Digital Week – March 25

In Steven Soderbergh’s typically stylish espionage flick, a married British spy couple (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) attempt to root out the traitors in their midst when they realize they’re being set up from within the agency. David Koepp’s clever script withholds just enough info to maintain interest, while the double crossings are recorded by Soderbergh’s sleek camera, which along with his editing is unsurprisingly impeccable. It all builds up to not much, but it’s a fun 90-minute ride, enlivened by Fassbender’s sturdy presence and Marisa Abela’s scene-stealing drone operator. Only Blanchett’s icy operator seems off-base.

The brazen 1990 robbery of Boston’s Gardner Museum—which netted Vermeer and Renoir paintings along with other priceless objects—has never been solved and the artifacts have never been found; Eric Aronson’s cleverly mounted drama imagines how the heist was planned and executed, with the film’s runtime the exact length of the actual theft. It’s more a stunt than a full-blooded story, but it’s enacted compellingly by a cast led by Paul Guilfoyle (usually cast in subordinate roles, he’s given a chance to be the anchor), Taylor Gray and Alexandra Templer.

This derivative sci-fi flick introduces its heroine Riya, the lone survivor of an attack aboard a space station on the distant planet Ash—her fellow astronauts are dead and she has no memory of what happened. Soon, flashbacks help her piece together the incident along with a rescuer named Brion, whom she supposedly knows but doesn’t completely trust. Director Flying Lotus cleverly conveys Riya’s fraught situation, but even with the gifted and properly intense Eiza González in the lead, the film ultimately doesn’t amount to much more than mere fragments, disappointingly.

In an authoritarian near-future, couples can only have children if they pass rigorous government testing, and director Fleur Fortuné’s stylized debut feature stars Alicia Vikander as Virginia, an assessor who visits the home of Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) to see if they will be worthy parents. The script by Dave Thomas, Nell Garfath-Cox and John Donnelly starts out well, but as Virginia acts more illogically infantilized and, finally, dangerously reckless, the extremes in everyone’s behavior are less than plausibly developed. The final half-hour is a mess, and the committed cast—led by the always magnetic Vikander, a captivating Olsen and Minnie Driver in a memorable cameo as a centenarian—keeps this watchable as it stumbles to end.

Despite the mawkish premise—a young woman, Lily, with a mostly absent father Bob reaches out on Facebook desperate for a connection and finds a man without children (and with her dad’s name) who becomes an unlikely correspondent and, later, friend—writer and director Tracie Laymon has made a sweet-natured study of two lonely people who fulfill each other’s needs, at least for a little while. Most of the credit goes to the quietly affecting John Leguizamo and Barbie Ferriera, with good support from French Stewart as Lily’s deadbeat dad and Rachel Bay Jones as her friend Bob’s wife.

French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest slow-burn drama shows the complex underside of placid village life as a young man returns to his hometown after his employer, the local baker (whom he had a crush on), dies—he is soon at odds with the baker’s son, spends time with his widow and begins a reciprocal relationship with the local priest. In Guiraudie’s world, sexuality brazenly intrudes on a seemingly conservative lifestyle, but here contrivance overpowers a more nuanced exploration of human behavior. Instead of finding depth in these characters, Guiraudie moves them around like pawns; even the quiet ending isn’t as affecting as it wants to be.

This 1923 silent feature was Charles Chaplin’s “Interiors”—an attempt by a one-of-a-kind comic voice desperately wanting to be considered a Serious Artist. Despite the baggage, it’s an entertaining melodrama notable for not starring Chaplin; instead, Edna Purviance stars the eponymous heroine. While not a disaster like Chaplin’s final film, A Countess from Hong Kong, it’s nowhere near the level of Chaplin’s legendary comedies that would come right after this. The restored film (which is the 1976 rerelease version featuring a score composed by Chaplin) has an excellent hi-def transfer, and the extras include an alternate score by conductor Timothy Brock, based on music by Chaplin; intro by Chaplin scholar David Robinson; new video essay by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance; “Chaplin Today: A Woman of Paris,” with interviews of Liv Ullmann and Michael Powell; an audio commentary; audio interview excerpts with Chaplin Studios cameraman Roland Totheroh; deleted shots from the original film; and archival footage.

What begins as a reasonably diverting mystery—a woman named Ana goes to her cousin’s home in suburban Chicago and finds someone else there—quickly degenerates into a ridiculously unpleasant study of a maniac terrorizing innocent people as if Buffalo Bill from “The Silence of the Lambs” was given too much screen time. Director-writer Mickey Keating doesn’t seem to be simply showing such abhorrent behavior but actually reveling in it, negating the sympathy afforded Ana (a nice turn by Vero Maynez) in the beginning.