REEL NEWS

NEW & SOON-TO-BE-RELEASED DVDS REVIEWED BY GEORGE OXFORD MILLER

Suburban Birds (Director Sheng Qiu. Starring Zihan Gong, Lu Huang, Mason Lee.) Filled with allegory and intersecting timelines, this arthouse cinema seems concocted more as festival fare than for mainstream consumption. It opens with a survey team analyzing a ruined neighborhood that originally looked healthy and stable, but literally, like the government agency that approved the construction, was rotten to its core. Sinkholes created by subterranean faults caused the buildings to collapse. While rummaging through an abandoned schoolhouse, one surveyor, Hao (Lee), finds a student’s diary that describes a traumatic event. Hardly coincidental, the boy (Zihan) is also named Hao. Suddenly the story shifts to a group of young boys playing in the woods, birdwatching, exploring, searching for the secrets of nature. They find a bird egg and wonder if it hides a monster. Then one goes missing. Their idyllic free-for-all turns into a quest for their lost comrade. Now we have two parallel realities to follow, each thematically mirroring a shattering, end-of-innocence event. Both teams are searching for answers to an unexpected happening that disrupted their lives. Director Qiu uses radically different camera technics and pacing to frame each reality, but the composition and settings often echo each other. Each narrative presents its unanswered mysteries in a compelling, slow-cinema approach that twines around and enthralls your imagination. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (NR) HHH

Knives Out (Director Rian Johnson. Starring Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Ana de Armas.) This Agatha Christi style whodone-it throws all murder-in-the-mansion

stereotypes out the window, along with the game of Clue and Daniel Craig’s image as James Bond. At times it approaches parody with its share of one-liners and plenitude of despicable suspects, but Johnson creates a new game with its own style and rules. When 85-year-old crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Plummer) is found with his throat cut, gentleman detective Benoit Blanc (Craig with a deep southern accent, tweed attire, and a foot-long cigar) arrives unannounced on the scene. The host of duplicitous, cut-throat (literally) family members battle for control of the murdered patriarch’s fortune. Blanc takes one look and declares that everyone’s a suspect, and the misdirection and machinations begin. We see Harlan’s daughter, > 37