Thumbnails May 19

by Tony Medley

The White Crow (9/10) Runtime 127 minutes.R. In this story of his defection, Oleg Ivenko plays Rudolph Nureyev and does all the dancing himself, as he was a Ukrainian dancer from the Tartar State Ballet company. Similar in stature to Nureyev, Ivenko carries the movie and captures his haughtiness and confidence. Unlike most films that center on ballet, the film does not concentrate on the dancing, but on the personalities and tension of the situation. Very well done, this is a longish movie, but I never felt it lag.

Teen Spirit (8/10): Runtime 92 minutes. PG-13: Tightly written and directed by Max Minghella and greatly enhanced by inventive cinematography (Autumn Durald), while it’s a prosaic tale of a teenaged girl, Elle Fanning, entering a singing contest, it’s the music, production values, and the choreography that serve as the surprises of the film. Fanning sings the songs herself and their presentation knocks your socks off. Fanning is buttressed by two scintillating supporting performances. Violet is “managed” by a decrepit-looking but sympathetic Russian, Zlatko Buric. Rebecca Hall plays an ambitious music agent. Both are award-quality (as is Fanning) and add immeasurably to the film.

The Chaperone (8/10) Runtime 107 minutes. NR: Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) was the original “it” girl in 1920s movies. This is the story of her trip from her home in Kansas in 1922 at the age of 16 to take some dancing classes which started her on the road to stardom. Her mother won’t send her unless she has a chaperone, Norma (Elizabeth McGovern). Norma’s relationship with Brooks is mostly a device to tell the fictional story about Norma exploring her past and her involvement with a janitor she meets, Joseph (Géza Röhrig, in a very good performance), resulting in an unrealistic denouement that would have been highly unlikely in the ‘40s, especially in the midwest.

The Best of Enemies (8/10) Runtime 127 minutes. PG-13: This stimulating tale of a simmering, contentious confrontation between a heroic black activist, Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson), and C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), the Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, NC barely scratches the surface of who Atwater really was and where she came from. Henson knocks it out of the park with her performance. At the end there are film clips and comments by the real Atwater and Snow, both of whom are now deceased.

Non-Fiction (7/10) Runtime 107 minutes. R: When a writer’s novel blurs the line between fiction and fact and involves his publisher and his publisher’s wife, tension mounts. This picture in time of the bohemian intelligentsia of the Parisian publishing world is filled with convincing, realistic, thought-provoking slice of life dialogue. The characters’ incestuous infidelity is treated with a wink and a nod. This is a good one, even though it is all talk. In French. Opens May 10.

J. T. LeRoy (7/10) Runtime 108 minutes. R: In the early 21^st Century a writer name Laura Albert (Laura Dern) created a hoax when she wrote Sarah, an apparently first person, autobiographical account of a homosexual male inflicted with HIV named J.T. LeRoy and his struggle with life. She got her sister-in-law Savannah Knoop (Kristen Stewart) to be the avatar of LeRoy and together for six years they pulled the wool over the eyes of the public who read the book. Based on Knoop’s memoir, Girl Boy Girl, while Dern’s performance is annoying, maybe that’s what she’s supposed to be. Stewart gives a credible performance assuming that Savannah really was going along against her better instincts. Since they did it for six years, though, that’s a little hard to swallow, especially when Knoop has made a career out of what she did. Creepy as it is, it doesn’t hurt to repeat here that what they did was blatantly dishonest and reprehensible.

Red Joan (4/10) Runtime 108 minutes. R. This is an astonishingly sympathetic roman à clef of the story of Melita Norwood who was a Russian agent in London for 40 years providing them with the information to make an atomic bomb. While it is factual in what she did, it is 100% rubbish in her motives and her background. It whitewashes a woman who was either a fool or a despicable traitor, or both. She should have been thrown in jail, if not executed, instead of becoming the subject of a fawning movie. The acting is superb; it moves quickly. If you don’t know anything about what really happened, you feel sympathetic for poor ol’ Melita (renamed Joan). But it’s partisan hokum. As an entertainment, it’s high quality. As history, it’s a disgraceful use of art as a weapon, which is right out of the Communist playbook. Even if a movie is entertaining and technically well made, if it’s touting a lie it’s not praiseworthy.

Stockholm (3/10) Runtime 91 minutes. R: A soporific drag.