Reverse Shot and true fans everywhere would like to congratulate and thank the 2007 New York Mets on another soul-shattering, God-questioning season of professional baseball. We have been aptly rewarded.

Come to glorious Lincoln Center for the 45th annual New York Film Festival!!

Well, we're not as quick on the draw as some of our colleagues, so we dare to begin our New York Film Festival coverage, with in-depth reviews of this year's selected films, on the first day of the festival!

First up, check out our takes on Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (here's our shot and our reverse shot) and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Check back throughout the next couple of weeks here and on our main site for continued coverage of our favorite, most streamlined, discriminating festival. Spoilers: we're just WILD about the Hou Hsiao-hsien and the Todd Haynes.....

Where to begin? Lowest-common denominator filmmaking in the guise of a "social problem picture," Trade does indeed make us mad, as director Marco Kreuzpaintner has said he wanted - but not in the way he intends. So much that's so wrong and so bad flies out of Trade so quickly that the audience practically has to duck and cover from shrapnel. From its flagrant exoticization-cum-demonization of Mexico City to its predictably trendy, faceless aesthetic to its uproariously hammy acting, Trade is a disaster from the top down. Obviously the work of a filmmaker who has genuinely no ideas about the ethics of storytelling or representation, Trade is essentially Hostel Part Two but designed to make you feel good for having learned about "something."

And what is that something? Why it's the hot topic of human trafficking, an undeniably serious human-rights issue that's become the narrative playground of exploitation hacks looking for credibility: amoral genre filmmakers, you now have your social problem of choice! It's apparent from the get-go that Kreuzpaintner has more interest in car-crash shock cuts and panties bunched up around molested women's flailing ankles (that would be eight punches to girls' faces too many, thank you very much) than exposing the harsh realities of underage sexual slavery or impoverished south-of-the-border life - which incidentally is introduced by this German filmmaker (whose last film was, oddly, the misshapen but good-natured gay coming-of-age flick Summer Storm - more underage flesh, but sun-dappled and safe) when wispy protagonist Jorge (Cesar Ramos) robs an American tourist and says, "What do weee doooo to greengos who don't respect Mexicans?" before squirting him with a water gun and laughing, "Die, beetch!" Cue upbeat mariachi music.
Click here if you actually want to read more of Michael Koresky's review of Trade.

Wes Anderson doesn't stray too far afield with The Darjeeling Limited, but judging by his latest film's considerable merits, do we really want him to? Even a ten-year-old could point out the aesthetic and narrative similarities between Anderson's films, so consistently do they deploy the same visual tricks and emotional turnarounds, yet to observe The Darjeeling Limited from a simple evaluative distance would deny the immersive pleasures therein. Asking Anderson to change (or "grow," as some critics would call it) ignores everything that's right with the artistic fluidity from Bottle Rocket to here. If The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou seemed too mechanical, too locked-in to its director's gambits, then with Darjeeling Anderson has found a way to overcome his own limitations without forgoing his expected style.

Here, we still have vaguely unhappy, comically morose family members trying to reconnect while boxed into Anderson's comic panel-like set-ups. Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman return, as brothers Francis and Jack, embarking on a soul-searching train voyage through India, and if their performances initially feel entirely too comfortable, as entrenched as these actors are in Anderson's constrictive sensibilities, then the addition of Anderson first-timer Adrien Brody, as the third (and... tallest) brother, Jack, has freed them. Whereas Wilson's faux earnest deadpan and Schwartzman's bruised puppy-dog gestures (as an actor, he's best when looking directly into the camera, imploring at an off-screen female object of desire) have received workouts before, Brody's elongated, sad-eyed interiority injects genuine vitality into the film.

Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of The Darjeeling Limited.

A disclaimer: If your immediate reaction to seeing the title Feast of Love appear on-screen accompanied by what sounds like music from a rainforest documentary is anything other than "Oh, God, I'm in the wrong movie!" it's probable that we approach film art from across an unbridgeable divide. And therefore my following opining would mean less to you than were it written in Sumerian.

Portland, Oregon. The vicinity of a college campus. Harry Scott (Morgan Freeman) is a philosophy professor on an extended leave of absence following the unexpected death of his son. So Harry spends his days at the local coffee shop, a fine vantage point from which to observe the foibles of love amongst frisky neighborhood Caucasians, whose flirtations he benedicts with a benevolent smile. Periodically he dispenses soft-serve homilies on life and love, and intones lines, in that commanding voice-over, such as, "Bradley looked up from the paper one day and realized, no one burns for him."
Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Feast of Love.

Elbert Ventura on Into the Wild
Released on the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Into the Wild is of a proud tradition. Like its hero, the movie is uniquely American, and its palpable affection for the landscape—both geographic and cultural—can make your heart swell. Penn and cinematographer Eric Gautier (who is, in a word, awesome) see the environment through Chris’s awed eyes, weaving a tapestry of fields, rivers, deserts, and mountains that make tangible Chris’s conviction that the “freedom and simple beauty” of the road are too good to pass up. The soulful landscape shots recall those of Terrence Malick, but even more reminiscent of Penn’s onetime director (on The Thin Red Line) are the transcendentalist perspective and the poetic montage.



Emily Condon on The Jane Austen Book Club
Harold Bloom once captured something essential about Austen’s achievement when he suggested that, despite its traditionally happy ending, Persuasion always leaves the reader with a palpable sense of sadness. Such sadness, he suggests, emerges from the novel’s overall “somberness.” That quality, which runs throughout all of Austen’s books, is what so many of the myriad modern interpretations of Austen sorely lack, and The Jane Austen Book Club is no exception.



Michael Koresky on The Man of My Life
Ebbing and flowing on the buzz of one all-night conversation, French director Zabou Breitman's The Man of My Life sketches the blossoming relationship between two fortysomething men: the happily married Frederic and his unattached, gay neighbor Hugo. And though occasionally its strength is sapped by heavy-handed symbolic gestures, The Man of My Life is a surprisingly unsentimental take on somewhat dubious character types. Just when it seems like Breitman's made another case study in how much the free-spirited homo can teach the sheltered hetero, the director actually manages to free her two main men from the burden of most cliches.

Horror is the most overburdened genre in existence, weighed down with so much symbolic, political, and sociological portent that it’s a marvel when a film can actually get down to the business of being scary. While unpretentious and well-crafted efforts like Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn fall by the wayside, the latest offerings from each newly minted horror “auteur” come with allegory locked firmly in place for critical exegesis, while any actual insight into their ostensible “real” topic is precisely nil. This isn’t to say that horror films are obliged to stay out of the real world and within their own supposed generic boundaries—rather that an attempt to address the real world must be made intrinsic to those boundaries, a part of the film rather than an imposed reading.

Larry Fessenden is a self-confessed horror filmmaker, and not only perhaps the greatest one working today—his potential rivals being Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Bong Joon-ho—but also the most pointedly political, emotionally invested, and unguardedly honest. Unlike his dissembling contemporaries, his films are defiantly about what they are about. Rather than the comfortable “archetypes” with which so many horror faux-teurs skim across any real investment in their material, Fessenden always has an actual subject, whether it’s the self-destruction of addiction in Habit or the familial breakdown of Wendigo, and it’s from these subjects that the atmosphere and fright emanate. Fessenden is not making art movies (or political tracts) in horror-film clothing, but employing the genre to break open the dread at the heart of his subjects, to give their terrifying formlessness a transitory form.

Click here to read the rest of Andrew Tracy's review of The Last Winter.

Alessandro Baricco's slim, lovely novel Silk works through structure and language (and structural and linguistic repetition) rather than character or plot. Sure, there is a plot: Herve, its nominal protagonist, travels to Japan a number of times in search of silkworms and returns to his native France, each journey bringing greater material reward, until violence in Japan makes the journey impossible. But there are women at both ends of the world--a French wife and a mysterious young girl whose "eyes did not have an oriental slant" (in Baricco's words)--and Herve's relationship to these two women, related obliquely, occupies the real center of Baricco's meditation on love, femininity, and otherness. It's a novel in which the form is the content, which makes the prospect of a film adaptation particularly dubious. With the movie Silk, writer-director Francois Girard, whose previous credits include The Red Violin, and his co-screenwriter Michael Golding make the transition from page to screen rather bumpily, fashioning a far too conventional and dramatically inert romantic epic out of such beautiful, mysterious raw material.
Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of Silk.

It pains me to say it, but Neil Jordan's new film, the vigilante flick The Brave One, doesn't really merit much of a mention in the pages of Reverse Shot, so this blog blurt will do. This hurts because this is a film from a director we really, really, really respect. Rarely does a filmmaker of Jordan's gifts plummet so drastically off the edge of good taste and judgment as he has here; I haven't read an Armond White recouping mission yet, but Jordan defenders (of which I have often been one) may have to do some serious scrambling, digging, and wishful thinking here.

The only excuse for the film, which doesn't let Jordan off the hook one iota, is that the film is so clearly another in a long line of Jodie Foster vanity projects, apparent from the flattering dialogue (one character calls her "skinny but with a nice ass"...impossible the character would know since she was sitting down during the entire scene) to the Sarah McLachlan tunes on the soundtrack (taken from Jodie's latest mix CD?). Foster is not just a formidable screen presence but also possibly the only over-40 actress who can still, consistently, open a film at number one at the box office based on her star power alone: that's an astonishing feat and nothing to be sniffed at. As evidenced from interviews, she tailors projects to her liking, changes scripts and sculpts stories and characters to fit her world view and the needs of her persona. Foster undoubtedly had as much say in the resulting lopsided catastrophe of The Brave One as producers, writers, and the woebegone director, who must have felt a serious ego-clash with his own. None of this is to disparage Foster, who remains mesmerizing onscreen, and who has an amazing ability to remain an icon of female individuality in a dream machine where wives, prostitutes, and slutty gfs are the norm. Yet the film's inability to sufficiently complicate the Foster image is its main downfall, as its repetitive, dully filmed (paranoia = tilty camera!) Death Wish structure allows her to kill a parade of muggers and nefarious baddies who, always at the last minute, say or do something which validates the audience's blood lust—the most egregious: when a couple of subway-riding black punks, who really only seem to be after some kid's iPod, turn on Foster with a blade and ask her if "she's ever been fucked by a knife"? Blammo.

Even more egregious than the film's moral simplicity and visual uninspiration, though, is the sheer stupidity of the script. Nearly every line has a Haggis-like mix of overexplanation and political self-righteousness, even contriving Foster as an NPR-like radio personality so that she can wax poetic on the "disappearing New York City" (which includes that old chestnut, little Plaza Hotel-dwelling Eloise) and, when she starts killing, on her own "stranger within." And when the radio show is opened up to live call-ins, we get, naturally, a flood of stock actor voices regurgitating conveniently opposed views to denounce or praise the actions of the infamous vigilante crime-fighter--for some added topicality, someone says, "It's like what's going on in Iraq!" Well, no, in fact. Not at all. The biggest eye-rolls come courtesy of Terrence "baby wipes" Howard's detective ("the only living cop in New York," as my friend chuckled), who literally is on every crime scene of Foster's random killing spree: whether it's on the Upper West Side or Roosevelt Island, they always conveniently seem to be in his jurisdiction.

Furthermore, the ending is so risible, illogical, and morally and racially dubious that it could never be mistaken for anything other than thoughtless Hollywood hackery. I won't give it away, lest someone wants to experience some incredulous gasping guffaws. Rarely does a film with such formidable talent feel so defeated, weak-willed, and confused. The film's success might encourage Jordan to keep taking for-hire projects (hopefully to fund his long-gestating Borgias project), but one can only hope he'll be more discerning next time; even his less-than-worthy earlier films like Interview with the Vampire and In Dreams showed off both visual invention and a tantalizingly idiosyncratic world view, despite their tendencies toward narrative incoherence. The Brave One is a craven mess, lacking in any of the deeply human qualities that its director usually effortlessly conveys.

Michael Douglas is crazy (like a fox!) and lookin' for gold in "King of California," the debut feature from writer-director Mike Cahill....
It's A Woman Under the Influence meets The Goonies, but not half as good as that sounds.
Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of King of California.

Good artists don’t deserve excuses when they fail, but explanations. Ignoring or dismissing a film’s manifold flaws—or perversely inflating them into virtues—does the exact opposite of what is intended: instead of revealing more about the artist’s work, it merely distorts it, sometimes beyond recognition. An artist’s flaws are as much a part of the work as his strengths, and to banish that dialectic to the back of the frame is to negate the crucial element of struggle within a film, the problems and challenges—whether of his own making or otherwise—which the filmmaker has to surmount. Auteurism, if it is anything at all, is an active process, not simply a passive “expression” of a filmmaker’s sensibilities. To pretend otherwise is to engage in boosterism, not criticism, however synonymous the two have become.

David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is a failed film. And it fails for a reason which many critics consider banal and irrelevant (a good indication of its continuing truth): the script is Bad. Writer Steve Knight is evidently seeking to continue pursuing, after Dirty Pretty Things, unvarnished, gritty authenticity by diligently carpentering together banalities and clichés, leaving just enough room at the joints for the film’s narrative progression to make no sense.
Click here to read Andrew Tracy's review of David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises.

A Lion in the House, the devastating, cleansing documentary that Reverse Shot helped to secure theatrical distribution in 2006, has won the Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking award at the Emmys. Congratulations to filmmakers Steve Bognar (fourth from the left) and Julia Reichert (fifth from the right) for their hugely deserved prize.
And as if to sweeten the deal, their toughest competitor, Spike Lee, didn't go home empty-handed either, tying with them for his immensely worthy epic When the Levees Broke.

Congratulations to all, from Reverse Shot.

For many, the jury is still out on Paul Haggis. The erstwhile television scribe turned Oscar-winner has certainly built an impressive resume in a short time, including partial or full screenwriting credit on four of the most acclaimed studio movies of recent years: Clint Eastwood's magnificent three-film run of Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers (okay...eh...), and Letters from Iwo Jima, plus the genuinely awesome Bond flick Casino Royale. But Haggis's colossally stupid directorial debut Crash, despite its Best Picture victory, hardly delivered on the promise suggested by his other successes--it's difficult to imagine the same person being involved in Eastwood's searing boxing drama and that pompous race screed on any level, much less in a major authorial role. Muddying the waters and splitting the difference (to mix my metaphors--hey, if Haggis can do it, so can I) is his directorial follow-up, In the Valley of Elah, a mostly inoffensive detective film that's also a confused prestige picture about American soldiers fighting in Iraq.

Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah.

It's rare that a film as initially unfocused and scattershot as Griffin Dunne's mock-ethnographic Fierce People would halfway redeem itself through the introduction of an anal rape/revenge narrative--but here we have it. Discussion of redemption in this case is tricky--it's not as if the two halves of this decidedly odd film display a marked difference in filmmaking and performance quality, but the whole enterprise does become a much more energized affair once the crime has been committed. However, my positive reaction to the "added value" Dunne serves up in Fierce People's latter portions may have less to do with its narrative necessity than with the extra oomph of purpose it lends a movie that seems content for its first hour to merely drift. That or, perhaps the sheer novelty factor of finding such a bizarre story strand grafted into a generally conventional and familiar work.
Click here to read Jeff Reichert's review of Fierce People.

If John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes had been financed and released by a studio, it would have been a calamity on the level of Francis Ford Coppola's infamous One from the Heart. That's not meant to be an insult. Though One from the Heart was one of many Hollywood productions (Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate among them) that hearkened the last gasp of the much-hallowed days of Seventies filmmaking, when directors were given big budgets and free reign to experiment on large canvases, it was also a gloriously earnest film that purposely, necessarily alienated its audience in order to collapse conventional narrative parameters--much in the same way it literally collapsed space and walls with its innovative use of video technology and breakaway sets. Romance & Cigarettes, like One from the Heart, is an interiorized musical set somewhere between stark lower middle-class reality and all-consuming artifice--also like that film, it's not entirely successful in its aims, often poking around rather than rooting to its characters' emotional core. Yet the labor of Turturro's love is evident in nearly every frame.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of John Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes.

There are untold artistic benefits to living in a culture of critical reassessment--otherwise, what would current generations think of Vertigo? But if the glut of superfluous "special edition" DVD packages over the past ten years is any indicator, then there are also some sorry side effects. Falling somewhere between the enshrined camp package (Mommie Dearest's Hollywood Royalty Edition, complete with John Waters commentary track!) and the sober-minded resurrection of the long unavailable and disenfranchised as crucial artifact (the recent "Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky" box set, featuring El Topo) will surely be Paramount's imminent deluxe edition of William Friedkin's 1980 film maudit, Cruising.

Cruising's squishily anticipated return to home video, and to the hearts and minds of a generation who had the benefit of possibly not knowing of its existence, will be accompanied by a brief theatrical run in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Add to all that a recent Cannes screening, followed by an alleged double standing ovation for Friedkin (come on...really?), and we have on our hands a full-fledged attempt at recouping Cruising as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece, and a reaffirmation of its director as visionary provocateur

.Paramount can only hope for cultural amnesia for this to work: "Cruising" remains a work of unparalleled, unedifying discomfort. Click here to read Michael Koresky on William Friedkin's Cruising.

Of course, it would follow that an Israeli filmmaker would center his films mostly around dichotomies, doubles, and impasses. Popular gay filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose previous two films, Yossi and Jagger and Walk on Water, enjoyed healthy limited-run success in the U.S., returns with The Bubble, and again proves that his strengths lie in establishing tender, fraught human relationships within volatile settings. Fox has a sharp ear and an open heart, and his characters' interactions are never less than believable, their struggles plainspoken and heartrending. Yet in shuttling these fragile souls through stock tragic frameworks, he sometimes undermines them, both personally and politically; though The Bubble makes for a mostly impassioned liberal plea, Fox's need to spin its central gay romance into a star-crossed present-day "West Bank Story" leads him to fall into some unnecessary stereotyping. Which is unfortunate since there's so much loveliness in The Bubble.
Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Eytan Fox's The Bubble.

It's late out here at Telluride, and there's no real time for a full considered review of what is sure to be one of the year's most remarkable movies: I'm Not There. Not to be all David Poland about things and blurt out half-formed opinions, but I have to say that what Haynes has accomplished here is so ingenious, intelligent, unique, and wholly entertaining that it's unfair to other filmmakers. I left the theater shaking and stammering, wanting to make out with everyone involved (sans Harvey), and if I'd been offered the opportunity, I would have walked right back in and seen it again.

Expect a lot more on I'm Not There from Reverse Shot in the weeks to come.