Two films in English, two in Russian and one in Ukrainian this week in Kyiv cinemas - take your pick.
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
Comedy
USA 2011
Language: Rus with Ukr subtitles
Directed by Woody Allen
Oct. 14-19 at 4:10 p.m., 8:10 p.m.,
Kyiv cinema
Woody Allen’s power to attract top-notch Hollywood talent is dazzling. His star cast in “Midnight in Paris” includes French First Lady Carla Bruni, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Adrien Brody and many others. But whether their presence makes the film any better is debatable.
A young Hollywood writer arrives in Paris with his fiancé and her family. Enamored by history-strewn neighborhoods, he roams the city day and night dreaming what it would be like to live at the time of Hemingway and Fitzerald.
Incidentally, he’s drawn into a time carriage and is able to meet all the famous artists who, it turns out, are also unhappy about their era. The film’s morale is so obvious that some viewers may get offended by Allen’s naïve plot. If a younger audience, however, gets inspired to read the classics after the film, then Allen nailed it again.
BRANDO UNAUTHORIZED
Drama/biopic
USA 2011
Language: Eng with Rus subtitles
Directed by Damian Chapa
Oct. 14-19 at 1:40 p.m., 7:20 p.m.,
Zhovten cinema
An enduring film icon who became a box office fix in the 1950s, actor Marlon Brando was also a father. His son Christian, however, didn’t enjoy his father’s love of limelight and raucous sexcapades.
Abusing drugs as much as his mother abused alcohol and his father – women, Christian revealed another side of Brando’s life.
Marlon, who died in 2004, wouldn’t have authorized this biopic, nor would his devoted fans. But the truth about one of the greatest actors in history is somewhere in the middle.
THE DOORS. PEOPLE ARE STRANGE
Documentary
U.S. 2011
Language: Eng with Rus subtitles
Directed by Tom DiCillo
Oct. 14, 17-19 at 6:25 p.m.; Oct. 15- 16 at 3:10 p.m., Zhovten cinema
Narrated by Johnny Depp, this biopic is a tribute to the cult American rock band, The Doors. Extraordinary “riders of the storm,” as their song goes, these four musicians kicked onto the music scene in the 60’s, rolled victoriously into the 70’s and are still buzzing in every rock fan’s music collection.
Award-winning director and screenwriter Tom DiCillo used the unseen before footage to create the first ever feature documentary about the band.
It follows The Doors from the corridors of UCLA’s film school where keyboardist Ray Manzarec and lead singer Jim Morrison first met to Morrison’s death in 1971.
SLEEPING BEAUTY
Drama
Australia 2011
Language: Rus with Ukr subtitles
Directed by Julia Leigh
Starring Emily Browning, Rachael Blake
Oct. 14-19 at 8:30 p.m., Kyiv cinema
Don’t take your children to this one – the film has no relation to the original sleeping beauty of the famous fable. Sexually intense, philosophical and grotesque, the drama revolves around young student Lucy who’s looking for work to subsidize her studies.
She discovers a niche sex industry where she’s paid to serve dinners nearly naked to elderly gentlemen in tuxedos. Lucy does well and is offered a promotion in a form of a pill, which would sedate her every night and allow her old clients to do anything they want to her, except penetration.
Obscure curiosity leads her to accept sometimes nauseating sex scenes with many old strangers. Will she ever wake up?
SKIN I LIVE IN
Thriller/melodrama
Spain 2011
Language: Ukrainian
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
Oct. 14-19 at 6 p.m., 8:20 p.m., 10:40 p.m., Butterfly Ultramarine cinema
Drenched in visual and passionate rapture, the film is an exotic tale of how one man tries to create a perfect woman.
A wealthy plastic surgeon experiments with a woman in his upstairs bedroom/surgery replacing her skin with a synthetic material of perfect texture, quality and color. Both the captor and his captive are madly in love with each other, which helps to sideline the impacts of blood, scalpels and a history of rape.
Spanish director Pedro Almodovar is a genius of complicated plots, mind games and heart throbbing emotions. You’ll be drying your brain trying to guess who the patient is – the surgeon’s ex-wife who is believed to have died in a car accident or a new lover who the doctor wants to shape in his wife’s likeness? Almodovar has again created a masterpiece, don’t miss it.
KYIV
19 Velyka Vasylkivska St. (former Chervonoarmiyska), 234-7381
www.kievkino.com.ua
ZHOVTEN
26 Kostyantynivska St., 205-5951
www.zhovten-kino.kiev.ua/
BUTTERFLY ULTRAMARINE
1a Urytskoho St., 206-0362
www.kino-butterfly.com.ua
