BRAVE ???
Set sometime around the barbarian invasions when Stonehenge still had a discernible function, this animated Pixar effort immerses us in a magical world of warring clans and old witches. Women weren't given much autonomy in the Dark Ages, but Scottish princess Merida is a feisty young lass who is determined to slip the noose of an arranged marriage. Falling somewhere between Hunger Games's Kat-niss Everdeen and Katherine from Taming of the Shrew, Merida is an excellent heroine and a great role model. If only the movie had decided on which plot line to focus on first, Brave could have been the best proto-feminist story since Mulan. KM
THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES ????
Documentary filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield (Thin, Kids with Money) follows time share king David Siegel and his beauty queen wife, Jackie, as they attempt to build the largest single-family dwelling in the U.S. When the crash hits during the Orlando build, the couple have to shelve their dream home, as well as their innate sense of entitlement. It's all ridiculously over-the-top. Yet, because Greenfield spies the darker shadows beneath the replica antique carpets and gauche vanity portraits, this cruise through the craters of the 2008 collapse acquires the proportions of Greek tragedy as the king falls before our eyes. KM
2 DAYS IN NEW YORK ???
What could be more embarrassing than your dad parading his baguette and sausage? How about a seductive little sister eager to score with your American friends? Take your pick, because Julie Delpy creates a rainbow of colourful flaws and annoying peccadil-los in this self-penned comedy co-starring Chris Rock. Playing an urbanite couple, Rock and Delpy look and feel like a younger, hipper version of a Woody Allen pairing, and you get the feeling that was Del-py's main ambition in scripting this comedy that pivots on culture clashes and sexual conquests. KM
SAVAGES ??
A star-studded strangulation of the senses, director Oliver Stone's latest piece tries to win us over with a story of two potheads who build up a weedy empire in the golden state. KM
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (BLU-RAY)??????
Wow. British director David Lean's 1962 epic has never looked better than in this restored, remastered, high-def, two-disc Blu-ray set from Sony Pictures. I take that back. Presentation-wise, it looks (and sounds) even better in the studio's 50th anniversary collector's edition: three Blu-rays, one soundtrack CD, an 88-page coffee-table book, a 70-mm film frame, all encased in sturdy and attractive white box. Need I describe the movie itself, which is nearly four hours long (and which, by the way, gets a limited re-release this month on the big screen; next Montreal showtime is Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. at Cineplex theatres)? Peter O'Toole got an Oscar nomination in the title role as T.E. Lawrence, the Welsh-born archeologist who became famous in the First World War for his exploits as a British Army officer, uniting the Arab forces in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and Syria against the enemy Ottoman Turks. Omar Sharif was nominated as best supporting actor, too, as were Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, who wrote the script. The movie itself won best picture, Lean got best director, and the crew picked up five other Oscars for best cinematography, sound, original score, art direction and film editing - in other words a triumph. (And for me, as a kid watching it on TV, there was that quicksand scene, so scary it kept me up at night.) Special features include a new interview with O'Toole, reminiscing about the shoot and some material from the original 2001 DVD, such as an hour-long making-of, a short interview with Steven Spielberg and newsreel footage from the movie's New York premiere. JH
PASOLINI'S TRILOGY OF LIFE?(THE DECAMERON, THE CANTERBURY TALES, ARABIAN NIGHTS)?????
Fans of ill-fated Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an openly gay radical intellectual who was murdered in 1975 at age 53, will love this extras-packed box set (three Blu-ray discs or four DVDs) by U.S. art-house distributor The Criterion Collection. His triology - The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972) and Arabian Nights, aka The Flower of 1,001 Nights (1974) - is a lusty, blasphemous, provocative vision of sexuality inspired by the folk tales of medieval Italy and England and the Arab lands. The first film, a collection of 10 stories of sex and death drawn from Boccaccio's Renaissance masterpiece, was considered so lewd it was banned by the Vatican; Pasolini himself appears on screen as a pupil of the medieval painter Giotto. The second film - shot in England - takes eight of Chaucer's 24 tales and milks them for all the bawdy exuberance they're famous for, while the third - shot in Yemen, Ethiopia, Iran and Nepal - recounts the erotic adventures of a young man travelling in search of a slave girl he once loved who, disguised as man, now rules a distant kingdom. Special features on the set are too numerous to detail: documentaries, deleted scenes, interviews and, on The Canterbury Tales, a Pasolini-approved English dub. (You'll find dubs of the other two films on the Blu-rays issued in 2009 in the U.K. by the British Film Institute; their discs are region-locked for Europe, however, so you'll need an all-region player.) JH
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE?(BLU-RAY)?????
"Man Wanted" - no kidding. At the start of this classic 1946 film noir, a sign outside a roadside caf? in rural California lures drifter Frank Chambers (John Garfield) to an unexpected date with destiny: a platinum-blonde hottie named Cora Smith (Lana Turner). Adapted from the crime novel of James M. Cain, the movie is short on actual sex (impossible in Hollywood at the time) but heavy on sexual innuendo, as Frank and Cora shamelessly get it on under the nose of her naive old husband, Nick (Cecil Kellaway), the caf?'s owner. Adultery soon turns to murder as the couple plot to get rid of Nick and run the diner themselves. But justice catches up with them and death - the "postman" of the title - awaits them both. Some fine acting (why is the great Garfield not better remembered today?) and memorable dialogue help the story escape the conventions of its time and speak to audiences today; the sizzle's still there. The Warner Blu-ray sharpens up the image displayed on the DVD the studio released in 2004 but crops it slightly, nothing major. The same extras are here (including an hour-long documentary on Garfield), with one excellent addition: an 86-minute documentary from 2001 that looks at Turner's tortuous relatonship with her daughter, Cheryl Crane. (In the U.S., Warner was also set to simultaneously release the 1981 remake of Postman starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, but that Blu-ray has now been delayed.) JH
TROUBLE IN PARADISE?????1/2
Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is one of my favourite directors. "The Lubitsch touch," as his brand of stylish and warmly funny cinema was called, was evident in such successful Hollywood comedies as Design for Living, The Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not to Be, and Ninotchka, his 1939 satire of Soviet philistinism starring Greta Garbo. The famous opening scene of the 1932 movie Trouble in Paradise is typical Lubitsch: At night in Venice, a lowly garbage collector quietly goes about his work emptying trash bins into a barge, then shatters the silence - and our expectations - by belting out a magnificent rendition of "O sole mio." The joke sets up the main act: A couple of crooks named Gaston and Lily (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins) meet in Venice before heading to Paris, where they rob a French perfume executive named Mariette Colet (Kay Francis); this being a pre-Production Code picture, the thieves get away with it, and Gaston even gets to two-time on Lily with lovestruck Mariette. On DVD in the superb Masters of Cinema series of British distributor Eureka! Video, the film looks crisper and shows more in the frame than the disc available since 2003 from MoC's U.S. counterpart The Criterion Collection. But you lose Criterion's extras; the British DVD has a 44-page booklet and a rather rambling 40-minute video discussion by two experts, and it's region-locked for Europe, so you'll need a region-free player. JH
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