José María Cabral's WOODPECKERS, a prison melodrama via the Dominican Republic, opens

It's been awhile since TrustMovies has seen a decent film set in a Latino prison (the 2012 Get the Gringo may have been the last one), so this new movie from Dominican filmmaker José María Cabral proves, for awhile anyway, a welcome change of pace. Taking place in one not-so-hot prison in the Dominican Republic, and then for its final half hour or so in another, even worse, behind-bars venue, WOODPECKERS (Carpenteros) acquaints us with the plight of a new inmate named Julián, played by the charismatic Haitian-born, Dominican-raised actor Jean Jean. As Julián and we learn the ropes in this new environment, we discover that, as ever, these ropes include mostly the usual: the pecking order, cruel guards, good guys and the bad, crummy food and lodging, and one oddity that stands out from the rest.

That would be the sign language the inmates use to communicate from afar with the female inmates in the prison next door, which makes these men the Woodpeckers of the movie's title. (How this name came about is also explained to us via the usual exposition.)

Señor Cabral, shown at right, does a good job of immediately submerging us into this milieu and quickly setting up the situation in which his protagonist (the svelte M. Jean, pictured below, left) and antagonist (a beefy, bonkers inmate named Manaury, played by the excellent Ramón Emilio Candelario, below, right) are pitted against each other. The reason for their antagonism is, of course, the woman -- Yanelly -- with whom Manaury has been "woodpecking." (And, yes, she's the pretty, spirited spitfire of all those women-in-prison movies you know and love.) When Manaury, who's always misbehaving, is sent to a place where he can no longer visually connect with her, he teaches Julián how to do this for him. Guess what happens?

Shucks: you already have! So from here, we move from threats to actual physical harm, as our new twosome (that's Judith Rodriguez Perez as Yanelly, below, left) moves farther from that nasty third wheel. All this is filmed with plenty of panache and pizzazz, and the performances from the entire cast are believable and up-to-snuff.

What becomes a problem is the coincidence that keeps popping up -- would an inmate so casually toss his prized cell phone on the cot then leave the room so it could be easily stolen? -- as well as the all-out melodramatic crescendo with which the movie closes, in which every last expected emotion is wrung from every last expected situation.

Now, some of  you may easily fall for all this (The New York Times reviewer certainly did), but I guess I've just seen too much of this too often to wholeheartedly give over again. Woodpeckers is fun, however, and energetic and full of enough incident to keep you relatively hooked -- the fixing of a broken air conditioner is one such event -- even if the 106-minute running time is a tad long for this kind of film.

From Outsider Pictures, in Spanish with English subtitles, the movie opens tomorrow in  the New York City area at the AMC Empire 25, Regal's UA Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14 and the Concourse Plaza Multiplex Cinemas in the Bronx, with a limited national release to follow. Here in South Florida it will open next Friday, September 22, at Miami's Tower Theater and AMC's Aventura 24. Click here and scroll down to see all currently scheduled playdates, theaters and cities.

CHEATIN' -- Adult animation thrives, off and on, in Bill Plympton's new infidelity-themed movie

Animator Bill Plympton is about as far as you can get from the bright, primary-colored, family-friendly, constant-action, all-special-effects-all-the-time animated movies that appear in theaters at a rate, these days, of maybe two to three per month. His new film, CHEATIN', is all about exactly that -- except that most of the infidelity here goes on in the fevered brain of our male protagonist, who, in the course of the first fifteen minutes of the film, has met, fallen in lust with, and abandoned his current girlfriend for the arms (and other body parts) of our heroine.

Mr. Plympton (shown at left), whose work I seem to favor in smaller rather than full-length doses, is great at animation that combines both the dark and the rapturous. His amazing and unbelievably numerous pencil lines (I'm thinking they're pencil, anyway) add such strangeness and style to his work. In this new film, a tall, entitled and quite fashionable young lady (below), shown from various angles -- all of them alluring and a little odd -- struts her way along, her face embedded in a book, passing men who seem to become immediately smitten by her. She is, as they say, a piece of work.

One of the things she struts by is a local carnival, to which its owner gives her ticket after ticket until she finally agrees to enter. Then -- don't ask why -- she decides to ride the bumper cars. Something less likely is hard to imagine. But it gives Plympton the chance to go wild with some beautifully animated action.

It also gives our gal the opportunity to meet that lunk of a guy (drawn impeccably weird, he is all biceps and chest but near-zero in the waist department) who soon becomes her new love.

But then -- it seems that hardly any time has passed -- the green-eyed monster raises its head via another young woman who has the hots for our guy. When he shows no interest in her, she conspires to make him think his own gal has been unfaithful. And, oh, the tsuris stirred up here!

The colors range from earth tones to what you might call dank pastel, and the hand-drawing goes from simple pencil lines to full-bore rapture. Mr. Plympton gives us a fire-starter, sex acts, a couple of hard-boiled eggs that look like nothing so much as a pair of gonads, and an ice-box opera complete with refrigerated chorus. Themes get repeated here, too: that earlier bumper car soon becomes one of milady's slippers. And finally there is a machine that offers transmigration-of-souls!

We get fantasy and reality, nice visual equivalents of loneliness and despair, and even a little music from Ravel's Bolero. And, unless I missed something, all of this is without a single line of dialog.  Instead, we're offered music and/or a lot of sound effects: grunting, groaning and the like. This is all both artistic and quite primal. And repetitious.

Even at 76 minutes, the movie's too long and too repetitive. For my taste, Plympton spends too much time on just about every one of his scenes -- until we get it, and then some. That's why I say that this particular animator is often better seen in smaller doses. There's a lot to like in Cheatin', but the actual content of the film does not nearly approach its running time. If unusual and creative animation is enough for you, however, this may very well be your ticket.

The movie opens this Friday, April 3, in New York City at the Village East Cinema. The following week it hits Chicago, and then 17 more locations in the weeks to come. You can view all playdates, with cities and theaters listed, by clicking here. On Tuesday, April 21, the film will have its digital premiere via Vimeo On Demand, for rental or sale.

Does JEALOUSY find Philippe Garrel in a more thoughtful, maybe even positive mood?

In addition to JEALOUSY,  the new movie from Philippe Garrel opening this week, TrustMovies has seen only four other of this famous Frenchman's films: his segment of Paris par vu..., Night Wind, Regular Lovers and The Frontier of Dawn (possibly one of the silliest titles in movie history). M Garrel is on record in the July/August 2014 issue of Film Comment as noting that the title of his latest film is not illustrative. Thank you. That helps, because, really, it seems that no one in Jealousy is in the least jealous of anyone else. This is, in fact, one of the oddly enjoyable things about the movie: How its characters move through life with an almost amazing lack of rancour, despite break-ups and other major problems concerning life, love and work.

If the movie seems beautifully alive yet oddly distant, this may be because its maker (pictured left), a 66-year-old man, is tackling relatively young people today but from an aged perspective that seems, by turns, thoughtful, quiet and simply removed from the agitation that is "youth." As both lead actors -- the filmmaker's son Louis Garrel and Anna Mouglalis -- shown on poster above and in the photos below -- are in their 30s, the "agitation that is middle age" might be more appropriate. Whatever. The bottom line is that Jealousy offers a kind of split perspective, as events occur that ought to cause conster-nation and yet the characters take them with the kind of philosophical stride reserved for the wisdom of age.

This allows us to identify with both generations, to see what is going on but not grow particularly alarmed by it all. Events here include everything from a husband and father leaving his family to his paramour betraying both him and his philosophy about the "purity" of the acting profession (which probably mirrors to a great extent the philosophy of the elder Garrel). That ever-present fight of family vs freedom is front and center once again.

Garrel père films in bits and pieces (and in lustrous black-and-white, with cinemtography by the great Willy Kurant), all of them leading from that initial scene in which Garrel fils moves out and begins his new life, while trying to still include his daughter (played by the adorable and extremely winning Olga Milshtein, shown above and below). Finally, these pieces produce a kind of mosaic of conventions, attitudes and culture. Jealousy is certainly not a great film (none of Garrel's are), but it is an interesting one, made by a filmmaker, the work of whom buffs will probably want to know. His new film is as good a place to start as any.

From Distrib Films and running a bare 77 minutes, Jealousy opens this Friday, August 15, here in New York City at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and the following Friday, August 22, in the Los Angeles area at three Laemmle theaters: the Royal, Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5. In the weeks and months to come, it will play venues around the country. Click here and scroll down to see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters.

Serge Bromberg excavates (and diddles) HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO

What you will see in the new documentary HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT'S INFERNO is more of a meditation on jealousy -- and film-making -- than any kind of "real" documentary you'll have viewed in your movie-going career. As famous a non-existent film as Terry Gilliam's never-happened Don Quixote movie (which is said to be not happening yet again!), Clouzot's "Inferno," I would guess, holds a similar place in the annals of French filmmaking.

In 1964, fabled French filmmaker Henri George Clouzot began directing Romy Schneider, then 26, and Serge Reggiani, 42, in his new film L'Enfer (Hell). By the end of three weeks, all enfer had broken loose, worst followed worse, and what existed of this film -- never completed -- was stowed away in a vault, until...   One day, Serge Bromberg (below, right), the co-director (with Ruxandra Medrea, below, left) of this documentary, found himself stuck in an suddenly out-of-service elevator with a woman who turned out to be Clouzot's widow.  Chatting away their time together while the lift was repaired, she told him the story -- a whopping good one -- of the history and making of that never-completed film.

On the spot, it seems, Bromberg decided he must bring that story to the screen. He and Ms Medrea now have, but they have also tried to pull off a number of other things: create a vision of what L'Enfer might have been, while giving us a sense of the character of Clouzot himself and what he was going through at the time (a heavy dose of hell/jealousy all his own).  To this end the two documentarians have diddled considerably with their basic premise, and although the result is only partially successful, so unusual is their film in so many ways that it becomes a fairly fascinating and certainly one-of-a-kind achievement.

Clouzot (shown above with Ms Schneider), always a perfectionist -- of a sort, at least; the French New Wave was critical of his "meticulousness" -- was evidently given an unlimited budget on this film. And while "unlimited" back then was hardly commensurate with even most limited budgets today, this proved enough to become probably the single biggest problem for the production.  The director began to "experiment."  And then experiment again. And then some more.  We see the results, which seem to make up a large portion of the documentary, and we can fully understand why Clouzot became so enrapt with his creations -- most of which use the lusciously pert Ms Schneider as their subject.

He experiments with unusual uses of color,

background,

effects.

And though the "stills" above give you a hint of what was created, they are no match for what the director actually accomplished in terms of "film."  His images are alternately striking, artful, creepy and strange. We also note how lighting can appear to change the same expression, and even discover a very early example of those fast-moving clouds that bore me silly -- decades, I believe, before anyone else used them. Yes, these may be no match for the special effects we see today, but as they are done by a movie master, they deliver the heft and visual appeal of an artist at work.

Schneider looks ravishing, as usual, and since she usually turned in a good performance, we could probably have expected the same from her here. We also get a taste of M. Regianni (Le Doulos), a fine actor not so well known on these shores. The oddest thing the filmmakers have done is to use present-day performers, who fit relatively well into the Schneider/Reggianni mode, and have them act out sections of the "Enfer" script.  Jacques Gamblin (at right, below, The Color of Lies) and Berénice Bejo (at left, below, OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies) do just fine with this, but because the idea is not particularly intrinsic, it ends up seeming more like filler.

We hear from other filmmakers, such as Costa-Gavras, of what was going on during the shoot, and we begin to see, hear and even feel the film -- and Clouzot -- beginning to fall apart.  It's odd and creepy, but if jealousy is indeed to blame, we don't really get close enough to the source of it to begin to understand it.  However, I warrant that we've all suffered from the green-eyed monster at one time or other, so putting ourselves in the place of the filmmaker, we can at least identify a bit. And the sense of sadness and waste only grows stronger as the documentary moves along and we learn what happened to Inferno and its would-be creators.  Even so, and with all the tsuris experienced from within and without, I left this movie with absolute surety of only one thing: The biggest curse any filmmaker can have fall on him is his producer giving him an unlimited budget.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, a Flicker Alley/MK2/Lobster Films release, begins its theatrical run this Friday, July 16, at Manhattan's IFC Center.  You can find further screenings -- dates and cities -- here.