Jean-Luc Godard (whose Contempt, starring Brigitte Bardot, is at Film Forum now) famously said that to make a movie all you need is a girl and a gun, and the marketing team for Boarding Gate are banking on it: the print ads show wild Italian actress Asia Argento armed with nothing but a pistol, heels and panties.
Times film critic Manhola Dargis thinks French director Olivier Assayas made the movie just so he could watch Argento strut around in black underwear and punishing heels. Dargis is “dazzled” by the “anti-thriller thriller,” which co-stars Michael Madsen as a struggling businessman and Argento as his ex-lover who gets caught up in some delirious nastiness in Hong Kong. How delirious? In one scene Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon bursts in shouting in Cantonese. (Watch the trailer.)
Zak Penn wrote screenplays for The Last Action Hero and the forthcoming Incredible Hulk, but his sophomore directorial effort, The Grand, required little writing at all. In the style of Christopher Guest, the dialogue is mostly improvised and presented as a faux-documentary, starring Woody Harrelson as the drug-addicted heir to his family’s Golden Nugget casino.
A celebrity poker tournament is his last chance to save the casino, and along for the ride are David Cross, Chris Parnell, Dennis Farina and German auteur Werner Herzog as a creepy Kraut with a menagerie of caged animals. The final game of poker was entirely unplanned, with Penn letting chance decide the film’s end; the Sun’s Meghan Keane says Penn’s “laissez-faire approach to comedy has surprising rewards.”
Among other openings this weekend is the Owen Wilson tween “comedy” Drillbit Taylor, a movie with the tagline “You Get What You Pay For.” A.O. Scott: “I saw it free, and I still feel cheated.” The documentary Planet B-Boy (pictured) covers an international breakdancing competition in Germany. And Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File examines the murder of the exiled Russian agent in 2006, for which many blame Putin. The Times says “extraordinary,” but the Post thinks it "wanders off into too many tangents and mentions too many cases."
