too noisy and busy. The saccade-style framings, yabbering dialogue and over-pumped decibels aid and abet ADD. With a gentler velocity and volume, “The Secret World of Arrietty” is a happy alternative from [...]


02/15/12--14:22: Review: The Story of Lover’s Rock (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED Menelik Shabazz’s “The Story of Lover’s Rock” is a doc heavy on talking heads, but also on tantalizing story strands, telling the story of the makers of a 1970s-80s form of underground south London reggae performance (which included comedy) meant to encourage late-night close dancing. “Lover’s Rock” is heavy on the love, for the [...]


02/15/12--14:23: Review: This Means War (chan 2799456)

A candy bar of a film, “This Means War” is a buddy comedy about two hotshot CIA operatives dating the same woman. FDR (Chris  Pine, “Unstoppable,” “Star Trek”) and Tuck (Tom Hardy, “Warrior,” “Inception”) enter and exit this no-nutrient “action-comedy” on high-risk missions. In between they compete to date Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), who runs focus [...]


02/15/12--14:30: Review: London River (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED The acting is fierce in Rachid Bouchareb’s “London River,” which strikes two parents from different cultures together in hope of sparks in the aftermath of the July 7, 2005 London terrorist attacks. Mrs. Sommers (Brenda Blethyn) is a Christian widow from the island of Guernsey, and the elderly Ousmane (Sotigui Kouyaté) a Muslim African [...]


02/15/12--14:31: Review: Declaration of War (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED The bold, hyper, often wondrous “Declaration of War” is a very personal project for director Valérie Donzelli and co-writer Jérémie Elkaïm—who also star—as a couple who find out their newborn boy is very ill. Their response is as much comic as tragic: how do we battle for the very life of our child in [...]


02/15/12--14:33: Review: In Darkness (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED Polish director Agnieszka Holland reportedly waited a decade to make “In Darkness”—another dark telling of an aspect of the Holocaust, no matter how compelling the true story, put her off. (Her “Europa, Europa” was released in 1990.)  In the occupied Polish city of Lvov, a sewer worker who is Catholic but also a petty [...]


02/15/12--14:48: Review: Margaret (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED Once was lost, now not quite saved: Kenneth Lonergan’s 150-minute cut of “Margaret,” the eccentric release of which has yet to be explained because of ongoing litigation, returns to Chicago, in 35mm, for a one-week run, because of the support of local critics. Condensing what I wrote at the time of its fugitive release [...]


02/15/12--15:00: Review: Rampart (chan 2799456)

RECOMMENDED James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed “Big Dog” of American detective fiction, who’s portrayed the history of Los Angeles and, in his latter-day trilogies, the United States, as a sour cesspool that wants only for more fascism to right the ship of state, wrote “Rampart” as an original screenplay, which Oren Moverman, writer-director of “The Messenger” [...]