I just discovered that I left a very important screening out of this week’s newsletter–one of the best movies not getting released this week. Since the screening hasn’t happened yet (it’s Thursday night), here it is:
Emotional Arithmetic, Castro, Thursday, 8:30. In the best performance of an excellent career, Susan Sarandon plays an American-born Holocaust survivor (the story is set in 1985) trying to hold onto her family and her sanity.
She’s overjoyed by the arrival of two old friends and fellow survivors, but their presence complicates her tricky relationship with her remote, sarcastic husband and their grown son–who appears to be devoting his life to caring for his messed-up parents. Beautifully written, designed, shot, acted, and edited, the Bergmanesque Emotional Arithmetic is simply the best new movie I’ve seen so far this year. Screenwriter Jefferson Lewis wisely avoids heavy exposition, giving us space to wonder how these people became the damaged humans they are. The near all-star cast includes Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, and Max Von Sydow. Read my full review. The closing night presentation of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival‘s Castro Theater run.
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musical of the same name, although a few songs would liven up this very dull creature from Thailand. The story concerns a young architect who comes to a small coastal town, one that was devastated by the 2004 tsunami, to help rebuild on a luxury resort. He stays at a much plainer hotel, and falls in love with the woman running the place. She’s moderately charming, he isn’t, and everything moves like a tortoise on downers. Allegedly, this Thai drama examines the long-term psychological aftereffects of disaster. Any real ideas about these two people as individuals or post-traumatic stress disorder in general never get through the telling. Read 
film doesn’t have to be a documentary. They don’t show us the audience or the backstage; just the performance (actually compiled from three performances). But what an amazing piece of rock and roll performance art they provide! Strange dance moves, great riffs, puzzling and possibly profound lyrics, and a very big suit, all backed by a beat that makes you want to get up and dance.
de a few mistakes, he got to play a psycho. But at least he loves his mother. Come to think of it, maybe he loves her a little too much. I’m not giving White Heat a grade because it has been years since I saw it. But I remember liking it very much. This 
odramatic special effects vehicle made before that was Hollywood’s dominant genre, San Francisco is a classic example of code-era Hollywood trying to have it both ways. It celebrates non-conformist, hedonistic, open-minded joy, but covers itself in a thick layer of Christian moralizing that’s as annoying as it is laughable. But all the weaknesses disappear when the earth shakes and the fires break out. The 1936 version of Showboat was director James Whale’s chance to break out of the horror genre. It starts well, dealing with miscegenation and racism in ways surprisingly advanced for 1936, but it soon descents into dull lifelessness.
at’s not an easy–or perhaps even a possible–goal. The young women in question are the scholarly daughter of a respected rabbi (Ania Bukstein), and a French rebel (Michal Shtamler). They meet at a women’s seminary in Safed, where they secretly undertake the subversive task of helping a dying murderess prepare to meet G*d. They also discover a mutual sexual attraction and fall in love. Writers Hadar Galron and Avi Nesher (who also directed) successfully delve into an extreme and often cruel form of Judaism most of us haven’t experienced, and raise questions about forgiveness, repentance, love, and the need both to conform and to rebel. Part of the Jewish Film Festival.
mselves at him because he was famous; he thought he was irresistible. Such confused thinking permeates Jan Schütte’s clumsy adaptation of three Singer stories. Love Comes Lately follows the adventures of a short-story writer who’s an obvious Singer alter-ego, and dramatizes two short stories whose protagonists are obviously this alter-ego’s alter-egos. Otto Tausig plays all three characters, and yes, they’re all irresistible to women. Schütte manages a few good scenes, but the movie goes nowhere and leads to nothing. Strangely, this mediocre film won not only the festival’s coveted Centerpiece spot, but also a future theatrical run.
writer/director Aditya Assarat reports that “the people are still walking around in a daze, like they just woke up and can’t find their way home.”
good guys in their story–Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and Bruce Wayne/Batman himself (Christian Bale)–all do things they know are wrong. They cross moral lines, they make choices they know they shouldn’t make, and they pay a price. And they do it because the evil they’re fighting drives them to it.
