Gustav Mahler’s music is exciting and beautiful, but also filled with angst and neuroticism. The dark spirits contribute to the works’ unique value and appeal, but were hard on the composer himself. To deal with tragedy and psychological problems, he turned to a Vienna neighbor, the granddaddy of psychoanalysis.That Mahler was treated by Sigmund Freud is a historic fact and the subject of a new film, “Mahler on the Couch” — which opens German Gems, a festival of new films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland opening at 7 p.m. Friday at the Castro Theatre.
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The best of intentions cannot rescue a relationship that has run its course — a lesson learned through tears, small explosions and passionless embraces by Dean and Cindy, a young married couple watching the embers of their romance burn out in “Blue Valentine.”As is often the case in a union soured by time and subtle estrangements, neither husband nor wife seems eager to admit that their marriage has been reduced to a tenuous living arrangement, maintained mostly for the benefit of their 6-year-old daughter, Frankie (Faith Wladyka).
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Although the daily experiences of its central subject may sound plucked from a potboiler, “Bhutto” is an earnest, informative and intricately researched documentary about the life and history-making career of Benazir Bhutto, who was killed in 2007 while campaigning in Pakistan. While too conventionally made and sympathetically toned to constitute a knockout or revelatory portrait of the mold-breaking but tainted former prime minister, the film is a high-caliber, tidbit-rich, gripping combination of family saga, celebrity profile, political thriller and Pakistani-history lesson.
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VIZ Cinema in San Francisco closes 2010 with “Mifune x Kurosawa,” a festival celebrating the work of iconic director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune. The lineup runs through Jan. 6 at 1746 Post St., and a special Sunday reception features the classic action masterpiece “Seven Samurai.” Tickets are $10. Visit www.vizcinema.com for more information. Here’s the remainder of the programming:
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A trigger-unhappy lawman realizes both his macho potential and his moral mettle while pursuing a vengeful killer with a dark backstory across a rugged landscape beneath a Gothic sky — among other ingredients from the cupboard — in “Red Hill.”
Clearly, originality and profundity do not figure into this Australian Western and police-suspense film. Still, first-time feature-filmmaker Patrick Hughes delivers impressively unsentimental drama and numerous genre pleasures in this mixture of art house and grind house.
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When “Rabbit Hole” opened on Broadway in 2006, The New York Times review advised the theater to have its flood insurance in good order.“The wrenching new play by David Lindsay-Abaire inspires such copious weeping among its audience that you wonder early on if you should have taken a life jacket,” wrote Ben Brantley, who went on to praise the play for its “honesty, accuracy and humor.”
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Fifteen minutes after Josh Brolin met 13-year-old Hailee Steinfeld for the first time, he was pinning her down with a blade to her throat.No, this was not another shocking case of “When Celebrities Attack.” Brolin and Steinfeld were on the set of Joel and Ethan Coen’s “True Grit” remake, which opened Wednesday, and their introduction preceded the rehearsal of one of the movie’s tensest scenes.
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The stars of “Rabbit Hole,” Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, play mourning parents eight months removed from the death of their son, each so consumed by individual grief that neither is attuned to the other’s emotional and physical needs.It is the kind of domestic melodrama Hollywood studios rarely make anymore, and perhaps the last man you would expect to direct it is John Cameron Mitchell, best known for 2001’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” his seminal comedy about a transsexual punk rocker, and the 2006 bohemians-in-heat drama “Shortbus.”
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You might need subtitles to understand Jeff Bridges’ mutterings in “True Grit,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel.Reprising John Wayne’s 1969 role as irascible U.S. marshal “Rooster” Cogburn, Bridges does not try to fill The Duke’s boots, his whiskey-voiced grumblings a far cry from Wayne’s unmistakable drawl. A character actor rather than a Hollywood monument, Bridges so thoroughly cloaks himself in Cogburn’s darkness that he threatens to disappear altogether.
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It is hard to imagine a story much slighter than Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” a running diary in the life of a Hollywood star — a life rife with malaise, superficial encounters and the occasional, inconvenient reminder that he is something more than the sum of his celebrity.
Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a dad, just not a very attentive one. Yet when he invites daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) over for lunch, he cares enough about her feelings to kick one of his many anonymous conquests to the curb — at least for the afternoon. Cleo is the first to sign the cast on his arm.
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