Ray Pride

(Juventude em marcha) Before having the chance to see all of the films from Portugal's little known (until this year) Pedro Costa, the articles written from various stretches of the critical globe suggested an arid, almost unapproachable, punishing kind of storytelling, but it's hardly the case. Largely set in a housing project that replaced a slum populated by émigrés from Cape Verde, a hushed, strange movie like "Colossal Youth" (2006) breathes with its characters' lives. I'd love to have the leisure to soak in its images another time. 154m. 35mm. Also notable this week: his absolutely fascinating but also very amusing documentary, "Where Lies Your Hidden Smile?" following the husband-wife filmmaking duo of Straub-Huillet during the editing of one of their loveliest but most difficult movies, "Sicilia!" There has never been such a depiction of love through cinematic collaboration: you have to love them for showing such love (and such temperament and intermittent intemperance!) toward each other.

"Colossal Youth" plays at the Siskel Film Center Saturday at 3pm, and Tuesday at 6:30pm. "Where Lies…" plays at Siskel Friday at 6pm and Monday at 8pm.

(2007-11-27)

Also by Ray Pride

Blurred
38-year-old Noah Baumbach's fifth feature, coming after "The Squid and the Whale," follows in terse, cutting strokes a short-story writer Margot Zeller (Nicole Kidman) with teenage son, Claude (Zane Pais) in tow to the wedding of her estranged sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Baumbach's wife) at the East Coast island home given to Pauline by their mother
(2007-11-19)

Tip of the Week
In the almost three hours of Pedro Costa's "Vanda's Room," shot in DV over the course of two years, and edited in a reported year from 130 hours of footage, is an epic of pain and beauty, claustrophobia and elegant tragedy
(2007-11-19)

All Yesterday's Costume Parties
Todd Haynes, he of "Far From Heaven," "Velvet Goldmine" and "[safe]" is no stranger to the European intellectual filmmaking tradition, nor to relentless citation and layering. Hoping to write about his new not-a-biopic of Bob Dylan, "I’m Not There" almost feels like trying to write footnotes to footnotes, a circular exercise that would wind even the fabulist likes of Jorge Luis Borges
(2007-11-13)

Tip of the Week
Folly, hubris, ambition, confusion, self-contradiction: how more American can you get? One of the glories of the sensory drench of writer-director Richard Kelly's follow-up to "Donnie Darko" is just how marvelous it is at its moments of greatest over-reach
(2007-11-13)

Damn Fine Pie
(2007-11-06)

Atomix Energy
(2007-11-06)

Coen Road
(2007-11-06)

Tip of the Week
(2007-11-06)

Present Tension
(2007-10-30)

Tip of the Week
(2007-10-30)

Shades of Graze
(2007-10-23)

Missing the Train
(2007-10-23)

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