Short Takes
This week in local theaters
YOU KILL ME Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Montana-born director John Dahl made a name for himself with a series of nifty, darkly comic neo-noirs bearing wonderfully hard-boiled titles like Kill Me Again, Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. The past decade has been less kind to Dahl, who’s foundered with a series of bigger-budget studio assignments and only sporadically (as in 2001’s Joy Ride) shown signs of his old B-movie mojo. You Kill Me, Dahl’s latest, has the outward appearance of a return to form but in fact may be the worst thing he’s ever done—an inert, tone-deaf mélange of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under about an alcoholic assassin (Ben Kingsley) in the New York Polish mafia who becomes a better man (and a better hit man) by joining AA and going to work in a San Francisco mortuary. The script supposedly kicked around Hollywood for years before attracting Sir Ben’s interest, and its age shows in the torrent of rimshot-worthy gay and Polack jokes, the gay-but-not-gay-seeming AA sponsor (Luke Wilson), and the submissive love interest (Téa Leoni, a far cry from Dahl’s usual steely dames) who doesn’t mind that Kingsley’s a killer as long as he’s not, you know, gay. —Scott Foundas (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
THE GOLDEN DOOR An aural and visual feast, The Golden Door is Emanuele Crialese’s poetic tale of a Sicilian peasant family’s emigration at the turn of the 20th century. Winner of the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the fable follows an illiterate farmer (a wonderfully expressive Vincenzo Amato), his mother and two adult sons, who after seeing doctored photographs of money growing on trees and gargantuan vegetables set their sights on America. Clinging to their meager belongings as tightly as they do to their old-world superstitions, they board the ship shadowed by a mysterious Englishwoman (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Arriving at Ellis Island, bewildered passengers are treated like animals, poked, prodded and interrogated by an assembly line of white-coated doctors intent on weeding out “undesirables.” The film is a portrait gallery of faces, its long stretches of silence broken only by sounds of nature: the braying of donkeys, wind sweeping across rocky hillsides, the moaning of the ship as it lurches forward. With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnès Godard does not disappoint, confirming her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today. In English and Italian with English subtitles. —Jean Oppenheimer (Opens Friday at Green Hills)
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