Thumbnails Sep 23

by Tony Medley

Gran Turismo (9/10): 135 minutes. PG-13. I’ve seen most of the sports movies made and this is right up there with the best of them like Hoosiers (1986) and Miracle (2004). It tells the true story of a former race car driver (Davaid Harbour) and a motorsport executive (Orlando Bloom) who took a gamer (Archie Madekwe) who had never driven a real car and gave him a chance to be a real Grand Prix racecar driver. It is enhanced by Oscar®-quality sound and cinematography that capture the speed and danger of racing better than anything I’ve seen, including the televised races themselves.
Operation Napoleon (9/10): 115 minutes. NR. Based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Arnaldur IndriĐason and inspired by Winston Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable,” Kristen (Vivian Didriksen Ólafsdóttir), an ambitious Icelandic lawyer, receives a text from her brother who is exploring on the Vatnajökull ice cap (the most voluminous in Iceland) that he and his friends have discovered a WWII Nazi plane. He sends her pictures and is then silent. Shortly thereafter she receives another text from him saying he is in trouble. She thinks he’s joking but quickly discovers that he is serious, and she loses complete communication with him.

Directed by Óskar Thór Axelsson, what follows is a captivating thriller with non-stop tension as she hooks up with her friend, Steve Rush (Jack Fox), to try to find her brother, all the while pursued by nefarious CIA Director Willam Carr (Iain Glen) and his powerful forces.The locations are cold and beautiful, the cinematography (Ȧrni Filippuson) exceptional, and the conducive music (Frank Hall) adds to the tension. With a screenplay by Marteinn Thórisson, and highlighted by fine acting, this is as good a thriller as anyone could want. In Icelandic and English.

Golda (9/10): 93 minutes without credits. PG-13. The always brilliant Helen Mirren (in Oscar®-quality makeup that took 3½ hours per day to apply) shines in this traumatic portrayal of heroic Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister through the harrowing Yom Kippur war in 1973. But she must share the limelight with Director of Photography Jasper Wolf because his cinematography captures her claustrophobic situation battling the war, dealing with her generals and cabinet, Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber) and the U.S., and serious cancer treatments (even though she still smokes incessantly) all cascading down on her at once, with many dark, tight shots and constricted locations, endarkening the ambience to match her problems.

Retribution (9/10). 90 minutes. R. Liam Neeson’s best thriller since the exceptional Taken in 2008. From a brilliant soft start where you suspect you are being set up for danger, he and his two children find themselves trapped by an unknown madman in his inventive and devious scheme. Neeson gives a bravura performance as the tension mounts and his untenable position gets worse and worse. While the car chases border on ludicrous, they are necessary. They usually don’t hand out Oscars® for thrillers, but Neeson deserves a nomination, at least.

Madeleine Collins (8/10): 113 minutes. NR. There have been movies before about people living double sexual lives with lovers in different cities, but they are always men. In this one, though, it's a woman, Judith/Margot (Virginie Efira in a sparkling performance) doing the splitting. In Switzerland she is Margot and lives with Abdel (Quim Gutierrez) and the little girl they are raising. In France, she is Judith and lives with famous orchestra conductor Melvil (Bruno Salomone) and their two older boys. Brilliantly directed by Antoine Barraud, this is an absorbing tale of lies and deception that tracks her complex life as it slowly, inevitably, falls off the rails. In French.

Between Two Worlds (8/10): 106 minutes: This is another scintillatingly directed story by Emanuelle Carrère based on French journalist Florence Aubenas’s bestselling non-fiction investigative work Le Quai de Ouistreham, looking at precarity in French society through her experiences in the port city of Caen. The always special Juliette Binoche goes undercover to report on the lives of women who clean the cross-channel ferry. As she connects with her fellow cleaning-women she becomes aware of the value of the relationships she is making and struggles to justify her deceit with her friendships. Except for Binoche, all the women playing cleaners in the film are actual cleaners, not actresses, which adds authenticity. In French.

Untold: Hall of Shame (8/10): 78 Minutes. TV-14. Netflix. Athletes using anabolic steroids seriously damaged the integrity of sports, especially baseball and its records. This documentary examines this disgrace with interviews with Victor Conte, the head of BALCO, the people who investigated him, like Jeff Novitzky of the FDA, and some of the athletes who participated, like sprinter Tim Montgomery, who honestly says, “When you’re doing a crime, you think you are the smartest person who is committing the crime. Then when you look back you say, ‘that was the dumbest thing I ever thought of’.” Conte rationalizes what he did, “If you’ve got the knowledge that that’s what everybody’s doing and those are the real rules of the game, then you’re not cheating.” To its credit it lays out the case against Barry Bonds, confirming the validity of his absence from the Hall of Fame.

Recommended reading: “The House in the Woods” by Mark Dawson. An enthralling British murder mystery.