Three Rivers Film Festival serves up wide-ranging choices
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The Three Rivers Film Festival continues with movies on a wide range of subjects, from punk rockers who become dads to a look at the black power movement of the late 1960s and mid-'70s.
A sampling of reviews for the second week:
No one does anxiety and intensity better than Michael Shannon, and by the time this movie is over, you may wish pharmacies sold anti-anxiety meds over the counter.
He plays Curtis LaForche, a working-class husband and father of a 6-year-old deaf girl who begins to have apocalyptic dreams and visions, typically involving the people in his life as victims or attackers. They're positively biblical, often starting with lightning, banks of black storm clouds and dark rain resembling droplets of motor oil.
When he tries to protect his family by building out the storm shelter in his backyard, he seemingly solves one problem and creates three more. Curtis' tower of worry is teetering, and it could buckle under the fear that he is showing signs of the same paranoid schizophrenia that devastated a parent.
"Take Shelter," being shown as a sneak preview before its eventual opening, also stars Jessica Chastain as Curtis' wife and Kathy Baker as his mother. But this movie belongs to Mr. Shannon who crawls inside a cauldron of worries and slams the door shut with us inside, leaving us with our own free-floating anxiety and strategies for coping and escaping.
Rated R for some language.
-- Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette movie editor
The premise of this film sounds fictional: A lone holdout, living in a Brooklyn building targeted for demolition to make way for a basketball arena, refuses to bow to the billionaires and bigwigs. He becomes the only occupant of a 32-condo building, loses his fiancee but finds love with a fellow warrior and becomes the compelling face of David battling Goliath.
If this were a Hollywood drama, instead of a documentary, the story might end differently, but what is remarkable is that filmmakers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky were there for every step of the way. They spent seven years and shot 500-plus hours to chart plans to gnaw away at a neighborhood so 16 skyscrapers and a New Jersey Nets arena could be built.
First Published November 10, 2011 12:00 am
