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    ‘Treasure’ Review: Unearthing the Past

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    Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry star in a Holocaust-memory drama that uneasily doubles as a father-daughter road movie.Along with Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” scheduled for release this fall, Julia von Heinz’s “Treasure” is one of at least two dramas this year to follow the American descendants of Holocaust survivors on travels across Poland. Von Heinz’s film is based on a novel by the Australia-raised author Lily Brett, herself the daughter of survivors. But whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.It is 1991, and Ruth (Lena Dunham, asked to do the most serious acting of her career), a journalist, has planned a trip to Poland. Her father, Edek (Stephen Fry), who, along with Ruth’s mother, survived Auschwitz, has insisted on joining her. He says he couldn’t let his daughter visit Poland alone.Initially, “Treasure” presents Edek as a goofy lug, jocular and uninhibited. But his carefree attitude masks repressed trauma, to an extent that Fry never manages to make visceral. Unnerved by train travel, Edek hires a driver (Zbigniew Zamachowski, from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “White”) to take them from site to site. “Treasure” builds to their trip to Auschwitz, where Edek quickly takes over from the tour guide with an outpouring of memories.The crux of the film involves their visits to the Lodz apartment from which Edek and his family were exiled in 1940. Ruth wants to reclaim what was stolen from her family; Edek has a learned fear of not moving on from the past. Their difference in outlooks is a potentially powerful subject, but miscasting has blunted its impact.TreasureRated R. Intense descriptions of survival in Auschwitz. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Inventor’ Review: Leonardo da Vinci in the Limelight

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      This playful movie uses stop-motion and hand-drawn animation to pay homage to Leonardo as a thinker and tinkerer.More than once in “The Inventor,” an animated feature about Leonardo da Vinci, powerful patrons tell that Renaissance polymath to behave “like a good little artist.” This advice comes first from Pope Leo X (voiced by Matt Berry) and later from Louise of Savoy (Marion Cotillard), the devoted mother of King Francis I of France.The notion of a great mind that is both beneficiary of and handmaid to the agendas of the powerful runs throughout this admirably artisanal appreciation of Leonardo’s intellect and innovative spirit, which follows him (Stephen Fry) as he leaves Rome to become King Francis’s maestro. The directors, Jim Capobianco (who also wrote the screenplay) and Pierre-Luc Granjon, keep the artist’s paintings secondary to his exploits as a thinker and tinkerer. Their engaging voice cast also includes Daisy Ridley as Leonardo’s royal champion, Marguerite de Navarre, and Gauthier Battoue as the king, who proves to be in dire need of an ego-stroking statue.The filmmakers use stop-motion puppetry and hand-illustrated animation to capture Leonardo’s story. This brings to life his fears and fascinations, while drawing out both the wonder and the tribulations he experiences as he searches for the “answer to life itself,” while struggling to work under the command of the powerful. (Here, “The Inventor” shares a theme with a decidedly less child-friendly recent big-screen portrait, “Oppenheimer.”)In honoring this beautiful mind, the plot’s forward motion lags at times. “The Inventor” is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.The InventorRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity’ Review: Is It Art?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity’ Review: Is It Art?A documentary examines the methods and interests of this Dutch printmaker, who felt his work was also indebted to mathematics.Escher’s “Band of Union,” as seen in “M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity,“Credit…Kino LorberFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETM.C. Escher – Journey to InfinityDirected by Robin LutzDocumentary1h 21mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Providing some orientation for the disorienting work of the Dutch printmaker M.C. Escher (1898-1972), the documentary “M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity” takes its cues from Escher’s writings, which it uses as narration. (Stephen Fry’s voice-over applies an unwarranted grandiosity to these self-effacing musings.)Escher is quoted as saying that he often dreamed of making a film, although he adds, “I would most certainly bore people to death with it.” Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.[embedded content]The film is strongest when it uses animation to illustrate Escher’s ideas, as when it unbends the curves of a lithograph to more clearly show what it depicts: a man in a gallery looking at a picture of the very scene he is in, a perspective repeated endlessly. We learn how Escher applied ideas from the mosaics at the Alhambra in Spain to imagery from the natural world. He describes the associative thinking — his mind jumping from a hexagon to a honeycomb to a bee — that inspired his subject matter and says he feels a kinship to Bach’s use of repetition and variation.Present-day footage of the sites discussed and interviews with Escher’s sons are more perfunctory, as is the commentary from the admiring folk rocker Graham Nash. Escher apparently did not understand why his “cerebral and rationalized” work found favor with the freewheeling 1960s counterculture — which was, in its own blissed-out way, also concerned with infinity.M.C. Escher: Journey to InfinityNot rated. In English, Dutch, Italian and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More