Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me? (Photo by Bruce McBroom)
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BLACK FRIDAY The underused Indian actor Kay Kay Menon is perfectly cast as a crisply correct detective keeping a tight lid on his seething anger in Black Friday, a rigorously naturalistic docudrama about a complex police investigation. The film is a methodical three-hour account of the mixture of luck, instinct and ruthlessness that allowed decorated investigator Rakesh Maria (Menon) and his crew to track down 168 conspirators in the 1993 Bombay bomb blasts in only a few weeks’ time. The 10 powerful explosions had targeted government and business landmarks and were acts of retaliation for a wave of anti-Muslim violence by Hindu nationalists a few months earlier. One edge the cops had was that the bombings had been arranged not by Muslim fundamentalists but by an outlaw faction they understood a bit better: Muslim gangsters. An established smuggler and money launderer with connections in Pakistan, the mobster Tiger Memon (Pavan Malhotra) was equipped to organize the attacks with professional efficiency. Writer-director Anurag Kashyap has made only one other movie, the critically admired crime drama Paanch (2003), but he has worked as a screenwriter for both Ram Gopal Varma (Satya) and Mani Rathnam (Yuva), and there is impressive craftsmanship in his set pieces, such as a foot chase through the Bombay slums that goes on and on until both the suspect and his pursuers are on the verge of collapse. But the movie would be all crisp surfaces without the internal combustion of Menon, as a man who bears down on familiar procedures in order to avoid being overwhelmed by his emotions. (Naz 8) (David Chute)
BREAKING AND ENTERING A genteel Crash for concerned liberals, Anthony Minghella’s ambitious new movie, Breaking and Entering, taps into contemporary urban panic, a state of mind in which the hopeful 20th-century pieties of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” have thinned into a skin stretched tight over the gathering tensions of the postindustrial city. Bold in scope, Breaking and Entering nonetheless plays out too quiet and too loose for its own good. The movie is set in the heart of London’s King’s Cross, a transient neighborhood pocked with dingy projects and gentrified townhouses. When the offices of landscape architect Will Francis (Jude Law) are repeatedly burgled by teenagers, Will follows one of them, a Bosnian refugee, to the apartment he shares with his mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche). Before long, Will too becomes a thief, seeking relief from the rigors of his relationship with his Swedish girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn) in an affair with Amira that implodes when she finds out that Will is using her to get to her son. The dialogue tapers off into dead ends as this most intimate of directors struggles to contain the multiple plots and swollen ensembles. Binoche is radiant as ever, but Amira is so minimally conceived that the actress’ skillful Bosnian accent overwhelms the character and we’re left thinking, hey, there’s Juliette Binoche, talking funny. Minghella invites us to buy these characters as fundamentally good folks whose worst flaw is that they can’t or won’t listen to each other — a bourgeois-liberal sentiment that fails to fully address the roots of the nervous reactivity that defines life in the multiracial modern city. Far from losing myself in this timid movie, I found myself wishing it would speak up. (ArcLight; Broadway 4) (Ella Taylor) See film feature
HANNIBAL RISING Once upon a time, before Clarice and the fava beans, Hannibal Lecter was a wee Lithuanian lad orphaned during WWII and left in the wilds of Eastern Europe to fend for himself and his baby sister, Mischa . Until, that is, the day some gauche, gap-toothed army deserters showed up and turned Mischa into mincemeat. From there, this abysmal prequel to the Lecter trilogy — series creator Thomas Harris wrote the novel and the screenplay — follows the adolescent psycho-in-training as he attends medical school in Pairs, engages in an oddly Oedipal courtship with his Japanese aunt (Gong Li, who also teaches Hannibal some kick-ass martial arts moves when he isn’t seducing her on her family’s ancestral altar) and, finally, embarks on a revenge odyssey so protracted as to make his namesake’s crossing of the Alps seem like a walk to the corner store. Hannibal Rising, which was directed by Peter Weber (The Girl with a Pearl Earring), plays that old game of trying to engender sympathy for the devil by making his victims so loathsome that you don’t begrudge them a hasty demise. The killings are numbingly brutal, though, with endless close-ups (and sound effects) of bloody bowels and flesh being ripped from bone. And as played by French actor Gaspard Ulliel (who seems to have learned his English from watching one too many Bela Lugosi movies), this Hannibal is a stick-in-the-mud altogether lacking in the wit, gourmet appetites and romantic flair required of any surrogate for Sir Anthony Hopkins. By the end of two full hours, it’s only Harris’ head you long to see on a plate. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)
THE LAST SIN EATER Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is arguably the most iconic female villain in film history. The miscasting of Fletcher — still a forbidding screen presence — as a kindly grandmother is only one of many missteps that director Michael Landon Jr. makes in this tale of a guilt-racked 10-year-old in mid-19th-century Appalachia. Little Cadi (Liana Liberato) is convinced that she caused the death of her younger sister and obsessed with absolving her crime by finding the “sin eater” — a member of the community who allegedly grants redemption to the worldly. Liberato muddles through a heavy-handed Christian agenda and barely legible plot as the film follows Cadi through the woods on various sin-expunging missions, sometimes accompanied by an imaginary sprite or her pseudo–love interest Fagan. Toward the end of the film, Cadi and Fagan stumble on a “Man of God,” who teaches them, and the rest of the village, that there are no mortal sin eaters: Only Jesus can nosh on your transgressions. (Selected theaters) (Jessica Grose)
