No tree left behind

Ron Rash is at the top of his game with Serena, his fourth novel, and 10th book. Rash’s storytelling ability ranks with the best around, and his history as a poet shows in every sentence.

Release Date: October 10

Director: Saul Dibb

Writers: Jeffrey Hatcher, Anders Thomas Jensen, Saul Dibb

Cinematographer: Gyula Pados

Starring: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Hayley Atwell, Charlotte Rampling

Studio/Running Time: Paramount Vantage, 110 mins.

Hollywood can’t seem to get enough of Keira Knightley, treating her like some sort of thoroughbred athlete whose most productive years are right now. With the The Duchess, Knightley has now appeared in more than 20 films since her role as Amidala’s handmaiden in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. And like a fourth-quarter tailback, the more she runs, the better she gets as she convincingly demonstrates in The Duchess.

Lucinda gets her joy back

Lucinda Williams has a great laugh—it’s a joyful sound to hear on the aptly titled Little Honey, the 10th album in her three-decade career. A sweet sense of renewal imbues Williams’ latest work, which encompasses all the elements of her eclectic catalog—from her stark early sets Ramblin’ (1979) and Happy Woman Blues (1980) to her 1988 self-titled breakthrough to last year’s textural West, co-produced with Hal Willner (Lou Reed, Bill Frisell). But not since her masterpiece, 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, has Williams dug so deep and come up with an album that brims with such varied, impeccable writing. Aided by loose-limbed playing from her band Buick 6, some notable party guests, and a voice full of everything from righteous gusto to hard-won wisdom, Little Honey is Lucinda Williams at her best.

La Ronde
Director: Max Ophüls
Writer: Louis Ducreux
Cinematographer: Christian Matras
Starring: Anton Walbrook, Simone Simon, Simone Signoret
Studio/Run time: Films Sacha Gordine, 97 mins.
82/100

Le Plaisir
Director: Max Ophüls
Writer: Jacques Natanson
Cinematographer: Christian Matras
Starring: Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, Simone Simon
Studio/Run time: CCFC, 97 mins.
80/100

Earrings of Madame de…
Director: Max Ophüls
Writers: Marcel Achard, Max Ophuls, Annette Wademant
Cinematographer: Christian Matras
Starring: Charles Boyer, Danielle Darrieux, Vittorio De Sica
Studio/Run time: Franco London Films, 105 mins.
84/100

In almost any scene of any of the films made by director Max Ophüls, be it in Berlin (before the ascent of the Nazi party), Paris, Hollywood, and then back in Paris, lie the director’s primary concerns: Men and women, lust, love, theatrical artifice and the illusion of desire. Though a favorite of Stanley Kubrick and perhaps the only peer to Orson Welles with regards to innovative camera shots, Ophüls’s oeuvre somehow fell by the wayside. In introductions by Todd Haynes and P.T. Anderson to these sterling DVD editions, both gush about the director’s art.

Holland enjoys herself on fourth album

Jolie Holland writes songs packed like retablos with autobiographical details and Dia de los Muertos figures, but it’s her voice that animates them. She slurs her words and blurs her phrasing, chewing her consonants and creating a distinctively drunken drawl. Holland’s fourth—and perhaps best—album (featuring contributions from collaborator M. Ward and guitarist Marc Ribot) foregoes the smoky speakeasy atmosphere of 2006’s Springtime Can Kill You for a more contemporary roots sound, which provides a more evocative backdrop for her signature vocals. Despite singing such despairing lyrics, she sounds more commanding and confident than ever on “Mexico City” and “Your Big Hands.” The bleak murder ballad “Love Henry” and “Fox In Its Hole” revisit her old noir-jazz vibe, but sound more connected to the here-and-now instead of some vague there-and-then. Holland half sings/ half laughs the closing cover of Guy Lombardo hit “Enjoy Yourself,” sounding like she’s truly taken that advice to heart.

Listen to Jolie Holland's "Love Henry" from The Living and the Dead:

Release Date: Oct. 10
Director/
Writer: Mike Leigh
Cinematographer: Dick Pope
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman
Studio/Run Time: 
Miramax, 118 mins.

Much happiness, some luck, mild charm

In Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy (Sally Hawkins) makes her own charmed life in London, following a trail of giggles between a stolen bike, a disturbed driving instructor, bookstore clerks, nights spent partying with her flatmate, and most other situations that might arise for a single 30-year-old woman. Like Audrey Tautou's Amélie remodeled for extroversion and erased of an interior monologue (and an external dream world, for that matter), Hawkins is charming—to a degree. Though she moves through Mike Leigh's film with grace, she rarely seems to arrive anywhere. She learns to drive, but literally has no destination in mind. There are laughs, of course, but where there is drama—mostly via bottled-up driving instructor Scott (Eddie Marsan) and one of Poppy’s young students—it rarely comes with any depth. Eventually, we find Poppy, but she’s already found herself a half-dozen times by then anyway.

Release Date: Oct. 10
Director/Writer: Wong Kar Wai
Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle
Starring: Jacky Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung
Studio/Run Time: 
Sony Pictures Classics/Jet Tone Films, 93 mins.

Try to get a grip on these ashes

Before he gained international renown for romantic, impressionistic art films like In the Mood for Love and 2046, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai dabbled in his homeland’s kung-fu fare with 1994’s Ashes of Time. Though it’s never been officially released Stateside until now, varying edits of the movie have been floating around for years. Wong clarifies some vagaries with this new cut—hence the Redux tag. Without knowledge of the novel from which the film draws, Western audiences will no doubt be confused by the interlocking stories of these ronins and their passions. An odd amalgam of D.H. Lawrence, Sergio Leone Westerns and samurai swordplay, Ashes shows Wong’s themes (elliptical time, doomed love, the sensorial human experience over the rational) to be constant throughout his career. And the landscape—expertly captured by the venerable Christopher Doyle—mystifies, as do the visceral and dizzyingly edited fight 
sequences.

Watch the trailer for Ashes of Time Redux:

Live tracks and crisp, rootsy outtakes with a whole lotta Lanois

As Dylan’s every move seems to add weight and mystery to his legend, it’s no surprise that Columbia’s bootleg series—the cockeyed commentary to the canon—has finally caught up to the latter phases of his recorded output. Tell Tale Signs largely resists the temptation to sketch “latter-era Dylan” in favor of the more specific “Lanois-era Dylan.” Stocked heavily with outtakes from Time out of Mind and Oh Mercy, these “lost” tracks demonstrate producer Daniel Lanois’ influence in steering the legendary songwriter to a place of seemingly pure voice—a revived interest in roots fused with an elder jokester’s nostalgic delivery. The peaceful, assured studio creature gilded here is an interesting foil to the Dylan we’ve seen on the road the last few decades. While a proper encapsulation of the “Never Ending Tour” awaits, the scattershot of live tracks here teases the subject. Even if the collection omits Dylan’s acerbic and often consciously sacrilegious re-workings of his largest-looming ’60s works, the tearing grind of 2002’s “Lonesome Day Blues” hints at the moments of higher energy that Dylan and the Sexton/Campbell guitar duo found while glancing back toward the highway. Catching these dual modes, Tell Tale Signs subtly makes a good argument that Dylan’s later work is richer than expected.

Listen to Bob Dylan's "Mississippi" from Tell Tale Signs:

Eleven albums in, “Nashville’s
most *%$#’d up country band” 
remains as indefinable as ever

I’ve long since given up attempting to label Lambchop; the exercise in futility hurts my head, and given that my ears are attached to that extremity, I need them focused on the task at hand. Is Lambchop alt.country? If sonic elements like steel guitars, nods to prime 
Burrito Brothers (tell me that “Close Up”—a kissing cousin to “Hot Burrito No. 1”—doesn’t grab you by the lapels of your Nudie jacket) or the occasional Countrypolitan string flourish strike you as such, sure. Maybe blue-eyed soul? Considering that songs such as “A Hold of You” could be Barry White fronting the Muscle Shoals house band with Al Green standing by in the green room, why not? Maybe indie-—hey, they are on Merge. Whatever: just
listen to the damn disc. Kurt Wagner has kept Lambchop’s lineup constantly rotating since he began in 1994—and its typical dozen-person formation instantly qualifies as the quietest ensemble ever heard—and he still comes on like the Bukowski of Music Row, but when he busts out a line like “You’re busting my chops” (as he punningly does on the title track) you just cherish the man, and his work, for the illogical, indescribable blips that they are.

Listen to Lambchop's "Slipped Dissolved and Loosed" from OH (ohio):

You can stop any time

Some might say addiction is a disease of perception. For example, my dad drank every single day: He arrived at his local tavern to belt beers daily with more punctuality than he ever put into any job he had, yet the fact that he was an alcoholic escaped my perception until nine years after he’d suddenly died of heart failure at 52, when my sister gave me a book about adult children of alcoholics and about how, you know, we sometimes can deny the obvious and stuff.