The imposing shadow of Indiana Jones looms, but this weekend belongs to Narnia, when C.S. Lewis’s second book in the series – Prince Caspian – finally gets the Hollywood treatment to accompany that epic Phish song. This installment has a lot more combat than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as the super-brilliant Peter Dinklage. The Voice’s Ella Taylor says it’s fun, you know, for kids, though adults may decide that, “other than the fights, everything else in the movie is equally bloodless.” Other reviews are generally favorable.
For the grownups, there’s the well-timed release of Reprise, the first feature from Norwegian director Joachim Trier. Part Parisian love story, part cautionary tale about youthful literary success in Oslo, the confident, briskly-paced film is being hailed by the Times’s Manohla Dargis as “a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure. [Trier] crams a world of ideas — about identity, friendship, home and suffering and not suffering for your art — into this tight, controlled film, confident that the rest of us will follow its every plot kink and jump across time.”
In from Germany is the award winning Yella (pictured), a taut, cryptic thriller about a sharp businesswoman (the acclaimed Nina Hoss) rushing around dreary East Germany just one step ahead of her stalker ex-husband and financial ruin. When she falls into cahoots with a white-collar con artist, the film becomes an “allegory about former East Germans yearning to attain capitalist success,” according to the Sun’s Martin Tsai. “It takes the all-too-ordinary fear of being caught by one’s past and makes it as creepily unsettling as the supernatural forces lurking in M. Night Shyamalan’s work.”
This weekend’s other thriller is Sangre de Mi Sangre, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year. It follows the indigent Juan as he scrambles from Pueblo to Brooklyn, where he crawls Williamsburg in search of the father he never knew. J. Hoberman calls it “high-powered humanism… contrived but compelling.” For something more familiar, there’s a new fiesta in the making with Dazed and Confused at the Sunshine Midnight, and Film Forum’s Godard flashback continues with Weekend… all weekend.
