Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Mostly Martha (Germany 2002, 106 min, dir: Sandra Nettelbeck, cast: Martina Gedeck, August Zirner). No Reservations (USA 2007, 104 min, dir: Scott Hicks, cast Katherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart Bob Balaban)

An expensive meal in a posh restaurant leaves you full and poorer. Next morning, can you remember what you ate? These two films are a mash-up of good cooking and elegant service. So why does one delight and the other push us away from the table?

Let’s cut the cute talk. Mostly Martha is mostly director Sandra Nettelbeck coaxing a charming performance out of Martina Gedeck. If you think Gedeck is just another breezy actress who is a natural for this part, take a look at her in The Lives of Others and The Baader Meinhof Complex. From neurotic chef who never has a hair out of place to brooding terrorist, she’s got an amazing range.

Then try Katherine Zeta-Jones in the same role, directed by Scott Hicks. It’s an easy comparison because both films have the same story almost scene for scene. Didn’t anybody say, “wait a minute, do we really need to copy even the song by Paolo Conte (Via con Me)? Martha is the lonely perfectionist who rules over a chic restaurant kitchen. Everything changes when her niece is suddenly orphaned and must come to live with her. Complications mean a sous chef needs to help her cook. Enter August Zirner (German version) and Aaron Eckhart (USA).

I kind of prefer Eckhart, even though he tries too hard. And Zeta-Jones is okay, even though Gedeck is more gegrubel (brooding). Mostly Martha was a big hit in Germany. No Reservations was a dud here. Why? Every Make & Remake comparison is different, but here I think it is about expectations. German audiences liked sexy aunt Martha slowly getting seduced by a man, and food. It’s Kultur (culture).

American audiences don’t give a shit about Kultur. If it’s food: there should be a lot of it, and if it sex: let’s get their clothes off. Here’s a place where a pie-in-the-face food fight followed by hot sex on the prep counter might have given us so memorable a scene that it would be endlessly played in those Academy Award clip reels of classic movies. But instead we got a gentle remake. Toss the souffle and gives us Ben & Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream ice cream. Fuck Kultur, Americans want to eat.

Title: Mr. And Mrs. Smith
Year: 1941
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Norman Krasna
Stars: Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery, Gene Raymond, Jack Carson

The Story: A bickering society couple discover that their marriage was never valid. He wants to have an affair with his own wife, but she kicks him out for “cheating” with her. Now he wants to win her back, especially after they both attract dismal new suitors…

Why It’s Great: Hitchcock fell in love with Lombard, the original cool blonde, and she was more than happy to work for him, but she wouldn’t make a suspense movie. He agreed to try a straight comedy, just to get the chance to work with her. Lombard is so smart, funny and elegant that you instantly understand how she could get Hitch to change his ways. Tragically, they would never get to do it again, since she died the next year in a plane crash at age 33. Hitch is able to use some of the same tricks for comedy that he uses for suspense. Here’s a great way to build a scene: Establish that someone needs to hear somebody else say something. Then have the other person say a bunch of seemingly nice things, but not what that person wants to hear. We know that tension is building, but the person talking has no idea… until the explosion. Audiences love being put in an information-superior position.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Life According to Muriel (Argentina 1997, 98 min, dir: Eduardo Milewicz, cast: Soledad Villamil, Florencia Camiletti, Ines Estevez, Jorge Perugorria).

When an actress bursts out in full stardom we often wonder where she has been all of our movies lives. How could someone so appealing and sexy be hidden so long?

The answer with Soledad Villamil, the amazing presence in the Academy Award winner, The Secret of Their Eyes, can be found in this little know Argentinean film about a mother and daughter’s journey to Patagonia.

Escaping from an unhappy relationship, Laura (Soledad) flees Buenos Aires with only the possessions she can stuff in her car, including her daughter, Muriel (Florencia Camiletti). When they’ve driven far enough to take a breath, Laura pauses at a roadside viewpoint high above a beautiful Patagonian lake. While they take a picture of themselves in their new freedom, the car rolls forward and plunges into the lake.

Is it comedy or tragedy? A little of both as they trudge to a nearby inn run by Mirta (Ines Estevez), another refugee from a bad relationship. The inn becomes their fortress as the three forge a friendship that cannot be penetrated by men (nor, for that matter, can they be penetrated by men). Until Ernesto (Jorge Perugorria), Muriel’s father, shows up and camps in his car until he captures Muriel’s heart. Laura eventually succumbs, and maybe, just maybe, the little family can make it work this time.

The mixture of anger, hurt and self-preservation that flips in an instant to sensuous need is all here in Soledad Villamil’s performance. It is a blueprint for the qualities that have made her so special. She is so easy to look at you shouldn’t ignore the performance of the daughter. It is, after all, life according to her (Muriel). This film has a core of heart and soul that spins in all directions, enveloping the characters and the landscape in a glow that just feels good.

Title: The Red House
Year: 1947
Director: Delmer Daves
Writer: Delmer Daves, from the novel by George Agnew Chamberlain
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Lon McCallister, Judith Anderson (Citizen Kane), Rory Calhoun, Arlene Roberts, Julie London

The Story: A subsistence farmer lusts after his foster daughter, who loves an upstanding farmhand, who dates a teen seductress, who runs around with a randy gamekeeper, who protects the sinister secrets of… the red house!

Why It’s Great: Daves made some great movies, but he’s better remembered today by fans of high camp who love the overheated melodramas that made him very rich at the end of his career, movies like A Summer Place and Parrish. It’s impossible to take those Troy Donahue movies seriously, so I was shocked to discover how powerful and disturbing this movie is. The plot isn’t even all that different –they’re all cautionary tales about budding teen sexuality, but this one still works. Those later movies are famous for their bombastic dialogue. Here Daves is smart enough to give most of his lyrical flourishes to tough-as-granite Robinson, who works them into a powerful portrait of bottomless madness. He can really sell a line like “We humans weren’t made that way, we were born helpless…”

Title: Lover Come Back
Year: 1961
Director: Delbert Mann (Marty)
Writers: Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning
Stars: Rock Hudson, Doris Day, Tony Randall, Edie Adams

The Story: She’s a go-getter ad exec who believes in impressing the client with quality. He’s a Don Draper-ish lothario who gets accounts by getting the client laid. When she finally decides to beat him at his own game, he lets her play right into his hands, but she’s determined to prove him wrong in the end.

Why It’s Great: Both “Mad Men” and Down With Love (which spoofed this series of movies) seem to assume that only now can look back with appropriate horror at the corporate culture and neanderthal male shananigans in the early ’60s, so it’s shocking to see a downright nasty satire like this hitting all the same targets while everything was still going on. When Hudson has to mollify a showgirl, he casts her in a fake ad campaign for a non-existent product called Vip, but then the ad campaign gets released accidentally… The ads don’t say what it is, only that it’ll solve all problems. The public is sold on it right away. “This will be the most convincing demonstration of the power of advertising ever conceived, you have sold a product that doesn’t exist!” At the time, this was outrageous satire, today it’s everyday reality. Steve Jobs based his whole career on this movie.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

The Stoning of Sorayra M. (USA 2008, 114 min, dir: Cyrus Nowrasteh, cast: Mozhan Marno, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Jim Caviezel)

Jim Caviezel played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. In The Stoning of Soraya M. he plays a reporter happening upon a story about a modern woman who must walk her own steps to her village’s version of the crucifixion. This actor’s personal passion expressed in his adopting of special needs children, and his support of politically incorrect causes; makes his participation in this singular, powerful movie all the more interesting.

A movie is what it is on screen: that is everything. Or is it? The writer/director of The Stoning of Soraya M. is known for taking on non PC subjects and making statements of personal conviction. Both Caviezel and director Cyrus Nowrasteh are drawn to a story that defies audience sensitivities to paint truth, harshness, courage and sadness. Soraya (Mozhan Marno) brings dignity to her own death.

Mozhan too, is no stranger to speaking out. She starred in a one women show 9 Parts of Desire about women in war-torn Iraq. The play, written by Heather Raffo (also the title of a book about the Middle East by Geraldine Brooks), comes from Ali ibn Abu Taleb, an early leader and scholar of Islam who said, “God created sexual desire in ten parts: then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.”

Soraya M’s husband accuses her of adultery so he can be free to marry a younger woman he has found in a nearby city. That the punishment for adultery is death by stoning doesn’t disturb him. Nor does he flinch at throwing the first stone at the head of the mother of his children as she waits defenseless: buried to her waist in the village square.

It’s easy to eject the DVD after seeing The Stoning of Soraya M. and condemn Iran as a primitive country driven by the intractable dogma of the Ayatollahs. But Iran is, in may ways, actually quite permissive: if you are a man.

Soraya M. is about that one part of desire granted to men and how the rage, feared impotence and lust for domination over those other nine parts propels men towards madness and grisly murder. Ali ibn Abu Taleb did not restrict his observation to Muslims. Violence towards women can happen anywhere, and it does.

Title: Saboteur
Year: 1941
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, and Dorothy Parker (yes, theDorothy Parker)
Stars: Robert Cummings, Priscilla Lane, Otto Kruger, Norman Lloyd

The Story: A nazi saboteur torches a defense plant, but the blame falls on an innocent young man, who takes off on a cross-country hunt for the real Nazi that takes him from a ghost town to Hoover Dam to the Statue of Liberty.

Why It’s Great: This film is the middle step in a three-decade long thematic trilogy, starting with The 39 Steps in 1935 and concluding with North By Northwest in 1959. All three follow an innocent man, accused of treason, who has to traipse across a series of national landmarks in order to clear his name. This isn’t an all-time classic like the other two, but it’s the only one made during an actual war, giving it a little more weight. Cummings spends the first half of the movie trying to convince everyone he’s innocent, then when he realizes what they want to do, he starts trying to convince the bad guys that he’s guilty, so that he can unravel the conspiracy from the inside. It’s a great example of raising the stakes– Reacting to circumstances is fine for getting a hero through the first half, but eventually you have to figure out a way to flip things around so that the hero takes control of the action.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Title: Smile
Year: 1975
Director: Michael Ritchie
Writer: Jerry Belson

Stars: Bruce Dern, Barbara Feldon (Get Smart), Annette O’Toole, Michael Kidd (It’s Always Fair Weather), Geoffrey Lewis

The Story: Teen girls from around California gather in Santa Rosa for the Young American Miss pageant, kicking the town’s boosterism into high gear. Eventually the relentless cheerfulness of it all begins to grate on some, both within the spotlight and outside of it.

Why It’s Great: Satire and sympathy sometimes seem incompatible. It’s so hard to write something that’s barbed without being uncharitable. You’re standing outside and casting a harsh light on buffoonery, but in order to write it well, you simultaneously have to generate genuine feeling and understanding for the buffoons themselves. Woody Allen is great, but when he attacks someone, the audience doesn’t get to pick a side. It’s Woody and us together against the world. The fuzzy, empathetic, heartbreaking worldview shared by ’70s directors like Altman, Mazursky and Ritchie is a lost art. Many actors shine in the ensemble case, including a flinty, nuanced performance from a beautiful young Annette O’Toole that makes you wonder why she didn’t have a bigger career. But the real stand out is Michael Kidd as a cynical big town choreographer stuck in Hicksville. He has the courage to be truly unlikable, right up until you realize with a shock that he’s become the heart of the movie. In a soulless town, the man with one spark of redemption is king.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…

Sex and Lucia (Spain 2001, 128 min. dir: Julio Medem, cast: Paz Vega, Najwa Nimri)

Sex shows everything and disguises plot. Julio Medem is a pure visualist whose stories are usually ridiculous. Here he gets away with it. But Strip away the gorgeous bodies, lingering looks, steamy nights and torrid landscapes: what is left is Lucia falling madly in love with a gifted poet and becoming his constant companion until memories drive him to the brink of suicide.

Thinking him dead, Lucia flees to a sun filled island to heal in the care of her best friend, Elena, who is healing from her own tragedy: the death of her daughter. They both have affairs with a scuba diver before discovering that the daughter’s father was the Lucia’s poet lover. Miraculously at this point, the poet comes out of his suicide-induced coma.

Try telling that one in an elevator pitch. What is remarkable is that Medem’s film works. Paz Vega vies with Najwa Nimri for the most beautiful body and the most writhingly sensual love scene. Their lovers are perfect Spanish archetypes. The poet is soft and doe-eyed. The scuba diver is big, hirsute, with a big cock. The clothing budget on this film was minimal.

Score by Ivan Aledo underscores the dreamlike quality. Altogether Sex and Lucia is an amazing tone poem that needs to be appreciated slowly, deeply, lanquidly; like sucking a fruit ice on a bright hot white beach before plunging quickly into the in cool blue ocean beyond.

Title: Frenzy

Year: 1972
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Anthony Shaffer, based on a novel by Arthur La Bern
Stars: Jon Finch, Alec McCowen, Barry Foster, Billie Whitelaw, Barbara Leigh-Hunt

The Story: An antisocial bartender finds that a series of coincidences have conspired to make it look like he’s the “necktie strangler” stalking London. Soon the real killer, a friendly greengrocer, realizes that our hero is the perfect patsy and starts making his life even more hellish.

Why It’s Great: This is the sort of valedictory summation of themes that you always hope every director will pull out at the end of his career, but few do. From the ’30s through the ’50s, Hitchcock excelled at pushing the boundaries of public morals without going over, culminating with Psycho in 1960, where he finally pushed them over the edge. As the ’60s progressed, however, the public’s boundaries disappeared entirely, and he was cut adrift. With this film, he finally abandoned tastefulness and accepted the new license he’d been granted, giving his most lurid and horrifying nightmares free reign onscreen for the first and only time. Hitchcock had made many films in which a “wrong man” had been fingered for a crime and forced to clear his name. He usually made it look like a surprising amount of fun. With this movie, he shows a far more realistic version of the same story. Anyone who studies the stories of the exonerated discovers an unfortunate fact: the sort of people who get falsely convicted tend to be those who do themselves no favors. But Finch’s powerful performance makes this unpleasant character heartbreaking. He has more in common with Job than the ennobled heroes of movies like Saboteur.

Two more reasons at Cockeyed Caravan…