Screening Room: ‘7 Days in Entebbe’

On March 14, 2018 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

The latest movie from Brazilian director Jose Padilha (Elite Squad, Narcos) is a thriller based on the famous 1976 airliner hijacking that ended up with a standoff in Uganda.

7 Days in Entebbe opens this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

The headline story feels tailor-made for Padilha’s brand of documentary-based world-crisis cinema. In 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv was hijacked. The quartet of kidnappers were two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a pair of German radical allies. Wilfried (Daniel Brühl, stolid and underwhelming as ever) is a publisher of “revolutionary texts” and terror neophyte. He is happy to shove a gun in the faces of the crew he forces to fly to Uganda but gets moral jitters once the reality sinks in. His partner Brigitte (Rosamund Pike, similarly unremarkable) is a more eager tool of the cause, furious over the recent prison suicide of Ulrike Meinhof, of Baader-Meinhof infamy…

Reader’s Corner: ‘A Legacy of Spies’

On October 18, 2017October 17, 2017 By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

The new John le Carre novel, A Legacy of Spies, is out now. And yes, George Smiley is back.

My review is at PopMatters:

It’s been about a quarter century since John le Carré appeared to wrap up his cycle of stories about the tantalizingly inscrutable spymaster George Smiley and his cabal of British spooks locked in mortal struggle with Moscow Centre. The Secret Pilgrim (1990) in which the semi-retired Smiley waxed wise about the entanglements of espionage to spellbound recruits while their trainer reminisced to himself about dark deeds from the past, was a ripping good read but felt like an excuse for le Carré to clean out some unfinished drafts from the bottom of his drawer…

You can read an excerpt here.

Screening Room: ‘Cop Car’

On August 8, 2015August 8, 2015 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Hays Wellford and James Freedson-Jackson have a good old time in 'Cop Car' (Focus) — Hays Wellford and James Freedson-Jackson have a good old time in ‘Cop Car’ (Focus)

Two kids come across a police cruiser in a clearing, seemingly abandoned. They’ve already run away from home, so why not one more transgression? While they joy ride across the prairie, the car’s owner, a corrupt and drug-addled sheriff (Kevin Bacon) who’s just buried a man is coming after them.

Cop Car is playing now. My review is at PopMatters.

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: ‘A Most Wanted Man’

On July 26, 2014July 24, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - NewLeave a comment

Philip Seymour Hoffman in 'A Most Wanted Man' (Roadside Attractions) — Philip Seymour Hoffman in ‘A Most Wanted Man’ (Roadside Attractions)

The latest John Le Carre adaptation is also one of the final film performances of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and just about nearly worth seeing just for him alone.

A Most Wanted Man is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Racket:

This elegant, sparse, and scrupulously acted but dramatically stunted adaptation is like Anton Corbijn’s last film,The American: tasteful in a Europhilic way and not quite human. Although set right in the middle of the post-9/11, post-Cold War chaos that supposedly put an end to the old ways of sleuthing, the film has us harkening back to spy business essentials. These operatives certainly make good use of bleeding-edge gadgetry; after all, one of the great draws of those old spy stories was their showing off of then-new technology, catalog-like. But the fixation is really on those classic skills of patience and mousetrap-springing that the modern espionage thriller has essentially jettisoned like Jason Bourne leaping out a window. It would seem gauche if one of these guys even pulled out a gun. That careful sense of professionals going about their work with grim diligence is some of the best of what Corbijn’s film has to offer. What it doesn’t present is a pulse…

You can see the trailer here:

New in Theaters: ‘Bethlehem’

On March 6, 2014March 5, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-ForeignLeave a comment

Tsahi Halevy and Shadi Mar'i in 'Bethlehem' — Tsahi Halevy and Shadi Mar’i in ‘Bethlehem’

In Yuval Adler’s West Bank thriller, a Palestinian teenager whose older brother is a high-ranking terrorist finds his loyalties divided between family and the Israeli intelligence agent who he’s feeding information to.

Bethlehem is opening this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:

Nothing in Yuval Adler’s tangled-up thriller Bethlehem is far removed from anything else. It’s a crowded film, with agendas, rivalries and frustrations crashing into one another like dancers in an over-capacity club. The Israeli agents and Palestinian terrorists and civilians populating this world of hot extremes are always in close proximity (there’s a fog of gossip and innuendo that makes a mockery of keeping any secret for long) while remaining diametrically opposed in their politics, orders and goals. This might be a war, but the stakes are personal. For both sides, the fields of battle are their homes…

You can watch the trailer here:

New in Theaters: ‘Omar’

On February 20, 2014February 20, 2014 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-Foreign, WorldLeave a comment

Training to kill in 'Omar' — ‘Omar’: Terrorists or freedom fighters?

In the Oscar-nominated thriller Omar, a young Palestinian man in the West Bank is faced with two challenges: First, how to convince his friend that he’d be a good bet to marry the friend’s little sister? Second, and more importantly, how does he escape the law after helping to murder an Israeli soldier?

Omar opens this week. My review is at Film Racket:

For such a razor-sharp thriller, the West Bank-set Omar smuggles a dense packet of ambiguity into its compact running time. This shouldn’t be a rarity, given how many stories there are about the conflict between occupiers and occupied, the dueling taxonomy of “freedom fighters” and “terrorists.” But too often these clashes are related in absolutes, where one narrative is bought into more than another. Hany Abu-Assad’s skillful story wrestles with those grey moralities without spoon-feeding one or the other to the audience. It’s a story about people, not ideologies, but it knows how inextricably the former intertwine with the latter…

Here is the trailer:

New in Books: ‘A Delicate Truth’

On May 22, 2013May 20, 2013 By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

John le Carré‘s 23rd novel, A Delicate Truth, is a tiring piece of work. Not that it’s not a perfectly good read, because it hums along at a swifter clip than some of the master’s classic older works. But it has a sense of moral outrage embedded in the scandal-espionage plotline, about a rogue mercenary operation that goes south, that feels just plain worn out by the modern world’s venality.

My review was published at PopMatters, here’s a bit of it:

Le Carré has long operated as a shadow Ian Fleming. For all the lone-man heroics of the Bond stories, with their (of late) painted-on world weariness, le Carré‘s men and women operated in murkier territories. They root about in cavernous bureaucracies where the deadly game of spying, information-trading, and executive actions are handled by committee meetings no more dramatic than a gathering of insurance sales executives. The only glamour came from the occasional grim satisfaction of a task well handled. In A Delicate Truth, there’s even less for the characters to hang on to, or readers. The world has gone foggy…

A Delicate Truth is currently on sale just about everywhere. Here’s an excerpt.

New in Theaters: ‘Unforgivable’

On July 23, 2012July 20, 2012 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

A writer of historical potboiler novels, Francis (André Dussollier), arrives in Venice determined to do research for his next book. As Unforgivable (Impardonnables) begins, we see that although he is well advanced in years, Francis is a fierce competitor for just about anything, and so has no nervousness about making overtures to his much younger real estate agent. Judith (Carole Bouquet), an ex-model who seems initially to be well past foolish fancies, turns out to be susceptible to his charms. In short order, Francis is set up in a characterful old villa on the picturesque island of Sant’Erasmo, just across the water from Venice, with Judith as his helpful and chic wife…

Andre Techine’s Unforgivable is an unlikely and curiously engaging thriller that’s in limited release now. My full review is at PopMatters.

New in Theaters: Oliver Stone’s ‘Savages’ is a Middling Mess

On July 7, 2012July 7, 2012 By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Oliver Stone’s Savages sets up some fascinating possibilities, few of which it fulfills. Set mostly in an idyllic swath of California beach paradise, the film follows the fortunes of a tightly run and immensely profitable pot operation that gets in the way of a rapidly expanding Baja cartel, which initiates a predictable fight over turf and reputation. Savages might have been a story of innocence lost, the corrosiveness of drug money, the endlessly looping violence of wars abroad and wars at home. Instead, what we got is a lurid revenge melodrama in which killers indulge in bloody excess and everybody does the best they can with some of the year’s worst dialogue…

Savages opened in theaters yesterday. You can read my full review at PopMatters.

Chris Barsanti

Tag: thriller