Django, Tarantino, Miike: These names alone are enough to tell anyone whether or not Sukiyaki Western Django is for them. If you only know the middle guy, don't bother (and for shame!); if you know and like all three, you've probably already seen and blogged about the movie anyway.

Takashi Miike's career spans some 40 feature films, twenty direct-to-video releases, a dozen or so works for television, and a stage adaptation of Zatoichi. He's known to popular Western audiences, if at all, for his excruciating 1999 psycho-horror Audition. And whereas a lot of Miike's work falls into this genre, just as much falls outside of it or pushes its margins.

2001's The Happiness of the Katakuris switches from TV-quality drama to lavish musical to claymation within seconds, and more than one of his films splices yakuza action with J-horror. Much of Miike's most interesting films turn on playful genre-mashing, and Sukiyaki Western Django, as the title suggests, is itself a hot-pot of styles from Orient and Occident, re-appropriating Yojimbo back from the Italians and translating the image of Franco Nero's laconic Django icon into that of a stubbly Japanese gunslinger.

Click here to read the rest of Leo Goldsmith's review of Sukiyaki Western Django.

For the last decade American movie audiences have been bludgeoned so mercilessly with poorly and vacuously executed whimsy ("We're drowning in quirk," Michael Hirschorn famously wrote in the September 2007 issue of Atlantic Monthly, and I wholeheartedly agree) that an even partially successful excursion into magical realism like Czech New Waver Jiri Menzel's I Served the King of England comes as nearly a relief, a rare contemporary example of how fanciful, wide-eyed filmmaking can be employed not simply for the sake of ironic condescension or set design window-dressing but for genuine emotional and political exploration.

I Served the King of England is based on Bohumil Hrabal's short but epic novel of the same name, in which a diminutive Candide-like simpleton named Dite (Czech for "child") follows his dream of becoming a millionaire and hobnobbing with the rich and powerful by rising from frankfurter vendor in pre-invasion Czechoslovakia, to hotel owner just after the fall of the Third Reich, and then finally to released prisoner from the Communist regime.

Menzel has us see through the eyes of waiter and then maitre d' Dite (played as an eager, taciturn young man by Ivan Barnev; as a wiser older man by Oldrich Kaiser) as he gawks at the swells, through beer glasses that enlarge the figures of their trophy women and in dreamlike sequences of decadent splendor where industrialists gallivant in sped-up motion and overlit interiors, devouring champagne and oysters while bedding willing young females. Such fancy abounds in England—stylized ornate period detail, silent movie homages, fantastic touches like halos appearing above heads and dollar bills floating in the air.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review if I Served the King of England.

It’s the dead of night in the forest, with just enough light to illuminate the expanse of the surrounding darkness. A group of soldiers solemnly passes through a field, their weariness easily recognizable on their fading blue uniforms and collective downward gaze, and as the last two stragglers, who are obviously in no hurry, mosey past the camera, out come the most unlikely words for a bushy-mustached WWI soldier: “I, the blind girl...it may be the influence of the seasons, but I can tell I’m back in France.” Sung in the anachronistic style of 1960s pop-psychedelia (and by a singer of the opposite gender), the song chronicles the travels of a sightless French girl and her love of a young English lord—yet it also captures the spirit of Serge Bozon’s La France, a cross-genre hybrid of a musical and war film, and a folkloric narrative of cross-country journeys and separated lovers, featuring playful gender-bending performances. Even though the director (who also co-wrote the film’s four songs) resists calling the film a musical, its infectious melodies give La France its most irresistible charm, and provide a mystery even bigger than that of whom the soldiers are and where they are going.

At the center of the film is not the band of soldiers, but Camille Robin (Sylvie Testud), a young wife whose husband, François (Guillaume Depardieu), is off fighting in the war. After receiving a letter from the front indicating that, “I don’t want you to write back to me, you’ll never see me again,” Camille chops off her hair and disguises herself as a young boy before wandering the forests, never quite sure of her location or even even her intended destination, in search of the war. The early days (or are they weeks? hours? The film’s lack of temporal guidelines is but one of its many semi-hallucinatory qualities) of Camille’s journey are captured in a few swift shots, characteristic of Bozon’s economical-but-evocative style: Camille on a path at night; Camille cracking walnuts barehanded by day; Camille at dusk on a path that leads her to the wayward soldiers, whom she hopes will guide her to her husband. Unknown to her, however, is the fact that the soldiers are deserters, and they are leading her away from the front instead of towards it. Click here to read the rest of Cullen Gallagher's review of La France.

"I'm showing the world that we had a world before the storm," says Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a.k.a. Black Kold Madina, on August 28, 2005, the day preceding Hurricane Katrina's devastating touch down in New Orleans. Kimberly is poor, black, and, unlike the majority of the city's wealthier white citizens, unable to "afford the luxury" of transportation that could take her out of what will prove to be a very vulnerable Dodge. Armed with a newly purchased camcorder, she records and narrates her preparations for the storm as well as the ongoing life of her Ninth Ward community, including neighbors' defying boasts in the face of reports warning residents to evacuate their homes due to the impending category-five hurricane.

Thus ominously, heartbreakingly begins Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, a documentary structured around Kimberly's incredible footage and her post-Katrina survival. Unlike Spike Lee's expansive, macroscopic When the Levees Broke or Lucia Small and Ed Pincus's self-reflexive The Axe in the Attic, Water captures Katrina and its aftermath as it unfolds through the point of view of a single person, and through that single person the film focuses widely on "the world before the storm" Kimberly not only represents but struggles to keep alive.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Trouble the Water.

Considering that Azazel Jacobs, the director of Momma's Man, is the offspring of American avant-garde filmmaker extraordinaire Ken Jacobs, one would be forgiven for expecting his film to be more experimental and abstract than the seemingly conventional narrative that plays out. Yet buried beneath the poignant clutter of this occasionally familiar stunted-youth-in-life-transition tale is a surprisingly complex, elegantly detailed meditation on creativity and artistic growth. While Ken Jacobs may work with found footage, purposefully elongating time and reassembling it into tapestries of pointed Americana, his son has constructed a personal fiction film using the detritus of his own life: the downtown Manhattan loft where he grew up, the gadgets and tchotchkes strewn about it like cherished memories, and his parents themselves.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's indieWIRE review.

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Momma's Man was one of my personal favorites from Sundance this past year (the others being the forthcoming Ballast and the surprisingly complex Baghead, already in release) so I'd urge anyone at all interested in the state of the American Independent to make this a priority. It's rough around the edges and occassionally a little shoddy, but isn't that what's been missing from the Sundance factory these last few years? A little bit of imperfection in the craftsmanship goes a long way. Skip Hamlet 2 (a wildly unfunny suckfest on an epic scale), and go for the little guy.

The high-concept hiring of indie darling David Gordon Green to direct the latest Judd Apatow–produced flick was a stroke of genius in theory. What better way to enliven the output of an already tired one-man cinematic brand and his merry band of acolytes than to bring in an outside agitator to shake things up? And what genre could use a makeover more than the stoner comedy, the demographic of which would certainly appreciate the possibly inspired visuals an art-house stylist might bring to the experience? Although I’d sworn off Apatow after Knocked Up—a movie so gleefully misogynistic I wanted to clock America on its collective head for falling for it—Green’s inclusion in the gang made me reconsider. At the very least, I’d hoped the talent mash-up would produce interesting frissons. Disappointingly, nothing doing: this long-gestating result of pop-art intercourse is stillborn.

Maybe Green smoked too much weed doing research for Pineapple Express; how else to account for the lazy disinterest in the cinematic conception of this strangely galumphing affair from a filmmaker usually attentive—in concert with his regular cinematographer Tim Orr—to such concerns as composition and lighting? Staid pacing and standard shots held a few beats too long to hit the comedic sweet spot show up Green’s inexperience in mainstream generic moviemaking. His direction here exhibits nothing so much as that least attractive of stoner attributes: a sluggish inertia. Otherwise his influence on Pineapple Express remains unfelt as Apatow’s concerns dictate the course of action. Based on a story written by the prolific producer, along with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (the pair developed it into a screenplay), the movie circles around rituals of heterosexual male bonding, as usual. But this time, as if in response to all the critical chatter surrounding such exclusionary attention to XY-only camaraderie, Team Apatow amps up the homosocial love-in even further to become a spoof of its former self.

Click here to read the rest of Kristi Mitsuda's review of Pineapple Express.

When it first came out in 1992, The Ben Stiller Show was like nothing else on TV, at least to this teenager. A wallow in Hollywood detritus and a loving deconstruction of pop idioms, The Ben Stiller Show was nuanced, knowing, and unapologetically geeky—which explains why it lasted all of 12 episodes. Yet the largely unseen series remains the most unadulterated product of Stiller’s comic imagination, a tonic to the numbing succession of slow-burn-nebbish roles that have come to define him. Like Albert Brooks, whom Stiller has cited as a big influence, Stiller presumes his audience’s pop literacy. He has shown a particular gift for spoofing the Hollywood hard sell—the best sketches and gags in Stiller’s shows and movies have been in the form of music videos, movie trailers, commercials, and biographical montages. His target has always been the entertainment industrial complex—its excesses, its fatuousness—and our unhealthy fixation with it.

Yet for all Stiller’s talent, his movies have never strayed far from the disappointing middle. After four directorial efforts, Stiller has yet to make a wholly satisfying picture. To be sure, there have been glimmers of intelligence and inspiration in his past films: the specter of derangement in The Cable Guy, the hilarious send-ups of celeb culture in Zoolander. (Reality Bites, his first movie, just plain bit.) But funny or incisive they may be in parts, not one can be called an unqualified success.

Nor can his latest film, Tropic Thunder. Entertaining enough and yet fatally compromised, it’s Stiller’s best movie, for whatever that’s worth—and probably the starkest reminder of the distance between his early promise and his current careerist track. Click here to read the rest of Elbert Ventura's review of Tropic Thunder.

HAHAHAHHA ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?

—Reverse Shot

Lots of events to celebrate today, including the Mets' move into sole possession of first place (before they once again find a new way to crush my hopes), but I'd like to call special attention to this weekend's "Remembering Arthur Lipsett" program at Anthology Film Archives, which begins this evening at 7pm EST with a program of Lipsett's short films. A documentary called Remembering Arthur shows at 9pm.

I first came across Lipsett's work at, of all things, a Godspeed You! Black Emperor show (I know, I know, but you were 20 once, too), where instead of having an opening band GY!BE asked Jonas Mekas to present (and herald with a bugle) a small collection of Canadian experimental films, Lipsett's among them. Along with earlier viewings of Valse Triste by the now late Bruce Conner, Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, and T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G by Paul Sharits, they were some of the first experimental films I ever encountered. As an impressionable young man they arrived as revelations, and Lipsett's films, Free Fall and his most famous work, Very Nice, Very Nice, stood out most disturbingly and, therefore, profoundly. Instead of the structural rigor and narrative comedy of Conner's found footage films -- where the apocalypse is offset by slapstick and pathos -- Lipsett presents collages of found and originally captured moments (often by frenzied camera work) as overwhelming barrages of cultural chaos, with images frequently machine gunned to the viewer in violent bursts of flash frames. Lipsett, the story goes, initially assembled audio samples from jazz records, scientific interviews, radio entertainments, and religious services into dark, unsettling montages while working as an animator for the National Film Board of Canada (my own former employer) and then created images to accompany these strange soundscapes. Ranging at their most extreme from horrific images of war to lulling anodynes of advertising to rediscovered grotesqueries of the natural world, the images become when destabilized in their new, anarchic environment -- for example, in 21-87 -- as much free-form abstract textures as the bizarre clips of evangelist sermons ("the body of our lord Jesus Christ" over a shot of a man engulfed in flame), paranoid confessions ("when I get on the bus I have the feeling everybody's looking at me"), heavy breathing (in tandem with amusement park patrons admiring themselves in funhouse mirrors), and electronic gurgles. When combined, image and sound evoke disarming associations at times explicitly political, at other times purely sensorial. Lipsett's films are environments and rarely stories, which is why they almost always end abruptly, without warning, their studies of human faces caught unawares and placed into relief by an avalanche of unloosed detritus (acrobats, masks, ceremonies, department stores, aerial test runs, atomic bombs, racetracks, cities, eyes) tuned into at this pioneering filmmaker's frequency and left open for us to pursue according to his inspiration.

These cacophonic, end time parades of human ritual, longing, and folly have been imitated to the point of parody (The Critic did a pretty good job sticking a fork in the avant-garde's self-serious cliches), but remember -- along with Conner, Lipsett in the early-60s was this style's originator. As one of experimental film's most forward looking and forgotten filmmakers (George Lucas apparently references his films in Star Wars, but so what? Someone on Wikipedia, please insert more info about the man himself instead of Lucas' shallow admiration of him, as if he's only important therefore) Lipsett remains consistently engaging and endlessly minable, his films valuable lessons in cinema as sensitizing and immolating agent, and frightening flickers of wonder in their own right.