It’s that time of the month….time to get caught up with what our loyal Reverse Shot staff writers are doing in other necks of the woods.

Andrew Tracy’s
Beyond Brut:
The Art of Cornel Wilde
in the brand new issue of CinemaScope:

“Celebrating the primal and primitive in cinema is a convenient fiction of criticism. To speak of a medium entirely premised on advanced technology as if it were an eruption from a bloodily liberated id—as if camera, crew, and equipment were merely the tactile extensions of the Neanderthal artist’s fingers smearing paint against the cave wall—is, of course, absurd. That the trope can be used at all is precisely because nobody takes its premise seriously; it’s simply another rhetorical club against genteelism, violating the middlebrow “cinema of quality” at its manicured root. While it may be a useful polemical device, its value in actually helping us understand films is limited, and often distorting. This is hardly the first instance where critical rhetoric has taken a sharp detour from filmic reality, but the particular irritation of the “primal” is that, by way of its implicit connection to unmediated authenticity, it brooks no argument and furthers no discussion. The primal is an end unto itself—indeed, the only “real” end to our supposed bestial natures and an excuse for pale, sallow-cheeked scribblers to carouse in print like lusty buccaneers, while neglecting the testimony of the films themselves.”

Click here to read the rest.

Elbert Ventura on Sergio Leone,
from Slate’s Summer Movies Issue:
“Essentially a compendium of flourishes, the action hero is rooted less in the movie he or she inhabits than in our collective pop consciousness. But the notion of the action hero as a pop icon isn't entirely a Hollywood invention. It can be partly credited to an Italian director working in an American genre on Spanish soil. In the 1960s, Sergio Leone made a string of Westerns that introduced to audiences a new sensibility—gloriously baroque, self-consciously iconic, and steeped in movies. The release this month of "The Sergio Leone Anthology," a box set composed of remastered versions of the Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and the little-seen Duck, You Sucker, gives us the chance to reacquaint ourselves with a blockbuster director who pioneered that now-familiar archetype: the film buff as artistic savant.”

Click here to read the rest.

Nicolas Rapold on Sicko:
“Yet like so much of Mr. Moore's work, Sicko is most healthily taken as a satirical polemic, not an airtight policy proposal. Mr. Moore's screed wallows in pitiable anecdotes, cherry-picks history, and applies skepticism selectively as suits its arguments. But as the filmic equivalent of a shameless and sardonic dinner-table raconteur, Sicko at its best rocks more like Twain than Chomsky, stringing together a story that begs to be retold.”

Click here to read the rest.

and Michael Joshua Rowin on Sicko:
"The irony is that while Bowling for Columbine reestablished Moore’s reputation and influence, the film also exposed how his talents were best served in the television format. The for-the-camera stunts — the montage sequences, the ubiquitous figure of Moore himself — all work to humorous effect on a small screen unable to contain his overload of ego and mainstream-unfriendly politics. Yet on a large screen the effect is diminished. There’s something embarrassing about Moore’s movies when viewed in a theater, like viewing a puffy, sleep-deprived face under bright lights. Flaws become magnified and horribly exposed: The stunts feel cheap, the montage sequences seem simplistic and Moore becomes an insufferable showboat."

Click here to read the rest.

Jeannette Catsoulis on Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox:
“Directed by Sara Lamm with more attention to texture than focus, the movie probes beneath the bubbles to unearth its subject's troubled relationship with his Jewish heritage and his insistence on the equality of all human beings. What emerges is a complex portrait of a man who cares more for humanity than for his own children, often left to languish in orphanages while their father scoured bodies and minds.”

Click here to read the rest.

Nick Pinkerton on Knocked Up:
The template for big-numbers success in American screen comedy, as established a decade ago in the twin box-office landslides of There’s Something About Mary and American Pie: over-the-latest-top raunch supplementing wide-eyed, naïve emotionality. The new reigning master of the form is Judd Apatow, whose 40-Year-Old Virgin treated its premise-title with absolute earnestness when it wasn’t loading the film with enough boner gags and just-us-guys bullshitting to diffuse accusations of dishonest sentimentality. Knocked Up, Apatow’s sophomore feature, furnishes a much-deserved leading role to Seth Rogen, one of his faithful supporting players, primed for stardom from his early days on Apatow-produced sitcoms Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. It’s a piece of casting that’s a little coup unto itself — the tubby, woolly-headed goof of a buddy is a familiar enough romantic comedy trope (see Rogen himself, doing journeyman work in You, Me, and Dupree), but trusting that guy to command the center stage nearly passes for profound subversion amidst the intellectual aridity of contemporary industrial moviemaking.

Click here to read the rest.

Michael Joshua Rowin on A Mighty Heart:
“So the Daniel Pearl story unfolds, with less political or emotional resonance than can be gathered from a Wikipedia entry containing the same details. Winterbottom attempts to inject some life into the proceedings with never-sit-still editing, tourist glimpses of local color in Pakistan, India, and France, and unannounced flashbacks. Nothing works.”
Click here to read the rest.

An exception within the still roughly circumscribed realm of Asian-American narrative cinema, So Young Kim’s lovely debut succeeds in blending cultural specificity with generic humanity for a quietly revelatory portrait. As simplistic as that sounds, few other representations of Asian Americans—Eric Byler’s Charlotte Sometimes comes to mind, along with (yes, that’s right) Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle—manage to acknowledge both difference and similarity at once. In Between Days takes a matter-of-fact approach in its description of a newly landed Korean immigrant and in neither ignoring nor belaboring the issue of race transcends it to a universal realm. Though it may not trumpet itself as a groundbreaking “event” along the lines of the flashier but emptier Better Luck Tomorrow, make no mistake: In Between Days is an original. But despite its glowing notices from Sundance 2006 and numerous “Best Undistributed” mentions on year-end lists, it languished for so long without distribution that I feared it might never see the dark of a cinema. Finally, thankfully, picked up by Kino and programmed by the IFC Center in New York, it finds theatrical release this week.

Click here to read the rest of Kristi Mitsuda's review of In Between Days.

There's an ever more prevalent, if still marginalized, subgenre in international films today that is difficult to classify. In such films as Larry Clark's Bully and Gael Morel's Le Clan (released here as Three Dancing Slaves), groups of teenagers descend into violent oblivion while the filmmakers dispassionately, purposely objectify their supple flesh. The gap between the actions of the characters and the voyeurism of the filmmakers makes for an awkward, sometimes stimulating dialogue, even if it also leaves the actors somewhat adrift. The recurring image of these films are young, lithe bodies, supine, entangled: in Le Clan, three eye-catching brothers lay together in a tableau less motivated by their characters than the filmmaker's whims. In One to Another, French co-directors Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr have their young actors lie atop, next to, and around each other with youthful, sexual abandon, and in a move similar to Morel's, intimate an incestuous relationship between the film's two main characters, brother and sister Pierre (Arthur Dupont) and Lucie (Lizzie Brochere), just by the sheer level of proximity and undress the two seem to share. It's a teasing, half-formed approach to character, and the film, tiptoeing around its own narrative and ideas of sexuality, feels not fully formed.

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

"Rap music influenced them people deep over there; they will live by it and they will die by it. And it ain't no Hollywood movie, it's the truth." So says Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean, speaking on the street-level reality in Cite Soleil, a shantytown outside Port-au-Prince, and the central character of Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a documentary on which Jean boasts both executive producer and original music credits. It's a statement that the film fails to follow through on the implications of, showing little curiosity as to what such an "influence" might imply for hardcore hip-hop music - a genre which, incidentally, has always borrowed freely from Hollywood - or for the residents of Cite Soleil, who daily see the most lunatic lyrical excesses made absolutely real.

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Ghosts of Cite Soleil.

A double take on Pascale Ferran’s Lady Chatterley this week:

“Ferran takes great pains to film nature in all its verdant glory, yet it’s a mere accounting; in a recent New York Times article she cites Apichatpong Weerasethakul as an influence in depicting the eroticism of nature, but despite some poignant night photography her dry, static shots of flowers, copses, and trees only minimally fulfill the “awakening of the senses” requirement and never achieve the hypnotic spell of the Thai filmmaker’s transcendence. As for the sex scenes, Ferran directs them with a serviceable integrity, both to Lawrence’s material and to the rhythms and motions of her actors, and she rightly refuses to shy away from the unapologetic human aspects of the realm of flesh, such as Lady Chatterley’s bewildered, unorgasmic shock as she finds herself beneath the strange man, as well as a direct look at an erect penis. But Ferran’s slavish fidelity to the sillier elements of Lawrence’s novel is disastrous. The running naked in the rain, the flowers in pubic hair—they’re Lawrence’s utopian ideal of sex as interpreted via the safe iconography of the sexual revolution Lawrence portended but looked far past. The fact that Hands and Coulloc’h play their scenes without the searching, improvising-on-the-spot nervousness of real sexual contact suggests that in Lady Chatterley sex isn’t a holy ritual of renewed blood, as it is for Lawrence, but a brief forestial vacation.”

Click here to read the rest of RS staff writer Michael Joshua Rowin’s review of Lady Chatterley on Reverse Shot.

“Showered with Cesar awards in its native France, Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley faces a more uncertain fate stateside (Gallic awards committees can't resist a pretty woman in a field of sun-kissed wildflowers; just ask Claude Berri). Though based on a version of D.H. Lawrence's long-banned, "pornographic" final novel, it's too restive and restrained to draw in the blithe, shock-hungry Terry Richardson/9 Songs contingent, too explicit for the AARP-discount crowd looking for a period romance that'll act as a soothing tonic — and as for American critics, there's never any shortage of twits eager to reenact the aesthetic skirmishes of fifty years past, "daring" to fatuously sneer at the sight of a petticoat.

It's a work that deserves more consideration, though it's worth asking: Why another film of Lady Chatterley now? Lawrence's story has been brought to the screen several times already — Lady Constance Chatterley (here played the half-British actress Marina Hands), neglected by her war-shattered, impotent husband, blows aside all social protocol to surrender to the caresses of their estate's groundskeeper (a brusque Jean-Louis Coulloc'h). The answer: Regeneration through sex, in response to a world tormented by violence and class disparity, is a more relevant, and better, idea than most movies manage."
Click here to read the rest of RS staff writer Nick Pinkerton’s review of Lady Chatterley on indieWIRE.

Sexy Dr. Moore is here to make all your doctor-patient fantasies come true.

After announcing itself with the requisite George W. Bush-as-incoherent-idiot sound bite, Michael Moore's SiCKO officially begins with a close-up of an unhealed wound. From that point on, Moore will train his camera on countless gashes and sores, most of them psychological, all of which hit the viewer with the force of a hurricane. The subject matter is so inherently powerful and frustrating, and the horror stories SiCKO relates are so relatable to American audiences, that one almost wishes that Moore had simply allowed his participants to just speak: to let the running camera record these everyday people's woes, to create a nonstop ethnographic view of contemporary American life from the point of view of those who've been let down by its bureaucracies and greed. Yet asking Moore to unyoke himself from his identity as an entertainer is like imploring Michael Bay to try his hand at E.M. Forster: it's not gonna happen, and, regardless of our own aesthetic criteria, do we really want it to?

Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of SiCKO.

The flurry of recent press both praising and decrying a new movement in horror filmmaking, dubbed, with tongue planted firmly in butt-cheek, the “Splat-Pack,” shows a determination to justify a cultural black hole. The need to align epochs of genres, especially horror, with sociopolitical realities has always made for neatly encapsulated criticism and terrific sound bites, but this sort of assessment works better in retrospect. Those who make up this contingent of new filmmakers are from such disparate backgrounds and sensibilities, nationally and otherwise, that to group them together as some kind of coalition comes across as desperate at best, disingenuous at worst. The truth is that the need to place instantaneous social readings on this new wave of horror willfully ignores the pathetic opportunism behind some of the films, as well as the savvy genre reclamation of others. Those influential Seventies horror films, from the dingy cult basement specials of Wes Craven to the multiplex delights of John Carpenter, were for the most part recouped decades later as trenchant post-Vietnam meditations on social disillusionment as a way of putting a neat bow atop a tumultuous past.

This is not to propose that there is no commentary or merit in any of these recent horror films, or that political metaphor isn’t detectable. The problem is that these filmmakers justify their lack of imagination on philosophical grounds. The grotesquely self-mythologizing Eli Roth has evidently bought into the hype for some time now, as he’s been digging a grave for himself with his own words since the 2006 release of Hostel, which so titillated mainstream audiences with its cut-and-dry scenarios of young people tied up and mutilated for sport that it brought the term “torture porn” into the public discourse. Now with the release of Hostel Part Two, one must ask: was the reputation of this effortless self-promoter (he’s a Tarantino without the intimidating sense of editing or composition) really based on one well timed—read: politically opportunistic—slasher flick and his two-minute Grindhouse gag reel?

Click here to read the entirety of Michael Koresky's Same Old, Same Old: The “New” Horror.

The experts at the American Film Institute have issued a 10th anniversary edition of their 100 years...100 movies poll of the best American movies ever made. This year's list is a significant improvement. Making the cut for the first time: F.W. Murnau's Sunrise at 82. A solid showing, just a bit behind such equally accomplished masterworks as Rocky (57), American Graffiti (62), and Forrest Gump (62). Did I mention this list is better than the last one? See the list (as an animated poster gallery!) here.

Initially, Jennifer Baichwal's Manufactured Landscapes recalls last year's Our Daily Bread. A clinical crawl through a gargantuan Chinese factory - with its endless, evenly spaced stations of laborers glued to tedious tasks - hauntingly echoes similar tracking shots Nikolaus Geyrhalter used in his film to explore the lulling, mechanical uniformity of industrial food production. Our Daily Bread discovers otherworldly environments and depersonalized regiments behind the curtain of modern agricultural processes; Manufactured Landscapes investigates those of the entire world.

And since the most significant new player on the global stage at the moment is China, Baichwal wisely follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky - famed for his surveyor's eye ability to bring out the unreality of mines, oil fields, and other landscape-changing undertakings - as he captures in precisely framed compositions the ravages upon urban and rural landscapes a rapidly developing nation has affected through destruction, pollution, waste, and aggressive dominance. Yet when Burtynsky isn't providing the film's vision through his work or his example, Manufactured Landscapes falls just short of finding its own voice.

Nevertheless, Manufactured Landscapes contains some remarkable material.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Manufactured Landscapes.

There's a fine line between an artist spinning out variations of core themes and merely treading water. No doubt some will find Aki Kaurismaki's deceptively slight, 77-minute Lights in the Dusk a textbook example of the latter, especially given the strenuously laudatory response that greeted his previous film, the Academy Award-nominated The Man Without a Past. While there's not much value (outside of sheer contrarian pleasure) in poking holes in a fine movie four years after the fact, it's still worth noting that The Man Without a Past probably represents less a high water mark for Kaurismaki's filmmaking (see Shadows in Paradise) than for the amount of time and money expended on raising his profile, and that this kind of maneuvering, while often valuable, doesn't always pay a filmmaker dividends when their next work rolls around.

"Lights in the Dusk" may not add anything particularly novel to the Kaurismaki formula, but for this viewer, easy familiarity bred content. The concluding chapter in his "Finland/Loser" trilogy (after Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past), Dusk follows lonely security guard Koistinen (relative Kaurismaki newcomer Janne Hyytiainen) as the already baleful drudgery of his daily existence takes a decidedly downbeat turn.

Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review of Aki Kaursmaki's Lights in the Dusk.

“What are we doing? How can we influence history? Can we influence society? That reflection for me is very interesting. Now we’re at a point where no one wants to hear about politics anymore or be an activist in any field, but nevertheless we feel that things can’t go on the way they do.”

So says New German Cinema legend Volker Schlöndorff in conversation with RS editor Jeff Reichert on the occasion of the release of his latest film, Strike. “A sort-of biopic about the life of Agnieszka Wolynicza (a terrific, bug-eyed Katharina Thalba), who played an important, if largely unknown, role in the Polish Solidarity movement,” Strike opens today in New York.

Click here to read In Solidarity: An Interview with Volker Schlöndorff.

Quirky: the one adjective that if employed in a synopsis or review should cause any thoughtful person to avoid a film so described, and a perfect kiss-of-death salvo for Eagle vs. Shark. This crowd-pleasing New Zealand indie, developed from the Sundance Director's and Screenwriter's Labs (from which the similar Me and You and Everyone You Know emerged) and plucked from the vine by savvy Miramax, is the latest in a recent trend of offbeat, adorable stillbirths about families of barely lovable misfits learning valuable life lessons in a world of kitschy crap. The parade of cute begins right off the bat when fast-food employee Lily (Loren Horsley), an awkward collection of Church Lady grimaces masquerading as a "sensitive dreamer," practices a marriage proposal into her mirror, thus demonstrating that the quirky indie's favorite go-to device - the head-on camera shot at some "ka-razee" character's goofy countenance - is in actuality a symptom of rampant narcissism.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Eagle vs. Shark.

1923-2007

Calling Ousmane Sembene merely Africa’s greatest filmmaker is to do disservice to one of world cinema’s finest practitioners and pioneers. With merely nine features and a handful of shorts left behind after a forty year career, the case for canonization might seem thin, but only for the uninitiated. That he started a cinema where there was none largely from scratch is an accomplishment worthy of a place in the history books on its own. But anyone who’s tracked his growth as an artist and social commentator across those nine unique features are more than aware of how the Nouvelle Vague-ish bent of first feature La Noire de… (which carefully, and perhaps more skillfully, probed the same post-colonial legacy Godard was contemporaneously wrestling with back in France) gave way over the course of its brief sixty-six minutes to indelible closing shots in which the repressed literally returned to the fore.

These closing images would reverberate throughout Sembene’s career as he attempted to crack the problem of updating African storytelling traditions (especially that of the Griot) and customs to his modern medium. As if creating an entirely new cinematic language (while also making the first films in Senegal’s native Wolof) weren’t enough of a political project, surrounded as he was by poverty, the ravages left by imperialism and the encroachment of soft colonial power, he also took it upon himself to chronicle and satirize his nation’s myriad ills. His early features Mandabi, Emitai, and Xala, rough-hewn all, represent a devastating batch of critiques in which Sembene berates respectively: the backwardness and corruption marring the newly freed Senegal, the tribal male indecision that helped abet the colonial state, and contemporary politicians who’ve turned their backs on tradition in favor of slavishly aping the customs of the West. His past-present approach across these films straddles a fine line; he’s never equivocating, merely trying to navigate complicated waters and put forward a comprehensive road map for the future of Senegal.

For me, his masterpiece remains the 1977 period drama Ceddo which fuses his core concerns into his most compelling narrative all coupled with simple but rich production design. Its story of kidnapped princess and internecine warfare is a world unto its own, but given that we’re dealing with a most political of filmmakers, its distant history concerning the introduction of Islam to Africa sends out a clarion call to the present moment: beware of interlopers.

His most famous works are probably his final three features: Guelwaar, Faat-Kiné and Mooladé, all of which find tradition and modernity crashing headlong into each other, and in the latter two, washing up at the feet of indomitable femininity. All three represent the maturation of his storytelling—the forced awkwardness of early attempts at re-structuring conversation cinematically (and Sembene’s characters almost never lack for words) has given way to a comfortable often joyous ease. Nothing feels quite like a Sembene film, and it’s hard to put a finger on what exactly that means except by saying that more often than not, he’s placed his camera somewhere unexpected and pointed it at something or someone you wouldn’t anticipate. One should expect a fair bit of humor as well. Unfortunately we won’t be able to experience the pleasure of re-discovering cinema through new Sembene films, but his unique vision is slowly starting to make its way to DVD. If you’re not familiar, you’ve got some homework to do.

The straightforward, very American, talking-head "expose" approach to documentary, cribbed from television shows like "Dateline NBC" and "20/20," has become the norm - and, in exploitative dreck like Capturing the Friedmans and Crazy Love, efficiently transformed real human lives into sound bites and greatest-hits packages. The recent Crazy Love comes across as especially derivative and tasteless in its poking and prodding at a woman's painful experience, preferring stringing together cute soundtrack cues and tabloid gossip to deconstructing the social black holes that created its central psychosexual bond in the first place. This form of documentary, wedded to personal narratives of rise-and-fall, destruction-and-reconciliation, is now prevalent in multiplexes. So seriously has it detracted attention from the groundbreaking traditions of direct cinema that it's hard to imagine a mainstream audience knowing what to make of French filmmaker Olivier Meyrou's superlative Beyond Hatred.

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

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 21: "Made in America"

Hello Robbie and cnw,

I’m feeling inclined to cheat and offer this blog post as my contribution to the upcoming Reverse Shot symposium – you know, the one about the power of a single cut to shape and define an entire film. “Made in America” ended The Sopranos in media res with a hard (dare I say Dardenne-ish?) cut to black. Seated at a table in a cozy neighborhood restaurant with Carmela and AJ, Tony looked up to see Meadow coming through the door to complete the family dinner. Or was it to see a gun being pointed in his direction by the two-shifty looking African-American kids who’d come in moments before? Or maybe to anxiously note the return of the leather-jacketed guy who’d walked in just ahead of AJ a few minutes before that and stared at Tony’s table before making a pointed beeline for the men’s room: a location fraught with symbolic peril in this season of Godfather riffs. Yes, it would make sense that the show would come unplugged in the exact split-second that Tony got plugged; like Bobby, with whom he’d previously discussed death’s never-see-it-coming factor, he just never saw it coming. Or maybe our man was just about to order more onion rings.

There’s more to talk about in and around “Made in America” (written and directed with economy and purpose by David Chase) than its endlessly discussable ending. Like the fact that Tony managed to flip the FBI into serving his purposes, or the curious arrival of an adorable orange cat that stayed fixated on the picture of Christopher hanging in the Bing (shades of Ade? Or is that too sentimental?), or its potentially damaging effect on SUV sales after the catalytic converter cataclysm that nearly claimed AJ and his new girlfriend. But I’m going to linger on that final moment, mostly because that’s how Tony would have it. The last significant dialogue of the series was a father-son exchange, with Tony encouraging AJ – now working, at his parents’ nudging, as a “development executive” for a lousy screenplay forwarded to Little Carmine’s production company by Daniel Baldwin – to enjoy the good times. And this is what I thought the non-ending was getting at. Tony may have escaped Phil Leotardo’s endgame maneuvers and this season’s endgame atmosphere but his life has been reframed as one sustained panic attack: somewhere, someone (what rough beast?) is waiting to take him down. Good times, but with an asterisk.

The genius of the episode is that it placed that burden of anxiety onto us. The last five minutes were an exercise in unabashed sweatshop-suspense techniques, with every shot carefully selected for maximum portent. It began with Tony sitting alone in the restaurant, fiddling with the jukebox (before settling on Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin”) – finally out in the open after a small eternity of clandestine movements. The (separate) arrivals of Carmela, AJ, and Meadow –the latter after some extended parking difficulties which, as inter-cut with the sanguine scene inside the restaurant, raised the show’s terror alert level to orange – actually made Tony seem more vulnerable. At the end of last week’s episode, alone in a safe-house, lying in the (hard, sheetless) bed that he’d made for himself, Tony looked like a cornered animal ,but he’d made arrangements to keep his family sequestered far away. Is he really more comfortable with them at his side after seven years’ worth of vivid lessons about how quickly and unexpectedly the proverbial sword can drop?

Let’s take stock of Tony’s situation. Phil Leotardo is dead, killed outside a gas station with his infant grandchildren in tow ( how sick was it then when his SUV, left unattended by his understandably hysterical wife, rolled over his face and Chase cut to the babies smiling in the backseat? Grandpa as a speed bump!). Paulie W is newly entrenched as his first lieutenant (not a rat after all). New York seems willing to do business (that Butch…what a softie). And, after all that, Tony’s still likely to be indicted because Carlo (who he berated a few weeks back about poor earnings) has flipped. “Trials are there to be won,” says Tony’s lawyer, Neil Mink but the real focus of their scene (another restaurant sitdown) was the bank of security monitors sitting over Tony’s shoulder. Mink may have been stealing glances to catch the waitresses as they stumbled, in various states of undress, through the restaurant’s back hall, but given the cut-it-with-a-knife tension of the surrounding episode, we looked nervously at the screens to see if Tony’s fate was about to burst through the door, gun in hand.

So somewhere after that final scene – provided it wasn’t the last moment of his life, of course -- Tony will go to trial. Perhaps he will be indicted. Doubtlessly, Meadow will express outrage, having confided in this episode that her decision to go into law (now looking, to Carm’s delight, like a lucrative choice) was forged after years of watching her Dad being dragged away by the Feds. The woman is, finally, insane. AJ may cite it as another cause for his depression, although at this point, he’s looking sated on anti-depressants, easy money and a hot girlfriend. The shot of him and Rhiannon gladly giggling at footage of MC Karl Rove and a clownish G.W. Bush was a portrait of contemporary material medication. (Didn’t AJ start off this episode by righteously citing “The Second Coming” at Bobby Bacala’s funeral to prove that everything is fucked up and gaping in wonderment at the timelessness of a Bob Dylan protest song? There’s more to say about AJ’s eventful hour, but I will leave it to you guys). Carmela will stand by her man and keep looking at spec house plans – she may have thrown Tony’s last gift back in his face, but when the show’s camera was elsewhere, is there any doubt she went and picked it back up?

There were hints of where else things could go further down the line. AJ driving by Rhiannon’s school in his new car recalled Carm’s starry-eyed memories of Tony swinging by her campus in his Camaro; AJ’s short-skirted shrink looked a bit like a younger Melfi. But the final cut rendered them all moot – we’ll never know. There are those who will accuse Chase of churlishness, that his choice to go with an open ending is a kind of cop-out after setting up so many tantalizing narrative dynamos. But I can think of no greater way to pay justice to the compelling lives he’s created – has any show ever had so many intriguingly developed regulars? Not even counting whackees, there are a dozen players whose fate is of great interest to me – than to keep us at a remove. The Sopranos was always defined by its intimacy, accessing the lives (and in Tony’s case, the subconscious) of its characters and sparing no details. Last night, we were, finally, cut off. Yet I have never felt so closely aligned with Tony – during the credit roll (which was, for the first time, silent – as if anything could follow Journey!) I sat, insecure in the knowledge that while I didn’t know what was coming next, on some level I did. And that deeper knowledge that motivated me to look around the living room at the people I loved and resolve to enjoy the good times. It was the banal, evasive Hallmark-card advice of a sociopath, and don’t you know it swelled my heart.

A recap of The Sopranos' final season on Reverse Shot:

The Sopranos: The Big Lie

Season Six, Episode 13: Soprano Home Movies

Season Six, Episode 14: Stage 5

Season Six, Episode 15: Remember When

Season Six, Episode 16: Chasing It

Season Six, Episode 17: Walk Like a Man

Season Six, Episode 18: Kennedy and Heidi

Season Six, Episode 19: The Second Coming

Season Six, Episode 20: Blue Comet

Who would have thought that Olivier Dahan’s glossy biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie en rose (or La Môme, as it was originally titled in France, for “Little Sparrow,” Piaf’s nickname) would be one of the must-see movies of the summer? Resolutely old-fashioned in its melodrama, La Vie en rose is nearly Sirkian in its lack of pulled punches and its steadfastly forthright artificiality…check out those incredible fake NYC backdrops, with glistening tall buildings bathed in full cardboard moonlight. And of course, perched atop it all, with bared talons and creepy penciled eyebrows is Marion Cotillard, whose full immersion into the role of the tragic chanteuse is the stuff movie legend is made of.

In honor of this grand old-fashioned party of misery (one that’s giving the word "biopic" a good name), here are two takes, from Reverse Shot staff writers Chris Wisniewski and Kristi Mitsuda. La Vie en rose opens today in limited release, and will expand in the coming weeks.

Currently 92% fresh on the “Tomatometer” at Rotten Tomatoes.com — 97% if you consult the dubiously determined “Cream of the Crop” contingent (really friends, nothing makes me damn this world that Edison and the Lumieres have wrought more than the plump/splat binary) — Knocked Up is this years’ snowball triumph, the “little” film that everyone saw coming, started to love well before it was screened, and then reviewed with vigorous strokes of hyperbole and self-satisfied folksiness. Lyman-lipped Peter Travers writes:

If you want to hate on Judd Apatow's Knocked Up -- and the anti-crowd-pleaser contingent will surely ding it -- then get ready to be drowned out by the sound of laughter from the rest of us.

Well, rather than dwell on the idea of an “us” to which Travers belongs, or on the menacing threat of dissent-drowning laughter, how about this from A.O. Scott’s advocation:

Since the birth of the talkies the best American movie comedies have managed to confront grave matters and to defy their own gravity. In this case the buoyant hilarity never feels weighed down by moral earnestness, even though the film’s ethical sincerity is rarely in doubt.

It’s a finely written piece, and Scott seems genuinely enamored of the film. But five days after opening night, let alone at some distant point in the future when “the best American movie comedies” are considered, what does this “instant classic” (Scott’s words) really amount to, particularly if lightness to a weighted context is what it brings to bear? As Elbert Ventura wrote in his Reverse Shot review of Blades of Glory, humor is a highly subjective quality. To this writer, Knocked Up has its share of laughs – both easy and hard-fought, sophomoric and sophisticated, ba-dum-pum and Conan/Simpsons scattershot. But I rather think that great comedy does the very opposite of what Scott asserts, bringing laughter and delight while subtly taking on weight. Knocked Up defies gravity all right, and it’s a dismaying feat of gutlessness, turning away from the comic potential of true conflict, moral complication, or the truly dirty business of living. There are exceptional scenes (the scary, true-feeling break-up in the gynecologist's office comes to mind), but writer/director Judd Apatow is positively in love with his buoyancy and good intentions, and coasts right past plausibility into the realm – intentional or not – of willful, Focus on the Family conservatism.

The film’s greatest conflict comes courtesy of its premise – stoner geek impregnates hot chick, who decides to give both baby and stoner a go – which it then systematically declines to exploit for conflict. There’s an inevitability to the proceedings that’s killing, a “let’s watch the improbable happen as if it’s the most natural thing in the world,” that sounds – and reads – far more progressive than it really is. For in order to make the wish-fulfillment work so effortlessly, Apatow disregards the multitude of questions that trail behind the plot’s every gallop forward. Why not an abortion? (Apatow’s reluctance to have any of his characters even utter the word is hardly clever or astute – it’s cowardly, or worse, capitulating. Ah, if abortion would only just go away...) What about her career? What about pregnancy makes such an unpromising mate suddenly worth pursuing? Are there no other romantic prospects for her? For him? Why again doesn’t she have an abortion?

Oh, right, because Knocked Up is a fairy tale for the benefit of lovable geeks in need of a little maturation. Hot blonde and forthcoming baby dutifully enlisted, the film proves that there’s truly no limit, no reality unbendable, no prostration not taken for the filmic sake of a boy’s redemption. That this particular boy is endearingly homely hardly counts as subversive.

A.O. Scott also once wrote:

In (film title withheld), a good many critics see themselves, and it is only natural that we should love what we see. Not that critics are the only ones, by any means, but the affection that we have lavished on this film has the effect of emphasizing the narrowness of its vision, and perhaps our own. It both satirizes and affirms a cherished male fantasy: that however antisocial, self-absorbed and downright unattractive a man may be, he can always be rescued by the love of a good woman. (What’s in it for her is less clear.)

He's actually writing about the previously snowballed-praised Sideways, in a ballyhooed piece from January 2005 bearing the headline, “The Most Overrated Film of the Year.” As it happens, every word also snuggly suits Knocked Up.

Now there are major exceptions, and I don’t want to essentialize, but it’s at least interesting that most of the dissenting voices gathered by the Tomatometer are female. As ever, these are voices easily sidelined by self-congratulatory male critical consensus (as are voices uncharmed by the winking frat-boy homophobia that undergirds much of Knocked Up’s humor). That we’re witnessing another epidemic of overpraise is clear enough, but in the realm of filmic male wish-fulfillment, we, like Knocked Up’s deluded, beer-goggled heroine, have traded down.

Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman, which first debuted at the Toronto Film Festival back in 2005, may have the highest body count of any movie to hit American theaters this side of 300. Since Albert Pierrepoint was among Britain's most prolific (though in point of fact not its last) hangmen - the film credits him with over 608 hangings - there's good reason for the film's seemingly endless depictions of executions, and given the movie's middlebrow pedigree (director Adrian Shergold and screenwriters Jeff Pope and Bob Mills work mostly for British television, and the film was produced "in association with Masterpiece Theater"), it's unsurprising that these executions are handled, for the most part, quite tastefully. Still, there's something deeply unsettling about watching this parade of death; the accumulation of executions is both disturbing and desensitizing, as the film itself strives, with only intermittent success, to depict capital punishment in simultaneously human and mundane terms.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski's review of Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman.

The Sopranos, Season Six, Episode 20: "Blue Comet"

“One more week of this,” Carmela sighed last night—though she was literally speaking of visiting AJ in the psychiatric hospital (the rates of which apparently exceed $2,000 a day, bemoaned Tony) following last week’s attempted suicide, in the context of this second to last episode of The Sopranos, it was merely one of many references to The End. “The End of Times,” groaned Agent Harris as he looked out at a grey, gloomy sky from the Satriales butcher shop window, then continuing, “Ready for the Rapture.” Additionally, AJ was seen watching a decidedly apocalyptic anime film on TV in the ward common area, and, later, on his couch at home, footage of an Iraqi insurgency. Plus, with Tony out back draining the pool, the message from David Chase & Co. couldn’t be any clearer: it’s the end of this world as we know it, and, as Yeats prophesied last episode, we’re not gonna feel fine.

Violent, propulsive, and breathless, “Blue Comet” was something of a change of pace, literally—an episode less driven by drama than action. Although, of course, as with any great episode of The Sopranos, not a moment was wasted, not an utterance or seeming throwaway shot not impregnated with years' worth of meaning. Portentous to an agonizing degree, “Blue Comet” closed many doors while also ending on one of the series’ most literal cliffhangers—its last image was, to speak of this duality, a closed door, though it put us on tenterhooks, leaving us far from resolution.

It was an episode full of references (to itself, to Scorsese, to Coppola) that were all neatly inverted, beginning with the ground level shot of a man walking to the end of the driveway to get the morning paper. It wasn’t Tony, however, but an associate, Burt, about to be brutally dispatched by bloody strangulation by a devilish Silvio for "misgivings" about his loyalty. After this disorienting opening, there was an immediate cut to Phil Leotardo, saying “Listen, I’ve made a decision.” This is the tone of “Blue Comet” – to the point, merciless, making no bones. Phil’s decision to “decapitate” the Jersey family, whom he calls “a glorified crew” after referencing past humilations (Vito, brother Billy, even the thought-forgotten Fat Dom), played out surprisingly literally. Bobby, murdered in a toy store while admiring the toy trains that were his hobby and one escape (if only he could have taken a real train out of town years ago), got an uncharacteristically stylized final scene, complete with close-ups of runaway mini locomotives and a last bloody sprawl over the elaborate train set. (The episode title was taken from the Blue Comet train he held in his hands with pride and hope.) It seemed a rather sentimental (fittingly so) conclusion for a character that often came across as one of the series' most likable: diginifed in his doofery, lunkheaded in his loyalty, to both Tony and Junior. Silvio, meanwhile, got his very own Bonnie and Clyde-esque shoot-out, outside the Bada Bing, ending up in a coma. Though Patsy Parisi got away, a hapless motorcycling passerby didn’t fare so well, slipping from his bike and getting crushed by an oncoming car—while Bing strippers and patrons watched from the parking lot. It was a strange moment of daytime carnage, and it brought the inside out, the secrecy of the establishment possibly forever exposed.

Earlier, in Vesuvio, Tony and Silvio enacted a slow-motion miming of the opening credit sequence of Raging Bul, spurred on by the sudden playing of Rossini’s "Rusticana" on the restaurant speakers…probably from an Italian Greatest Classical Hits CD that Artie has on constant rotation. Yet amidst such dire intimations of the end, this final moment of sandboxing seemed pathetic—and made Tony not just a parallel to Michael Corleone but also to Jake LaMotta. Enormously overweight, wheezing consistently, Tony has now become Jake, a has-been, playing at boss, taking final stabs at tomfoolery. Just as for Silvio, it was his dying punch, perhaps.

Meanwhile, perhaps the most pivotal moment of the season (or series?) occurred with Dr. Melfi, which not only reclaimed her character, but inversed the final shot of The Godfather in immensely satisfying terms. Melfi, on a quiet rampage following the last-straw moral crisis engendered by Dr. Eliot’s prodding about Tony’s probable sociopathic personality and then reading (rendered in extreme close-up font) a journal about The Criminal Personality, terminated treatment. After years of dancing around this possibility, she did so with a swift door in the face, switching the gender roles of Diane Keaton’s final shot in the first Godfather film, her face blocked out by her husband’s slam of a door. This time, she made the decision.

Though it was a moment of triumph for Melfi, David Chase and Matthew Weiner (this week’s exemplary writers) of course complicated matters. All season long, Tony has been pegged as a monster, a beast, a pathetic, murderous shrivelling patriarch, whose only moment of grace (saving his son’s life and cradling him in tears) was quickly followed by more thoughtless violence. Yet last night, Tony was in pure victim mode—hunted down by Phil’s henchmen, losing his associates, and now, kicked out of therapy, as he remarks to Melfi with rage, right when his son tried to kill himself. Melfi’s opportunistic use of Tony’s ripping a page out of her waiting-room magazine (hilariously called DEPARTURES, the publication had a steak recipe that Tony wanted to try) to instigate a fight seemed somewhat childish and disingenuous, further making Tony out as the abused. It was an extraordinarily tense interplay (as with many seasons ago, I greatly feared for Melfi’s safety in these moments), even more throat-grabbing than the death of Bobby, and while Melfi extricated herself, it still left a bitter taste.

One wishes that Carmela, though, had such backbone (though Tony tried to accuse Melfi of being like his wife, he was dead wrong this time). I can’t help but recall Tony in last episode’s session with Melfi in which he remarked on his Las Vegas epiphany: that our mothers are the bus drivers, and we’re always trying to catch up. What then does this mean for Carmela, being the mother of AJ? Last installment's “The Second Coming” dealt greatly with father-son dynamics, inheritance of violence and depression, and as always the show created plenty of other son/proteges for Tony (Jackie Jr., Christopher); yet thus far this season, Carmela has merely reacted, though in increasingly emotional, deluded ways. “He was always our happy little boy,” she wept about AJ, while all viewers collectively went, “Really?”

This week, Carmela’s two small moments were quite telling: in one, she’s making oatmeal for AJ, while Meadow watches her from the counter. Carmela is smiling, while AJ is in the other room, watching the Iraqi war footage. Meadow stares at her mother with both melancholy and compassion. A few scenes later, at Vesuvio, Carmela, talking to Artie and Charmaine, expresses her pleasure at Meadow’s leaving pre-med. In an odd moment, she remarks, with harsh judgment, that she doubts her daughter has the “compassion” or “patience” required to be a doctor. Might Carmela's resentment of Meadow be equal to Tony's towards AJ? Soon, Tony rises to greet another guest eating dinner, and Carmela is left alone. Director Alan Taylor holds on her for a while,long enough to catch her expression changing to something like frustration…or anger…or loneliness. At this point, with one week left, hoping for Carmela’s moral revelation must be wishful thinking. Perhaps in last season’s “Cold Stones,” she saw the beacon at the top of the Eiffel Tower (mirroring perfectly the light on the horizon seen by Tony in his coma dream state), because she and Tony are on parallel paths, heading towards the same “big nothing.”

After all, that’s what Livia Soprano called it. And we know she’s waiting there.

Just when you thought we’d forgotten…yeah, Syndromes and a Century [our favorite movie of the year so far] has floated out of New York theaters, but Apichatpong Weerasethaku’s still in the news. His first solo exhibition in the United States, Unknown Forces is currently on view at REDCAT in Los Angeles until June 17— and several of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films will be screening as well in early June.

Meanwhile, this most docile, contemplative, and poetic of filmmakers ran into a bit of controversy in his native land in April, when the Thai Board of Censors demanded major cuts to Syndromes, for risk of its being banned. Apichatpong accepted the ban rather than make the cuts, and the event incited worldwide petitions against Thai censorship.

Amidst all this, this one-of-a-kind artist had time to sit down and talk to interviewers Genevieve Yue and S. Mickey Lin for Reverse Shot, to speak about Unknown Forces, politics in Thailand, and his upcoming project, Utopia.

Also, earlier: 2005 interview upon the release of Tropical Malady.

I'm usually left slightly anxious by those works of western filmmakers that take as their subjects the nature and stories of indigenous peoples. The potential for exploitation - artistic, commercial, moral - runs so deep in these instances of cultural intersection that it's amazing such films don't all turn out like the garishly insensate Apocalypto, which, if not for its bloated running length, might have worked perfectly as part of a Grindhouse-style tribal-exploitation double bill. We can point to films like Walkabout, Where the Green Ants Dream, or The Fast Runner (interesting in how it adopts an Inuit media workshop ground-up approach) as genuine attempts to render the experience of an indigenous culture cinematically, but those are like needles in a haystack - more often you'll find something like Geronimo instead.

Enter Dutch-born Australia-raised Rolf De Heer's Ten Canoes, which casts its glance on the traditions of the Yolgnu peoples of Australia. De Heer's a festival favorite (a Cannes and Venice regular) who hasn't achieved a tremendous amount of notoriety in the States, so hopefully Canoes, a positive, nuanced representation of native culture, isn't just a lucky exception to an otherwise unflattering rule. Instead of the worst cliches about noble natives invested with quasi-mystical powers, a deep relationship with the land, and the tendency to speak in Yoda-worthy riddles, De Heer's Yolngu are conflicted, jealous, earnest, horny, and often terribly funny (especially around scatological themes) - in short, all too perfectly human. De Heer developed the screenplay in conjunction with the Yolngu community in Ramingining, on the northern tip of Australia, so this probably accounts for the sensitivity and richness of the experience.

Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review of Ten Canoes.