Leonardo DiCaprio gets ready for battle in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning THE DEPARTED
THE DEPARTED (Martin Scorsese, 2006)
Bow Tie Ziegfeld Theater
141 West 54th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Thursday, February 13, 3:30
Festival runs February 13-14
212-765-7600
www.bowtiecinemas.com
Based on Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s awesome Infernal Affairs (2002), Martin Scorsese’s relatively faithful remake, The Departed, moves the relentless action and intrigue from Hong Kong to the mean streets of Boston, where it is hard to tell cop from criminal. Just out of the academy, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) rises quickly to detective in the Special Investigations Unit, but he’s actually in cahoots with master crime lord Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Meanwhile, Billy Costigan (an excellent Leonardo DiCaprio), training to become a cop, is sent deep undercover (including a prison stint) to infiltrate Costello’s gang, with only Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sergeant Dignam (a very funny and foul-mouthed Mark Wahlberg) aware of the secret mission. Sullivan and Costigan are like opposite sides of the same persona; in between them stands Costello — and Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), a psychiatrist who is in a relationship with one and is doctor to the other. As both the cops and the criminals search desperately for their respective rats, no one can trust each other, leading to lots of blood and a spectacular finale. Nicholson has a field day as the aging gangster, chewing up mounds of scenery in his first film with Scorsese, who returned to peak form with his best work since 1990’s Goodfellas. The film was nominated for five Oscars, winning four, for Best Director, Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), Best Adapted Screenplay (William Monahan), and Best Picture, while Wahlberg was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
Collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio is celebrated with two-day festival at the Ziegfeld
The Departed is being shown on February 13 at 3:30 as part of a two-day salute at the Ziegfeld to the long-running partnership between DiCaprio and Scorsese, including screenings of all five of their collaborations: The Aviator, Scorsese’s examination of Howard Hughes’s (DiCaprio) high-flying and controversial airplane career; Gangs of New York, which pits Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) against Bill “the Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) in the city’s immigrant-heavy Five Corners; Shutter Island, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel with DiCaprio as a U.S. marshal; and their latest, the multi-Oscar-nominated The Wolf of Wall Street, in which DiCaprio plays real-life stockbroker Jordan Belfort. DiCaprio, Schoonmaker, and screenwriter Terence Winter will take part in a Q&A with Kent Jones prior to the 7:00 screening of Wolf on February 13.
“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box). 
After screening at more than seventy-five international film festivals over the past two years, Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori’s Paraguayan thriller, 7 Boxes, is getting its official U.S. theatrical release February 7, opening at Cinema Village. The low-budget film, which was made for about half a million dollars and broke box-office records in its native country, is set in and around Municipal Market No. 4 in Paraguay’s capital city, Asunción, where seventeen-year-old Victor (Celso Sebastián Franco Ferreira) pushes a rickety wheelbarrow, helping people with their purchases, sometimes accompanied by his friend Liz (Lali González). Always on the lookout to make a quick buck in order to afford a cell phone and a television, Victor gets a call from Gus (Roberto Cardozo), asking him to make an important delivery because Gus’s usual accomplice, Nelson (Víctor Sosa Traverzi), cannot be reached and it’s an emergency. So Victor jumps at the opportunity, not caring what’s in the boxes even though he knows something shady’s going on, instead simply taking half of a hundred-dollar bill, the second half of which will be given to him upon completion of his task. But it’s not going to be very easy, because when Nelson finds out about it, he is determined to do whatever it takes to steal the deal for himself. Meanwhile, Victor’s sister, Tamara (Nelly Dávalos), is concerned not only about the trouble her younger brother might be in but also about her pregnant coworker, Leti (Katia García), who is getting no help from the father, Gus, who is more worried about what his bosses, the comic-relief duo of Don Dario (Paletita) and Luis (Nico García), are going to do to him when they learn how nothing has gone quite as planned. Maneglia and Schémbori’s debut feature, following a long career in shorts and television, has its moments, but there are far too many head-scratching plot holes, red herrings, inconsistencies, and hard-to-believe twists that detract from the film’s energy, which works best when it focuses on Victor and his desire to better his station, through technology. While Victor is a sympathetic character, played with a wide-eyed innocence by Franco, his nemesis, Nelson, is a lost cause from the start, desperate to make money to buy medicine for his sick child but never really having a moral center. Still, it’s an admirable achievement coming from a country that has produced so few full-length films. Maneglia and Schémbori will be at Cinema Village for Q&As after the 7:10 screenings on February 7 & 8.
For forty years, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has been documenting the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel in such provocative and powerful films as Israel, Why; Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.; and his nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, Shoah. In 1997, he made A Visitor from the Living, built around a 1979 interview with International Red Cross worker Maurice Rossel, who led a delegation inspecting the Nazis’ so-called “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt, which turned out to be a glorified concentration camp. Lanzmann returns to the Czech camp in The Last of the Unjust, an utterly fascinating 218-minute documentary consisting of a series of interviews he conducted in Rome in 1975 with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the only Jewish Elder to survive the Holocaust. For years, Murmelstein, who was appointed directly by and reported to Obersturmbannführer Adolph Eichmann, has been declared a Nazi collaborator, by writer Hannah Arendt and many others, even being arrested, imprisoned, and tried by Czech authorities. But in The Last of the Unjust, he paints a vivid portrait of everyday life in Theresienstadt, claiming he was not a collaborator but instead was doing whatever he could to improve conditions for the Jews there.