2000's art-house megahit City of God has officially attained franchise status—after spawning a made-for-television series, City of Men, it's now passing a licensed spin-off of the same title along to theaters. Director Paulo Morelli, who had a hand in the TV show, looks at the favelas of Rio de Janeiro through a scrim of hissing high-contrast grain, the camera swaying with heatstroke wooziness over swaggering neighborhood kingpins.

A civil war is popping off between the longtime King of the Hill drug mogul and his first lieutenant, and the gang conscription drive starts going after uncommitted able-bodied kids, basically decent types like teen father Ace and his longtime best friend Wallace (CoG's child stars Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha). They're both about to turn 18, and mutually trying to settle questions of paternity so they can put their ID papers in order—the theme of absentee fatherhood is further elucidated through Significant Scenes (a game of hot potato with a neglected toddler) that make one retrospectively long for the outright weirdness of John Singleton's Baby Boy. Click here to read Nick Pinkerton's review of City of Men.

As restless and flashy as the radicals it valorizes, Chicago 10 is an apocalyptic dispatch from the past refashioned as a slick flyer for the present. Brett Morgen’s account of the 1968 Chicago riots and the conspiracy trial against its organizers has a stylistic hook as catchy as its subject: it combines archival footage—some of it now iconic—with animated recreations of the trial and the incendiary events leading up to it. With both eyes trained on his audience, Morgen frames his movie as a piece of agitprop, an antiwar exhortation to dormant youth, complete with contemporary rabble-rousing songs (Rage Against the Machine, Eminem, Beastie Boys). The result is less history written with lightning than by lightning: the occasional flash illuminates, but a lot of times you’re just left in the dark.

Click here to read Elbert Ventura's review of Chicago 10.

Due to the onslaught of environmental documentaries that prioritize urgency over intelligence, Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen, an inquisitive, elegant rendering of the battle between land development and dwindling natural resources in Austin, might get lost in the shuffle. And what a shame that would be, for Dunn's refreshingly thorough look at the encroachment of capital on untouched land is smart enough not to treat its subject as a horror show. The film is more sobered than alarming, yet it's hardly defeatist. An impressionist's portrait of contemporary American economic life, The Unforeseen is for nature both a paean and an elegy, and for contemporary American nonfiction a challenge, in both scope and aesthetic.

Too legitimately discursive to be merely poetic and too visually restful and unexpected to fall in line with the usual talking-heads issue docs, The Unforeseen makes for invigorating viewing; it's a provocative tapestry that, while occasionally reveling in abstract digression, never loses sight of the complicated human, political, and historical issues at its core. Though there's a clear narrative trajectory--that of the initial success and eventual ignominious bankruptcy of reviled local land developer Gary Bradley, responsible for Austin's most profitable subdivision--Dunn takes an unconventional approach, complicating her own process by cross-hatching various threads with ease, and using facts rather than polemics to buoy her storytelling.

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

So many new releases and unearthed rarities cross through New York’s various first run and repertory screens each week that it often gets terribly hard to prioritize. Given that, I only expected only a handful of warm (or half-warm) bodies waiting for the start of Frederick Wiseman’s nearly four-hour State Legislature at the Anthology Film Archives last weekend.

Surprisingly, Anthology’s little Maya Deren had a healthy matinee audience ready to be treated to a mini-masterwork of real documentary—“real” in the sense of documentary filmmaking that hews closely to the formal definition of the term, that verité strand that’s been long overtaken in our theatres (and in public consciousness) by beefed up Frontline expose reportage and essayistic finger-wagging. Wiseman stubbornly eschews overt editorializing, preferring instead a laid back approach that allows his subjects room to grow and complicate themselves in front of our eyes. He also continues to shoot his films—many of robust length culled from mountains of footage—on 16mm, a choice which, in this digital era, lends each shot a kind of value that more frenetic video-lensed docs generally can’t achieve.

With overwhelming patience, Wiseman documented the 3-month 2004 session of the Idaho state legislature. Unlike larger states where legislators work full-time for their constituents, underpopulated Idaho’s elected officials work only three months of the year for a nominal stipend. Choosing a less “complicated” system than, say, California allows State Legislature the ability to unfold into a treatise on the issues of the day in America, not just Idaho—it’s our democracy’s crucial battles writ small.

So, we find a heated argument around public funding of education stemming from a bill that would put 200 more children into kindergarten (common sense or the creeping hand of socialism?). Or, a tense segment in which a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman is voted down in committee (a necessary protection or a waste of the government’s time?). These “showdowns” are remarkable for the seriousness of purpose of the legislators and their generally passionate articulacy. In between, State Legislature achieves a nearly hypnotic state, the only sounds being the hushed conversations and clacking footsteps echoing off the marble walls of the state’s beautifully appointed Capitol.

State Legislature seems a profoundly optimistic work, one in which we see the mechanisms of American democracy actually functioning. Of course it’s sloppy at times (the government, not the filmmaking, which is wholly elegant and rigorous), but when you assemble a bunch of random folks into a room and ask them to make decisions on behalf of some vaguely defined constituency, what else can we, and should we, expect? It’s riveting stuff.

State Legislature is gone from the Anthology, but available on DVD from Wiseman’s website, along with many of his other films.

Scraping for a living in the shadow of that holy of professional baseball holies, Shea Stadium, twelve year-old Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco) does everything an impoverished, parentless, out-of-school 12-year-old can do to survive in the lowest depths of one of New York City's strangest and direst areas, Willets Point, Queens. He calls his boss Rob's (Rob Sowulski) auto body shop both his workplace and home, hustles pornographic DVDs, robs U.S. Open patrons, steals hub caps from Shea's parking lot for extra cash, and saves up precious money to buy a used mobile-food van along with his 16-year-old prostitute sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), in order to, as they dream, start their own business.

But at the bottom things don't just lead straight up. As in his stunningly assured debut, Man Push Cart, Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani uses Chop Shop not to sentimentalize the travails of one of NYC's multitudinous, ignored underclass, but to discover, as Arthur Miller once said of The Bicycle Thief, "Everyman's search for dignity." Or in this case, Everyboy's. Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Chop Shop.

At the beginning of Vantage Point—and, due to its nonlinear narrative structure, also at several points throughout it—President William Ashton (William Hurt) is poised to take the podium to announce a landmark anti-terror initiative, the culmination of a global summit in Salamanca, Spain. Here is America rebuilding its image in the world, slowly, one diplomatic gesture at a time. No hints are given in the film as to what this international agreement might consist of, but there is a general tone of progress in the plaza, despite the large, vocal crowd of equally unspecific anti-American protestors. President Ashton’s admirable policies, however, are all for naught. He is shot and killed, and a well-organized group of terrorists follow up the assassination with the detonation of two bombs nearby.

Vantage Point, written by Barry L. Levy and directed by Pete Travis, resets its clock six times, returning each time to noon—same day, same place—offering another person’s perspective of the assassination and subsequent blasts, each time revealing a new dimension of what really happened. I didn’t expect conceptual rigor, but Vantage Point eventually seems to lose interest in its own narrative strategy. Click here to read Benjamin Mercer's review of Vantage Point.

A chamber piece for two tragic almost-lovers, a coquettish Duchess and a noble French General. A chance flirtation at a Fauborg St-Germain party initiates an arduous campaign of romantic outflankings, accomplished through feigned illnesses, epistolary sallies, evocations of God, and threats of force. Abstemious with close-ups, The Duchess of Langeais is a two-shot duet for Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu. The performances are precise in the extreme, the combatants' war games regulated by elaborate rules of engagement, incremental charges and retreats. In visits to the Duchess's residence, they push and pull their conversations between the bedchamber, drawing room, and foyer, the camera softly slipping after. The Duchess, however, has underestimated the fortitude of this suitor, whose continual, nauseous glowering at his loose forelock hides a master strategian.

The reason something so staid is playing in American theaters at all is that it happens to have been directed by Jacques Rivette (this is no indictment of the film, which I like more each time I see it, but rather of the grim mathematics of distribution). A once damningly oddball second-tier New Waver, Rivette's continued vitality and lissome touch has made him ripe for rediscovery. Click here to read Nick Pinkerton's review of The Duchess of Langeais.

L’Iceberg sails into Oscar’s open arms.

Pundits have been begging “No!” (why, because we’re always right?), but we’re going to ballsily throw our hats into the ring for this Sunday’s 80th Academy Awards ceremony. The little voices in our heads may have tried to talk us out of it, but readers’ mail like these forced us to once again take up the prediction baton:
“Dear Reverse Shit [sic], thank you so much for your predixions [sic] for last year’s Oscar Awards—I won enough money in Oscar pool at work to finally pay for my cataract oparation [sic]. Keep up the good work.” – “Lil’ Mo Beckstein.

And then there was this one that came to us Air Mail, crumpled up with sunflower seed shells scattered in the pocket of its tattered envelope:
“Dear Reverse Slop [sic], I simply cannot tell you how inspiring you’ve been to me. I had given up hope that Banlop Lomnoi would receive a surprise write-in best-actor win for his fascinating, delicate, literally transformative performance as a gay man-beast in Tropical Malady. And lo and behold, you predicted it! I’ll never forget the dazed look on Banlop’s face as he accepted his award and stared dumbfounded at the camera for a full thirty seconds. Take that, Anna Paquin!” – Sally Kirkland.

We can’t disappoint our fans, so, without further ado, here are Reverse Shot’s official, thoroughly researched, pragmatic, and sobering predictions for the big prizes at this weekend’s Academy Awards, the organization that chose Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, Ron Howard over David Lynch and Robert Altman, and Braveheart over close competition from a banana and a stapler.

Best Picture: As everyone’s been saying, this is Joel and Ethan Coen’s to lose. But if they do, it’ll probably be to Ten Canoes, surprisingly the first Aboriginal film ever to be nominated for the top award. Pundits are saying that its chance to upset has been spurred on by Palm Pictures’ sly marketing campaign—just last week plastered all over the inside cover of Variety, accompanying a picture of star Peter Minygululu, was the catchphrase that’s put to bed thoughts of milkshakes: “Ten canoes, three wives, one hundred and fifty spears...trouble!” The rest of the nominees are starting to feel like also-rans: Gbravica: The Land of My Dreams and Day Night Day Night are just in it for the post-game parties at this point, but if there’s vote splitting between No Country and Ten Canoes, then there’s the outside chance of Color Me Kubrick coming in for a sneak attack—revered director (Kubrick) + beloved star (Malkovich) + niche success (one week at IFC Center) + Day & Date release (you can see it on TV, too!)? You do the math…

Best Actor: James Gandolfini’s surprising snub (for the long delayed but loved long-time Romance & Cigarettes) left this race wide open. Luckily, all the nominees are not only from warmly embraced films, they’re also household names, or in a couple cases soon will be: perennial nominee Lee Kang-Sheng (doing brave double duty in I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, and getting two nods in the process), Samuel Boidin (lovable, vulnerable, hulking man-child of Flandres), Joe Souza (memorable as cock on the left in Naked Boys Singing), and, last but never least, Tobin Bell, mainly for that autopsy scene, in Saw IV; and if you think he doesn’t have a chance due to limited screen time, tell it to Beatrice Straight. Prediction: Expect a split between both Lee Kang-Shengs and for Bell to prevail, finalement!

Best Actress: Lucy Tulugarjuk has swept every single critics’ award so far this season for her minimalist, Kaurismaki-esque turn in L’Iceberg, so common wisdom would tell you she’s a shoo-in. Not likely. Due to her recent myriad unmentionable scandals (so indelicately splashed all over Page Six), Tulugarjuk is more likely to be run out of town on a rail come Sunday (Oscar lover Bill O’Reilly’s already calling for a good ol-fashun lynchin’); which only further goes to prove that she is indeed, as People magazine dubbed her way back in May, the New Ingrid Bergman. Instead, Oscar may be looking for someone more wholesome: all sights turn to Rita Wilson. Most insiders and critics and fellow macramé aficionados agree that it’s her turn for the award, after paying her dues in the business for decades. And lo and behold, she was in a movie this year: Chad Lowe’s Beautiful Ohio, which, though still unreleased, did show at the Newport Beach International Film Festival in April. With a heavyweight like Wilson, Ellen Page, Julie Christie, and Marion Cotillard can kiss their dreams goodbye.

Write in to us with your thoughts on this year’s cutthroat awards ceremony, and tell us which films you think will win and which deserve to be put out with Monday morning’s garbage. Viva l'Oscar!

If Paddy Chayefsky and Newton Minow had ever bonded over too many cocktails—secretly spiked by Neil Postman—the result might have been The Signal, a grungy warning to anyone who would rather watch than engage.

Television, however, isn’t the movie’s only maleficent medium. The signal in question—a crackling hiss of static and snow—beams with equally terrifying consequences from radios and cell phones, infecting its listeners with nonspecific, pathological rage. Exuberantly merging sci-fi, horror, and black comedy, three writer-directors each take responsibility for one third of the narrative; and if the outcome is more zealous than lucid that’s not to say the experiment lacks merit. There’s nothing like the combination of low budget and high anxiety for liberating the id.

Click here to read Jeannette Catsoulis's review of The Signal.

Let's get it out of the way first: Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters was nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, controversially at the exclusion of a handful of borderline masterpieces, from Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days to the upcoming Silent Light and Secret Sunshine. Though it feels disingenuous to bring up the most notoriously boorish, nonsensically designed of all Academy Award categories when discussing a film's merits, perhaps it's productive to point out all the reasons why a film such as The Counterfeiters gets that slot over more difficult, rewarding, and harder to categorize films that would need the recognition to make any waves outside of small, cinephilic circles.

The Counterfeiters is the bread and butter of the Academy, not to mention film festival audiences everywhere, and as such, seems to have been designed solely to win plaudits: a Holocaust drama that effectively mixes raw, "realistic" violence with a narrative of moral uplift that prizes individual strengths, inferring that overcoming is possible; a main character who's just the right, ingratiating mix of stoic and rascally; a litany of latter-day Euro cinema-of-quality cliches predicated upon a central moral conundrum that grants the film its supposed complexity; a German filmmaker grappling with the demons of his own nation and family (Ruzowitzky's grandparents were Nazi collaborators) and daring to depict the impossible.

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

How one views his latest film will depend on whether one believes Woody Allen to be calculating or oblivious in his trajectory, for Cassandra's Dream seems at once a tossed-off follow-up designed to capitalize on his late-career critical success Match Point and just another in a long line of genre experiments and Dostoevsky riffs. And so much is done so wrong in Cassandra’s Dream that it’s all too easy to ignore what’s done right. Now in the long latter-day stretch of his career, Woody Allen’s mixing it up with abandon; yet whereas during his last most fecund, thematically varied period, the eighties, he was still attuning his films to character and relationships, fluctuating between slapstick and pathos with great ease (kooky Borscht-belt Broadway Danny Rose led to the poignant nostalgia of Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days, the fine neuroses of Hannah and Her Sisters and the somber wistfulness of September and Another Woman), now he goes broader, and the motions are more herky-jerky as he plummets from the buoyant, forced whimsy of Scoop to the despairing depths of Cassandra’s Dream. Furthermore, he seems less and less interested in character: one couldn’t help but see Match Point’s Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson as anonymous, almost cardboard stand-ins for Woody’s lofty ideas on fate, chance, crime, punishment, etc. His recent films have been high concept, more fixated on their own themes than the inner workings of the people that navigate them. This is why even when the narratives work, there’s a core missing, something’s detached.

In deployment, Cassandra’s Dream isn’t territory we’re accustomed to, even for “serious Woody.” Like Match Point this is again something like Chabrol, in its murder, guilt, and deception springing from upward mobility and pangs of class resentment (Allen specialties), yet replacing that film's fascination with elegantly appointed upscale interiors and garden parties is Woody's stab at capturing working-class London, a backdrop for a surprisingly overwrought Greek tragedy–aping tale of two brothers torn apart by greed, murder, lust. The narrative is preposterous, the characters are garrulous in all the wrong ways (Allen likes to underline his own themes in his films of late; it’s doubtful that Ewan McGregor’s Ian would be self-aware enough to lust after a bird by saying, “She’s working class, but classy”), and as a screenwriter Allen shows a strange hesitancy to deal with the minutiae of his characters’ lives. Of course this is probably because he knows absolutely nothing about working-class London, he merely fetishizes it, his only understanding evidently coming from what he's seen in other movies (he even casts a Mike Leigh regular, Sally Hawkins, in a main role—and damned if she doesn’t steal every scene she’s in, with a role that’s barely even on the page). There’s nary a hint of authenticity in the film, just a series of strained encounters meant to give voice to financial desperation and loutish, laddish behavior. It also can’t be stressed enough just how disconcerting (and unusually rewarding) it is to hear a new Philip Glass composition as a pulsating score for a Woody Allen film; the templated glissando and insistent rhythms are predictably there, yet they create an odd, not wholly unwelcome effect when paired with Allen’s practiced, greatly immobile camerawork, like trying to propel a boulder with a slingshot.

The sheer oddness of putting Woody in these slummy new digs does produce some riches. Though the filmmaking is often lazy (or if we’re being generous, “workmanlike”), especially in its bizarrely truncated climax, presumably the result of Woody not shooting much coverage, the film is also largely compelling in its construction, and its glibness in how it treats its central murder is genuinely disturbing. And the film’s most persuasive excuse for its existence is, surprisingly, Colin Farrell as Ian’s brother, Terry, a sweet-souled small-time gambler who gets in over his head and is taken advantage of by his brother and nefarious uncle (Tom Wilkinson, doing his usual big-boned huffing and puffing). With two eyebrows more expressive than most actors’ four limbs, Farrell’s puckered nonchalance for once seems ingratiating and sympathetic rather than studied and preening; and bonus points for not having to hear him chew his way through an American accent. Just when the film seems to fall into an overly academic Greek symmetry, Farrell keeps the film human. He’s a bundle of nerves, fears, and neuroses that, for once in a Woody Allen film, seem to not be imitative of his director’s.

Who is Charlie Bartlett? A quirky know-it-all, a likeable dweeb, a guileless Ferris Bueller for our overmedicated age. Director Jon Poll and writer Gustin Nash's movie is about a teenager who gets kicked out of prep school, joins the hoi polloi, makes a name for himself as the student body's resident therapist/pharmacologist, and wins over the girl and the school by the end. Bullies are swayed by his dime-store analysis; a hottie buys his eccentric, overprivileged shtick. A good guy? Sure he is. In fact, he hangs out with a developmentally disabled kid, one of those ostensibly hilarious retards with weird facial tics and involuntary hand gestures that somehow always pop up in the frame when the movie needs a laugh. So yeah, he's pretty cool. Click here to read Elbert Ventura's review of Charlie Bartlett.

Despite her memorable work with filmmakers of such high caliber as Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, and, briefly, Woody Allen, Shelley Duvall seems to get little respect. Maybe it's the monotone baby-doll vocal delivery, the deer-caught-in-Mac-truck-headlights gaze, the unsteady spaghetti-limbed stance, or, most likely, the fact that she often doesn't prize intelligence as a main character trait, but Shelley Duvall is one of the few 70s icons who also doubles as a punchline. Her too-perfect-for-comfort role as Olive Oyl capping her decade-long winning streak was like an awkward exhalation, as if this is what she was destined to play: a shapeless woman playing a formless sketch, reduced to disembodied ADR voice tricks and flailing rubbery mannerisms. The result seemed to be a decade of toiling away in TV fantasy and children's whimsy, from Time Bandits to Faerie Tale Theatre, even if the latter was an appropriate and charming claim to fame for the younger set (certainly many of those in my generation first saw Duvall perched on her storybook chair, surrounded by mounds of wiggy ringlets, narrating a series of delightfully mounted Grimm costume dramas).

The tendency to write off Duvall as simpering ninny (The Shining), apathetic barnacle (Nashville, Annie Hall), or catatonic woman-child (Thieves Like Us) all breaks down in the face of Altman's 3 Women, which had been both underappreciated and all but unseen by my generation until its Criterion reissue five or so years ago. Yet I had been enamored of its tricks since high school, when I happened upon it on cable's Fox Movie Channel at the wholly apt time of one a.m. I went to bed haunted and bleary-eyed and the next day scanned TV Guide for its next showing, with a blank tape at the ready. Sissy Spacek's half-raging, half-playful performance as Pinky/Mildred was astonishing, yet it came as no shock, considering the versatility on view in Carrie, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Crimes of the Heart. It was Duvall who took me by surprise; yes, she was again ethereal, in her own world, a real "space cadet"--yet as Millie Lamoreaux, the Texan physical therapy worker who takes in Spacek's anonymous, sweetly freckled drifter (and new fellow nursing home attendant) as a roommate, Duvall revealed new depths of melancholy.

This time, her remoteness was there but she was constantly trying to puncture it, to make contact with neighbors, acquaintances, co-workers; she's outcast and socially strained, yet she now had a heightened awareness of her own limitations and frightful difference. Altman, always an expert at zeroing in (often, literally, with his camera) on the small details that make someone either blend in with or stand out from their environment, constantly boils Millie down to a series of memorable symbols and objects (cheese whiz and tuna fish sandwiches with onion powder, a swatch of canary yellow dress eternally caught in her car's driver's side door ) or awkward movements (her wavering cigarette lighting, her meticulous Breck-girl hair maintenance), yet Duvall never allows herself to be just a succession of goofy shtick. By the time Altman's film has descended into a nightmarish, abstract evocation of the two women's souls, split and congealed together, his surprisingly experimental leap is made all the smoother by Duvall's presence; she may have a natural tendency toward the detached, but she's poignant and bitter here, as well. By the end of the film, she's made a drastic transition: she's grounded, has become necessarily maternal, commanding. 3 Women is baffling, heavily symbolic filmmaking, yet Duvall and Spacek sell it, moment for moment; it's all about subtle gradations in their performances, their minute transformations, and eventual metamorphosis. In other words, the kind of stuff impossible without actors attuned to the material; it's one of the finest films of the seventies, and Duvall deserves a lion's share of the credit.

Click here for last week's tribute to Margaret Avery in The Color Purple.

For a director drawn to neurosis and insecurity, Michel Gondry is remarkably sure of himself. Insistently idiosyncratic and unworried about self-indulgence, he seems unable to second-guess his ideas—which would be a problem if his ideas weren’t so inspired. Not to say that Gondry is without flaws. Be it whimsy overload or muddled politics, Be Kind Rewind contains reminders of the limits of this brilliant artist. That the movie still enthralls is a testament to the fact that Gondry’s starting point—an aesthetic in which each frame bears its maker’s sensibility—is miles ahead of where most filmmakers aspire to be. Click here to read Elbert Ventura's review of Be Kind Rewind.

Take a second and look at that cast. Quoth headliner Paul Lynde (as Templeton the Rat in the similarly choppily animated 1970s non-Disney cheapo Charlotte's Web) this is a "veritable smorgasbord" of voice-over talent, albeit a roster that might better please the closing night crowds at the Catskills. (Was this where Lynde first met Margaret Hamilton, who was soon to make her ignominious career bookend in Lynde's indelible 1978 Halloween special?) This is a film I haven't seen, but whose poster strangely obsesses me: those shoddy Little Golden Book drawings, that desperately unmagical maize soaking the back of the paper like urine. And who is that angry elephant? I can think of few things that scream "relic" more than this poster, which dares to advert "HERSCHEL BERNARDI" in large caps as a way of drawing in the parents (what, no Topol?), and has the decidedly historic pairing of Liza (as Dorothy!) and Mickey Rooney. Add the nattering screeches of Lynde, Ethel Merman, and Uncle Milty, and I can freakin' hear this movie, as it whinily belts through my head.

Yet as cobwebbed as this appears now, and as easy as these kid-unfriendly cabaret stars (destined for Forbidden Broadway parodies for years and years to come) are to bash for us "sophisticates," let us flash forward twenty years, to little Richie or Jimmy eyeing the voice talents of the state-of-the-art Pixar extravaganza Cars: Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, Larry the Cable Guy, George Carlin, Katharine Helmond, John Ratzenberger, Jeremy Piven . . . Merman's lookin' pretty sweet, now, eh?

"Daydream delusion
Limousine eyelash
Oh, baby with your pretty face
Drop a tear in my wine glass
Look at those big eyes
See what you mean to me
Sweet cakes and milkshakes
I am delusion angel
I am fantasy parade
I want you to know what I think
Don't want you to guess anymore
You have no idea where I am from
We have no idea where we are going
Lodged in life, like branches in the river
Flowing downstream
Caught in the current
I carry you
You'll carry me
That's how it could be
Don't you know me?
Don't you know me by now?"

Happy Valentine's Day
Love, Reverse Shot

Hey, home skillet, it's Morgan Freeman here (the one from The Bone Collector, or was it Training Day...or was it Antwone Fisher....?). Wait'll ya get a load of this doodle that can't be undid...the new Diablo Cody screenplay, "leaked," courtesy of the kool kats at Somethiing Awful.

Read more from the leaked screenplay of Diablo Cody's Quotey.

What if a good, often great film from an exciting young-ish Chinese director opened in New York City to generally positive reviews and no one cared? What if that same film had the pedigree of a scandal-tinged Cannes premiere where it was pulled from competition for the Palme d’Or by a repressive government angered at the filmmaker’s portrayal of its suppression of protest and the narrative’s frequent and explicit sex? Would that help? Seemingly the answer would be “no” as Lou Ye’s Summer Palace limps into its fifth week of scattered daily shows at New York’s increasingly valuable Cinema Village (for those interested, they’re picking up Jia Zhang-ke’s superlative Still Life as of Friday). Though, I guess it is something of a minor miracle that it’s lasted this long. Not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, Summer Palace admirably serves as an elegy for the youthful Beijing of ’88, much in the way French filmmakers memorialize Paris circa May ’68.

Lou’s protagonist, Yu Hong (fiercely embodied by newcomer Lei Hao) is a country girl who’s accepted into university in Beijing early in the film. After somewhat summarily, if not emotionlessly, dispatching her virginity in a field with her high sweetheart, she’s off to the big city, where the delights of living in university dorms—overstuffed sweaty drinking parties, dancing, fucking surreptitiously in a twin bed, constant smoking, turning the intriguing stranger down the hall into a best friend (or lover)—are rendered via a briskly-paced continuously sequenced introductory tour of the school’s halls. Lou’s camera moves so swiftly and smoothly to the beats of the pop on the soundtrack that the multiple edits end up bringing the disparate spaces closer together, not further—it’s about the most bravura and fun filmmaking I’ve seen in the past month or so.

This first half, in which Yu Hong meets the “love of her life,” Zhou Wei, and the two by turns couple, argue, fall apart, and come together again shows the filmmaking at its most vivacious, and easily recognizable to anyone who’s managed to put together a relationship during their messy college years. Summer Palace takes a darker turn when it hits the Tiananmen Square massacre—though the murders themselves are rendered mostly off-screen, the mounting reformist enthusiasm of the students blends and swirls freely amongst the exuberance of the personal politics governing the film’s relationships such that, in the immediate aftermath of the clampdown, its easy to see the damage wrought on those who participated in the demonstrations, but lived to tell about it.

After Tiananmen, the film moves briskly through time from 1989 to the early part of this century. Zhou Wei’s living in Berlin with another girl and thinking about a return to China, Yu Hong’s bouncing between loveless affairs, and both pine for each other. Lou who’s on record as saying, “I'm just a director. I'm not a politician. I don't want to get into boring politics in my films,” reveals his true aims as a melodramatic stylist here—his regular cross-cutting between the two, coupled with the forced dissections of the nature of love (both via dialogue and scenario) suggests nothing else. Accordingly the film, lithe and free at its open, bogs down. Summer Palace’s female characters, more finely drawn than the men throughout, bear the brunt and end up looking more hysterical, less resolute than their masculine counterparts, who generally mope their way into stable jobs and relationships. I don’t want to accuse Lou of misogyny, especially given the fiery, dominating, yet simultaneously confused, Yu Hong of the film’s first half, but the narrative’s turns let this indelible character down.

Something like a cross between Jia’s epic Platform (in its interest in the continuing political implications of the Cultural Revolution) and Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (thinking here of the redemptive power of pop for wayward, wild youth), Summer Palace, for all its faults, remains an engrossing must-see. Lei hao’s performance is more than noteworthy, runs the risk of going even more ignored than another star turn delivered by a young Chinese actress recently asked to bare much more than her soul—Tang Wei in Lust, Caution. Palm Pictures will be rolling this one out slowly, so wait and watch out for it.

There's a tendency in some high and low circles to instantly enshrine any new work from classic horror-meister George A. Romero, good-natured, jocular guy that he is, as a way of validating not only his formidable zombie oeuvre but also the seventies horror movie canon itself. Always the most overt of that bunch in his penchant for toothy sociopolitical commentary, Romero has often traded in rather glib social satire since the revelation of his 1978 Dawn of the Dead; whereas Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter's genre work has mostly been greeted with retrospective praise and analysis, Romero's never made any bones about his intent. His easy-to-bottle concepts have always had a clever ring—the pop-allegorical purity of brain-devouring zombies shambling through a shopping mall was a great idea waiting to happen. The pitch for the latest incarnation of his series of pre-apocalyptic undead films, Diary of the Dead, in which he has a group of nattering film-schoolers wielding cameras to capture the mayhem as it unfolds, is likewise, a no-brainer.

Yet as smartly staged, and even emotionally tender as it often is, Romero's latest, with its central and oft-repeated mistrust of the "new information age," also can't help but seem a little like the product of aged paranoia—like your pissed-off grandpa, a little preachy and slightly doddering. By now, criticism of twenty-four-seven news cycles, the rapidity of internet communication, and the impossibility of gleaning truth amidst so much unreality, is simply by the book, a dire prognostication of information cataclysm blind to the prospects of new forms of community building, and which does little more than demonize contemporary young filmmakers as (yawn) cannibalistic voyeurs. Click here to read Michael Koresky's review of Diary of the Dead.

With her twin matriarch roles in this year's Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins and the latest from-nowhere Tyler Perry family-values comedy Meet the Browns, Margaret Avery has suddenly reappeared. Yet that name may not ring bells for many viewers, overshadowed as it was even in her major, Oscar-nominated breakout by behemoths like Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Heck, back in 1985, Rae Dawn Chong, in a minuscule role, even got more poster space than Avery in Spielberg's The Color Purple. Yet the film, whose incessant unfair maligning has been going on now for two-plus decades (Empire of the Sun seems to have been widely reassessed....why no cinephilic love for Purple?), is unthinkable without the presence of Avery, whose performance as the identically surnamed "Shug" Avery is one of Purple's most versatile, surprising, and effortless. Yet anecdotes of Avery's tireless, and ultimately defeated, Oscar campaigning (when she was nominated against Winfrey, and eventually lost to Anjelica Huston for Prizzi's Honor) summarily usurped the real story, which should have been that of a sensational breakthrough.

Avery is a wonder, emotionally varied without ever seeming schizophrenic, from her cackling, double-soused introduction (coming out of the rain, lifting her sopping wet head, and exclaiming to Goldberg's Celie, "You sure is ugly!"--certainly one of the most memorable of all screen entrances) to her breakfast-in-the-bathtub hangover to her blowsy Billie Holiday routine in the Juke Joint (where she perfectly lip-syncs to Quincy Jones's terrific period song "Miss Celie's Blues") to her tender, erotic kiss with Celie (yes, yes, it was toned down from the more sexually explicit book, but would we really expect a Hollywood blockbuster circa 1985, or heck even today, to show two black lesbians doing much more than kissing and holding hands?). In the final hour of the film, Avery elegantly wears, but never pushes, the after-effects of hard living, even though she's left it behind for a "respectable" marriage; it's all there, in the lines on her face, in her tired, but indomitable gait. It's not her story, but when she's on-screen, she makes it hers, and Spielberg even gives her her own stirring climax, a reconciliation with her preacher papa, rousingly set to the Jones-penned spiritual "Maybe God's Trying to Tell You Something," that nearly equals Celie's own conclusion for emotional wallop (no mean feat).

Avery inhabits Shug so fully, and has subsequently dropped so far from public view, that the actress and role have become inseparable. I must admit the Averys (Margaret and "Shug") have never left me; Margaret dug into the role with claws outstretched and held on to "Shug" for dear life. And while Whoopi and Oprah have stayed constantly in the public eye, and we've seen them age, expand, and morph into different forms and personalities, Avery has stayed captured on-screen, and remains a sweet, spectacular memory.

Pere Portabella. Major Spanish cinema auteur and political figure. Tireless anti-Franco activist. Elected senator in the first Democratic elections in 1977 Spain. Founder of the production company Films 59, which oversaw major works by Saura, Ferreri, and Buñuel, including the masterpiece Viridiana. Filmmaker in his own right, of both narrative and avant-garde. Recipient of a major retrospective last fall at MoMA.

And until today, I knew absolutely nothing about him. But I wiped the egg off my face long enough to take in the 78-year-old director's new film, The Silence Before Bach today at Film Forum, where it only has two more days to go before disappearing. No small matter that, considering that none of Portabella's films have been made available on DVD or video. Knowing next to nothing about this director, who yesterday I might have dubbed "Father Mushroom," undoubtedly contributed to my thoroughly enjoyable experience watching this unclassifiable film, which takes so many forms, yet has such a unified aesthetic, that it could only come from a master comfortable with his own experimentation. Whether it's self-consciously emulating biopic formulas, sensuously surveying musical performances, or reveling in visual non sequiturs, Silence is always tongue-in-cheek yet never in that reserved, overly constructed tableaux way that has defined international festival crossovers of recent years.

One basic way of describing this terrific, lulling whatsit is as an investigation of what classical music means, to Europe then and now, specifically, of course, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. No talking heads here, though. No characters either. And no Fantasia this, it's not really adequate to call it a series of abstract musical sequences. Instead, Portabella piles one anecdote atop the next, evoking the power of Bach's music within wildly different contexts. In the opening sequence, one of many elaborately orchestrated single takes, Portabella sinuously tracks a player piano sitting and swiveling atop a robotic base, moving itself across an empty, white warehouse space. Things do get more human from there, but any real show of emotion comes from the music itself, from choral to chamber to piano, from the Goldberg Variations to the Well Tempered Clavier to St. Matthew Passion—a boy's choir, a close-up of the perforated paper rolls inside a player piano as it crescendos, the matching of a keyboard piece with the whinnying movements of a show horse. Vignettes vary from the visually remarkable (a gorgeous, drifting pan down a narrow subway car lined with bowing cellists) to the narratively playful ("flashbacks" to Bach himself dealing with professional and domestic problems, shot with knowing, distanced artifice). It's a Europe before and after Bach, or as Portabella posits, music itself. Resourceful and unpretentious, The Silence Before Bach will make those in the dark, like me, want to peruse the rest of the Portabella canon. If MoMA has another retro, that is.

No sugarcoating it: Ezra is a difficult film to watch. It isn't particularly graphic or gory, but its dramatization of children being kidnapped and forced into fighting--or, really, raping and pillaging--by rebel armies in Sierra Leone is extremely upsetting, and all the more terrifying for alluding to greater and more incomprehensible crimes occurring in reality. As directed by Nigerian filmmaker Newton I. Aduaka, Ezra is often messy and awkwardly told, but even its amateurishness lends a sort of raw power to its harrowing depiction of dehumanization, exploitation, senseless violence, and the post-conflict attempts at "Truth and Reconciliation" as promoted by the series of human rights hearings set up to make some sort of sense of the devastation of a decade-long civil war.

As with last year's Bamako, Ezra sifts through the ruins of Africa's recent, tumultuous history by way of a judicial process, even if, as Richard Grant's American judge continually reminds the title character and the audience, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission trial he presides over is essentially a therapeutic and non-punitive one. Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Ezra.

...BUT THIS WEEKEND, WE THINK WE'LL SIT THIS ONE OUT.

Check out: http://www.idrinkyourmilkshake.com/ for all the There Will Be Blood discussion you can handle. Or, ignore the discussion and just play the audio of the year's best line over and over and over again...

Not only is it great, but its apparently historically accurate as well -- I hear it's based on an actual speech given in Congress dealing with the issue of DDDDRRRRRAAAAAAIIIINNNNNAAAAGGEEEEE!!!!

It drops by the local art house every few months without fail--the "challenging" exotic import, too maddeningly slow and nonlinear for the Pan's Labyrinth crowd to cross it over to mainstream success, yet too naively earnest and moppet-dependent to impress a critical community taken with the more avant-garde and minimalist likes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul or the Dardenne brothers. An unfortunate situation, perhaps, but don't shed too many tears for a foreign film caught between a rock and a hard place like Bab-Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul. Tunisian director Nacer Khemir's latest internationally co-produced effort--the last in his "Desert Trilogy" and the first to find theatrical distribution in the States, though the first two will be released on DVD this month--will likely have supporters able to see in its fairy tale platitudes and vague beauty something "life-affirming" and indicative of the dervish culture it purportedly represents. But without wholly dismissing its unpretentious spirituality, it's still difficult to praise Bab'Aziz merely on the basis of good intentions. Khemir is going for the mythical and transcendent, but Bab'Aziz too often feels fluffy and antiquated.

Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Bab'Aziz.

I would guarantee that anyone of my generation who frequented video stores in the late Eighties and early Nineties and had a certain morbid fascination with the horror section (see also: Creepshow, and any number of Herschell Gordon Lewis atrocities, all of which are still crouching like fanged possums somewhere in the hollow of my skull) will remember this charming little Ken Russell ditty. I never saw the film, not once, not one frame of it, but thanks to this indelible poster/video art, with its horny little devil perched, claw-splayed, like a living gargoyle atop a supine victim in a nightgown (who I now realize is Natasha Richardson...who knew?!), I feel like I've seen the film about eighty-seven times. The late-Eighties Ken Russell comeback, largely buoyed by tantalized video renters no doubt, is dotted with curios such as these (remember Lair of the White Worm? How about Theresa Russell in Whore?), films eternally recalled (and doubtful just by me) for their box art more than anything that happened in them. For the record, Ken Russell's oeuvre is one of my movie gaps, save Women in Love, and I'm not sure that needs to be corrected anytime soon. I prefer my memories of Gothic and its ilk relegated to the dusty shelves of the once-beautiful Video Paradise, small-town video store of my childhood . . . now a Hallmark shop.

"It's in Belgium," a frustrated voice-over informs. In the aftermath of a botched job, two London-based hit men are cooling off in the title city. It was the maiden murder for Ray (Colin Farrell), the narrator, a new kid who's still ill over catching a bystander in crossfire; Ken (Brendan Gleeson), fiftyish and settled into the habitual trudge of middle age, is the industry veteran who took the boy through initiation. There's the odd-couple stuff that goes with the age difference--Ken, an affable enough sort, wants to make a holiday of their hideout, seeing the sights in the perfectly intact medieval city, taking the canal tours, absorbing the altarpieces, strolling the galleries. Ray, hating the town and himself, wants to go get pissed on framboise and fuck or fight the local baraki trash (Clemence Poesy and the Dardenne Brothers' fixture Jeremie Renier, respectively).

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of In Bruges.

D.A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking 1967 Bob Dylan documentary Dont Look Back begins with a calculated sale: the two-and-a-half minute promotional film for Dylan’s first Billboard-landing single and electric rock anthem, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” As one of the first predecessors to the music video it’s still a stunner, more Jean-Luc Godard than Dick Clark—committed to crossing over to the pop charts on his own terms, Dylan used the clip to spotlight his hip persona, certainly, but also to call direct attention to his language by nonchalantly holding up and discarding a series of cue cards containing fragments of the absurdist slang of “Subterranean.” Such simplicity, and what a statement! Dylan was so far ahead of the game in ’65 that he already understood the best way to undermine any “natural” relationships between sound, image and performer—long before the ubiquity of music videos and the complicated intersections between art, performance, and commerce they would inherently embody and exacerbate. The “Subterranean” clip thus becomes a semiotic explosion, dicing Dylan’s lyrics into contradictions (“11 dollar bills” on the soundtrack becomes “20” on a card), awkwardly isolated blocks (“head put,” “bed, but”), commentary (accompanying “look out, kid” on the soundtrack: “dig yourself”), silly puns (“suckcess”), accents (“pawking metaws”), and seditious shorthand (“leaders ? ? ?”), all as Dylan falls behind or races ahead of the words playing over him and to the point where the song goes beyond radical, nonsensical rave-up (but man, does it scorch!) to become a thing tenuously attached to its own intended meanings, literal and otherwise, as well as the artist who means them.

Click here for Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Dont Look Back.

New York's venerable Anthology Film Archives kicks off a retrospective of the later films of Reverse Shot favorite Olivier Assayas tonight which runs though February 10th. Pretty much complete from his 1994 masterwork Cold Water until the present (excepting only his recent music doc Noise and the forthcoming bizarro Boarding Gate), it's that rare retro without a dud in the bunch. Though it sadly omits his fascinating, underscreened early films.

Longtime Reverse Shot fans will remember our Assayas symposium from all the way back in the Fall of 2003 (our fourth issue!), so in honor of Olivier, undoubtably one of the world's greatest filmmakers and a terribly nice guy to boot, here are a few of our "greatest hits" on his films:

Jeff Reichert's long interview which spans Assayas's entire career up to demonlover

Nick Pinkerton on Clean

Michael Koresky on Cold Water

Michael Joshua Rowin on demonlover

Olivier will introduce Irma Vep tomorrow night at Anthology.

**Also, don't forget to read Reverse Shot staff writer Nick Pinkerton's terrific Assayas piece in this week's Village Voice.