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REVIEWS
The Visitor
(PG-13) 1 hr 43 min Official Site
Directed by Thomas McCarthy
Starring Richard Jenkins, Hazz Sleiman, Danai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass
In a world of six billion people, it only takes one to change your life. In actor and filmmaker Tom McCarthy’s follow-up to his award winning directorial debut The Station Agent, Richard Jenkins (Six Feet Under) stars as a disillusioned Connecticut economics professor whose life is transformed by a chance encounter in New York City.
Sixty-two-year-old Walter Vale (Jenkins) is sleepwalking through his life. Having lost his passion for teaching and writing, he fills the void by unsuccessfully trying to learn to play classical piano. When his college sends him to Manhattan to attend a conference, Walter is surprised to find a young couple has taken up residence in his apartment. Victims of a real estate scam, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian man, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend, have nowhere else to go. In the first of a series of tests of the heart, Walter reluctantly allows the couple to stay with him...
And it’s through these new found connections with these virtual strangers that Walter is awakened to a new world and a new life.
...The premise is simple and the conclusion preordained, but within this formula McCarthy has crafted a splendid emotional odyssey for this protagonist that pulls us right along for the ride and, in small but satisfying ways, goes against expectation at every turn.
William Arnold Seattle Post- Intelligencer Full Review
...We all know Richard Jenkins even if we don't recognize the name. He's a character actor who has appeared in supporting roles with increasing regularity since the early '80s. The Visitor, written and directed by The Station Agent's Thomas McCarthy, gives Jenkins a rare lead part and he brings to it a mixture of pathos and wit. The chief pleasure of The Visitor is in watching Jenkins' character, Walter Vale, grow. Jenkins never overplays the role, opting for a low-key approach that makes the one scene where Walter boils over all the more effective. A lot of heart goes into the performance; when Walter encounters something that gives him a brief flurry of happiness, we smile with him...
James Bernardinelli ReelReviews Full Review
Flight of the Red Balloon
(NR)
Voyages du Ballon Rouge
1 hr 53 min In French with subtitles
Written & Directed by Hsiao-hsien Hou
Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) is charming but she is a mother snowed under by obligations. With her puppet shows, the classes she teaches and the two children, Simon and Louise, that she has been raising alone since their father left, she hasn't got a minute to herself. To help her, she takes in a young Taiwanese babysitter, Song Fang, who is a student at Paris University. On his way home from school, Simon, who is 7 years old, leads her through the streets and cafés of his neighborhood. Soon, Song Fang and Simon share an imaginary world: a strange red balloon follows them, even in the exhibition space of the Musée d'Orsay. While Suzanne is caught up in a court case involving her tenant downstairs, who refuses to leave, every day, Son Fang becomes more important in her life. In the end, it is Song Fang's Asian perspective that helps Suzanne get to grips with her life.
If I see no film better than "The Flight of the Red Balloon" at Cannes this year, I'll leave a happy man.
...Simon's harried mom is marvelously played by French star Juliette Binoche. She rushes through shots, dropping things with a crash and then tripping over them. She wears half-baked outfits, and her hair stands on end. She's been semi-deserted by her husband, who's in Montreal writing an endless novel. She's feuding with the downstairs tenants, supposedly her friends, over their unpaid rent. The tiny flat she shares with Simon is cluttered, chaotic, claustrophobic. She's almost entirely a disaster in conventional parenting terms, but she loves Simon without reservation, and when we watch her at work -- she reads all the parts for a puppet troupe, and I could listen to Binoche do that for hours -- you realize how lucky he really is to have such a mother.
You can watch this whole movie without even noticing Hou's elegant, theatrically constructed shots, which often go on for several minutes while the characters make sandwiches, bash into lamps, misunderstand each other and generally conduct their lives. Several people walked out of the premiere and I can only assume they were bored by this stuff. I'm not so naive as to think there's a large audience for Hou's films in America (or anywhere else, really). But "The Flight of the Red Balloon" is not arty or difficult in any way, and I genuinely believe that, in its unassuming fashion, it's a masterpiece. Hou has approached one of the best-loved films in cinema history and the iconic, too-often-photographed scenery of Paris, and composed them into a bittersweet comic valentine that honors the originals but feels fully contemporary...
Beyond the Multiplex By Andrew O'Hehir Salon.com
This quietly astonishing picture has the power to carry you outside of yourself and float you away.
Hou's inspiration is Albert Lamorisse's 1956 "The Red Balloon," about a lonely young Parisian boy who is befriended, and seemingly protected by, a balloon that follows him everywhere, even when he's not clutching its string. Hou's picture is a love letter to the earlier one; it also features a lonely boy, Simon (played by Simon Iteanu), and a watchful red balloon. And like Lamorisse's film, it's set in Paris, but through Hou's eyes, the setting is a cross between the dream Paris and the real one, as if Hou were a visitor not from another country but from another time, or perhaps another planet. Hou and his frequent cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping Bing, give the city a pearlescent glow, like a prize to be found within a giant oyster's shell. The look of the movie, along with its gently unfolding, unforced narrative, gives it a momentum that's both soothing and urgent. This is a transportive picture, the kind with the power to carry you outside of yourself; it is itself a flotation device.
Stephanie Zacharek Salon.com
Then She Found Me
(R) 1hr 40min Official Site
Our ART Mission Audiences LOVE This Film!
Synopsis: The move from actor to director can be a difficult one, but actress Helen Hunt makes the transition seem effortless with THEN SHE FOUND ME. Hunt, who also produced and cowrote the film, plays April Epner, a down-on-her-luck schoolteacher who longs to have a child. April's chances of bringing a baby into the world are diminished when her husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick), leaves her, and more bad news follows when her adoptive mother dies. The beleaguered April subsequently forms an unexpected bond with her real mother, the overbearing TV host Bernice (Bette Midler), and takes tentative steps towards motherhood with a new man in her life, the bumbling Frank (Colin Firth). Hunt's film, which is based on the novel of the same name by Elinor Lipman, is likely to win over fans of classic rom-coms such as WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and YOU'VE GOT MAIL. At its heart the film poses some thoughtful observations on what a late-30s woman goes through when she is facing a possibly childless future. But Hunt also stirs some generous scoops of humor into the plot, providing light relief from her central character's plight, and also demonstrating her range as a writer/director. The cast members are uniformly excellent throughout, with Firth and Hunt giving strong performances that are helped along by a supporting cast that provides most of the comic relief. Hunt even finds time to provide a small role for the writer Salman Rushdie, who plays a doctor.
"Variety" says: Thespian Helen Hunt makes an exceptionally deft and self-assured debut as a multi-hyphenate with "Then She Found Me," a smart, subtle and seriously funny dramedy bound to find favor with sophisticated audiences.