<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Spy movies come in two flavors: high-octane 007 ultraviolence or the danger-haunted melancholy realism of John Le Carr\u00E9. French director Christian Carion&amp;#039;s smartly crafted new thriller, L&amp;#039;Affaire Farewell, is in the latter vein, covering events in the Cold War that hastened the fall of the Iron Curtain. Subtle and fierce, it&amp;#039;s an espionage tale that runs the gamut of human experience, from unexpected family joy and illicit crazy-hot sex to the wrenching sight of a man impatiently beckoning his own death. Farewell is based on a real-life figure most of us have never heard of: Vladimir Vetrov\u2014called Sergei Grigoriev in the movie\u2014a colonel in the Soviet Union&amp;#039;s famously brutal KGB. In 1981, hoping to bring down a corrupt political system, he passed invaluable secrets through French intermediaries to the Reagan administration, including a list of KGB spies in the CIA, NASA, the Pentagon, and the White House itself. Within four years, the Soviet breakup had begun. A political idealist, Vetrov was personally violent. In Farewell, Carion keeps the idealism but gives his hero a more nuanced fallibility as played by Bosnian director Emir Kusturica. Farewell (the code name given Grigoriev by the French security service) plays out in French, Russian, and English, with a witty lineup including Willem Dafoe as the ruthless head of the CIA, a down-home Fred Ward as Ronald Reagan, David Soul as a Dick Cheney\u2013like character, and a second notable director, Guillaume Canet (Tell No One), as Pierre Froment, a French engineer working in Moscow who&amp;#039;s understandably rattled at becoming Grigoriev&amp;#039;s messenger to the other side. But the film&amp;#039;s magnetic center is Sarajevo-born Kusturica, who has seen more than his share of political tragedy. Tall and stoopshouldered with deep-set, baggy eyes and strong, sensual features, his Grigoriev\u2014who&amp;#039;s a Francophile and a poetry lover\u2014radiates a wounded charisma reminiscent of a Belmondo character, but older, warier, and infinitely wiser. It&amp;#039;s to him we look for our common humanity, warts and all. A late bloomer, Carion, 47, made two previous films, both a pleasure, The Girl From Paris (2001) and the even better Joyeux No\u00EBl (2005), about the famous Christmas Eve truce that broke out among French, British, and German soldiers in World War I. He&amp;#039;s always been good with actors, but in Farewell he shows new mastery. The movie doesn&amp;#039;t just look beautiful; it&amp;#039;s beautifully constructed visually and narratively. Farewell has an emotional depth and complexity that&amp;#039;s rare in spy thrillers, reflecting Carion&amp;#039;s concern for his characters&amp;#039; intimate lives and how they intersect with a culture of surveillance and deceit. The lethal cat-and-mouse game that drives the suspense never lets up, but it&amp;#039;s also richly inflected with pathos, surprise, and even humor. (In an exuberant scene featuring Grigoriev&amp;#039;s rebellious teenage son, concert footage of Freddie Mercury&amp;#039;s romping, stomping, nearly naked performance of &amp;quot;We Will Rock You&amp;quot; is put to hilarious dialectical use.) Froment is younger, smaller, and far more priggish than Grigoriev, lending their partnership a Mutt and Jeff tinge, comic relief from the anxious reality that surrounds them. That reality defies the standard movie clich\u00E9s that cloak Moscow in gloomy shades of gray. Here, the city looks surprisingly spacious and clean\u2014even the blue sky above it feels startling. Still, both men&amp;#039;s marriages suffer from various kinds of state-inflicted deception. Froment and his wife (an underused Alexandra Maria Lara) are well aware that their housekeeper is reporting anything suspicious to her government bosses. And while the love between Grigoriev and his wife (the luminous Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite) is palpable, he means it when he says, &amp;quot;I live in lies and solitude.&amp;quot; Farewell&amp;#039;s portrait of a totalitarian state is more effective for being unemphatic; you feel the daily insult of a system in which people on a subway platform reflexively look elsewhere when KGB men flash a badge at a woman and haul her away. Who is she? What has she done? Nobody wants to know. Carion shows how fear spreads corruption like a virus, infecting everyone until it becomes a backdrop that makes acts of conscience, heroism, and simple kindness stand out in stark relief. L&amp;#039;Affaire Farewell isn&amp;#039;t about us versus them; by the movie&amp;#039;s end, no country&amp;#039;s hands are clean. Its real subject is repression: Totalitarianism eventually fails because it&amp;#039;s a lousy fit with human nature. Click here to see more film picks from Karen Durbin           Mamma Mia  Two darkly amusing crime-family dramas from England and Australia, Down Terrace and Animal Kingdom, feel so realistic that they make The Sopranos look like grand opera. Murder is all in a day&amp;#039;s dirty work for the men, but the most compelling characters are the mothers, one poignant, one chilling, and, for all their middle-aged domesticity, both as lethal as the family business demands.             Love on the Nile In Cairo Time, an elegant UN wife (Patricia Clarkson) and her husband&amp;#039;s former colleague (Syriana&amp;#039;s dishy Alexander Siddig) find themselves intensely attracted. Powered by their evocative performances, Ruba Nadda&amp;#039;s moving story of thwarted love builds to an exquisite standoff between passion and principle that may leave you in tears.             Blindsided When Arizona Cardinals star safety Pat Tillman enlisted and died by friendly fire in Afghanistan, the Pentagon launched a cover-up that his family exposed. Amir Bar-Lev&amp;#039;s doc The Tillman Story nails the liars and shows us true American heroes. The Tillmans embody what the government conveniently forgot: that a democracy without truth is no democracy at all.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a11305/karen-durbin-reviews-christian-carrions-laffaire-farewell/>