Goya’s Ghosts, and a few others
Goya’s Ghosts (Spain/USA). Very strong film about the Spanish Inquisition. I very much liked the performances of Stellan Skårsgard as the painter Francisco Goya, and Natalie Portman as one of his models who becomes a target of the Inquisition. You might want to read it as a political statement about the present, but I don’t think it was intended like that; rather it is more of a human story. 9

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (USA). Sidney Lumet is one of my favourite directors but this film is disappointing. It had the feeling that he was trying to do a 1990s Tarantino movie, but omitting any humour. Despite good performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney I did not find any of the characters in the film particularly interesting. The nonlinear narrative created some confusion without adding anything to the story. There were a handful of scenes done very well but overall this heist film lacked suspense; I just did not care about any of the characters or their fate. 3

The Counterfeiters (Austria/Germany). Incredible performance by Karl Markovics as a Jewish concentration-camp inmate recruited for a top-secret project to aid the Nazi war effort: produce counterfeit British and American currency. The film shows the brutality and hypocrisy of the members of the SS as well as the influences on the inmates in an impossible situation: pride, survival, loyalty, etc. The story is framed by a postwar sequence in Monte Carlo; I’m not sure that was really necessary or what the point of the ending was. 10

The Man from the Embassy (Germany). An interesting premise: a midlevel diplomat posted to the German embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, develops a friendship with a girl of maybe 10-12 years old. (The VIFF program note mistakenly calls her a refugee.) The main actor won an award at another festival for this performance, but I thought it was problematic. The character was supposed to be flat, but for me the performance was too closed off to be interesting. 6

Mad Detective (Hong Kong). Again an interesting premise: A brilliant police detective whose idiosyncrasies have gone well past eccentricity (cf. Monk to serious mental illness: he is dismissed from the force after he slices off his right ear to present to the retiring Chief of Police. He sees individuals broken up into their component personalities, and in this way solves cases: you can read the film as having a slightly supernatural interpretation or just that his mind is so intuitive that its insights cannot be processed normally. The premise is interesting but the film dragged too much and the plot was fairly dull. I fell asleep for the last fifteen minutes or so and don’t really care how everything turned out. 5

Today I am planning to see the Australian film The Home Song Stories, in an added screening at 1:30 at PCP, then either Dans la ville de Sylvia or London to Brighton, and tonight probably Empties and Lust, Caution although I also want to catch the documentary Strange Culture.