Tideland
The Cat O’ Nine Tails
Italian director Dario Argento loved long tracking shots and employed them liberally—along with quirky camera angles—in The Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971). Despite stilted plot points, the murder thriller centered around a genetics research institute holds interest. Buoying the story is the performance by Karl Malden as a blind man who helps a brash reporter track the culprit. The Cat O’ Nine Tails is acutely aware of darkness and the power of vision.
Tideland
Nine-year-old Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) dutifully administers a fix to her heroin-addicted dad (Jeff Bridges) and that’s just for starters. Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005) is John Waters splattered with Texas dust and an ugly Amélie with touches of Psycho. Based on the novel by Mitch Cullin, Tideland is also a fractured fairytale populated with ogres and filmed from askew and shifting angles. Occasionally amusing and always macabre, Tideland is an evocation of childhood at its darkest.
The Escape
For Tara (Gemma Arterton), sex with her husband (Dominic Cooper) is more a matter of endurance than pleasure. Although he clearly loves her, he doesn’t really understand her. Their whiny needy kids get on her nerves and the suburban housewife routine is deadening. “I’m not happy,” she finally declares. He’s baffled. Measuring the distance between two people in nano-inches registered in silence, The Escape is an essay in the ennui that can result from unrealistic expectations.
To Auschwitz and Back: The Joe Engel Story
The story is familiar, but we have fewer and fewer opportunities to hear it from anyone who was there. When he was 14, Joe Engel was separated from his family in the Warsaw ghetto and carted off to the death camps. He survived and made a new life in Charleston, S.C. In To Auschwitz and Back, he recounts the degradation, the filth, the inhumanity of the Holocaust. His terrifying eyewitness account becomes a plea against forgetfulness.
