Slumdog Millionaire

Accolades for "Slumdog Millionaire" from Kenneth Turan:

Who would believe that the best old-fashioned audience picture of the year, a Hollywood-style romantic melodrama that delivers major studio satisfactions in an ultra-modern way, was made on the streets of India with largely unknown stars by a British director who never makes the same movie twice? Go figure.

That would be the hard-to-resist " Slumdog Millionaire," with director Danny Boyle adding independent film touches to a story of star-crossed romance that the original Warner brothers would have embraced, shamelessly pulling out stops that you wouldn't think anyone would have the nerve to attempt anymore.

Read Turan's review of "Slumdog Millionaire" at the LA Times

Synopsis Slumdog Millionaire
Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” But when the show breaks for the night, police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much? Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika, the girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of his story reveals the key to the answer to one of the game show’s questions. Intrigued by Jamal’s story, the jaded Police Inspector begins to wonder what a young man with no apparent desire for riches is really doing on this game show? When the new day dawns and Jamal returns to answer the final question, the Inspector and sixty million viewers are about to find out.

Opened November 12, 2008 Runtime:2 hr. 0 min.
Cast: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irfan Khan
Director: Danny Boyle
Genres: Drama, Urban Drama, Inspirational Drama

Showtimes for Slumdog Millionaire from Fandango

A Christmas Tale

A critics' choice award for the French movie "A Christmas Tale":

It is Christmas weekend in the French provincial town of Roubaix, and three generations of a family are gathering under one roof to, yes, celebrate the holiday and endure each other. It's a family melodrama situation that has been done and overdone every which way but loose, but stifle those yawns: In the hands of writer-director Arnaud Desplechin this moribund conception comes to vivid and astonishing life...

The story of a family Christmas weekend from hell...is the kind of film Hollywood would produce if it had the strength - or the nerve. Review of A Christmas Tale by Kenneth Turan of the LA Times

Synopsis of A Christmas Tale
Junon (Catherine Deneuve) and Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) are the parents of three grown children: Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), a melancholic playwright with a mathematician husband (Hippolyte Girardot) and a tortured teenage son, Paul (Emile Berling); Henri (Mathieu Amalric), the self-destructive black sheep, banished from family events by Elizabeth five years prior; youngest Ivan (Melvil Poupaud), the peacemaker, is married to the beautiful Sylvia and has two eccentric little boys; while a fourth - Joseph, the eldest - died from leukemia as a boy. When the disease reappears again in the family, all are tested to see who can be a donor, and then everyone - including lovesick cousin Simon and Henri's girlfriend, Faunia - return home for a long Christmas weekend. All crowded again under the same roof, solidarity quickly - and hilariously - devolves into feuding, drunkenness and bed-hopping, as everyone struggles to make sense of the mysteries of family, life, and what lies ahead.

Opened November 14, 2008 Runtime:2 hr. 46 min.
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud
Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Genres: Psychological Drama, Drama, Family Drama, Ensemble Film

Showtimes from Fandango

Stranded

Although given very limited released, Kenneth Turan recommends "Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains".

This exceptional documentary tells one of the 20th Century's best-known tales of survival, the story of the 16 young Uruguayans who stayed alive for 72 days in the Andes because they did the unthinkable and ate the flesh of those who died. Candid interview and haunting recreations make this a film impossible to forget and shows that we haven't really known the story at all

This documentary recounts the harrowing story via firsthand accounts with those involved. Director Gonzalo Arijon shoots dramatic reenactments of the events; he intercuts this footage with clips of the press conference that greeted the men on their return, and recently recovered archival photographs.

Opened October 22, 2008 Runtime:1 hr. 53 min.
Cast: Roberto Francois, Roy Harley, Nando Parrado, Antonio Vizintin
Director: Gonzalo Arijon
Genres: Biography, Culture & Society, Tragedies & Catastrophes

Synecdoche, New York

Kenneth Turan gives "Synecdoche, New York" a thumbs up:

"Synecdoche, New York" is beautiful, and I don't just mean the title. A synecdoche, for those unversed in the poetic tropes, is a figure of speech by which a part stands in for the whole, or the whole stands in for a part, or the general stands in for the specific, or vice versa. It's a lilting play on the name of the town of Schenectady, N.Y., where the movie's hero, a melancholy regional theater director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), lives with his painter wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), and their 4-year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein). It hints at the artistic and existential obsessions that come to stand in for the life of an unhappy artist who blankets his life with his work, struggles mightily to understand the first by way of the second, and loses an ability to distinguish between the two. And it makes an irrefutable case for the universality of the individual human experience.
Full review here at the LA Times

Synopsis Synecdoche, New York
Theater director Caden Cotard (Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside.

Opened October 24, 2008 Runtime:2 hr. 3 min. R language and some sexual content/nudity
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Genres: Psychological Drama, Showbiz Drama, Drama

2008 Holiday Season Sneak Previews

By the way, today's LA Times Calendar was devoted to sneak previews of movies to be released this upcoming holiday season. Check it out online: LA Times Holiday Movie Sneak Previews

Moving Midway

This recommendation from Carina Chocano for "Moving Midway" may be one of the last we get from her as I saw during the week that she is one LA Times staff that is being layed off in the latest round of cuts.

When Southern-born, New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire learned that his North Carolina cousin Charles Silver was going to literally uproot the family's ancestral mid-19th century plantation home called Midway and haul it to a quieter location -- far from the encroachment of real-estate developers -- Cheshire's documentary instincts kicked in. And thankfully so, because "Moving Midway," his engaging chronicle of the physical, historical and psychological effect of the undertaking, is also an invitation for a film buff to meditate on the antebellum South's mythic power in stories and film (from "Birth of a Nation" to "Roots"), and a personal genealogical inquiry that uncovers a parallel family line of slave-descendant cousins he'd never met.

One is New York University professor Robert Hinton, whose insight from the African American perspective is enriching and often funny, as when he challenges Cheshire's steel-magnolia mom at a Civil War reenactment on her love of the typically white-only spectacles, and the notion that the conflict was about states' rights more than slavery. Says a smiling Hinton to Cheshire later, "I'm perfectly happy to have them keep fighting the war, as long as they keep losing it."

In this potentially monumental election year for racial progress and demographic change in North Carolina, "Moving Midway" and its house-relocating metaphor plays its own quirky yet thoughtful part in the question of how much the South has truly moved. Wide load indeed.

Synopsis of Moving Midway
New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire is visiting his family in North Carolina when his cousin Charlie Silver tells him something startling. He inherited Midway Plantation, the ancestral home of his and Cheshire's extended family. But now Charlie and his wife Dena have made a decision: They want to move Midway to a new location to escape Raleigh's encroaching sprawl. Charlie's plan provokes immediate controversy in Cheshire's tradition-minded family. For Cheshire, it brings back memories of the wild, strange and magical place Midway seemed when he was a child, and of the stories he heard there. Yet stories, Cheshire realizes, both convey and conceal. The reality of the Southern plantation was that it depended on the institution of slavery. In fact, Midway bred two sets of Hintons, one white, one black. For years, they have rarely encountered each other. But that begins to change as Cheshire sets out to chronicle Charlie's attempt to move Midway.

Director: Godfrey Cheshire
Opened September 12, 2008 Runtime:1 hr. 35 min.
Genres: Biography, Social History, Culture & Society

Showtimes for Moving Midway from Fandango.com