ALSO SHOWING
The Whistlers (15) ✪✪✪✪
The latest from Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of
Bucharest) is an intriguing heist film built around a criminal gang on La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, who use the local whistling language to avoid surveillance as they plan to rob €30 million from a Romanian gangster. The film follows a crooked Bucharest cop (Vlad Ivanov) as he infiltrates the gang, but that’s only part of this multifaceted film.
Coming on like a like a selfconscious genre exercise steeped in film references and allusions to the movie industry, Porumboiu gradually turns it into a sequel of sorts to his 2009 film Police,
Adjective (which also featured Ivanov’s character) in order to make deeper points about the evolution of Romania as its post-ceausescu experiment in democracy has gradually given way to the everyone-for-themselves chaos of postfinancial-crash Europe. Catrinel Marlon is also very good as the movie’s old-school femme fatale.
Curzon Home Cinema
Infinite Football (N/A) ✪✪✪✪
Corneliu Porumbiou’s second new offering this week also deals with Romania’s recent history, albeit in documentary form and with a far more sympathetic focal point. It’s about Laurentiu Ginghina, a middleaged bureaucrat with a quixotic plan to reinvent football. Though at first his obsessive quest to improve the beautiful game – it involves splitting the field in two and subdividing the teams to make the players more static and the ball more fluid – echoes Nigel Tufnel’s confused plan to make guitar amplifiers louder in This Is
Spinal Tap, the film is no exercise in mockery or exploitation. Ginghina is an old acquaintance of Porumboiu (the director was friends with his younger brother in school) and, as we gradually learn his story over the film’s densely packed 70-minute running time, Porumboiu presents us with a remarkable portrait of how an ordinary man’s personal history can intersect with the political realities of his times and inspire him to apply what turns out to be a formidable intelligence to develop not so much a new sport, but a blue-print for a new way of living.
Curzon Home Cinema
In Search of Greatness (N/A) ✪✪✪
Sport happens to be the lens through which documentary maker Gabe Polsky explores the over-used term of genius in this latest film from the director of acclaimed ice hockey documentary Red Army. Extensive interviews with the likes of Canadian ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, American Football star Jerry Rice and Brazilian football supremo Pelé lend credence to his thesis that talent can’t be quantified and honed into excellence through rigorous statistical analysis. On the contrary, it needs to be allowed to develop creatively at a young age so that it can thrive by allowing its possessor to push against the boundaries and regulations of their chosen field of excellence when their passion becomes their profession. A very watchable doc.
The Wretched (15) ✪✪
A horror movie about a witch preying on the children of a small American town sounds like the sort of schlocky genre effort that might nevertheless have interesting things to say about gender in the current era. Sadly, The
Wretched has very little on its mind beyond serving up a few nifty special effects in service of a plot stitched together from various slasher movies of yesteryear. ■
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