The latest in an increasingly exhausting sweep of Italian imports about that country’s political tensions in the late Sixties and Seventies, Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child is, for a little more than half of its running time, a serviceable middlebrow jaunt through the life of Accio (Vittorio Emanuele Propizio as a boy, Elio Germano as an adult), a young misfit who turns to fascism to find camaraderie and escape from a distressed home life. The film hits all the stations of the cross of political awakening along the way; call it This Is Italy. There’s certainly more to it than that, though—Luchetti shoehorns a lot of plot into 105 minutes, and so we also follow the story of Accio’s brother, Manrico (Ricardo Scarmaccio), a dickish, womanizing sort increasingly drawn into revolutionary deeds as a communist activist, and that of the woman caught between them, Francesca (Diane Fleri), who’s just comely enough that Accio, distressed by the bureaucracy of his fellow fascists, decides communism might be the ideology for him after all (guh?).

At about this point, with a little less than an hour left to go, the film sputters out, devolving from an intriguing study of the politics of familial estrangement to a ho-hum romance of Pretty People Looking at Each Other Wistfully. Click here to read Brendon Bouzard's review of My Brother Is an Only Child.

Christ, Spacey, you didn't even make the poster? You need a new agent, dude.

When mainstream screens are clogged with predictable-looking drek like Shutter, College Road Trip, and this weekend’s hott new entry 21 (so unsurprising in appearance that the New Republic’s house critic took it upon himself to review based on the trailer, and seems to have nailed it), it’s a great time to hit up your local repertory house.

Start your weekend off right with a trip to the Film Forum with your honey to watch love die painfully in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece Contempt. I have this sense that there's a new print of this thing in circulation every other year, which mildly annoys me (so many great films out there...), until I remember that it’s actually been a while since I’ve been able to see it and end up heading to the theatre to be forcefully reminded of its sheer greatness. Contempt is almost certainly Godard’s most beautiful film (though Eloge de l’amour ranks) and its general formal restraint—so unlike his other sixties works—makes it one of his most accessible and effective. I’d actually like to see it on a double bill with Week End for a nice summation of that period of his career, something that might well be possible with Film Forum’s upcoming retro of his storied work from that decade.

After Sunday brunch you could stumble home drunk on mimosas and hit up the DVR, or you could head over to BAM for a Manoel de Oliveira double bill featuring The Letter (which I haven’t seen) and Inquietude, a clear masterpiece. The three Oliveiras in the series that I’ve managed to catch for the first time have only served to broaden and deepen my idea of the range of this great artist (I’m glad I now know that he made a surrealist robot opera in The Cannibals, or tried to take on the history of Portugal and warfare in Non, or the Vain Glory of Command), and I’ve heard good things about The Letter, so I’m excited for it, and even more so for the chance to experience Inquietude again. Don’t take my word for it; take Jonathan Rosenbaum’s—he named it his #1 film of 1998.

And if you’re still fogged from the remnants of your weekend on Monday, head back to BAM and settle in for Chantal Akerman’s epic, glacial, and, in the end, rather terrifying Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, playing in their tribute to J. Hoberman. Akerman’s pretty hard to get a hold of over here (only a few of her films have made it to DVD) and Jeanne maintains its legendary status amongst her oeuvre for a reason. Definitely, definitely, definitely catch this one on the big screen.

None of these sound appealing? I suppose there’s always this.

If Demi Moore in constant motion is your idea of cinematic bliss, by all means: go see Flawless. This dramatically inert, ideologically muddled film possesses little worthy of praise, but it undeniably offers plenty of Moore striding purposefully through echoing marble hallways. If nothing else, it possesses an ardor for click-clacking high heels in mid-tread that will likely remain unchallenged until Wong Kar-wai’s latest comes stateside.

Set in the early 1960s, the film follows Laura Quinn (Moore), an executive at the London Diamond Company chipping away at the company’s glass ceiling through sober professionalism. Her position becomes jeopardized after receiving the blame for a business error, although it’s clear the dismissal relates more to gender than competence. Company janitor Hobbs (Michael Caine) notices her growing frustrations, and approaches her with an offer: If she provides the combination to the company’s vault, Hobbs will break in during his night shift and steal a small amount of diamonds. Click here to read Matt Connolly's review of Flawless.

Not one but two eff-yous to David Schwimmer's directorial debut Run Fatboy Run:

Emily Condon:

The notion of movies serving as propaganda for the sex-starved men of the world—those who don’t fit the Cary Grant or George Clooney profile—is hardly new, but what’s troubling is that these movie men seem to offer less with each passing year. C.C. Baxter may have made spaghetti with a tennis racket in The Apartment, but he also provided Miss Kubelik an honest, stable, caring alternative to her philandering, heartless boss. Manhattan’s Isaac Davis may have been a nebbishy, narcissistic nutcase, but he could talk Proust and Bergman and he practiced personal hygiene—and he still couldn’t get the girl. In the universe of Run Fatboy Run and its brethren, however, having a spare tire and an aversion to gainful employment seems to be enough to make ladies (once they’re able to see past their own vain, materialistic, and superficial desires) swoon. There are exceptions, certainly—Adam Brooks’s Definitely Maybe pops to mind—but if the majority of male-driven romantic comedies have anything to tell us, it’s that successful women should feel downright thankful for any schlub who’s reasonably nice and has a passable sense of humor. Read the rest...

Kristi Mitsuda:

Since the "chick flick" moniker continues to stick, it's only fair that male-targeted incarnations of the romantic comedy receive an equally derogatory nickname now that they're all the rage. I nominate "dick flicks" over David Denby's more diplomatic "slacker striver romance" designation—certainly the subgenre's preoccupation with penis jokes earns the label. As outlined by the New Yorker critic in an article last year heralding the crop's crystallization with Knocked Up, the flicks typically focus on an unmotivated and immature man as he kicks and screams his way towards reformation for the love of a good (and hot) woman. Run Fatboy Run fits so uncomplicatedly into this mold, you can imagine how paint-by-numbers it plays. Read the rest...

Sorry, but we couldn't let this one go.

No, we haven't seen the film. No, we won't see the film. Yes, we want to put this poster of a Glick-i-fied Jared Leto on our kitchen wall and stare at it while we eat Ring Dings, Lucky Charms, cigarette butts, small animals, and our own legs. The somewhat well publicized trick of the film is that this ain't no fat suit, folks: in a bid for cred or Oscar, or perhaps just as a token of his "craft," Leto gained what appears from this poster to be four-hundred pounds in order to play John Lennon killer Mark David Chapman. The transformation might not be as head-turningly hideous as once-pretty Leto's recent forays into a kewpie goth rocker for his band 40 Shades of Blue, er, I mean 20 Feet to Donut Shop, er...I don't remember what it's called, but when blown up to billboard size, this is a whole new world of gross. I already learned my lesson watching Charlize Theron's grunt and snort Oscar-winning latex work in Monster (a pretty good approximation of Dan Aykroyd's weenie-eating leper judge in Nothing But Trouble), so I'll definitely be sitting this one out. Leto's constant mission to de-beautify himself has thus far extended from his face-pummeling in Fight Club to his collapsed veins in Requiem for a Dream to his bounding up and down the rows of a plane I took to California last year in ill-fitting chapeau and pitch-black eye-liner (way to make yourself inconspicuous...in coach, no less!)—Chapter 27 seems to be his most desperate bid yet. Of course if this doesn't work out, Leto can always have a future as a villain in the next installment of Spawn.

The presence of David Gordon Green's name in Shotgun Stories' billing block is probably both a blessing and a curse for the reception of Jeff Nichols's feature film debut. On the one hand, it broadcasts what sort of film this is—an earnest character study with a touch of that neo-Southern Gothic quirkiness that Green has made his own. But on the other hand, it will probably authorize some unforgiving comparisons to a style of filmmaking that—judging by the maddeningly uneven Snow Angels—even Green himself seems to have exhausted. With a trailer for Green's Seth Rogen-James Franco stoner comedy Pineapple Express and head-scratching rumors of a Suspiria remake circling the internet, it's becoming clear that even Green is anxious to move on from the type of filmmaking he patented, even as a cottage industry of similar films flourishes.

Fortunately for Nichols, however, there is much to Shotgun Stories that elevates it above the fray of Green derivatives and unflattering categorizations. For one thing, his tale of two warring sets of half-brothers in semi-rural Arkansas is bolstered by a roster of naturalistic, fully assimilated performances, led by Bug's now ubiquitous Michael Shannon.Click here to read Leo Goldsmith's review of Shotgun Stories.

"The Cool School" is one of a subset of documentary biographies that might best be called "Scenes of Yesteryear." Like the recent "Weather Underground," "Commune," and "American Hardcore"--whose respective subjects include radical terrorists, hippie collectives, and indigenous, anticommercial punk rock--"The Cool School" weaves testimony from participants of a faded fringe movement with footage from its heyday to take stock of the legacy of the marginal subculture in question. These are nostalgic, sometimes commemorative films employing a similar functional style to deliver content as practically as possible, and they're so close to each other in quality that a misfire ("American Hardcore"'s harried mess) usually isn't all that far from a triumph ("Weather Underground"'s precise portrait of revolutionary fanaticism).

As a result it's hard to avoid faint praise even when recommending Morgan Neville's "The Cool School," which recounts Los Angeles' frequently overshadowed 1950s and 1960s art scene. As "Scenes of Yesteryear" documentaries go it does right by its subject, providing an illuminating primer on a lesser-known strand of America's eruptive postwar art movement, even as it doesn't do much aesthetically to distinguish itself from the pack.

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

It's an all-Assayas weekend.

First, Michael Koresky's review at indieWIRE:

Olivier Assayas's Boarding Gate arrives on these shores like a battered shipment of cheap goods. True, it's only sat moldering for ten months in its film canister since its Cannes premiere -- a relatively short period in these hazy days of distribution -- but it shows a distinct lack of freshness all the same. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing: there's a tantalizing whiff of mediocrity to Boarding Gate, and it's consistently set off by high levels of self-awareness and undeniable craft. Assayas's later career has been a heady stew of class and crass, yet not even in his terrific, audience-baiting pseudo-technothriller demonlover, with its corporate-girls-gone-wild for the smart set, did he flirt as heavily with exploitation as he does here.

Is Assayas truly putting forth the kind of loutish gamines-and-guns actioner his Irma Vep might have excoriated only a decade earlier? It's not exactly genre subversion (once in gear, it generally plays by its own silly rules), and it's not merely an exercise in style (before those rules are laid down, Assayas has a few narrative tricks up his sleeve), but rather a disconcertingly sincere stab at a particular kind of claptrap, a straight-to-video '80s thriller dolled up in a glossy art-house finish.

Click here to read the rest.

And then, it's just a hop, skip, and jump over to the main site for Nick Pinkerton's interview with Olivier Assayas:

REVERSE SHOT: You seem to have quite a bit of control of your own destiny, and looking at the trajectory of your filmmaking, there seems to be some kind of logic at work. So in approaching Boarding Gate, what was the big concept?

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: Well, I think it was definitely an area I’d been wanting to explore for quite awhile, something I’d been attracted to, and I’d been using elements of it here and there, and I felt at some specific stage I had to have a shot at going all the way. Meaning making a movie that, whatever it is, functions within some kind of genre framework, and also that’s fully an English-language film, even though it’s a strange English-language film, in the sense that a lot of the characters use English as a second language. But still, it’s technically an English-speaking film. And it’s things I’ve been tackling, I think starting, in a way, with Irma Vep—you know, it’s Irma Vep that was this break in my way of approaching films, when all of a sudden I decided for myself that it was okay to mix genre, to mix cultures, and that movies sometimes could be experiments, that within the format of modern cinema, within the format of narrative, you could experiment by mixing elements. So it kind of opened up the door to try things in areas where normally, as an independent French filmmaker you would not go. And I’ve been using, starting I suppose with demonlover, genre elements here and there. It also has to do with the fact that for ages I’ve wanted to make a film in Hong Kong. It goes back as far as I can remember, I suppose since I was there for the first time in the middle eighties, I’ve always had it in the back of my mind. And somehow, obviously the key to it was, again, you know, just making something that’s within the genre framework, and to me it was pretty natural. It was like a missing jigsaw piece somewhere in my filmmaking. Continue reading entire interview...

Wow, that looks like one hell of a party: you got cool football dude "88," neat-o "tie-guy" tipping his two frothy beers in a gesture of jocular invitation, that reclining girl who’s just too much of an iconoclast to take her feet off the table, the affable chain-smoker, the cut-up wearing the napkin over the lower part of his face. I’d sure like to attend that shindig. But, oh, wait, who’s that saucy new arrival, raising a glass to toast this holiest of holidays, wherein we light our menorahs with trick candles and eat communion wafers dipped in super glue? The dress is lovely and formfitting, but she looks a little dangerous, no? And who does her hair?!

As with so many eighties horror films, this is one I never saw and can't imagine seeing. Why this poster, which as far as these things go, is pretty innocuous, so greatly disturbed precious little me when doing my weekly shelf scouring at Video Paradise I really can't describe. I still don't know whether it's really about a young girl with a moussed noose for a ponytail showing up at a co-ed dorm party and proceeding to pick them off one at a time—though that's my best guess. And for that I want to seriously credit the poster designer, not only for preying on my impressionable young mind but for creating a surreal image that also seemed to stand in pretty well for the film's literal narrative. Twenty years on, and this image is vivid, man. A quick, brave visit to the imdb page and I realize from reading user comments that April Fool's Day doesn't seem to be overly gory, is fairly well shot for this type of film, and features a group of nubile teens spending a fuck and slash weekend in a remote island home in the Northwest. The question remains: is there a death by ponytail? If not, after 25 years, I would feel slightly cheated.

he main question Under the Same Moon poses is whether its story, which follows the basic outline of a separated mother and son fairy tale, befits its subject, the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants. The immigration issue has in the last few years become a hot one in part due to economic angst and homeland security paranoia, but Mexican director Patricia Riggen and screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos don't use their film to explore the larger political picture of fence-hopping workers and the varied American responses to their increasing numbers. Instead Under the Same Moon remains at ground level, showing audiences the unique backgrounds of individuals forced by circumstances to leave their homes and risk their lives north of the border.

The problem with Under the Same Moon, then, is that while many of its characters can conceivably represent these real people toiling in the undocumented shadows far away from their families and communities, its protagonist, nine-year-old Carlos (Adrian Alonso), does not. His journey from a small Mexican town to Tucson to East Los Angeles in search of his illegal alien mother, Rosario (Kate del Castillo), might be possible, but realistically it's only the stuff of heartstring-yanking melodrama. That doesn't mean there isn't room within Under the Same Moon's predictable trajectory for a few surprisingly effective emotional moments, but the film as a whole betrays the somber authenticity of its subjects' dire situations with unbelievable and sentimental contrivances. Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of Under the Same Moon.

Generally in these circles, we reserve our authoritative regret for the deaths of certain types of filmmakers. Hence, over the past year, the passing of those filmmakers who have attained grand critical standing, whether by virtue of long, fruitful careers outside of the mainstream (Edward Yang, Ousmane Sembene) or status as hallowed legends who helped navigate world cinema (Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni) received a lot of digital print on erudite film blogs. I fear that a director such as Anthony Minghella, who passed away today at the young age of 54, still of undisclosed causes, will not receive the same amount of reminiscence; one could argue that this is because he didn't have a full career to prove himself, but it's also just as likely that Minghella's passing will be met with great disinterest due to his status as a purveyor of middlebrow. Ah, middlebrow, that terrible word that raises the cackles of any respectable Mikio Naruse retrospective–attending, Maurice Pialat–praising cinephile. Yet as simple as it is to identify Minghella's track record as award-baiting or eminently tasteful (damning terms), it's just as easy to overlook the genuine craft at work in some of his films. The English Patient, derided for its swoony, bodice-ripping romanticism as much as its deviations from its source novel, is nevertheless an effective period drama of the first order, layered and complex in that capital-T thematic way that displays a technical mastery of screenwriting (more than emotional subtlety, yes, but when a film is this attuned to the intricacies of human interaction and language, it seems like nitpicking). And while Cold Mountain and Breaking and Entering suffered greatly for the thickness of their creation and constant underlining of their ideas, they each had moments of stunning clarity. (I still have yet to see Minghella's lauded debut, Truly Madly Deeply.)

So I save my greatest praise for The Talented Mr. Ripley, a psychological thriller of the first order, and a lucid mix of "old-fashioned" craftsmanship with modern sensibility. Minghella reimagines Patricia Highsmith's fifties-era novel and does something terrifyingly "middlebrow": he fishes around for motivations, diagnoses, and pathos, and comes up with a warm-blooded image of a cold-blooded killer. It's the kind of thing that really shouldn't work, but Minghella shows so much interest in the main characters here that nearly every scene pops with humane fascination. Returning to Purple Noon, Ripley's first incarnation, seems a particularly frozen, fruitless exercise after Minghella dared to describe everyone in such detail; Matt Damon manages a "sympathetic" portrayal of twinned repressed homosexuality and murderous upward mobility that manages to miraculously not offended while making you justifiably queasy; meanwhile Jude Law and Cate Blanchett's x-ray–precise portraits of privilege prove that sociopathic behavior comes in all shapes and sizes. Minghella also adds so much ripe period detail of fifties Italy and injects so much of the film with a palpable sexual urge (it's one of the most boldly homoerotic mainstream releases of all time, and the reason why Law became a household name) that the film even manages to catch up to To Catch a Thief, to name one work from the master this film obviously means to ape. Ripley's the kind of glossy prestige movie that gives the word "middlebrow" a good name, the kind that should make such classifications null. Take another look, and notice the talent we've lost today.

As in last year's Dans Paris, 37-year-old filmmaker Christophe Honoré ventures back to that lost Eden known as the French New Wave, this time to punch up a featherweight tale of young love and loss with high-concept tomfoolery. And though Love Songs (or, if we could please use its original, more melodic title, Les Chansons d'amour) better evokes that era's carefree cinematic spirit, it's similarly bound by dictates and referents, twice-removed and over-rehearsed. Hence Love Songs is not merely a musical—in which passionate, lost twentysomethings wend their way through difficult times by breaking into pop tunes with puppy-love ingenuousness—but also a riff on musicals, performance, play-acting, etc. Part of this is just by postmodern design, yet often the result is simultaneously ingratiating and distancing. Those looking for the exhilarating crescendos of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (the film's declared inspiration: Honore borrows Jacques Demy's structure, separating his narrative into the same three distinct chapters—Departure, Absence, and Return) might be put off by the film's less dramatic swooniness; Love Songs is the brief dalliance to Cherbourg's intense affair, perhaps too shy to fully take the plunge, but nimble enough to give off a flirtatious buzz.

Dans Paris winked and nudged itself to the edge of oblivion, while Love Songs merely wants to smile and shrug its way into your heart. Thanks to a magnetic cast of up-and-coming certified French hotties frolicking through a roundelay of appealing polysexual pleasures, it almost gets there. Click here to read all of Michael Koresky's review of Love Songs.

Welcome to this week's edition of GO SEE THIS MOVIE!!!! Okay, we seriously wish we could even have this as a weekly column, but the truth is that a film of the caliber of Philippe Garrel's J'entends plus la guitare doesn't really come out very often. Simply unlike anything else out there, the film might not be the most inviting entrée into the ouevre of Garrel (that might be the phenomenal Regular Lovers), but it's an unforgettable experience, a fragmented, penetrating, honest, human piece of filmmaking. Go to Cinema Village, buy a ticket, and thank us later. And now, I happily give the floor to our own Nick Pinkerton:

Camera Obscura
By Nick Pinkerton

J’entends plus la guitare (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar)
Dir. Philippe Garrel, France, 1991, The Film Desk

Is Philippe Garrel ready to "break" in America—or, at least, New York? Last year's limited release of his opus Regular Lovers was the first stateside distribution he'd received in four decades. Nobody got rich off it, but for the cabal of film obscurantists it screened to, it was an unquestionably major document. Like his contemporary Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, it was a "love letter" to the generation who came of age in the late Sixties and Seventies, accomplished with romance, poignancy, and the sociohistorical breadth of a 19th-century novel (that it's a generation that’s treated itself to far too many eulogies already does not, I should say, diminish the art).

Now BAMcinématek curator (and longtime Garrel booster) Jake Perlin's nascent distributor Film Desk is giving the director's J’entends plus la guitare (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar) a long-deferred run. It's a chancy gamble—but the until-recent obscurity of Garrel's name stateside, his ever-modish sullenness, and his impeccably hip references/collaborators (Cale, Godard, Jean Seberg, Nico) might seem to favor a new generation of kids pretending they'd known about him for years (this is the best-case scenario).

Further evidence that the Nineties might be the greatest film decade: Guitar was finished in 1991, three years after the mausoleum-throated Teutonic chanteuse Nico plopped off her bicycle in Ibiza, dead (keeping an appointment, by most accounts, she'd had for some time). Garrel had spent most of the Seventies with her. Their bodies of work from their time together are inextricable: the cover of her album Desertshore is a still from Garrel's monumentally inhospitable La Cicatrice interieur (The Inner Scar), in which she and her music prominently feature, alongside the director himself. Together they'd blackened spoons, stabbed veins, and creatively malingered in slag piles of medieval dolor and post-plague barrenness.

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of J'entends plus la guitare.

And then, go here.

I only managed to catch a handful of features during my time in Austin for the SXSW Film Festival, so I can’t claim to offer anything close to full “fest coverage” (though how possible that is for all but the most manageable festivals is an open question). But I did watch two worthy movies that you’ll hopefully get the opportunity to see in the coming months.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths had its premiere at Sundance, but this low-key, rigorously traditional doc was generally overshadowed in coverage of the lineup by its flashier competition, somewhat understandable (if certainly not just) given that the contemporary measuring stick for a doc’s theatrical readiness is so closely linked to its topicality. Brown’s second feature (after the Townes Van Zandt doc Be Here to Love Me), a movie about the continuing segregation of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, falls far from the immediate headlines of the day, but the miracle of Myths is how Brown spins the local minutiae of party preparation for the 2006 festivities, filled with unknown players, into a complex meditation on our country’s troubled racial history. Her cuts between the arrangements for the black and white festivities are well-placed and appropriately calculated for effect, but what stings are those shots in which a black figure (usually some kind of server) is highlighted against a host of white folks enjoying a posh event that African Americans can only participate in while via supporting roles.

Given that Myths is about race in the South, it’s also a movie about class, and Brown takes care to note the differing financial impacts of purchasing and creating parade finery and floats on the various families. But she carefully eschews easy moralizing—an Alabama native herself, Brown knows well that the relationships between Southern whites and blacks are much more complicated than most who don’t live there will ever understand. There’s a sense of tender, tentative, ever-encroaching rapprochement between the two communities—even though the divide between them is palpable, some kind of thaw surrounding the two ceremonies seems more than possible. Fittingly, Brown’s stirring climax finds the black Mardi Gras royalty attending the white king and queen’s coronation for the first time. As the two are announced, the all-white audience seems genuinely sincere in its vocal approbation. This court visit is repaid at an event the next night and Brown lingers on joyous shots of the two royal courts intermingling freely and openly. What’s fascinating is a little nugget of shared history Brown’s plucked from an interview and placed earlier in the film: the white queen’s grandfather, on a dare, illegally carried out the last slave run from Africa to the United States . The black queen’s ancestors were part of that cargo. Order of Myths is built around these subtle, gradual revelations, leaving the overall effect more of long, involved conversation than an attention-grabbing slap in the face. Dear documentary filmmakers: More of this, please.

On the narrative side, SXSW seems to be struggling somewhat uneasily with its own growth in relation to that of the filmmakers the festival has long championed. A home for the mumblecore movement that Sundance has largely ignored (save for the two Duplass brothers films), the festival continues to showcase work by Swanberg, Ross, Bujalski, Kat, Duplass, and the like (a friend commented that he felt the narrative features could be generally described as films made by young men wielding video cameras), but will those filmmakers step up from each work to the next to fit SXSW’s ever-growing stage? And if they won’t, who will be the next generation of talents to find a home there? 23-year-old filmmaker Joshua Safdie provides a ready answer. His slight and winning The Pleasure of Being Robbed, a not-really-mumblecore feature that still exists somewhere in that movement’s orbit of DIY, youth-centric filmmaking, was my favorite narrative of the fest.

For the first half, as Safdie follows his young protagonist Eleonore (Eleonore Hendricks) as she robs a variety of random folks (not at all maliciously—her theft drips of raccoon-ish curiosity), I was worried that Pleasure would be nothing more than yet another film constructed around a masculine eye following a pathological female and just waiting for the hammer to fall. Safdie’s protagonist is caught rummaging through a bag (instead of running from the police, she loudly proclaims, “I just wanted to see what’s in there" while continuing to dig), but instead of mug shots and punishment, the film cruises into fantastic whimsy—Safdie takes us on a trip to the zoo for a swim with a giant fake polar and all of a sudden we’re in what I hope is an homage to unexpected magic acts of Jacques Rivette. The Business of Being Robbed is certainly slim as a narrative (a lengthy trip to Boston in a borrowed car might occupy too much screen time), but its mood is so lovely that it might have actually benefited from stretching out to a gargantuan Rivette-ian length. Even as it stands, Pleasure is a nice little movie made by a seemingly unpretentious and talented young guy that doesn’t focus on the painful end of a relationship or the inarticulacy of space post-college, and for that I’m grateful I had the chance to sit with it for a little while.

When a film opens with shots of a straight and anonymous American highway -- that most overdetermined of American film locations -- as Sleepwalking does, one must be braced for a story about emotional journeys. A ribbon of asphalt stretching to the horizon is immediate shorthand for personal growth along the road of life (for, to paraphrase Tom Cochrane, life is a highway); this is as true for Captain America and Billy as it is for Steve Martin and the late John Candy. Though Sleepwalking offers little variation on the modern automotive odyssey to maturity (as its protagonists carpool their way to catharsis and fulfillment, sensitive pop songs play in the background and the camera's lens flares with orange sunsets), its earnestness and acting at least provide the momentum necessary to avoid stalling, whether or not the viewer is content to ride along.

Click here to read Leo Goldsmith's review of Sleepwalking.

In the last several years, moviegoers have been inundated with films—narrative and documentary features alike—that depict the decaying soul of the individual in the service of corporate ambition, but I can recall no such work as dark or morose as Heartbeat Detector, a new film from French director Nicolas Klotz (La Blessure, Paria). And I mean literally dark: where the characters live, work and play is, without fail, presented in stifling shadows or nearly devoid of light. Though the film ably establishes a pervasive, portentous atmosphere, it sadly results in stylistic overkill. While unquestionably sincere in its efforts to suggest that personal choices in furtherance of institutional progress can and do have dire consequences—not only for the decision maker but also, and especially, the nameless victims of such choices—Klotz’s film is a challenging slog, and it falls far short of compelling cinema.
Click here to read Chet Mellema's review of Heartbeat Detector.

Sorry, Mr. Haneke, but my conscience is a hell of a lot better looking than you. Nice try, guy.

Michael Haneke's 1997 Funny Games always seemed more like an instruction manual than a thriller, with the famously dyspeptic Austrian auteur hesitantly going through the genre motions only to teach us something he feels we really ought to learn. Now, as if to put all doubts of his intentional didacticism to rest, Haneke has returned to the scene of his crime (against art?) for his first English-language film, a stringent remake that, in theory at least, takes the guise of the sort of Hollywood product he always intended to deconstruct. The implication is that those who most needed this movie medicine (namely us mindless drones known as Americans) didn't swallow the first time, so perhaps now, unencumbered by nattering subtitles and unfamiliar European faces, we will unwittingly flock to the multiplex for a punishing lesson in audience humility and media critique posing as a home-invasion suspenser.

The problem is that even if one fell for Haneke's limp tsk-tsking the first time around, ten years later his nasty little games of viewer barbarism seem musty, even quaint. What's worse, the entire project suffers from the gall Haneke shows in not only remaking his own film for the "edification" of a wider audience, but in trusting his own original vision so fundamentally and without question that he has chosen not to append or alter it in any significant way.

This speaks to an astonishing artistic hubris, but also of Haneke's refusal to engage with his own work and legacy; one would hope at this point in his career, especially after the refinement of his craft in films such as Code Unknown and Caché, that Haneke would want to slash this old canvas with a razor. Instead, he offers it up again, like a paper written in freshman colloquium, without changing the text. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Funny Games, American-style.

In the wake of Hostel: Part II and any other sex slavery film du jour, the synopsis for Li Yang's Blind Mountain sounds desperately lurid: With the promise of some quick cash, pretty, young, college-educated Bai Xuemei follows some new acquaintances into a remote rural village in the Shaanxi region of China, where she's drugged, kidnapped, and sold into an illegal forced marriage. Unable to reason with her new husband, Huang Degui, his parents, or the corrupt local government, Bai is held in a Kafkaesque, but all too real nightmare, coerced into labor, sexual compliance, and even childbirth with little hope for justice or escape.

But this sort of glib synopsis would mask the intentions of a patient, politically subtle film with a good deal more to say about contemporary China as a whole than Eli Roth's film about the Slovakian black market in particular. Not simply exploitation with an air of social conscience, Yang's film is rather more like 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days in that it uses as its raw material a contentious women's rights issue to drive home a broader point about the political and the personal.

Click here to read the rest of Leo Goldsmith's review of Blind Mountain.

Though the early to mid-aughts documentary boom has recently died down, it's still difficult to believe there hasn't been a serious nonfiction indictment of the collusion between the government and the media in selling the invasion of Iraq to the American public. This accounts for a somewhat shameful omission in the ever-growing Iraq War doc catalogue--the sheer amount of lies, distortions, and fear-mongering titillations on display in a typical CNN or Fox News broadcast circa 2002 (and today) would offer enough evidence on the sorry state of our national media for a book-length study, let alone a feature film. Columnist, critic, and antiwar notable Norman Solomon has now, remarkably, provided both: his 2005 volume War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death has been adapted into an explosive, compact 73-minute documentary by filmmakers Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. If a few years ago Solomon was a lonely voice in the wilderness, with this film he has a major stage from which to educate a potentially greater audience.

Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's review of War Made Easy.

Snow Angels, the fourth feature by the preternaturally visually gifted, yet often narratively scattershot filmmaker David Gordon Green almost begs to be disliked. Forgoing the burnt-out rural environs that enveloped his first three features and in no small way contributed to their positive critical reception (city critics alternately love and hate the outsider), Green here attempts not just his first literary adaptation (of a terribly grim novel by Stewart O’Nan), but one that required a move North of the Mason-Dixon line for the first time in his filmmaking career. This geographic shift wouldn’t be terribly notable if the contemporary South, and the pockets of visual beauty he searched out there, hadn’t represented as fully formed a character in his oeuvre as any of those portrayed by his actors.

Click here to read Jeff Reichert's "Shot" on Snow Angels.

David Gordon Green shows his condescending hand early in Snow Angels. A high school marching band plays slovenly and moves in lockstep to a familiar-sounding pop hit on a football field in the cool winter air of some Everysuburb, USA. This might be a cozy sight of the Norman Rockwell variety, but a bespectacled and pained band instructor (Tom Noonan) doesn't like what he sees and gathers his students to impart the necessity of discipline and impassioned performance. "Do you have a sledgehammer in your heart? Because I have a sledgehammer in my heart. Are you ready to be my sledgehammer?" he yells, and that's when we not only recall the tune but also know the jig is up. Green essentially confesses that he doesn't really give a shit about the reality of his sleepy Pennsylvania suburb or the characters that dwell in it; not even the attendant heft of a distant gunshot that interrupts Noonan's speech—foreshadowing the film's tortured melodrama and predictable tragedy to come—can compensate. This supposed joke (some stodgy old dork is deadpanning Peter Gabriel!) and Snow Angels' other pathetic attempts at ironic and/or above-it-all quaintness are no better than the "random" signifiers of cutesiness that have been eating away like a cancer at this country's independent filmmaking ever since Rushmore, only they're insultingly padded with the Green stamp of ponderous melancholy.

Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin's "Reverse Shot" on Snow Angels.

Manoel de Oliveira celebrates his centenary this month with a royal workup at BAM’s Cinématek—their tribute to the Portuguese master stretches over three weeks (March 7-30) and includes 18 features and a program of shorts. Though he's largely unknown outside of true cinematic circles here (and probably elsewhere), his slight, but moving I’m Going Home (screening in the series) and the staid eccentric A Talking Picture (not screening, but available on DVD) are about the only films in his ever-growing filmography to receive small-scale U.S. distribution pushes, even if retrospectives of his work are ever more common. He’s been cranking out films at a rapid pace through the 1990s and 2000s—about a film a year, and the BAM series focuses on the highlights of this period, while dipping back into the sixties and seventies to round up his rare early works (his first feature, 1942s Aniki Bóbó screens this evening).

You’ll read (or will have read) that Oliveira’s been making films since the silent period, and that he’s the world’s oldest living filmmaker, but what’s interesting about Oliveira is not his longevity or productivity per se, but how those secondary characteristics of his career have played out into a tenacious, tough bunch of films that reverberate along certain fixed axes—art, religion, history, culture—that truly define his art. He’s been around for a long time, and this affords him a unique perspective on our world and ways of life. When his filmmaking career ends (not for another few decades, I hope), Oliveira will be remembered as the most rigorous cinematic chronicler of that dying beast we call Western Civilization (he literally murders it in A Talking Picture). With a wink and a sad smile he’s surveyed our cultural landscape, ferreted out the worthy and worthless bits, and captured the ways life has changed around him on film for nearly eighty years.

I’ve only seen about a dozen of his features (nine of which BAM is screening), so there are plenty of discoveries I’m hoping to make over the next few weeks (I’m told Abraham’s Valley is terrific), but if I could implore anyone reading this to see just one film in the series, make it Inquietude, my favorite of the bunch. Broken into three segments, each of which flows fluidly from one to the next, it’s a broad commentary on art, artmaking and myth that implicates the viewer in its mechanisms by a neat, inviting formal trick. It’s also the most singularly beautiful of the films of his I’ve seen, high praise for a warmly glowing cinema that seems constantly lit from within. If you can see a second, make it Doomed Love, his lengthy adaptation of an epic swooning romance placed against artificial sets and rendered via performances that make Bresson’s models look traditionally expressive. It’s not an easy sit, but is rewarding nonetheless—with its extensive use of titles it feels nearly as though one’s read the source novel by the time it's over (this is the kind of film for which one knows instantly their degree of tolerance). Seeing a third? I like The Uncertainty Principle—the title invokes physics, but the film is more of an odd little thriller—quite a bit as well…

Those into self-referential cinema (and completists) should check out Oliveira's "Tetraology of Frustrated Love" films, Pasado e presente (more naturalistic and recalling Buñuel's late comedies, but definitely transitional), Benilde, or The Virgin Mother, Doomed Love, and Francisca. Benilde's the turning point in his career, basically a filmed play about a virgin mother that opens and closes with the theatrical artifice unpacked—Oliveira leads us to and away from his characters via tracking shots through the soundstage surrounding his sets. The meat of Benilde feels like an intensely Ibsen-esque experience, but constant references to the empty space off-screen highlight the nature of a film as fake. The following two titles in the Tetralogy expand and deepen this same exploration. By the time the series is finished, you’ll have witnessed a complete cinematic metamorphosis.

For everyone who finds this stuff literate, urbane, and slyly witty (see the club sequences in The Uncertainty Principle or John Malkovich's performances in The Convent and A Talking Picture), there will be plenty who will exit theaters dulled by boredom (the thankfully absent The Fifth Empire) or feel as though they’ve witnessed some of the most hermetically sealed cinema going (his seemingly marathon dialogues for two don’t always play like the intellectual fencing matches they were intended to be). His is a cinema that somehow seems both airless and relevant, though to his detractors, this is a point that will certainly be up for debate. I’m a true believer but on occasion I’ve questioned the place of puzzling (usually intentionally so) films like these in the world. Fun, frustrating, serious, suffocating—whatever mode he’s in, Oliveira is never anything but himself, and at 100 years of age he seems absolutely unstoppable.

For the full schedule, click here.

Ronald Bronstein's already notorious low-budget New York psychodrama Frownland is opening this Friday, March 7, at Manhattan's IFC Center for a one-week run, distributed by the filmmaker himself. Reverse Shot contributor Daniel Cockburn takes a long, hard, eye-prying look at Frownland:

"Early in Ronald Bronstein’s debut feature Frownland, Keith Sontag (Dore Mann) sits in a car, waiting for his friend Laura (Mary Wall), prying his own eyes open for an interminable length of time. It’s a fitting mission statement for the entire film: staring open-eyed wider and longer than is comfortable. Audience reaction to this scene can vary from nervousness to laughter to boredom; we still haven’t received many cues as to what this movie is. To what end these open eyes, this long-held stare? That this mini-scene withholds emotional signposts, but not a payoff, is also representative of the film to come. " Click here to read Daniel Cockburn's review of Frownland in its entirety.

Louis Gossett Jr. in Enemy Mine? Oh, heavens, no, it's Frances McDormand in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day!

A middle-aged, getting-your-groove-back Cinderella story: Miss Pettigrew, an unsuccessful domestic used to taking her meals in breadlines, maneuvers a job with a flighty American "actress" abroad, Delysia Lafosse. Just like that, prim Pettigrew is off the streets and hovering around the nexus of the London smart set, where her self-possession and propriety are suddenly rare and valuable commodities. It doesn't take long for a reasonably handsome suitor to notice.

The film's basis is a novel by one Winifred Watson, written in 1938, the year in which Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day is set; shadows of the depression and oncoming war are cast over the proceedings. Pettigrew, as played by Frances McDormand, starts out a dun-clad frowse, hair a crisped nest, seemingly incapable of taking ten steps in any direction without confronting some ungraceful incident. All of this changes with her introduction to Amy Adams's Lafosse, a dialogue spouter who punctuates her lines with a squirty giggle, and whose sheer momentum of living doesn't allow Pettigrew space for self-consciousness. Lafosse is the live-in tart of a nightclub owner (Mark Strong), screwing another fella for a stage role (Tom Payne), and desperately in love with a third, noble suitor who wants her and her only (played by Lee Pace; the character has no worthwhile connections, naturally). She plugs Pettigrew into the role of her "social secretary," charged with keeping all the balls in the air (ahem), and to everyone's surprise, the Miss does so quite well—McDormand exudes the appropriate sense of astonishment in her newfound capacities. Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

Stephen Chow was at least at one point the biggest star in Asia; he may still be. As an actor, he’s affable, equally conversant with extreme physical comedy and action melodrama. As a filmmaker, his approach is endearingly idiosyncratic: irreverent, homage-heavy, with unapologetically stylized performance, camerawork, and low slapstick. His lineage as filmmaker includes Keaton, the Brothers Marx and Hui, Chuck Jones, and the better ZAZ spoofs. He has taken longer and longer to produce each of his recent directorial offerings (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle), but this has not diminished his drawing power—those films not only broke box-office records but also allowed Chow to cross over into western markets, blending his anarchic, cracked mo lei tau sensibility with interculturally resonant genre play. That Kung Fu Hustle arrived in western theaters on the heels of the portentous, lugubrious post-Crouching Tiger martial-arts pageants of Zhang Yimou likely contributed greatly to its success and to the high expectations in line for his newest film, four years in the making.

At first, CJ7 will be startling to Chow’s fans, perhaps because it exposes many of the sentimental undercurrents of his previous films. Click here to read Brendon Bouzard's review of Stephen Chow's CJ7.

Gus Van Sant's so-called "Death Trilogy" may have culminated two years ago with crowning achievement Last Days, but to judge by his latest film, Paranoid Park, the entropic weight of mortality is still very much at the center of the filmmaker's concerns. Moving beyond the Death Trilogy's Béla Tarr-grafted stories of self- and other-inflicted violence, Van Sant now tinkers with his trademark stylistic oddities, nonlinear narrative devices, and thematic ideas to fashion a heterogeneous, experimental grab bag that even for him and his death obsession becomes seemingly familiar and evocatively strange.

And also just as often only strangely familiar and seemingly strange. By Last Days, Van Sant had mastered the Tarr template and in the process made it his own; with Paranoid Park he's starting to reinvent himself yet again, but just as Gerry was an interesting but awkward first attempt in creating significant distance from late Nineties commercial efforts like Good Will Hunting and the remade Psycho, so may Park ultimately prove a transitional step into gradually more assured territory. No longer content to remain at arm's length from his brooding protagonists as in the Death Trilogy, here Van Sant plunges (though not completely, as there's still a layer of depth that refuses to be permeated) into the troubled subjectivity of teenage skate brat Alex (amateur actor Gabe Nevins, who along with the film's other young actors auditioned via myspace), who accidentally causes the death of a night watchman while hopping a train. In representing that subjectivity, Van Sant's arsenal of aesthetic tricks, including a few carryovers from his My Own Private Idaho days, yields wildly disparate results: at its worst, Paranoid Park plays like an affected, artified "reclamation" of hackneyed Warp Tour-era skater poses, with endless repetitions of grainy super-8 and languid slo-mo shots indulging Van Sant's prurient gaze and naively intending to impart the dreamworld of romantically disaffected youth.
Click here to read Michael Joshua Rowin on Paranoid Park.

Also, earlier: Michael Koresky on Paranoid Park:

Paranoid Park is most notable for the ways it effectively synthesizes the early and later parts of Van Sant’s film career, melding the angsty male character studies of Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, and the River Phoenix sections of My Own Private Idaho with the heavier formal experimentation of the “Death Trilogy.” And Van Sant’s ever-tightening technical precision here shows how far he’s come: whereas today, Drugstore and Idaho seem like patchwork assemblies of early indie trends (Drugstore’s “trippy” drug scenes and erratic, at times misplaced irony) and narrative spare parts (Idaho was a compendium of three separate story treatments that Van Sant smooshed together during preproduction), Paranoid Park shows a remarkable sense of focus, if not purpose. The entire article here..

Married Life, the third feature from Ira Sachs, marks a major departure for the Memphis-born filmmaker. The first of his movies to take place away from his native South, and his only period picture, Married Life stakes out new thematic ground for a director whose previous efforts, The Delta and Forty Shades of Blue, focused resolutely on outsiders, people on the margins trying to navigate their way through an unfamiliar, unfriendly, and even hostile social environment. By contrast, Married Life tackles a far more commonplace—and rather banal—subject: suburban heterosexual partnership and the mysterious, often unspoken undercurrents that both threaten and sustain ostensibly happy marriages.

Married Life opens much like an episode of Desperate Housewives, complete with a winky, nudgy animated title sequence and a dreadful voiceover from a supporting character (here, Pierce Brosnan's Richard Langley), but these initially arch shadings become less pronounced as the film veers into romantic melodrama territory: It's late 1949, and Harry (Chris Cooper) has fallen for the beautiful Kay Nesbitt (Rachel McAdams), despite being pleasantly (if not happily) married to Pat (Patricia Clarkson). Harry takes Richard into his confidence, resolving to find a way out of his marriage. Things get dicier when Richard also falls for Kay, and then discovers that Pat has her own extracurricular activities. And so we're left with a many-sided love polygon made all the more complicated by postwar suburban social and sexual mores.

Click here to read Chris Wisniewski's review of Married Life.