Eleanor Ringel Cater

“A Separation,” the excellent new movie from Iran (and likely Oscar winner for best foreign-language picture) begins on a feminist note. A couple with obvious marital differences sits before a judge.

She wants to leave Iran. More opportunity, she feels, for both herself and their adolescent daughter.
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By Eleanor Ringel Cater

Possible the only thing wrong with “Pina,” the new 3-D dance documentary by Wim Wenders, is its title. I mean, you don’t call a movie “Jagger” and expect people who’ve never heard of the Rolling Stones to know what you mean.

Pina is Pina Bausch, a bracingly original German choreographer who was friendly with Wenders. They’d talked about making a movie showcasing her work for years. Unfortunately, she died in 2009, only 68.
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Jack London cozies up to Frederick Nietzsche in “The Grey,” a sweaty-palmed action film about survival of the fittest.

On every imaginable level.

En route to an oil rig in Alaska, Liam Neeson and a snack tray of assorted humans crash-land somewhere in the Great White North. There they must survive wolves, weather and each other.
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Oscar nominations are out and probably the only thing Oscar addicts enjoy as much as second-guessing the eventual winners is second-guessing who got nominated and who got snubbed.

Here are some random thoughts on last Tuesday’s naming names:

Best Picture

“The Artist” “The Descendants” “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” “The Help” “Hugo” “Midnight in Paris” “Moneyball” “The Tree of Life” “War Horse”

With the Best Picture category expanded to anywhere between 5 and 10, you’d think there wouldn’t be any snubs. And there weren’t…well, yeah there were.
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About “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close…”

The title alone is like a sitting duck.

It becomes “Extremely Dumb and Incredibly Cloying.” Or “Extremely Self-Absorbed and Dangerously Moronic.” Or…well, I’ll leave it to you.
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The superb new movie, “The Iron Lady,” which stars Meryl Streep as the (in?) famous former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, is about a lot of things.

That said, one thing it isn’t especially about is Mrs. Thatcher’s famously (in?) conservative politics. Yes, her decisions — on everything from taxes to the
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“What do women want?” Sigmund Freud once famously asked.

Well, this particular woman does NOT want “A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s surprisingly tepid and disappointing about Freud and his colleague/rival Carl Jung.

Where is the Cronenberg of yore? The envelop-pushing genius behind such creepy cult classics as “The Brood,” “Dead Ringers” and “Videodrome?”
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Based on John Le Carre’s 1974 best-seller, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy,” takes place in the mid ‘70s, when the Cold War is still in its Big Chill stage.

So, with a mole deeply burrowed into the inner circle of “The Circus” (as British Intelligence is called), something must be done to keep the Commies at bay. The Circus’s ringmaster, if you will, — code-named Control and played by John Hurt with a heavily furrowed brow and deep rasping voice — knows this. But he doesn’t know who said mole is.
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I feel as if I’m committing film-critic heresy, but here goes:

I preferred David Fincher’s American re-boot of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” to the original Swedish version.

I didn’t think I would. After all, we critics are ALWAYS supposed to prefer the foreign version of anything (I think it’s written down somewhere in a secret code, like the DaVinci Code).
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According to Jean-Luc Godard, “The cinema is truth 24 frames per second.”

According to Martin Scorsese and his wondrous new film “Hugo,” the cinema is dreams 24 frames per second.

Not, perhaps, what you’d expect from the man famous for such down-and-dirty pictures as “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets” and “Goodfellas.”

But it is absolutely true of “Hugo,” Scorsese’s astonishing valentine to cinema that’s also the best Film 101 you could ever imagine (or dream of…?)
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