Movie Reviews: Anton Chekhov's The Duel, Toy Story 3, I Am Love

GO  I AM LOVE As unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous as its title, Luca Guadagnino's visually ravishing third feature suggests an epic that Visconti and Sirk might have made after they finished watching Vertigo and reading Madame Bovary while gorging themselves on aphrodisiacs. That it works so well — despite frequently risible dialogue ("Happy is a word that makes one sad") and a notion of feminism that carbon-dates around the time Kate Chopin published The Awakening — is a testament to the film's loony sincerity and seductive voluptuousness. Guadagnino's "social melodrama" is anchored by the magnificence of Tilda Swinton, who plays Emma Recchi, the unhappy, unfulfilled Russian wife of a Milanese industrialist and mother of three adult children; her carnal desires surface after her son's friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), prepares her a plate of perfectly seasoned shrimp. There's nothing especially novel, of course, about exploring the soul-crushing emptiness of marriage to a titan of industry. But I Am Love may be the first film in which the lonely heroine finds inspiration in her daughter's lesberation. For all its corny social studies, I Am Love never forgets the lust that drives its narrative. Swinton and Gabbriellini make an extremely foxy couple, her translucent flesh complemented by his dark hair and beard. Their assignations are all action, little talk; when Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way. (Melissa Anderson) (Arclight Hollywood, Landmark, Playhouse, Town Center)

JONAH HEX Bracingly inept, Chef Boyardee spaghetti Western Jonah Hex is the rare 80-minute movie that you can’t even call “taut.” Rather than teasing out curiosity about its outcast hero’s past, Jonah pelts the viewer with clumps of exposition, including a hasty comic-book–graphic origin montage illustrating the strange case of Hex (Josh Brolin), a former Confederate war machine whose near-death experience gave him the ability to talk to the departed — hardly utilized or meaningful, given the movie’s fatuous killing. We catch up with Hex roaming the steampunk Wild (Wild) West, now a heavy-ordinance bounty hunter with his face half-melted into a permanent growl, a reminder of the former commanding officer, Turnbull, who destroyed his life (played by John Malkovich, pulling his purring villain off the shelf). It’s 1876, and guess-who is plotting to construct a sort-of Doomsday Merrimack to sail into the Chesapeake Bay and level Washington, D.C., for President Grant’s July 4th centenary address. Grudgingly tapped to save the Union, Jonah gets help from strategic Black Friend gadgeteer Lance Reddick and strumpet gal pal Megan Fox, who looks like she’s waiting for the invention of clear heels. Metal outfit Mastodon’s sound track riffs never lock down a groove with the image, interesting actors flit by barely used, and franchise ambitions quietly expire. (Nick Pinkerton) (Citywide)

GO  THE LOTTERY The ginger stepchild of President Obama's election platform, it seems that this country's broke-ass education system is finally stepping up for its media moment. On the heels of a recent 60 Minutes piece on the SEED school in Washington, D.C., and New York Times Magazine cover story focused on education reform comes The Lottery, a precise, impassioned look at the battle between zone and charter schools in Harlem. Director Madeleine Sackler interweaves the stories of four charter hopefuls and their families with an exploration of an issue whose politics have grown so complex that they squiggle even partisan lines. Sackler finds personal, persuasive points of entry for key factors in the debate: Statistics contrasting the annual amounts spent on a child's education and a prisoner's housing are followed by the account of a school lottery entrant's incarcerated father, who laments his lack of choice as much as the choices he made. An electrifying community meeting finds Harlem Success president Eva Moskowitz both vilified and heralded as "our Obama" by local parents, as the unions depend on such poorly understood class and neighborhood tensions to maintain the status quo. Sackler reframes education reform as a moral issue, and it's impossible to look at the fallen faces of kids turned away from a school — of all things — and disagree. (Michelle Orange) (Music Hall)

RAVAAN was not screened in advance of our deadline, but a review will appear here next week.

STONEWALL UPRISING In the early-morning hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, at a dive on 53 Christopher Street in New York City, the homosexual intifada began — an event that remains surprisingly underdocumented. Homo history is bifurcated pre– and post–June '69, evident in the titles of the documentaries Before Stonewall (1984) and After Stonewall (1999). The value of Kate Davis and David Heilbroner's poorly structured doc Stonewall Uprising is that it focuses on the during, assembling minute-by-minute recapitulations of those who were there. Their memories are undeniably powerful, their fury still white-hot 41 years later: "Our goal was to hurt the police. I wanted to kill those cops," remembers John O'Brien, one man on the front lines. The inclusion of some talking heads, however, remains highly questionable: For a film that celebrates the courage of the long-marginalized who fought back, who ushered in the whole concept of gay pride, is Ed Koch really someone you want to talk to? And, tellingly, it's not the queers, but a cop — Seymour Pine, the 90-year-old retired NYPD morals inspector who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn — who gets the last word. (Melissa Anderson) (Nuart)