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Deal Me Some Death, Baby: Kate Beckinsale does even more of what she does in UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING.

The UNDERWORLD franchise’s relentless, death-dealing vampire, Selene (Kate Beckinsale), goes under ice at the beginning of UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING, and so does most of the series’ political intrigue, swapping out the power struggles from the previous entries in favor of even more chases, gunplay, and explosions — lots and lots of explosions. Awakened into a (nominally) future world where humanity has decimated the vampire covens and their natural enemy, the werewolf-like lycans, Selene finds herself protecting the fate of the young vamp/lycan hybrid Eve (India Eisley), and on the run from a sinister pharmaceutical corporation, all in glorious 3D. You will believe a metal-barbed whip can poke your eye out.

Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski and Dan Persons set their logic centers to neutral and debate what’s fun (i.e. Kate Beckinsale in skin-tight leather) and what’s not (plot) in this fourth installment, and whether there’s any future to UNDERWORLD’s future. They also discuss their gut-reactions to the latest crop of genre trailers, and Steve talks a little about a safe-driving film with a surprising production credit. Plus: What’s coming in theaters.

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Spies spying on spies spying on spies: Gary Oldman explores an elaborate conspiracy in TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY.

Long for the heady, Cold War days of espionage, when spies were spies, ideologies were economics-based, and there wasn’t all this religious brouhaha muddying up the motivations? (Enhanced interrogation, though, was still pretty much the same thing.) Well, director Tomas Alfredson (LET THE RIGHT ONE IN) takes us back to that furtive, paranoia-laced era in TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY, the big-screen adaptation of John le Carré’s celebrated novel.

Set in the early 70′s and centered on the search for a mole in Britain’s MI6, otherwise known as the Circus, Alfredson rallies a stellar cast — including Gary Oldman as le Carré’s canny spy George Smiley, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth, and Tom Hardy — to tell a tale deception and conspiracy, where friends may not be what they seem and secret masterminds may not be as secret as you might expect. It’s dark, it’s tense, it makes James Bond look like Maxwell Smart’s less-incisive brother.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Alfredson.

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY
Trailer

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Official Website:
www.tinkertailorsoldierspy.com

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Dream Come True: Emily Browning enters a strange world of erotic desire in SLEEPING BEAUTY.

Award-winning novelist Julia Leigh makes a hell of a directorial debut with her quiet fantasia, SLEEPING BEAUTY, the story of a young college student (Emily Browning) who becomes immersed in a strange world of desire when she signs on as employee of a service that drugs women and allows men — frequently much older — to do whatever they wish with the inert bodies (with the strict proviso that there be no penetration or damage).

Dark, provocative, erotic, the film inspires a multitude of responses, frequently within the same second of footage. And once you get past the tale’s elegant mise en scene and sensuous atmosphere, don’t be surprised to discover Leigh has posed some intriguing questions on love, death, and all the impulses that drive our species. Sex is 99% brain, after all.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Leigh.

SLEEPING BEAUTY
Trailer

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Official Website:
www.ifcfilms.com/films/sleeping-beauty

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Nowhere Near a Gilded Cage: Mikhail Khodorkovsky in custody in KHODORKOVSKY.

“World’s richest political prisoner,” now there’s a term you don’t hear much. And while OWS can make a case that there are select representatives of the 1% that deserve to see the inside of jail cell, in the case of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now serving time in his home country for charges of tax evasion and embezzlement (both trumped-up, in the opinion of many), the argument is not so clear.

In the new documentary, KHODORKOVSKY, filmmaker Cyril Tuschi incorporates interviews, stark, stylized animation, and his own personal journey to explore the story of a man who went from committed socialist to successful capitalist to political pariah. In the process, the film explores the paradoxes not just of Khodorkovsky’s own rise — a narrative that incorporates canny leveraging of a still-nascent financial system, a high-profile flaunting of his good fortune, and an ill-advised face-off with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin — but of a financial system that, in transitioning from communist to capitalist, wound up a Frankensteinian combination of both.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Tuschi.

KHODORKOVSKY
Trailer

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Official Website:
kinolorber.com/khodorkovsky

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Professional Behavior: Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender take their relationship outside of the office in A DANGEROUS METHOD.

David Cronenberg is no stranger to exploring how people undo themselves by venturing into the boundaries of human sexuality. In A DANGEROUS METHOD, though, he delves into the historical figures who helped set those boundaries, and creates a drama where intellect and science are pitted against human passion and sexual politics.

The story — as adapted by screenwriter Christopher Hampton from his stage play, The Talking Cure, which in turn was based on John Kerr’s book, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein — spins off the actual relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), one of the fathers (and we use that term guardedly) of modern psychoanalysis, and Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a young woman who starts out as the doctor’s patient and eventually becomes his colleague and, as rumor has it, mistress. As Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson) is drawn into their orbits, the film becomes an intelligent and moving tale of people striving for the betterment of humanity, frequently against the pull of their own frailties.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Christopher Hampton.

A DANGEROUS METHOD
Trailer

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Official Website:
adangerousmethodfilm.com

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Strike a Pose Before Striking Your Enemy: Henry Cavill (right) wages decorous war in IMMORTALS.

It’s a good week for lush, exquisite cinematography and vividly stylized worlds; maybe not so good a week for compelling narratives. In IMMORTALS, director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar uses Greek mythology as the raw material upon which to invest his skill with staging beautiful, beautiful actors in elaborate tableaux, all in the service of the tale of a lowly peasant (Henry Cavil) who, with the blessings of the gods (including former Apollo Luke Evans), rallies the bedraggled forces of Greece against a sadistic warlord (Mickey Rourke, and are you surprised?). Come join Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski, Lawrence French, and Dan Persons as they admire the scenery and debate whether anything exists past the pretty facade.

Then, Larry and Dan briefly discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Lars von Trier’s elegant science fiction drama, MELANCHOLIA, in which a despondent Kirsten Dunst must cope with her own sense of inertia and the threat of a rogue planet on a collision course with Earth. Plus: What’s coming in theaters.

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Untitled (Slide) (2011)

I’m a lucky guy. I’ve wanted a reason to break out of my cramped, unkempt studio and check out Carsten Höller: Experience, the new exhibit at the New Museum that provides a comprehensive survey of the German-born artist known for his immersive, sensory-confounding — and sometimes adrenaline-pumping — installations, and along comes Air France to sponsor my coverage.

And why not? Not only is Air France the gateway to Paris, New York’s only equal as a cultural capital (I’m not saying which city is actually better, but only one of them has original Picassos and Shake Shack), but the airline tends to express the romantic thrill of travelling to their home turf (yeah, there may be grungy areas in France, but I can’t think of any, offhand) by coming up with imagery like this:

Which is just a lovely way of expressing the feeling through pure kinetics.

Giant Triple Mushrooms (2010)

Interestingly, Carsten Höller is himself no stranger to employing kinetics as part of his toolset for provoking intense, and frequently visceral, responses from his viewers. Having left a career in science in the early 90′s, Höller has translated his clinical background into works that range from the grandly whimsical — the lobby of the New Museum boasts a garden of oversized mushrooms that Lewis Carroll would have felt right at home in — to the powerfully immersive. “Viewers” rarely remain passive observers in the artist’s efforts: Included in the exhibit are such works as Experience Corridor, a series of rooms containing strange, sensory experiments (most curious: The Pinocchio Effect, in which strategic application of a medical vibrator convinces one that one’s nose is growing); Giant Psycho Tank, a sensory deprivation pool; Mirror Carousel, in which the glistening replication of a stock, amusement park thrill-ride is paradoxically trimmed to a serene pace; and — the big draw for this exhibition — Untitled (Slide), a corkscrewing tube that briskly transports daring visitors from the museum’s fourth floor down to the second, landing them into the visual bombardment of a pulsing, Höller light installation.

The works have a singularly unique way of cutting through intellectual concerns to provoke pure, emotional responses — interesting for pieces that frequently present themselves as the products of an especially fanciful laboratory. I wanted to find out more about Höller’s motivations, so in addition to getting some interesting pics of the exhibit, I also spoke with associate curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. Click on the player to hear the discussion, and check out the link to the slide show below that

CHECK OUT FULL SLIDE & VIDEO SHOW
AT THE HUFFINGTON POST

BTW: I’m not likely to be shaken from my conviction that New York was, is, and forever will be the center of the cultural universe, but if anyone wants to check out what’s doing in Paris, hit up Air France, get yourself over there, and compile the evidence that’ll make me eat my words.

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We're Getting the Atrocity Back Together: Ashlynn Yennie (left) lives the nightmare perpetrated by Laurence R. Harvey in THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2 (FULL SEQUENCE).

The tag line for Tom Six’s new THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2 (FULL SEQUENCE) is “100% Medically Inaccurate,” tipping those who witnessed the merciless onslaught that was THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) that the follow-up is, if anything, going to be a further affront to everything that is pure, good, and sanitary in this world.

The tale of a mentally deranged parking attendant (Laurence R. Harvey), who is transported by repeated, obsessive viewings of the first HUMAN CENTIPEDE film — in which a mad, German doctor (is there any other kind?) stitches three unfortunate people together, mouth-to-anus, with the expected, alimentary repercussions — and decides to make his own, twelve-person (“full sequence”) version with the crude tools available to him, FULL SEQUENCE is an unstinting assault of gritty, black and white photography, and grotty gore effects, not to mention crowbar assaults, ball-peen hammer dentistry, staple-gun surgery, and live centipedes inserted in orifices where live centipedes should not go.  THE BLIND SIDE it ain’t, but that’s all to the good, in my humble opinion. If you’re the type who can get into Six’s “You think that’s too much? Try THIS!” aesthetic, you’ll no doubt find it an intense and weirdly gratifying ninety minutes. You sick little monkey, you.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Tom Six and Laurence R. Harvey.

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2 (FULL SEQUENCE)
Trailer

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OFFICIAL WEBSITE

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Not Your Average Fix'r Up'r: Daniel Craig stands at the precipice of his fracturing sanity in DREAM HOUSE.

Winner of this year’s Ironic Film Title ribbon (SARAH PALIN: THE UNDEFEATED was disqualified for failure to complete a term — talk about ironic) DREAM HOUSE marks director Jim Sheridan’s attempt to explore the world of the psychological thriller, with a few surprising twists thrown in along the way. The tale of man whose family life begins to crumble with the revelation that the beautiful house they’ve just moved into was the scene of an horrific crime, the film has the atmosphere, has affecting performances by stars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, — backed up by Naomi Watts as a sympathetic neighbor — and lays its story out in a way that casts events already witnessed in new lights as secrets are progressively revealed, but does its old-school approach still have relevance? Join Cinefantastique Online’s Steve Biodrowski and Dan Persons as they root around the cellar of a beloved genre and try to sweep away the cobwebs to find what works and what doesn’t in this latest attempt to draw chills from the infinite convolutions of the human mind.

Also: a discussion of the announced short-list of directors for Leonardo DiCaprio’s upcoming TWILIGHT ZONE project; and what’s coming in theatrical and home video releases.

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Please Watch This Video – You’re a Nice Person

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Meet the New Ape, Not at All Like the Old Ape: A MoCapped Andy Serkis takes command in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

Startling the studios, startling the critics, and startling its delighted audiences, RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES has arrived to prove that a reboot — in the hands of a skilled director and inspired writers, actors and effects artists — does not necessarily need to serve as Exhibit One in the case for the film industry’s creative bankruptcy. Join theofantastique.com’s John W. Morehead and Cinefantastique Online’s Lawrence French and Dan Persons as they explore how the latest retooling of a moribund franchise has become the most bracing film of the summer, discuss some emotional nuances director Rupert Wyatt uses to bring depth to the fantasy, celebrate Andy Serkis’ work as our new simian overlord, and sift over some notable glitches in the scenario.

Also: Some thoughts on the revelation that Steven Sodherbergh is directing second unit sequences for THE HUNGER GAMES; and what’s coming to theaters and home video.