Guy Ritchie’s MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. reboot tells the origin story of Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer)
THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (Guy Ritchie, 2015)
Opens Friday, August 14
www.manfromuncle.com
In their stylish update of the popular 1960s Cold War spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., cowriter and director Guy Ritchie and cowriter and producer Lionel Wigram create an origin story for American operative Napoleon Solo (British actor Henry Cavill) and his KGB counterpart, Ilya Kuryakin (American actor Armie Hammer). Solo is a well-dressed former soldier and international arts and antiquities dealer who is working for the CIA instead of serving time for illegal doings, while Kuryakin is a thickly muscled specimen with father issues. After trying to kill each other in an opening car chase through East Berlin involving a Trabant, a Wartburg, and the Berlin Wall, they team up to try to extract German scientist Udo Teller (Christian Berkel) from the clutches of the elegant and devious Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki) and her husband, racecar driver Alexander (Luca Calvani), who, along with Udo’s brother, the torture-loving Rudi (Sylvester Groth), are forcing Teller to build a nuclear bomb for them. Solo and Kuryakin have recruited Teller’s long-estranged daughter, Gaby (Alicia Vikander), a gorgeous East German mechanic, to help them infiltrate the Vinciguerras’ island compound and prevent them from launching a warhead.
Alicia Vikander, Armie Hammer, and Henry Cavill team up in stylish update of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.
The convoluted plot is minor-league Bond at best, just an excuse to establish the main characters, who develop a strong chemistry as they go from mortal enemies to partners who still don’t necessarily trust each other. Cavill (Man of Steel, The Tudors) seems to be channeling Jon Hamm, one of a bevy of superstar actors who were at one time or another attached to the role of Napoleon Solo, played by the dapper Robert Vaughn in the television series, while Hammer (The Social Network, J. Edgar) is a slightly softer and more cerebral version of Ivan Drago from Rocky IV as Kuryakin, portrayed by the cerebral David McCallum in the original. Swedish actress Vikander is part Maria Schneider, part Brigitte Bardot as the tomboy / sex kittenish Gaby, who pretends to be Ilya’s fiancé to help get him inside the Vinciguerras’ inner circle. Vikander and Debicki look spectacular in Joanna Johnston’s 1960s-inspired haute couture. The film also features Jared Harris as Saunders, Solo’s grizzled boss at the CIA, Misha Kuznetsov as Oleg, Kuryakin’s sneaky boss at the KGB, and a wrinkled Hugh Grant as Waverly, the head of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, famously played by the great Leo G. Carroll on TV. The plot is filled with ginormous holes and the characters’ relationships are overmanipulated, but Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; Snatch; the Sherlock Holmes films with Robert Downey J.) brings a fresh style to the story, perhaps more stirred than shaken, incorporating occasional split screens and flashy colors to add a cool dimension to a favorite old series. It might not have the massive power of the Mission: Impossible reboot or the pedigree of the continuing James Bond movies, but it is still a nice little start for a potential new franchise.
“This climb has seen more attempts and more failures than any route in the Himalaya,” Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer says near the beginning of Meru, which follows two recent tries to make it to the Shark’s Fin summit atop Mount Meru in India. “It’s the headwaters of the Ganges River, one of the most sacred rivers on earth, the center of the universe. It’s this weird nexus that is the point where heaven and earth and hell all come together.” In 2008, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk sought to be the first climbers ever to reach the top of the mountain, which features a 1,500-foot nearly sheer blade of granite at its apex. Scaling Mount Meru is more than just an extreme sport; it’s a passion and an obsession, and a supremely dangerous one at that. The film documents the two climbs as well as an extreme skiing photo shoot, and each time the men set out on a journey, they know that there is a chance that they might not make it back to their loved ones. Ozturk faces even more daunting odds; he attempts a second climb after a serious head injury with aftereffects that could kill him. But the trio is determined to go where no one has gone before, even as the stakes increase and their prospects for success dim considerably. “Meru is not just hard; it’s hard in this really complicated way,” Krakauer adds. “You can’t just be a good ice climber. You can’t just be good at altitude. You can’t just be a good rock climber. . . . It’s defeated so many good climbers and maybe will defeat everybody for all time. That, to a certain kind of mind-set, is an irresistible appeal.” In addition to carrying two hundred pounds of gear on their back, Chin, who is also a professional photographer, and Ozturk have small cameras, deatiling the treacherous trip up the twenty-one-thousand-foot-high mountain. The film is filled with gorgeous shots of the mountain and the surrounding area, but it is a beauty fraught with danger. Codirectors Chin and his wife, E. Chai Vasarhelyi (Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love, Touba), include commentary by the three alpinists, some of their relatives, Krakauer, and big mountain snowboarding legend Jeremy Jones, which emphasizes the tremendous peril involved in the climb. “I often ask myself: Where do you draw the line between following your heart and your responsibility to others?” Chin explains in his director’s statement, and the film does an excellent job of examining that critical point, especially as potential death surrounds them. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Meru is a tense, tantalizing look at humanity’s never-ending desire to go beyond all limits to bond with, and conquer, nature and its elements, no matter the risks. Meru opens August 14 at the Angelika, with Chin and Vasarhelyi participating in Q&As following the 5:00 and 7:20 shows on Friday and Chin by himself on August 19 at 7:20.
As Hubert Sauper’s We Come as Friends opens, a naked young African boy is walking down a deserted road, carrying an empty plastic water bottle. He smiles into the camera as he heads toward the blazing hot sun. The scene recalls Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy, a 1980 comedy in which the arrival of an empty Coke bottle, dropped from the sky, has a profound effect on a South African tribe living in solitude in the Kalahari Desert. But We Come as Friends is no fictional farce as a filmmaker, not a Coke bottle, drops from the sky to let Africans reveal how world powers are still employing old methods of colonialism to exploit, and essentially steal, valuable resources from African nations in the twenty-first century. “Did you know that the moon belongs to the white man?” a man asks early on. In the 2014 documentary 
In a 1984 interview with Gideon Bachmann for a special issue of the Swedish film journal Chaplin, Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky said, “I don’t believe that there exists any form of art film that can be understood by everyone. . . . It is not essential for me to be understood by everyone.” Tarkovsky was referring specifically to his latest work, the 1983 poetic masterpiece Nostalghia, although he could have been referring to almost any of his seven feature-length films. Nostalghia is a gorgeously told tale of loneliness, alienation, faith, devotion, and the search for home and family, the first film that Tarkovsky made outside of Russia, in Italy. It’s also about light and dark, as Tarkovsky and cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci explore chiaroscuro effects, often incorporating candles to create mesmerizing glows and elongated shadows while alternating between color, sepia, and black-and-white. Written by Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, who also collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, the Taviani brothers, and many others, the film opens in a vast, dark, foggy landscape, where married poet Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yanovsky, with strange white patches in his black hair), who is in Italy researching a book on eighteenth-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, and Eugenia, his Italian translator (Domiziana Giordano), have driven to a remote church to look at a fresco of the Madonna of Childbirth. Inside the church, Tarkovsky and Lanci establish one of their key visual motifs for the film, long, slow shots that pan across vertical elements — columns here, and trees and poles later, with characters showing up in one part of the shot and then another, impossibly, without the camera cutting away. Eugenia, who has flowing blond hair, is reading a book of poems by Arseni Tarkovsky, the director’s father, in Italian, but Gorchakov tells her to throw it away. “Poetry is untranslatable, like the whole of art,” he says, a sly reference to the director’s first Italian film.