Once again, with his new film The Witnesses, great French filmmaker André Téchiné surveys the intersections of sexuality and politics, while offering up a compelling study in human strength and weakness. Instructive without ever falling into cheap bromides, dramatic without ever veering into overzealous melodrama, The Witnesses is a penetrating, even essential narrative. Téchiné is fascinated by the ways in which lives interact, personalities cross-pollinate, wounds are compounded, exacerbated, or even healed, yet never in that increasingly mundane American style of overlapping stories that prize fate or coincidence; he paints specifically, creating not vague character sketches but full lives, however defined by enigma or contradiction. Here, as in his superlative (and admittedly more vivid) Wild Reeds, Téchiné introduces complicated people who may evolve throughout the course of the narrative but who are also unavoidably wedded to their specific time and place in history.

The nucleus around which all of the characters will move is Manu (newcomer Johan Libéreau), a young fellow from the country with a face as unspoiled as fresh milk who's just come to Paris, in 1984, to move in with his opera-singer sister (Julie Depardieu). This being an historical drama perched on the edge between the pre and post AIDS eras, Téchiné presents Manu's after-dark park cruising with devil-may-care abandon. Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of The Witnesses.

With the presentation of Lee Kang-Sheng’s new film, Help Me Eros, and Tsai Ming-Liang’s installation, Is It a Dream? as part of the New Dragon Inns program (named for Tsai’s Goodbye Dragon Inn), it’s hard not to talk about the two Taiwanese figures in the same breath. They have been long-time collaborators: on-screen at least, Lee has been the face of Tsai for fourteen years, but behind the scenes they work very much together, even when pursuing their own projects. Yet too often has Lee’s directorial work been criticized for being overshadowed by Tsai, and it’s often been unfairly judged in those terms. This is a shame, as it’s no small feat that Lee won Rotterdam’s competitive Tiger Award in 2004 with his debut feature, The Missing. Now, with Help Me Eros, Lee announces his talent as a visual stylist with undeniable originality.


Help Me Eros (Bangbang wo aishen, Lee Kang-Sheng, Taiwan)

Help Me Eros is like the roving dream of a fitful sleeper. Taking place almost entirely at night, it restlessly shifts from place to place, from the garish neon platforms of the Kaohsiung betelnut girls, and the austere white emptiness of Ah Jie’s apartment. Yet for anyone familiar with the visual landscape of Taiwan, many of the seemingly fantastical elements are in fact realistic portrayals of a fantastic place. Contemporary Taiwan is very much at the heart of Lee’s story, crass and materialistic, but also despairing in the wake of dramatic stock market losses. Ah Jie, a former trader, has been hit particularly hard. As he slowly sells off his belongings, he becomes increasingly unhinged, escaping into the haze of smoke and finding anonymous solace in the comforting voice of a suicide hotline worker. And throughout the film, we’re constantly reminded that he’s hardly alone in his suffering: television broadcasts of protests, suicides, and financial hardship frequently play in the background as his life gradually falls apart.

Playing the lead role, Lee is very much the same tragic, Keatonesque figure he has always played in the films of Tsai, who also executive produced and art directed the film. Lonely and languid, Lee shuffles pantless through his home, recites uplifting messages to the marijuana plants in his closet greenhouse, and misses most of the human connections he reaches for while ignoring those that are right in front of him.

On one level, the Eros here refers to the highly theatrical sex scenes, one of which involves a threesome blanketed by iconic designer labels like Fendi and Louis Vuitton. Yet some of the most striking images come from the unexpected horror of the banal, as when two chefs on a cooking show crack an egg only to have an unborn ostrich fall out onto a frying pan. Eros works against this: it’s the longing to touch and meaningfully connect with others in an increasingly fragmented and nonsensical world. This is best expressed in one of the film’s many musical interludes, when Ah Jie drifts off into a drug-induced fantasy about his suicide hotline caseworker, and smoke magically wafts through her phone and into her mouth. The moment recalls the smoke shared through the prison walls of Jean Genet’s seminal Chant d’amour: through the smoke, one’s presence is passed across the lines, a kiss against impossible odds. At its best, Help Me Eros is just like this—one deep breath, slowly exhaled.

Is It a Dream? (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)

Before Tsai made Goodbye Dragon Inn, there came recurring dreams of a movie palace recalled from his childhood in Malaysia, and it’s this theater that’s literally brought to us in the installation Is It a Dream?, originally presented at the Taiwan Pavilion at the most recent Venice Biennale. With the worn seats of the original theater transported to the gallery space and a short film projected in front, Tsai’s piece recreates the theater of his memories and dreams. The theater itself takes center stage in the film we watch: we never see the movie screen, but only the rapt expressions of the small family sitting in the otherwise empty theater. Their seats are our seats: as I watched the film, I could imagine them sitting in my place, feeling the same frayed armrest and hearing the loud creaks of the chair whenever the slightest movement was made. In this way the installation, however closely mapped to Tsai’s experience, works quietly on us, making apparent our own private rituals of moviegoing.

As with Goodbye Dragon Inn, the theater is almost completely empty, and in a few simple shots, Tsai manages to construct a family across generations, not only at the cinema, but also through it, in the collective pleasure of sharing a movie. The grandmother is at times pictured as a young woman nonchalantly offering a man a stick of pear wedges, and also a framed photograph leaned against a seat. As the family gradually fades away in their seats, their presence is like that of a haunting. In many ways, we too are its ghosts, unsure, as the song asks, if “this is a dream or reality.” And this is always the question where it concerns the cinema. In a way, it’s both: it’s the seats we sit in and the world we imagine, it’s the different lives we embody, on-screen and in the theater, the accumulated presence of all those who have come before us to experience the same rapture. For Tsai, the space of the theater is sacred, with offerings of fruit, the grandmother’s photograph (a common fixture on family shrines), and even a shrine-like stand housing the projector in the back of the gallery.

Later that day, I arrived just after the lights went down on Lee Kang-Sheng’s afternoon screening of Help Me Eros. As I scanned the packed theater looking for an available seat, someone turned around from the front row and graciously offered me one of the reserved chairs behind him. The person was none other than Tsai himself, seated beside Lee, both of them joyfully anticipating the start of the film. It was as if the experience of Is It a Dream? had followed me into waking life, and the title of the piece was now less a question than a certainty. As the opening titles came up, I considered how lucky and how strange it was that Tsai had once again invited me to sit down in a theater, and how, in the dark, we all fall into the same dream. —GENEVIEVE YUE

Everyone's favorite worthless waste of muppet-faced space, Tom O'Neil, made a pithy statement on his hilarious, always-wrong Oscar prognostication website (Dreamgirls will win Best Picture...doh; Sweeney Todd will win...doh!), calling out the GLAAD awards for its apparent lack of edge for not including The Kite Runner in its citation of great gay films.

O.......kay....The Kite Runner, right...well, I do recall that deliriously erotic child-on-child same-sex rape scene, in which a young sadistic bully, in a show of fascistic aggression, viciously rapes another young boy because he disapproves of his perceived inferior race, that of Hazara. With discreet cutaways, Marc Forster edits around the offense, but in the end shows a single droplet of blood from the poor victim's wounded anal cavity splashing to the ground (At Slant, Ed Gonzalez memorably compared it to a syrup drizzle over a stack of golden pancakes, if memory serves.)

Then, as a result of shooting this sequence, the actors involved had to be taken to safe havens so that their lives would be spared after bristling homophobia in their homeland.

O'Neil calls The Kite Runner a great film with a gay subtext. And then muses, Why did GLAAD wimp out? Well, there's no accounting for taste (The Kite Runner....great? come the fuck on...), but there should be some accounting for really poor taste. O'Neil, take your sock-puppet mouth and googly eyes and finally go far, far away. Perhaps to that magical land of soaring digital kites, where boys learn how to be men, and men learn how to wear sticky beards.

Ever read something on Reverse Shot that made your blood boil? Well, next time that happens, exorcise your rage: head here, type in our URL and select your weapon of choice...

Standing at the front of the theater before the screening, they look nervous and don’t have much to say by way of an introduction. When the applause erupts they look slightly embarrassed because they haven’t yet earned the audience’s approval. For filmmakers premiering their first work, and especially for those who are making their first forays into feature-length fiction films, the debut screening can be especially nerve-wracking. But this is, as Peter Forgács puts it, "the risk of the filmmaker," turning a private and sometimes obsessive endeavor into public spectacle, and laying it before the mercy of an audience that’s probably seen it all. It’s a courageous move. We applaud the filmmaker for simply showing up, for taking the risk. And if we’re lucky, we’ll be treated to something we’ve never seen before.

Rail Road Crossing (Pas a nivell, Pere Vilà, Spain)

The risk taken by Pere Vilà is evident from the start: with a budget of 30,000 Euros, he dared to shoot Rail Road Crossing on 35 mm film, which, for him, was the only way it could be done. Working on a shoestring, his small crew and cast traveled throughout Catalan and made use of whatever was there: locations, extras, and occasional actors. In one scene, Marc, the young man who’s taken an unusual job shuttling tourists to and from the beach, picks up a Dutch couple who chat away merrily. Their conversation, a rare burst of dialogue in an otherwise reticent film, isn’t subtitled; it was only after the screening that Vilà learned what they were actually saying, thanks to the Rotterdam audience (amusingly, they weren’t talking about the film, but of the plans for their next winter holiday). That he could put so much faith in the unknown is rare and remarkable, and it speaks volumes about his calm, open approach to filmmaking.

Filmed in Vilà’s native Catalan and based largely on his own experiences, Rail Road Crossing loosely follows Marc the summer after he graduates. Not yet sure of what he wants to do, he takes a seaside job and moves in with his grandmother, the only person who seems to understand that he’s not quite ready to face the world. Rail Road Crossing’s pace is slow, with long, lingering shots that seem to absorb the heat of the Catalan summer. Like its protagonist, the film drifts on a giant inflatable mattress in the water and coasts on a bicycle headed downhill; it’s not in any hurry to get to where it’s going, wherever that is. When Marc’s asked about his future, he can only think as far as the next few hours—he’s going to town to get some photographs developed. Vilà’s realism has a light touch, a slightly absurdist quality that’s attentive to Marc’s missteps. One entire sequence is devoted to him as he eats a potato wedge that’s too hot, and though unnoticed by his family members, we see his grimace after each bite, his determination to make it through, and then the final, sad victory of the potato, still on the fork, being laid down on the plate. Perhaps the most wonderful image is that of Marc floating on the water, disconnected from everything and everyone, lazily snapping pictures of the jet-skiing tourists. For him, this summer may just last forever.

Much of Rail Road Crossing/ was shot in the home of Vilà’s grandmother. When she passed away last year, Vilà realized he knew little about her, who she was or what her life had been like. Yet if the scenes between Marc and his grandmother are any indication, it matters less to know about the person than to know the person, deeply and fully. In this way Rail Road Crossing is a dedication, not only to Vilà’s grandmother but also to the gradual transformations of adolescence.

Own Death (Peter Forgács, Hungary)

As the title might suggest, Peter Forgács’s Own Death is a risky proposition, a taut and uncompromising examination of a fairly uncomfortable and difficult subject. The text, adapted from the short story of celebrated Hungarian author Péter Nádas, delves deeper than most, constantly turning over the medical and metaphysical details of one man’s near-death experience. It’s dense and prismatic, and however slowly it’s read in voiceover, or whatever phrases are selected to appear onscreen, one viewing (and one reading, I would imagine) can hardly do it justice. If “the complexity of the text demanded a new language,” as Forgács remarked in the Q&A, the filmed stills and sequences, together with found home movie footage, make up its alphabet.

Forgács, a documentarian and media artist, is best known for his work with found materials. In Budapest, he founded the Private Film and Photo Archive Foundation, a collection of amateur footage culled from Central Europe during the Nazi era, and in over thirty films and videos he’s “reorchestrated” the home movie material to tell alternative versions of their often troubling history. Besides being a fiction film, Own Death marks something of a departure, leaving aside the larger questions of the past to focus intently on the personal. The voice guides everything—images, music, and pacing—and it’s a “narrow” path, as Forgács puts it, and the sinew of Nádas’s prose is especially lean. Yet the strongest elements in the film rely the least on the words: found footage remnants of a man leaping nude in a field, or a child swinging around in a towel offer a needed reprieve from the unrelenting text. In those moments, the narrator holds his breath and we are the ones who breathe, taking in images that can’t necessarily be accounted for, but are beautiful to behold. They widen the narrow path by granting us a sense of other people: their memories, their lives, their perseverance.
—GENEVIEVE YUE

For the first time in nearly twenty years, domestic films in Japan have outsold foreign imports at the box office. Adding to this the fact that Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest, Kobayashi Masahiro’s The Rebirth, and Takeshi Kitano’s Glory to the Filmmaker! all won major prizes at international film festivals in the past year, and it would seem that Japanese cinema is experiencing its own rebirth of sorts (though significant developments have long been underway). For all the renewed vitality, however, the three films are notably elegiac in tone or subject matter. In each there’s a sense of aftermath, but distance doesn’t necessarily bring clarity or well-being. As one character observes in The Mourning Forest, there’s a difference between being alive and feeling alive, and all three films hover on that borderline. Their characters live on after the fact, and each, in their own way, attempts to make sense of the wreckage.

The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori, Naomi Kawase, Japan)
*Grand Prix winner at Cannes

The Rebirth (Ai no yokan, Kobayashi Masahiro, Japan)
*Golden Leopard winner at Locarno

The two most recent films of Naomi Kawase and Kobayashi Masahiro (one of the festival's Filmmakers in Focus), each relatively new filmmakers (both Kawase and Masahiro made their first features in 1996), both treat the death of family members through the encounter with strangers, or semi-strangers. In Kawase’s The Mourning Forest, the young Machiko (Machiko Ono) begins working at a retirement home after the death of her young son. There she treats Shigeki (Shigeki Uda), who apparently suffers from dementia, though, as he imagines and grasps for his deceased wife, his is more a condition of intense melancholy. Through their developing friendship—one of the most touching images is that of Shigeki and Machiko hiding from and chasing each other amid rows of scalloped hedges—they begin the work of mourning, retreating into the forest, but doing so together and through each other. Though beautifully shot with long, lingering vistas of the misty forest and closely tracked handheld camerawork, there’s still something too pristine and neat about Kawase’s film, and this is made clear through Masahiro’s example.

The Rebirth is a taut and conceptually rigorous film, built largely on the mundane and repetitive tasks of daily life, and with most of the dialogue dropping out entirely after the first ten minutes. The film demands a level of patience not usually required even in art-house cinema, and more than a few people walked out of the theater midway through. But like Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, its relentless drive to repetition and order sharpens our perceptual awareness that much more, so that when things quietly shift, they do so with a tremendous roar. Following the fatal stabbing of a teenage girl by her classmate, the single parents of each child both relocate to the Hokkaido countryside, where, coincidentally or not, their lives continually intersect. Noriko (Makiko Watanabe, who also played the luminous Wakake in The Mourning Forest), the mother of the perpetrator, is at a loss to explain her daughter’s actions, but is nevertheless wracked by guilt and grief. She works in the kitchen of the dormitory where the widower Junichi (played by Masahiro himself) resides, and he has left his job as a Tokyo journalist to shovel hot coals in a local factory.

Where The Mourning Forest gets metaphysically lost in the woods,The Rebirth is steadfastly rooted in the banal realities of ordinary life. Hokkaido, normally viewed as a warm tourist destination, is depicted as a wintery wasteland, devoid of people and warmth. Noriko literally keeps her head down, her long bangs obscuring her face, and when she walks, even indoors, it’s as if she’s always cold. And Junichi, slow and deliberate in all his movements, leaves his glasses on even as they fog over during his nightly bath: he’s unwilling to let down his guard, even for an instant. They struggle to connect but can hardly face each other; each leaves a gift of a cell phone to the other, but these mostly end up in the trash, unused. The Rebirth is full of false starts and failed missives, but for Noriko and Junichi, linked to the same, awful experience, being near each other may be enough.

Glory to the Filmmaker! (Kantoku banzai, Takeshi Kitano, Japan)
*Glory to the Filmmaker award at Venice

Like Takeshis before it, Kitano’s latest exploit is at times maddening and utterly indecipherable. And though it may be, as many critics have charged, naval-gazing at its worst, the self-reflexive magnifying glass here seems to have the effect of aiming concentrated light at the subject, gradually burning away the man at its center. For the first half at least, Glory to the Filmmaker! is a chronicle of failed film projects attempted by Kitano, wryly observed by a somewhat contemptuous narrator. Kitano and his companion, a life-size dummy version of himself (it looks like a three-dimensional Mii) try out different genres, from yakuza film, Ozu-style family drama, and tear-jerker melodrama, to period drama and swordfighting, and fails every time. Everything’s been done before, and moreover everything’s been done by Kitano before. As the film progresses, there’s a pronounced sense of acceleration, that the things done over the course of Kitano’s television and film careers are beginning to run together and collide. Each project is abandoned nearly as soon as it is begun—even the title of the film only gets as far as “GLOR” —and through it all Kitano, like his dummy, is expressionless, his face barely registering the change in sets and costume.

The second half of the film is ostensibly the sci-fi thriller, The Promised Day, yet that quickly becomes something else, a farce resembling ‘Beat’ Takeshi’s broad and often vulgar television slapstick, perhaps, though it might be more related to surrealism. Primary colors abound in grotesque saturation, as a mother schemes to marry off her daughter (who ventriloquizes a stuffed goosed under her arm) to a wealthy man. But this is only the thinnest of narratives: as Luis Buñuel said of Un Chien Andalou, the film wasn’t meant to make any sense, but to incite people to murder.

Glory to the Filmmaker! is less disorienting than Takeshis but more brutally nihilistic. It takes the two figures of Kitano, ‘Beat’ Takeshi the television comedian and actor and Takeshi Kitano the auteur, and adds to them the dummy, a distilled caricature of Kitano whose mute performance is uncannily similar to its model. With each failed project, the dummy is the one who bears the brunt of the consequence. Hung, drowned, and beaten, it’s killed every time something goes wrong, and though it always comes back shiny and resilient, Kitano’s metaphoric death each time suggests a bleak outlook for the filmmaker. Though the new Venice Film Festival award, named after the film, recognizes lifetime achievement, the film itself is hardly a celebration. It’s always been impossible to predict where Kitano’s going, but here it doesn’t seem he knows any better than the rest of us.
—Genevieve Yue

Not much more to say, is there?

[Editors Note: This is the first in a series of dispatches from the 37th Rotterdam International Film Festival, written by Reverse Shot contributor Genevieve Yue. Click here to read Yue's 2007 Reverse Shot interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul.]

An irony of film festivals is that you travel to some place, often distant, only to travel once again through the films presented there. Much of the delight that comes from attending an international film festival such as Rotterdam, of course, lies in the determined range of films presented. Once again the festival presents a diversity of geography and style, established and particularly emerging talent. Yet Rutger Wolfson, Rotterdam’s new director, takes the question posed by last year’s edition—what is the relevance of a film festival in a digital age? —and responds with an emphasis on live programming and events, from the Pop Cinema sidebar, which promises ear-shattering noise accompaniment to the work of Cameron Jamie, to New Dragon Inns, an exhibition inspired by Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn that explores the intersections between film, art, and the movie theater.

For all the pleasures of being at a festival, lost in a flurry of distribution deals and serious cinephilia, once the house lights come down, everything changes. Before the glowing screen, it becomes vividly apparent that one of cinema’s enduring powers is to import a sense of there, not here. On my first day at the festival, I had traveled nearly halfway around the world, then in the theater was transported again. Two visions of rural life, Uruphong Raksasad’s short film The Rocket (2007) and Sandra Kogut’s Mutum (2007) presented distant places as intimate experiences, timeless wonders with sly hints of the present.

The Rocket (Uruphong Raksasad, Thailand)

One of two shorts presented by Uruphong Raksasad in a program of Thai artist films, The Rocket is ostensibly about the celebratory rocket launching festival put on by several villages outside of Chaing Rai, Thailand, yet the film, which is in competition for the VPRO Tiger Awards for Short Film, manages to do quite a bit more. After the makeshift rocket tower is erected, villagers send their rockets, with names like “waiting for your love,” “pity for faraway man,” and “tsunami” up into the sky. Nearly all of them have terrific trajectories (one explodes in the tower, though it’s all safely contained in a garbage barrel) and it’s almost like a form of prayer, with people’s wishes and desires being shot up into the air, and everyone wishing them a long voyage. For all the film’s gentle mirth, Raksasad’s skill is seamless to the point of being almost imperceptible. From close-ups on a young monk’s face to distant shots of white contrails streaming through the sky, or from the rapidly edited arrival scene, one flatbed truck carrying an entire band, to stark time lapse sequences before and after the event, Raksasad creates a sense of a community always full of surprises. And throughout, the tinny loudspeaker voice of the announcer is always heard, his enthusiasm unwavering and infectious. Afterward, when the villagers tackle each other gleefully in the rice paddies, you know that the soggy ride home was well worth it.

Mutum (Sandra Kogut, France/Brazil)

Of Mutum’s central figure, 10-year-old Thiago, one character remarks that “he knows many stories but doesn’t realize it yet.” And looking into the thoughtful green eyes of Thiego, described by his mother as a dreamer and to most, a quiet observer to the life around him, it’s apparent that those stories are rapidly forming all the time. Cinematographer Mauro Pinheiro Jr.’s camerawork is lush and responsive, always knowing when to stand back from the characters or to push in to their slightest expressions, and through the camera we see what Thiago sees: a soft netting of spiderwebs in the trees, a tattered paper note worn with sweat and secrecy, and his own forefinger lightly stroking the back of an ant.

With Kogut’s background in documentary, there is a strong sense that the action is being followed rather than directed. Mutum, supported in part by Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, began with a long preparatory process in which the actors, nearly all nonprofessionals, moved into a farm well before shooting, establishing a strong connection to the place and with each other. When the crew arrived, Kogut remembers that they felt like asking if they could come in, so strongly had it become home for the (fictional) family. Even as shooting took place, the actors that were not in the scene were still in the house, staying in character, which is to say, remaining themselves. Kogut notes that the actors, who had never seen a film before, recognized themselves in the characters. Determinedly playing on the border between documentary and fiction, they “became the characters,” improvising dialogue instead of learning lines. Kogut rewrote the script every day on set, responding to everything that happened along the way: “I had the impression we were dealing with something that was alive.”

The story, adapted from João Guimarães Rosa’s well-known novel, Campo Geral, centers on Thiago as he, along with his brother Felipe, attempt to make sense of the world around them, particularly the lives of their parents. Mutum, the name for a mountain region in Brazil’s remote hinterland, the sertão, originally began as a workshop study in rural life, with Kogut traveling to different parts of the country and visited with local schoolchildren. She describes the film as being more a dialogue with Rosa’s novel than a faithful adaptation; instead of the descriptive elements of the text, Mutum is focused on the “inner landscapes” of the characters, one whose visual textures and emotional range is richer than most fictions can imagine. For it’s only when he must leave his home that Thiago sees his surroundings clearly for the first time. The short-sightedness he discovers late in the film is present throughout, not only in the way Thiago can or can’t see certain things, but in the myopic perspective of childhood itself. It’s “a manner of situating oneself in the world,” limited in some ways, perhaps, but utterly magical in others.
—Genevieve Yue

It says much about the failed dramatic strivings of The Air I Breathe that at a press screening -- an occasion for the most part free of audible displays of emotion, since critics like to play their cards close to the vest -- Jieho Lee's feature debut (co-scripted by Bob DeRosa) met with hoots of laughter the likes of which I've never before heard in that notoriously solemn setting. Based, according to the press release, on a Chinese proverb representing "four emotional cornerstones of life" -- Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love, each dedicated its own vignette though the stories, of course, overlap -- the movie stars numerous B-list celebrities including, amongst others, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a smug, spoiled pop starlet, Brendan Fraser as a hitman who can see the future, Andy Garcia as a crime boss named "Fingers" . . . Did I mention this is a drama?

Click here to read Kristi Mitsuda's review of The Air I Breathe.

Caramel, the directing debut of Lebanese actress/music video director Nadine Labaki, concerns five women who frequent a beauty salon in Beirut, their lives unfolding onscreen in between hair stylings and waxings (the latter accomplished with the sticky, burnt-sugar mixture for which the film is named). Each of the women is meant to represent the various challenges of being a “modern” Middle Eastern woman. I put the word “modern” in quotations not to suggest an incongruence between modernity and the middle east, but rather to note that the very notion of a “modern woman” is a construction that has a history about as long as the formulation of the modern nation-state. This construction encourages women to believe that they must simultaneously balance some amorphous notion of tradition based on a myth of an authentic past with a construction of a progressive “modern,” which could include definitions of women’s work, both in and outside of the home, and, increasingly, a globalized notion of beauty. So, while Caramel is essentially a lighthearted romantic comedy, a Lebanese Sex in the City if you will, minus the nudity or raunch, it’s most striking for how Labaki depicts the constant negotiation of the “modern” women, illustrating the ways in which people can resist the roles imposed on them, and the limits of that resistance.

Click here to read Joanne Nucho's review of Caramel.

It was the eternal grimace, the decades-long implosion, the attempt at decency swallowed up by half-hearted stabs at propriety, that not only defined Heath Ledger's Ennis Del Mar, but also Brokeback Mountain as a whole. And if Ennis hadn't already been one of recent American cinema's truly iconic characters, then, sadly, he surely will be from this point forward. Once simultaneously representative of the wide-open frontiers, tight-lipped repression, and willful self-denial of America, Ledger's much-lauded portrait of rough-hewn, gorgeously fragile masculinity now becomes something horribly definitive, indescribably expressive. Brokeback's cultural impact is unthinkable without Ennis's weathered visage, the crinkle of his spreading crow’s feet, the attempts of his denim body armor to make him impervious to emotional pain; Gyllenhaal's transition from yee-haw cowhand to disillusioned romantic useless without Ledger's heedless patience; Ang Lee's restrained mise-en-scène incomplete without Ledger's disappearance into it. If Brokeback's pain proved exquisite for some and unbearably raw for others, odds are it was all because of Ennis's internalized anguish, his disparity between how he felt and how he was told to act opening up a chasm within him too great to bridge. If Brokeback was criticized by some at the time as dated, as a tale of repression and safe closet-dwelling, then it also served as a fitful warning for future generations, a hope that happiness can still exist for a large segment of the American population who every day swallow their guilt, longings, and needs until it all burns like acid in the pits of their stomachs. This was the locus of Ennis's winces, the reason for his roiling guts. Ledger provided the face of anguish, a reflection for many who saw it, now caught forever in a freeze-frame, older than this fine actor will ever have the chance to grow to become.

Update: A lovely tribute to Ledger and all troubled celebrities like him over at the new blog Notes from the Range.

Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is as good as you've heard -- ravaging, provocative, deeply moving, and expertly crafted -- but it may not be what you expect. Billed by many as the "Romanian abortion movie" (something akin to labeling "There Will Be Blood" the "American oil movie"), 4 Months isn't simply about abortion, even if the film uses it as its structuring conceit. So yes, Mungiu's film concerns two friends, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), who attempt to procure an illegal abortion for the latter in the waning days of the Ceausescu regime, but it is not an "abortion movie" in the vein of Mike Leigh's excellent Vera Drake or Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth. Otilia -- and not Gabita -- occupies the film's narrative and moral center, and through this character, magnificently rendered by Marinca and insistently studied by Mungiu's handheld camera, 4 Months becomes something far more expansive than a simple plot description could imply -- a tense, riveting thriller (of a sort) that subtly evokes the experiences of women in a society that fiercely regulates their lives and bodies, often reducing them to commodities to be bought, sold, and bartered, no different at the extreme from the Kent cigarettes and orange Tic Tacs traded on the Bucharest black market.

Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of Cristian Mungiu's truly remarkable 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.

Also, earlier, Michael Koresky on the film.

Presidential hopeful and all-around sleaze bucket Mitt Romney's desperate equivocating over the use of waterboarding during this season's Republican YouTube debate nearly left the man a frothing mess. That's because there really isn't any room for equivocation: torture is torture, no matter how much the administration and other assorted "defenders of freedom" try to make excuses or strict, revisionist definitions. In his simultaneously harrowing and soberly parsed new documentary, Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) trots out endless footage of disgraced Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld smugly invalidating queries into American torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay and George Bush musing into what really constitutes torture, after all.

Gibney knows what constitutes torture, and he makes it abundantly clear in Taxi to the Dark Side, which uses as its springboard the true story of Dilawar, a 22-year-old Afghani cab driver who was murdered by his American captors in a Bagram prison, his death occurring after extended, painful bouts of psychological and physical torment. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Taxi to the Dark Side.

Any thoughtful film about the Israel-Palestine conflict naturally takes futility as its main subject; and acclaimed Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar has a central premise in his new film Beaufort that perfectly encapsulates not just the futility of war but also the cycle of retribution and violence that will seemingly forever engulf the Middle East. Set in 2000, Cedar's film, based on a novel by Ron Leshem, depicts a troop of Israeli soldiers assigned to watch over the outpost castle of Beaufort, located in Lebanon. As much a symbol of pride as a necessary strategic base, Beaufort, built in the 12th century by Crusaders, was claimed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1970s, during Lebanon's Civil War, before being captured by the Israeli army in 1982. For the next eighteen years, Israel commandeered the castle, its existence as an image of superiority and dominance greatly controversial, especially since the soldiers assigned to watch it had been regularly the targets of Hezbollah ambush.

With the dubious, crumbling bastion, located in distant mountains overlooking southern Lebanon and northern Israel, as its backdrop, Beaufort goes on not to dramatize a mundane tale of indomitable soldiers in wartime, but rather investigates the inner lives of men caught between pragmatism and entrenched patriotism. Figuratively and literally isolated, the troops, led by the enigmatic Liraz (Oshri Cohen), while away their days and, more nervously, their nights in the labyrinthine bunkers and stone crevices of the castle. Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of Beaufort.

Of all the varied strands of post-9/11 cinema, the speculative film--the one showing us what life would be like if it were slightly (but significantly!) different--is by far the most superfluous. Last year's lame "Right at Your Door, which sank right into oblivion, pondered a world where Los Angeles is hit by a biological weapon: suffice it to say that civilians panic, human bonds are frayed, and military authority acts really mean. Strangely, Bryan Gunnar Cole's Day Zero (not to be confused with another desperate stab at topicality, 2003's Columbine-riding Zero Day) could be Door's unasked-for spin-off. Here, a recent terrorist attack on L.A. is referred to, right along with 9/11, making its world an ostensibly more vulnerable one in which the draft has been reinstated. Of course, the return of a draft would probably be more dependent on the situation in Iraq and the one on Capitol Hill, but first-time film director Cole and screenwriter Robert Malkani (whose only other credit is the brilliantly titled Dot.Kill) don't really care about realistic politics. They're more interested in the "human side" of this fictional issue, which they seem to know just as little about.

Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin on Day Zero.

Jia Zhangke, who has emerged as one of the great artists from the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers, is one of those directors whose work will always be embraced and discussed by a number of devoted followers but whose discursive, searching approach to narratives and the people who inhabit them keep his films from appealing to a wider audience. At this juncture, I can't recall any of his earlier features creating much of an art-house stir once they found distributors after their North American festival debuts; it's a shame because, despite their refusal of cinematic conventions, Jia's films are hardly ossified, self-contained art works--in fact, today there are no films reaching American screens that reveal quite so much about the state of contemporary China, as important a topic as anything else going on in the world today (despite the understandable glut of films on Iraq and Darfur).

As with his earlier Unknown Pleasures and The World, Jia Zhangke's masterful Still Life is shot on digital video and skirts the line between documenting its nation's transitional woes as it moves towards promised free-market independence, and creating fictional narratives around these events. Yet those descriptions can't begin to illustrate the delicacy with which Jia surveys the scene, or the miraculous mixture of hope and despair that seems to spring from every moment he captures. For one thing, Jia embraces the video medium's grain and slightly muddy hues to create something wonderfully, unexpectedly rich; much of Still Life (in an echo of the film's English title) has a tint of chiaroscuro, casually placed tableaux of smooth bodies illuminated by pockets of natural golden sunlight, the camera drifting by.

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

It certainly seemed like folly. Not only was Tim Burton making a movie musical—a genre as in demand as color-plate cartoons and pseudo-scientific nudies—he was adapting a stage musical that, though long celebrated for its snarled melodies and grim theatricality, seems as out-of-place on today’s overly anthemic and anesthetized Broadway as it does beneath The Bucket List on multiplex marquees. For an operatic work with a notoriously difficult libretto, Burton not only enlisted non-singers, his casting process netted as leads his own reedy-voiced wife (Helena Bonham Carter) and ho-hum, go-to pretty-boy muse (Johnny Depp). Above all, Burton’s decision to film Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street smacked of a prolonged fixation with, and systematic co-optation of, his macabre sensibility’s source materials. From B-movies, comic books, and trading cards to Roald Dahl and Washington Irving, Burton’s become a gothic Disney, solidifying nostalgia into variations on his own image. Taking on Sweeney Todd seemed a misstep both hubristic and lazy: artistically out of his league yet squarely in his misfit wheelhouse. That it works at all is a major surprise; that it’s a very good movie is as shocking as its geysers of screen-splattering blood, and as satisfying as its potty-mouthed, Pyrrhic pathos. Click here to read Eric Hynes's piece on Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd.

Nikita Mikhalkov? Denys Arcand? Giuseppe Tornatore??! Excuse us for thinking we just woke up on the eve of the presidency of that other Clinton, but we're feeling, uh, nostalgic, upon today's announced narrowing of the eligible films for Oscar's Best Foreign-Language Film -- or, as it's more commonly known, Best Movie Picked From a Random Group of Movies from Some Countries Seen By a Handful of People in a Room Somewhere. The wonderfully alarmist Scott Foundas has certainly said it better than we ever could, but we will say that though the preference evidenced today by that mysteriously appointed foreign film committee for the palatable middlebrow wasn't surprising, it was as disheartening as ever.

As usual, the film has to be appointed by its country to be eligible (one imagines Kim Jong-Il sitting down with his cabinet, stroking his chin to decide whether to sumbit A Schoolgirl's Diary or Lazy Cat Dinga for nomination), and among the arbitrary rules, only one film per country, and it can't be an international coproduction (tsk tsk, Kieslowski!). It continued today, when the Academy announced the final nine, which did admittedly contain a couple films of interest, including the widely unseen latest from Andrzej Wajda and the Israeli film Beaufort (strong filmmaking there, but piffle compared to some of the great artistry on display elsewhere), but mostly was a stirring reminder of the ridiculous votes made in the past decade, in favor of Holocaust inspirationals, Italian twee, and coming-of-age pablum. We shouldn't have hoped for much more, but complete slaps in the face to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, Persepolis, Silent Light, Secret Sunshine, all of them extraordinary in one way or another, amounts to a full-scale idiocy. And it must be reiterated, these films didn't even make it to the final round, while self-parodic titles such as The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (not to be confused with When Father Was Away on Business, Kusturica's nominee from 1988) squeaked in for another level of what I'm sure will be distinguished discernment.

I mean, seriously, listen to this from the official press release:

The Phase I committee, consisting of several hundred Los Angeles-based members, screened the 63 eligible films and their ballots determined the above shortlist.

A Phase II committee, made up of ten randomly selected members from the Phase I group, joined by specially invited ten-member contingents in New York and Los Angeles, will view the shortlisted films and select the five nominees for the category.

Phase II screenings will take place from Friday, January 18, through Sunday,January 20, in both Hollywood and New York City.

Have your eyes crossed yet? What does it matter? Nothing really, they're Oscars, right? Well, for little-seen foreign films, it means a hell of a lot of recognition that most subtitled movies don't get outside of cinephile circles, and more of a chance at an audience. And a film like Cristian Mungiu's masterwork needs that recognition, especially in a marketplace flooded with so many films that success borders on the miraculous.

Out with the old, in with the new. We've given you our best, we've offered up our worst, and now, stick a fork in us, because our annual year-end spectacular is more done than Helena Bonham Carter at the end of Sweeney Todd. Top tens are fun, and bottom elevens are even more fun, but goddamn it, so much gets lost in the middle.

To rectify this aching problem (ewww), check out those films that by all accounts should have made it to the top ten, nearly squeaked in, or were disqualified on account of being, oh, 30-plus years old. Then turn your attention to those films that we can't quite get behind, even if they have a lot of smart vocal supporters. And finally, join in our old-fashioned coin toss for our once annual, previously thought retired "Two Cents" column, in which we get together and award the best and brightest of the industry...for one night only...check your local listings....this year, though we had to settle for host Billy Bush (he's good!).

It's just one more chance to sound off on those things that gave us movie hard-ons . . .

. . . those things that made us go "meh" . . .

. . . and those things that made going to the movies feel strangely akin to a rupturous bowel movement.

Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein's feature debut takes high-concept to its zenith with Teeth, a story about the myth of vagina dentata manifest in a teenage girl named Dawn. With an opening bird's-eye view onto a family home scored to Danny Elfman-esque music, the film quickly establishes the atmosphere of a grim fairy tale: A primal I'll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours encounter between a young Dawn and soon-to-be stepbrother Brad (John Hensley) leaves the boy sans fingertip. This memory, repressed by both, hangs heavy over the present day, which finds our pretty, blond heroine overzealously active in a chastity group, and multiply pierced Brad interested only in anal sex. But beneath these outre, campy trappings, Lichtenstein otherwise imagines a fairly standard coming-of-age trajectory, as Teeth intriguingly, if awkwardly, morphs into an exploration of burgeoning, unique female sexuality and its empowering possibilities.

Click here to read Kristi Mitsuda on Teeth.

Welcome to our annual 11 Offenses, a proper wake-up call from the end-of-year lovefest that found us waxing on the greatness of contemporary cinema, as well as the only list you’re likely to see that doesn’t feature There Will Be Blood. With a year as great as 2007 behind us, it took all we could muster to get out the knives and sharpen them up, but how could we deny our fans the pleasure? Why, just read a sampling of reactions from some devoted, erudite readers about last year’s litany of litter:

“Who are you people and why does anyone give a rat’s ass what you think?” . . . “The article does come across as though someone played around on Word's synonym tool.”; . . . “what a moronic column. absurd. friggin idiots. next time i bump into a bitter film critic, i guess i'll punch them in the face instead of just laughing at them.” . . . “Criticism, in general, is such a negative thing. And real hard to do. Not! Hey, instead of actually doing anything, I will just judge what everyone else does....nice! Great Legacy! trust me bro...you dont look smarter, no matter how hard you try!”

With only 11 slots, and so much ground to cover—somewhat less than last year’s bumper crop of high-profile stinkers, to be sure—there are bound to be omissions. By all accounts, Trade should be on this list, as it’s probably the most offensive, and inept, movie in many a moon, but not only has it already been appropriately excoriated by Reverse Shot, we also really don’t want to have it give that largely unseen filth another half a thought. But all you bad films know that we know you’re out there. So, back by popular demand:

Click here to read 11 Offenses!

It's clear that South Korean director Hong Sang-soo knows a thing or two about human relationships, of longings, self-delusions, attitudinal dead ends, and, once in a very miraculous while, he has a revelation or insight suggesting a new way to conduct them. On the basis of six heralded films, including 2004's Woman Is the Future of Man (his only one before Woman on the Beach to have gained distribution in the U.S.) Hong has been labeled an Asian Rohmer. At first glance he seems to have learned lessons directly from the French master in how to tell conversation-heavy, behavior-observant stories by means of an "economic" visual grammar, which in Hong's case includes long, patient single takes punctuated here and there by zooms or intrusive (and sometimes incongruously light) soundtrack music.

But Hong's worldview is remarkably distinct. Constructively cynical and optimistically disillusioned, he maintains an unclouded perspective on the expedient reasons underlying human interactions, particularly those of his stunted male characters, who, blessed with artistic intelligence but lacking in emotional maturity, are some of the most real to be seen on current art-house screens. Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Woman on the Beach.

Also, earlier: Jeff Reichert on Woman on the Beach.

There Will Be Blood is a slow-moving whirlwind that suddenly, utterly spent, just finishes. Daniel Plainview, oil man, family man, small businessman, and half Blood’s lifeblood, head hung low between his shoulders, exhausted amidst the destroyed remains of his mansion’s bowling alley (it’s telling that this character would bring America’s most popular amateur sport into his home), the titular liquid collecting at the side of the frame, is suddenly bereft of enemies, bereft of the need to struggle, and thus Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is bereft of the need to continue. One almost wishes the film’s last frame would catch in the projector gate and burn, thus physically closing the loop on the movie’s final conflagration. This much-debated ending is the queasy aftermath of a serious purge. But even by the time the nauseous opening drone of Jonny Greenwood’s disquieting score segues into a sickening glissando, it was already clear that something’s not right in Paul Thomas Anderson’s vision of America—something unhealthy, maybe even unearthly, is in the process of becoming. The feature film that follows, Anderson’s fifth, quickly introduces us to this otherworldly, yet finally, utterly American creation, who commands the director’s widescreen frames through the film’s running length. (I’ll leave it an open question for now as to who is truly in control of There Will Be Blood.)

Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review of There Will Be Blood, one of Reverse Shot's Best of 2007.

Charlie Wilson's War announces what kind of movie it is from the opening shot, when an animated mujahideen turns to the camera and launches a missile right at the audience, and—bombs away!—the title is revealed in an explosion of red, white, and blue. From there, it's on to the first half of a clumsily conceived book-end, with Tom Hanks's eponymous Texas Congressman receiving a special civilian award from the CIA for his hand in turning the tide of the Cold War against the Soviets, in front of an audience that includes an unfortunately blond Julia Roberts and an unfortunately mustachioed Philip Seymour Hoffman. These are the central players in the drama proper, an aggressively frothy tale of political intrigue set in the good old days when Red states were in Eastern Europe, not the American Midwest; coke was in (before it was out and then back in again); Dan Rather was on 60 Minutes wearing a turban; and the United States was engaged in an epochal struggle of Good versus Evil, played out in the distant lands of the Middle East. Good times.

Aesthetically uninteresting and ideologically dubious, Charlie Wilson's War repackages a critical turning point in world history—the covert American intervention on behalf of the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghanistan war—as a delightful romp through the offices of Congress, the bedroom of the wealthy, conservative Texas socialite Joanne Herring (Roberts, with a vaguely embarrassing Southern drawl), and the presidential palace of Pakistan. Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of Charlie Wilson's War.

Despite the tortured self-analysis some critics feel the need to use as ostensibly humbling preface for their top tens, at Reverse Shot we're thankful for best-of-year round-ups -- we savor any chance we get to reiterate our love for films that might not have had the benefit of a massive marketing team behind them. Pitting the year's best films against one another in a top-ten list may seem like an arbitrary comparison of national cinemas, moods, genres, and political statements, but it doesn't necessarily invalidate the act.

Click here to read about Reverse Shot's top ten films of 2007, as usual, decided on by a poll of our major contributors and staff writers.