Reviews

David Lynch spends about 20 minutes, supposedly in real time, cooking his dinner: Quinoa with broccoli and flavorings. While it's cooking he sits down on his porch, lights a cigarette and proceeds to tell us a story about his European travels - and in the process succeeds, as only David Lynch can, in thoroughly messing with our heads. Shot in black-and-white (or is it color denaturized?), it all looks so innocent and realistic. But it's all pure Lynch. What more do you want? (I'm not certain how you're going to see it right now. It was an extra on the first disc release of "Inland Empire" but it doesn't seem to be included in the new Criterion set.)

"Margin Call" is a terrific movie - sometimes funny, sometimes scary, often both at once - about dirty goings-on at a big Wall Street investment firm over a period of about 30 hours. It starts with the discovery of a possible financial meltdown by a lowly (but still well-paid) analyst and goes all the way up the food chain to the CEO - which is where things really get interesting.

This is certainly one of the smartest scripts to be filmed in recent years, giving human faces and voices to the people we have accused (with some justice) of having destroyed the American economy: we have met the enemy, and he really is us. And it's amazing that this is J.C. Chandor's first feature. The pacing is taut throughout, the lighting and camera placement always dead-on. And he has somehow assembled one of 2011's best casts. These are certainly the best roles Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons have have in a decade, and Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto and the ever-reliable Stanley Tucci are equally impressive. Just see this movie.

It infuriates me no end that, now and forever, I will have to identify this movie (which I consider a masterpiece, and I don't use that word lightly) with the qualifier "Not the Michael Douglas movie!" Not only are the titles the same, but they refer to the same thing- the radioactive fallout that rained upon the survivors of the first nuclear bombings. In Imamura's film, this is no cheap metaphor; the whole movie is about the fallout, physical and emotional, from Hiroshima and the war itself. As the deterioration of a couple and their grown niece becomes more grimly clear, the ironic imagery becomes more potent, from the old clock that is reset each night to the stone gods that gradually pile up outside the heroine's door. (These, in turn, are carved by a shellshocked veteran who is compelled, in a series of tragicomic episodes, to attack anything with a motor that approaches the town.) The bombing day itself is shown in piecemeal flashbacks that are coolly horrifying. Yet "Black Rain" ("NtMDm!") can be watched, even repeatedly, because of Imamura's compassion for his characters. I repeat: a masterpiece.