Ann (Lucy Walters) is struggling to survive a postapocalyptic nightmare in HERE ALONE
HERE ALONE (Rod Blackhurst, 2016)
Sunday, April 24, Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea 5, 9:45
tribecafilm.com
www.herealonefilm.com
Rod Blackhurst’s tense 2013 short film, Alone Time, in which a New York City woman named Ann (Rose Hemingway) heads upstate for a few days of camping by herself, was based on a true story. Fortunately, Blackhurst’s feature debut, Here Alone, is not. The gripping postapocalyptic thriller is set in what has become our standard vision of the near future, when a virus has decimated the world’s population, turning people into cannibalistic zombies. (Are there any other kind?) Ann (Lucy Walters) is doing her best to survive in the forest by herself, raiding nearby houses for canned food while evading the hungry walking dead. The film flashes back and forth between the present and the recent past, when Ann, her husband, Jason (Shane West), and their baby left their home to seek safety in the woods. Along the way, Jason taught Ann detailed survival methods, which she uses to the best of her ability. When she finds a teenage girl, Olivia (Gina Piersanti), and her injured stepfather, Chris (Adam David Thompson), in the middle of the road, she has to decide whether to help and trust them — while also facing haunting memories, as they remind her of the family she has lost — in a future that is uncertain for all of them. Director and editor Blackhurst, screenwriter David Ebeltoft, and cinematographer Adam McDaid (Ebeltoft cowrote Alone Time with Blackhurst, and McDaid photographed the short) have crafted a nifty little horror film, mining familiar genre territory but twisting conventions just enough to keep viewers on the edge of their seat. You can’t take your eyes off Walters (Shame, Power), who gives Ann a tough yet vulnerable quality, focusing on her troubled psyche, with Thompson (A Walk among the Tombstones, Mozart in the Jungle) and Piersanti (It Felt Like Love) keeping things right on the edge of comfort and chaos. Here Alone is screening in the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival on April 24 at 9:45.
We called Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2004 hit, Kamikaze Girls, the “otaku version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie,” referring to it as “fresh,” “frenetic,” “fast-paced,” and “very funny.” His feature-length follow-up, the stunningly gorgeous Memories of Matsuko, also recalls Amelie and all those other adjectives, albeit with much more sadness. Miki Nakatani (Ring, Silk) stars as Matsuko, a sweet woman who spent her life just looking to be loved but instead found nothing but heartbreak, deception, and physical and emotional abuse. But Memories of Matsuko, is not a depressing melodrama, even if Nakashima (Confessions, The World of Kanako) incorporates touches of Douglas Sirk every now and again. The film is drenched in glorious Technicolor, often breaking out into bright and cheerful musical numbers straight out of a 1950s fantasy world. As the movie begins, Matsuko has been found murdered, and her long-estranged brother (Akira Emoto) has sent his son, Sho (Eita), who never knew she existed, to clean out her apartment. As Sho goes through the mess she left behind, the film flashes back to critical moments in Matsuko’s life — and he also meets some crazy characters in the present. It’s difficult rooting for the endearing Matsuko knowing what becomes of her, but Nakashima’s remarkable visual style will grab you and never let go. And like Audrey Tatou in Amelie, Nakatani — who won a host of Japanese acting awards for her outstanding performance — is just a marvel to watch. Memories of Matsuko is a fine choice to conclude Japan Society’s rather eclectic 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film.” As curator Michael Raine notes, “The ubiquity of music and song in postwar Japanese cinema became an anti-naturalist resource for modernist filmmakers to characterize social groups (Twilight Saloon, 
“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!” announces the monocled, whip-snapping Mammoth Circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) as Max Ophüls’s 1955 CinemaScope masterpiece, Lola Montès, begins. “The most sensational act of the century!” he continues, the camera following him in a breathtaking tracking shot as he introduces “a creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty . . . with the eyes of an angel!” Then, with much fanfare, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) arrives like a queen — albeit a circus queen — as the ringmaster tells the audience that they (we) are about to witness “the whole truth of the extraordinary life of Lola Montès.” What follows is not necessarily the true tale of the famed courtesan and entertainer who gained more notoriety for her scandalous love affairs and hourglass body than for her abilities as an actress and dancer. Lola’s story is told in a series of flashbacks showing her with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny), conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau), a young student (Oskar Werner), and, most critically, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (a dashing Anton Walbrook). The episodes reveal her to be both loved and reviled as she struggles to succeed in her career, which ends up taking second place to the men in her life. Ophüls barely shows the cigar-loving Lola performing, instead letting the camera slowly dance around her, often depicting her through window frames, screens, and curtains as if she is a caged animal, all leading to a dangerous grand finale.
“When you create a story about yourself that’s based on a lie about who you are and who your family is, sooner or later it’s bound to be revealed,” political journalist Anne Applebaum says at the beginning of Joseph Martin and Sam Blair’s engrossing documentary, Keep Quiet. “Who are we really?” In 2012, Csanád Szegedi was a terrifying young star in Hungary’s far-right Jobbik party, one of the founders of the paramilitary, pro-Nazi, nationalist Hungarian Guard, rising to election to the European Parliament on the strength of a resurgent, virulent anti-Semitism. “I wanted everyone to believe in the world as I saw it,” he says in the film. “Anti-Semitism and discrimination of Jews was a powerful motivation.” But it all came crumbling down when the public heard an audio recording of the young leader’s phone conversation with disgruntled Jobbik party member Zoltán Ambrus, who tells Szegedi that his family is actually Jewish. At first Szegedi refuses to believe it, but soon his maternal grandmother is admitting to him that she is indeed a Holocaust survivor, with a number tattooed on her arm and memories of the camps. Martin (Win a Baby, Scientologists at War) and Blair (Personal Best, Maradona ’86) detail how Szegedi dealt with this dramatic revelation as the conflicted man shares his innermost thoughts, meets with Orthodox Rabbi Boruch Oberlander, and travels to Auschwitz with Holocaust survivor Eva “Bobby” Neumann. He undergoes a radical transformation that not everyone trusts as the film explores who we are, the impact of where we come from, and whether blood trumps all. Keep Quiet is particularly relevant in a world that is experiencing yet another frightening rise in anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. Martin and Blair also delve into Hungary’s history with the Jews, and it’s not a very pleasant one. The film gets to the very heart of the matter, examining the nature of religious hatred in one man who reevaluates everything he believes in when the tables are suddenly turned. Keep Quiet, which features a beautiful score by cellist and composer Philip Sheppard, is screening in the World Documentary Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18, 19, and 20, with Martin, Blair, Rabbi Oberlander, and Szegedi present on April 18 to discuss the film.