We needed another delicate, comedy-tinged American independent drama about a socially awkward, emotionally stunted creative guy who has a hard time communicating with girls like a hole in the head. At the very least, what immediately sets the new film Easier with Practice apart from many recent installments in this ever-ready subgenre is that first-time director Kyle Patrick Alvarez knows where to point a camera. As overly self-aware and photo-album-ready as much of the film’s shots are, especially in its opening moments, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a genuine moviemaker. Unfortunately it takes a little digging to get past the received indie mannerisms (disaffected people in frozen tableaux of American nowheresville) to find approximations of recognizable human behavior in the film, an adaptation of a fact-based short story about a passive young writer, Davey (Brian Geraghty), who begins a phone-sex relationship with a woman who one night randomly calls his motel room while he’s on a book-reading tour of the American Southwest. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Easier with Practice.
One of the first things viewers will inevitably remember from A Prophet is an early sequence in which the film’s young hero, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) murders a fellow prison inmate, by extracting a concealed razor blade from inside his mouth with his tongue, and slicing open the unsuspecting victim’s throat. Notwithstanding the stygian brutality of this scene (from which a residual dread is likely to remain with the viewer throughout the film), A Prophet is ultimately as memorable for the responsibility it assumes, as it is for the savagery it depicts. At a time where an entire sub-genre of popular cinema exists only to invent more repulsive and cruel forms of torture, not once during A Prophet does the horror on the screen feel any less real than that of the chaotic world it succeeds in depicting with moral precision and intellectual honesty. Few will quibble against the consensus since Cannes ’09 that A Prophet is a gripping and exceptionally well-crafted crime film, but whether it represents a substantial step up for its director is more debatable. Read the rest of Julien Allen’s review of A Prophet.
In the first twenty or so minutes of Kimberly Reed’s marvelous documentary Prodigal Sons, the film’s director, who is also one of its main subjects, returns to her small Montana hometown to attend a high-school reunion. En route, she is reunited with her adopted older brother, Marc, with whom she casually mentions she has been estranged for over a decade. Soon, the first bombshell, uttered by Marc from the backseat of a car: his sister Kim, our narrator, used to be his brother, Paul. A third child, Todd, will waft in and out of conversation and the movie itself. Shot in perfunctory home video style with the occasional Big Sky Country visual interlude, these early scenes would seem to establish the film in predictable personal-diary doc territory—and though the structure and aesthetics of the film will not necessarily come to refute this impression, Prodigal Sons turns out to be so much more. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Prodigal Sons.
Once upon a time, Martin Scorsese’s occasional dabbling in genre filmmaking would come packaged with a twist. Indeed, looking back over his oeuvre, one can spot the musical, the sports picture, the comedy, the horror film, (and, yes, the gangster film). Yet the final product was so far afield from such strictly designated categories that one would never dare reduce them. New York, New York (perhaps the film that most baldly evokes common movie tropes) transcends imitation in its raw performances and abnormal scene duration, in the chilling brutality of its palpable, almost Cassavetes-like marital spats; Raging Bull, of course, never was your grandfather’s boxing picture, an intensely personal and nearly ethnographic dissection of a lone brute; The King of Comedy’s thin veneer of slapstick barely conceals some of the most terrifying pathologies put onscreen in the Eighties; Cape Fear’s monster slices through the screen with agonizing, suspenseful precision, yet it’s that rare depiction of a family’s dysfunction that truly frightens, wrenching ideas of good and evil out of their comfort zones. To praise these films is not to instantly assume that such genres necessarily need to be scrutinized or eviscerated, but to acknowledge Scorsese’s imbuing of common narrative fallbacks with his seeking, passionate artistry, which often has manifested not merely as technical bravura but as part of a individualistic journey, both through film and his own tenable life philosophies.
Of late, many of Scorsese’s most ardent admirers have been dubious, and his detractors have been able to add coal to their furnaces, perhaps because Scorsese’s relationship to genre seems to have altered. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Shutter Island.
With the possible exception of the post-Tarantino crime thriller, has any genre been as good to American independent film over the past 20 years as the family dramedy? One can hardly begin to count the stories of estranged children, bickering couples, or wayward siblings who all end up back under the same roof: crying and laughing and truth-telling their way to moist-eyed emotional equilibrium, if not redemption. It’s no mystery why these films keep popping up. For budget-conscious directors, dialogue-heavy screenplays set in a limited number of everyday locations keep the costs down. At the same time, stars looking to bolster their thespian credentials often jump at the highly emotive, de-glammed roles that populate these scripts, and at a reduced price to boot. Beyond industrial considerations, however, they hold appeal for viewers who like largely conventional films accented with indie flavor. These movies’ slightly looser, observational narratives and less polished visual style allow them to stand apart from their Hollywood counterparts, while still casting a wide net in terms of audience relatability. (We all have families, right?) Given all this, it’s little wonder that so many of these films have been made, and consequently, how the characters and situations routinely seen within them have hardened into generic formula. Read Matt Connolly’s review of Happy Tears.
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