A scene from Ruben Östlund's Involuntary.

How to get rid of the ghost that you want to keep close? It's been more than twenty-five years now since Ingmar Bergman was regularly making feature films, but the master's mammoth shadow looms over the national cinema with undiminished dominance, and indeed most of European art cinema in general; meanwhile it's just one year after his death, at age 89, and Swedish cinema is still struggling with the legacy of this fearsomely popular and canonized auteur. Despite the domestic success of homegrown films such as Kay Pollack's As It Is in Heaven and Mikael Hafstrom's Evil, and the ever-growing international reputations of festival-circuit favorites Roy Andersson and Lukas Moodysson (not to mention the imminent international release of Tomas Alfredson's already widely acclaimed, and Tribeca-feted Let the Right One In), Swedish cinema longs to crawl out from under the shadow of Bergman, even as it cannot afford to forget him.

Although American viewers only get the slightest sampling of Swedish films in any given year (other than Bergman's final film, Saraband, U.S.-distributed releases from Sweden in the past five years included those by the increasingly difficult and militantly confrontational Moodysson, Hafstrom's film, and not much else), the industry is chugging along steadily, even if attendance for its own films has been on a downslide. (And in a search for stability, only twenty-nine films were made in 2007—as opposed to more than forty between 2005 and 2006—after too many production companies were trying to survive in Sweden at once.) Of course it goes without saying that the grant-based and state-sponsored Swedish Film Institute, which, founded in 1963, proudly touts itself as the world's first film archive, and which today produces, promotes, and preserves its country's cinema, needs to think about the future even more than the past, especially with Bergman's passing.

The international journalists' film program assembled this year by the Swedish Institute, a public agency promoting the exportation of their country's national culture, in conjunction with both the Swedish Film Institute and the organizers of the fifth annual Bergman Week festival, is a journey that exemplifies and clarifies this schism. Before embarking on the festival itself, held once again at Bergman's longtime home and current resting place, Fårö Island, we were treated in Stockholm to a mini-festival of contemporary Swedish films, which provided a fascinating cross-section of the nation's cinematic output, shining a light on concerns both artistic and commercial, traditional and progressive.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's coverage of contemporary Swedish cinema. Coming soon: Bergman Week on Fårö Island.

The first time Asia Argento appears in Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress, she fills the frame, reclining on a couch with devilish confidence as her character, Vellini, discusses the upcoming marriage of Ryno (Fu'ad Ait Aattou), her lover of ten years, to another woman. It's an appropriate entrance for a woman who could fittingly be described as a force of nature -- a "goddess of capriciousness," as one character calls her -- someone who trembles with erotic delight as she climaxes on a tiger-skin rug, moans with unfathomable grief clutching the corpse of a loved one, and drinks blood from a man's bullet wound with carnal glee.

She is touchingly human and fiercely animal, and the actress brings her to life with captivating ferocity. Argento feels vaguely out of place in Breillat's film, a creature of the 21st century somehow transported to the 19th, but Breillat uses this incongruity to excellent effect. The illegitimate daughter of an Italian princess and a Spanish matador, Vellini belongs no more to July Monarchy-era France than Argento does. Her defiant nonconformity confers upon the character the status of a perennial outsider, while making the film into an uncommonly playful star text.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski's indieWIRE review.

The Last Mistress is Asia Argento, both in the sense that she plays the title role and in that she looms so large that to succumb to her performance is to succumb to the film itself. She is introduced lying invitingly prone on a divan, not bothering to get up to greet us, instead daring us to join her. Her performance is necessarily oversized; perhaps like Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of oilman Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, audience reaction correlates neatly with how comfortable the viewer is with the actor’s departure from presentist naturalism. Argento’s character La Vellini is a 36 year-old Spanish divorcee, formerly married to an elderly Englishman. She glowers at those she shares scenes with, spouting lines like “he is free,” “I owe nobody nothing,” and “I hate anything feminine, except in young men, of course.” In that era of beheadings, where a sick man drinks chicken blood to get well, Vellini jumps on the body of her beloved to lick his bloody wound from a duel (fought over her honor, of course), pushing the doctor out of the way, shouting that she wants to drink his blood and no one can stop her. Aristocratic society, peopled by the overstuffed peacocks in cafes, salons, and boxes at the opera, has no choice but to scorn her deviance for obstinately refusing to conform to its standards. And she, as the film’s real libertine, defines herself in turn against the mainstream’s hypocrisy and perversity. At a time when nobility was up for grabs, La Vellini seeks to redefine it, living above society by her own moral code, with unprecedented allowance for female sexual pleasure to a degree that seems novel and nonconformist even today.

Click here to read the rest of Lauren Kaminsky's Reverse Shot review.

Over the years, it's been both disconcerting and somehow satisfying to watch Matthew Broderick gradually morph from a lithe, cocky teen heartthrob to a pudgy, middle-aged sad sack. The puppy-dog eyes have sunken deeper into down-turned crevices of disappointment, and he seems lost in his burly torso, often vacuum-packed into tucked shirts and constricting ties. Broderick's onscreen persona has come to embody early forties despair, when fading youth has given way to ambivalence about the future; this seems to have been a long, slow journey, which began somewhere around Alexander Payne's superlative Election.

In that endlessly rewatchable satire, Broderick was something of a revelation, maintaining his air of superiority, but this time it was cloaked behind layers of self-deception, neuroses, and suburban despondency. Payne brought out an exacting, painfully observed performance from the actor, and ever since it seems like Broderick's been doing milquetoast variations on it, with ever diminishing returns, from his likeable doofus boss in You Can Count on Me to his nebbishy nothings in The Stepford Wives and The Producers.

Now, as Taylor Peters, an atrociously named TV comedy writer with a crippling gambling problem, in Peter Tolan's Finding Amanda, Broderick puts on his best deluded-dork outfit and wanders precariously close to Chevy Chase territory. This time however, he doesn't have Reese Witherspoon as a formidable opponent, and he's stuck playing opposite a plucky but uncharitably used Brittany Snow as his wife's troubled niece, Amanda, who he's supposed to track down in Las Vegas and save from a life of prostitution and drugs.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Finding Amanda.

Trumbo tells the eventful story of the best-known name in the Hollywood Ten, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, with an unsurprising emphasis on the leftist's misadventures with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Famous and well-paid before HUAC sentenced him and nine other fellow Communist sympathizers and members to jail, Trumbo toiled for years afterward to win back his career, returning to the movies under pseudonyms and "fronts" designed to keep a blacklisted name unconnected to the scripts he was working on (Roman Holiday and The Brave One, for which his front, Robert Rich, won the 1957 Academy Award) and then being the first to break the blacklist by taking unconcealed credit for Spartacus and Exodus.

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

The Sydney Film Festival ended today, and there are still many exceptional works to cover. But I’ve monopolized the Reverse Blog too much, so I’m clearing the decks, dispatching the very nadir of what I’ve seen before turning my attention to a couple of the best. The following aren’t well intentioned failures or films that don’t quite hit the mark; they are aggressively inept or just plain reprehensible. This bunch is beneath the breadth and depth of full consideration, so like HOVA shutting down in “Takeover,” they’ll only get half a line.

Newcastle
A layabout teen flick grafted onto an extreme sports video results in something like a lurching, scarcely competent boys’ Blue Crush in a blue-collar town. Pretty vacuous young things grow up in the titular Australian coastal city, are given oh-so-very little to say, and have no earthly idea how to say it. Surfing’s the only way out of these wastrel streets; when they surf, they surf hard. The baddies, when they come around, surf even harder.

Elite Squad
Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, once the setting for what Glauber Rocha called the “aesthetics of hunger,” or Black Narcissus’s liminal poetry, is now ground zero for a fascist, frat boy SWAT fantasy. José Padilha doesn’t merely celebrate violence, he gets off on it, letting the elite squad and drug dealers torture and massacre each other into oblivion. (My favourite: a man stuffed into a cylinder of tires, doused in gasoline, and lit on fire. No: bloody plastic bag strangling, repeated three times just to make sure the horror sinks in.) The leader’s a sadist, but it’s okay, because he loves his wife and kid.

Ten Empty
Suburban mouse returns from the big smoke after a ten-year absence motivated by his insane mum’s suicide. Character traits of a pretentious dick: he now wears silk suits, sells luxury pens, drinks only pinot, and hates his old life & friends (who are homespun salt-of-the earth folk). Textbook tragedy: Dad, who “built this house with my own bare hands,” gets blind drunk, forces new wifey to wear the old one’s red dress (oh—they’re sisters), and frets over his catatonic son, who’s also on the brink of suicide. It’s like Aussie cinema Mad-Libs.

Donkey Punch
Apparently the British have discovered exploitation too. Soft-core screwing aboard a luxury yacht goes awry, so a group of nubile holidaymakers start stabbing each other—with a knife! with an outboard motor!—until only one’s left standing. This flick is named after a sexual manoeuvre: doggy-style sex climaxes with the girl being punched in the back of the neck just as the guy blows his wad. “Why not quit cold turkey?” the waif asks the sex addict. “Because I prefer hot pussy,” he retorts. You stay classy and direct many more like this, Olly Blackburn. -JAMES CRAWFORD

The casting of Edward Norton as the eponymous green galoot in The Incredible Hulk, the take-two revamp of the comic book franchise following Ang Lee’s 2003 critical and commercial disappointment, is not surprising. Almost all of the recent superhero franchises have been placed on the shoulders of actors known more for flexing acting chops than gym-sculpted physiques, and Norton’s history of playing loners, losers, and boy-next-door sociopaths places him in the off-casting pantheon next to such calculatedly “quirky” choices as Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man, Christian Bale in Batman Begins, and Tobey Maguire in the Spider Man films. These leading men are meant to inject pathos and idiosyncrasy into films that might otherwise drown in a sea of cold digitized spectacle, insuring both comic geeks and cineastes that it’s okay to plop down twelve bucks, sink into the climate-controlled darkness of the mall megaplex, and get lost in a couple hours of grandiose escapism without feeling like complete sell-outs. (Is anyone else more than a little intrigued by the prospect of Seth Rogen in 2010’s Green Hornet? I can see the tagline now: He knocked you up . . . now he’ll knock you out!)

Click here to read the rest of Matt Connolly's review of The Incredible Hulk

It’s the greatest photograph in sports, perhaps one of the 20th century’s most indelible images: two African-American sprinters atop a victory dais, heads bowed, black gloves borne aloft, fists clenched in an act of astonishing—truly, according-to-Hoyle astonishing—protest. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos stepped up at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games to receive their gold and bronze 200m medals respectively, the stadium was struck silent. The Star Spangled Banner petered out after a scant four bars. As the victors exited, a smattering of boos rippled through Estadio Olímpico.

What of the third person in that picture? A slight, meek-looking Caucasian man stands to the left, facing away from the two Americans, looking awkwardly out of place. It appears that two of him could fit inside Smith, who towers over him like a hulking Adonis. He resembles the waterboy more than one of the Games’ great sprinters. His name is Peter Norman, the Australian silver medallist, and his unlikely involvement in this standstill historical moment motivates the documentary Salute.

I first discovered this picture almost a decade ago in a 50th-anniversary edition of the once-defunct, now-resurrected Life magazine. I don’t think my teenage self even registered another presence alongside Smith and Carlos, let alone his part in the moment. Next to the Americans, his protest is almost unnoticeable. Look a little closer, and you’ll see a small white disc adorning Norman’s left lapel—an Olympic Project for Human Rights badge—a minute gesture, and one so freighted with meaning because it was forbidden by the IOC. The late sprinter’s nephew, Matt Norman, uses this protest as a fulcrum to celebrate his uncle’s life, chronicling how each sprinter arrived at that moment, and then dealt with the volatile aftermath.

Norman’s film is slotted somewhere between DIY homage and ramshackle PBS feature, and there’s a lot of well-intentioned chaff, as Norman tallies race times on the road to the finals and essays miniature human interest biographies of each sprinter. Then he really finds stride as he contextualizes the protest. A world out of joint, a cauldron for discontent: the Martin Luther King riots, Russia invading Czechoslovakia, China’s cultural revolution, South African apartheid, the white Australia policy, and the pre-Olympic student protest turned massacre in Mexico City. The political activism found in the ’68 U.S. Track and Field team, spearheaded by another sprinter, Lee Evans, is placed in that continuum. The salute, recognizable as that of the Black Panther movement, finds resonance with so much more.

Matt Norman doesn’t seem to have the stuff to be an above-the-title documentarian. His rather pedestrian qualities do suit an effort whose most compelling passages reveal, to borrow a term from Hannah Arendt, the banality of heroism: Norman plucking that badge at the last minute from the chest of an American rower; John Carlos forgetting his black gloves at home, meaning that he and Smith had to share a single pair. John Carlos believes God ordained those three to be in that situation. Not so much destiny, I would say. More having an awareness of the moment, and seizing it.

As befits a eulogy, Norman the younger' is always dragging his uncle to the fore, and in their interviews, Smith and Carlos are happy to oblige. Genuine affection flows between them during their several interviews, as does an understanding that can only be borne out of mutual hardship. Amidst the politically charged lead-up to the Games, half-whispered rumors of an American protest had the team plagued by threats of career suicide, not to mention possible snipers in the stands ready to quell any protests, and had them at the centre of a debate whether or not the Olympics should truck with politics. Beset by these worries, Smith and Carlos became bravery’s avatars, and Peter Norman, their fellow traveller, was no less iron-willed for his part. Barred from the American Olympic team days after their display, Smith and Carlos were blackballed and found it difficult to secure employment stateside. Norman, despite being his country’s best sprinter, was subjected to similar, though subtler, ostracism. He never competed for Australia in the Olympics again. Through it all, Norman the elder is humorous and self-effacing in conversation, believing that he was “merely a rock cast into the deep, still waters,” depicted by his nephew with a modesty that makes Salute excel both as a personal document, and as a treatment of history viewed first hand.—JAMES CRAWFORD

Foster Child begins with an establishing shot of the Manila skyline divided into three blurred strata. A crystalline blue sky hangs suspended, as if propped up by tent-pole skyscrapers, whose feet are shrouded in congee-colored smog. Below lies a shantytown, ramshackle hovels anchored at a profusion of angles like grubby quartz fingers. After a held-breath eternity, shot becomes symbol, as the camera tilts downwards, revealing the sprawling human tumult that is the city’s outskirt slums. With this clear-eyed and simple shot, director Brilliante Mendoza shows the moneyed elite living literally on top of those who scrabble to get even a meager purchase on life. Tilting down to view the depths of poverty, the image contains everything there is to say about class in the Philippines, all in one guileless camera movement. How is it then, that a film graced with such an astute opening salvo, is initially unable to captivate in its wake?

Any number of contemporary directors maintain a Bazinian “faith in reality,” most of whom grace the international festival circuit, but I’ll be damned if I can summon a cogent, all-encompassing rubric that would explain why certain work is rarefied (invariably Kiarostami, the Dardennes brothers) and others, less-so. The reason is as ephemeral and elusive as cotton candy: in that tasting moment, the allure is all too clear, but come time to articulate with intellect, words dissolve on the tongue. Whatever the alchemy, the first hour of Foster Child doesn’t seem to have it. Mendoza follows a social worker down the shantytown’s alleys, finally arriving at Thelma (one of the SFF’s great monikers, Cherry Pie Picache), who has taken John-John, a Mestizo orphan, into her care. Alternating between intimate handheld footage and distanced tripod scenes, Mendoza surveys impoverished daily minutiae with discretion, however there’s an ineffable veil cast between action and emotional. The 35mm photography is too polished for conveying immediacy, yet not nearly glossy enough to ascend to hardship lyricism..

There are reasons why I never walk out on a film (I haven’t given up on any theater screening before or since One Hour Photo), and Foster Child is vindication. When Thelma moves out of the slums and into bureaucracy, Mendoza really finds stride—and his subtle opening act realizes its payoff. Under his depiction, the foster care system in the Philippines is a queasy pact of charity and financial necessity. Orphaned kids find temporary sanctuary with poor, paid carers, who raise them until the age of three or four, at which time they find permanent homes with often wealthy, invariably foreign foster parents. Thelma moves toward that awful separation moment, quiet as is proper for such places; she reverses the film’s opening movement and ascends one of those stalagmite skyscrapers to pass her adopted son onto an American couple. Upon entering into a hotel room so opulent it borders on indecent, Picache shows a wide-eyed bewilderment—disbelief that anyone could be allowed to live like this; joy at her charge’s deliverance; a slowly disintegrating wall set against grief—that makes for the SFF’s greatest moment thus far. In that instance, slack-jawed revelation: what’s past is prologue. Mendoza’s blank and seemingly unremarkable first-half documentary is an imperceptible strengthening of the bond between mother and child, showing no difference between adopted or natural kinship; Foster Child’s softly potent climax couldn’t have come without it. When that bond is severed, Thelma is absolutely wrecked, and the film breaks in sympathy with her. She wanders out into the night, ashen with sorrow, unsteady, and barely able to find her way home. No doubt as she has before, and will again when her next assignment comes to an end. Foster Child doesn’t debase itself with ham-fisted outrage, yet it’s ineluctably clear that the transaction—a modest monthly wage for cycles of perpetual heartache—is a poor one indeed.—JAMES CRAWFORD

Each of M. Night Shyamalan’s studio films thus far have employed, or even exploited, genre scenarios to similar ends—to question the unknown, to collapse boundaries between well-trod fantasy tropes and untranslatable spirituality, and ultimately, to preach the importance of human connection in the face of trauma or even tragedy. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs seemed less interested, respectively, in ghosts, superheroes, and aliens, than in the intuitive human healing that their presence brought about. It’s precariously new age, and it’s certainly no surprise to hear him in interviews talk of his target audience as “the collective soul.” If The Village easily remains his greatest film thus far (and possibly the most accomplished, coherent social allegory to come out of Hollywood in this politically catastrophic decade), it’s in part because in it he purposefully bumped up against the limits of all these things: the unknown was explicitly revealed as hokum (or as William Hurt’s elder called it, “farce”), belief was betrayed, egalitarianism turned to rancid, nearly fascistic self-preservation. Yet despite The Village’s political and social cynicism, Shyamalan managed to offer a portrait of blossoming love so genuinely touching, so well performed (by Bryce Dallas Howard and Joaquin Phoenix), and given such generous narrative weight, equal to its explicitly sham horror thread, that the film left in the dust the self-help guru trappings that so many people see in his oeuvre. The Village proved that Shyamalan doesn’t mean to just work big-L love (between estranged couples, tentative lovers, family members) in as a plot expedient but as a unifying plasma, and that he’s disinterested in utilizing sci-fi and fantasy detritus without it as an adhesive.

But if Signs, with its religious coddling, and Lady in the Water, with its frazzled, bogus attempts at community building and self-reflexive storytelling, showed the biggest chinks in Shyamalan’s armor so far, exposing as they did the director’s penchant for easy narrative wrap-ups and a distressing spiritual determinism, then his latest film, the already reviled The Happening, rightfully holds the director up to the harshest scrutiny yet. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of The Happening.

It's an incontrovertible truth that Samantha Morton is among the best actresses in the world, a fact somehow aided and not obscured by her insistence on playing, from Sweet and Lowdown to Mister Lonely, the same character: the innocent, all-forgiving punching bag of a self-obsessed, self-hating asshole. And in Cecilia Miniucchi's Expired, Morton once again owns this self-abnegation, here in its most socially and municipally abject form: that of the meter maid. Reluctantly writing up parking tickets to the ever irate and incredulous population of Santa Monica, Morton's Claire, in voice over, identifies herself as "one of the most hated people in the world." A brutally funny and relentlessly squirm-inducing film about neuroses, loneliness, and love, Expired posits the traffic cop as the nadir of self-esteem and the constant recipient of abuse and disgust.

"You always live in fear and guilt," notes Claire, whose personal life seems no more fruitful and rewarding than her career. At the end of a day apologetically dispensing parking tickets and sweetly bearing insults, Claire returns home to the apartment she shares with her mother (played with a warm familiarity by the great Teri Garr, working industriously around her quite apparent multiple sclerosis). Decorated with a saccharine taste for competing floral patterns and dollar-store Christmas lights, their apartment is a comfy haven from the outside world, but a lonely one in which the telephone is only ever used to order Chinese food.

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

Long has the Australian film industry suffered from an identity crisis. Actually, backtrack for a moment: unlike the United States or India, it’s debatable whether this country’s cinema output can be properly classified as an industry at all. For years, scarcely any significant film has been made without considerable government support, either in the form of direct investment from the Film Finance Corporation (to be folded into a new umbrella organization, Screen Australia, on July 1, 2008) or similar institutions, or heavy tax rebates for those projects with “significant Australian content.” The most recent controversy, over George “Happy Feet” Miller’s Justice League Mortal, was whether or not it qualified as being Aussie enough to benefit from the 40% producer offset. Justice League was rejected, presumably because it’s an American production, with an Australian at the helm. FFC president Brian Rosen, apparently enraged at the decision, shot from the hip, decrying a formula that turns away big-money behemoths “so we can make small films that appeal to about 100,000 people and nobody else, about lesbians, drugs, and whatever else.” Amongst the artistic elite, Rosen’s words became a cause scandale, but to the lay public and the popular press, he spoke sweet reason. The FFC invested $76 million of taxpayers’ money for film and television projects in the 2006-2007 financial year, and given that outlay, a film’s value, at least in editorial pages, is counted in profit recoupment, not the quality of artistic expression. Simultaneously, the Hollywood story model is desirable as a money-spinner, but regarded with open disdain for its mode of same-ish storytelling. The film crisis in Australia, then, bubbles out of the desire to make films that are profitable, but with a still decidedly Australian mien.

By that token, Matt Newtown’s Three Blind Mice might be the perfect curative, one of Rosen’s “small films” that will find wide purchase down here. In his unassuming, blokey digital video feature, Newtown takes a familiar narrative and gives it an Antipodean inflection: three sailors brawling, flirting, gambling, and boozing their way around downtown Sydney. Some unspoken misconduct hangs heavily over the evening, but the cure for what ails ya is one last dusk-till-dawn bacchanalian caper before shipping out for the Gulf at dawn’s first light. The film is something of a travelogue for Sydney, rambling from Darling Harbour down to the inner west suburbs, and Hugh Miller’s lovely DV photography is suited to capturing the hazy allure of Hyde Park under burnished streetlights, or the gone-to-seed interiors of the city’s ill-used monorail line. Completed scant hours before its SFF world premiere, Three Blind Mice bears the marks of an edit room scramble, a splintered feeling of raw timber not fully sanded. But there are benefits to dating the daughter of Australian screen royalty (Gracie Otto, sister to Miranda, and son of Barry): what can’t be smoothed over gets a touch of performative varnish from a cavalcade of local screen luminaries, called in as a favor for daddy’s little girl. It’s highly ironic that a film so clearly disdainful of power and suspicious of privilege is the beneficiary of the same. (That’s perhaps a bit unfair, although I can’t help but wonder how the film would play with lesser lights on screen. Every cameo is high-powered, making Three Blind Mice an untenable production model for your run-of-the mill first-time director.)

Stepping behind the camera for the first time after a sturdy film and television career, Newtown succumbs to relatively few debut stumbles. He lets his camera run a minute or two past its use-by date, and his dips into seriousness—the artistic fallout from the Iraq war is that too many directors are using it as instant gravitas—dovetail awkwardly with nicely observed chummy chill-out time, but that shouldn’t dim its many redeeming qualities. Short on thematic heft, then, but long on craft: Newtown is a deft and lively director, demonstrating an uncanny knack for eliciting crackling spontaneity from his actors, able to juggle several competing performances with level efficiency. His clever-dick persona—this is a population that loves a well-crafted put-down—is awfully fun to watch, and the relationship between Newtown and his shipmates, fleshed out by Ewan Leslie and Toby Schmitz, rings with breezy camaraderie. The film’s also deftly paced, and after a spate of irredeemably dreadful features (more on them in a later dispatch) I’m of a mind to praise a film that can simply hit the marks of even reasonably professional filmmaking.

It’s an awful bugbear, but despite Three Blind Mice’s rough-hewn character, there’s definite potential here, and quirky truth too, from a gang of irascible, foul-mouthed Italian-Australian poker players, to an elderly couple with a surreal solution to marital problems. In surveying these, Three Blind Mice is profane, messy, quick to cut down tall poppies or pretension, and coursing with a certain irreverent lust for life. It won’t play well outside of Australia, but it contains every one of this country’s most admirable traits.—JAMES CRAWFORD

By admitting the following, I’m probably a terrible person: I really, really, enjoyed Choke. There are no press screenings at the Sydney Film Festival, meaning that critics—though judging from the sparsely attended press row there seem to be very few about—watch all films with the paying public. What lining up for the day’s tickets every morning lacks in convenience, it more than makes up for in gauging general opinion. Borne along by an enthusiastic audience, which was positively smitten by Sam Rockwell’s turn as a weasely and charming reprobate, I was sucked in, in spite of myself, and oddly able to overlook Choke’s flaws. Like a Seurat painting, it falls apart under the magnifying glass, nothing more than a confusion of garish, brightly colored dots; and yet viewed from far away, in the moment if you will, it is completely beguiling. But I was first seduced by Fight Club too, and Choke is David Fincher’s film reflected in a mirror lightly. Chuck Palahniuk, the dark prince of skewed satire, provides the source material yet again, glossing the same thematic sitting ducks: insanity, help groups, mind numbing employment, officious bureaucracy, the mute middle class desperate for human contact, dime-store psychology blaming negligent parents, and even airlines.

The wrinkle here is that Victor Mancini (Rockwell) goes to Sex Addicts Anonymous, works at a historical re-creation of an American colonial village, and runs a sideline con where, as per the film’s title, he forces himself to choke in restaurants in front of wealthy patrons—who then feel so responsible for bringing Victor back to life that they send him money to care for a bevy of phantom illnesses. Like the rest of Choke, the scam has a kind of perverse logic—Victor dubs it a “savior” experience, where money is traded for a sense of self-worth—but falling for that reasoning also means giving credence to a pretty dire and pessimistic view of the human species.

There are flashes of humanity, delivered by the captivating trio of Rockwell, Kelly Macdonald, and Anjelica Huston. Although greatly reminiscent of her matriarch figures from Wes Anderson’s universe, Huston is a quiet revelation as Rockwell’s asylum-bound mother clinging to the last vestiges of her sanity—less quirky and more brokenly human. However—and here’s an emblem of what’s wrong with Choke—when viewed in flashback, she’s a domineering and self-actualized social protester, and hateful because she’s obliterated her son’s childhood during her life on the run. The about-face that’s required to suddenly identify with a character because of one single epiphany is simply too big of an ask—not that I noticed it at the time, being too much drawn in by its sardonic streak and smug intelligence after days of bleak and protracted observational dramas. Choke’s black and mordant but also impossibly overwritten, excessively structured, and runs around with signal flares directing us towards how clever it is. Palahniuk is bent on eviscerating society for being a dead-end cesspool filled with charlatans, whores, pimps, perverts, hucksters, and false prophets. But what does he offer as an alternative, other than a limp road-to-Damascus conversion? At the time, I was taken in, drawn to Sam Rockwell’s cynical, self-deprecating shtick. But the further I get from Choke, the more I hate it (and hate myself for liking it): the very definition of a guilty pleasure. —JAMES CRAWFORD

Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane is the kind of movie a critic would just as soon let pass without comment. Unchallenging and inoffensive, it gives little to work with, its soft-focus take on a rich novel less outrageous than enervating. The potential for a banalized transposition was always there. Monica Ali's bestseller approached issues of cultural dislocation and female empowerment with sensitivity and nuance, but faint whiffs of Lifetime wafted through at certain moments. In Gavron's hands, those shortcomings find their full flowering. If you had never read Ali's novel, no one would blame you if after Gavron's movie you thought it was a high-toned, paperback romance for housewives.

Opening with idyllic images of the Bangladeshi countryside, Brick Lane doesn't waste time amping up the melodrama. Sisters Nazneen and Hasini play in the fields, even as their mother, in ominous flash cuts, drowns herself in the river (in the book, she dies a different, perhaps less soap-operatic, death). Nazneen in due course gets sent by her father to England for an arranged marriage. Cut to London, 2001: Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), walks the gray streets of Brick Lane, the lush Shangri-La of her childhood a constant waking dream. Shaving off a good chunk of the novel, which depicts Nazneen's adjustment to life in England in the 1980s, the movie does a good job of suggesting an adulthood lived in disappointment—we hear of an infant son who died years earlier, observe a squalid apartment grown too small for Nazneen's family of four, hear of dreams of a return that she has grown used to stifling.

Into this delicate ecosystem intrudes Karim (Christopher Simpson), a young man who becomes Nazneen's lover. Unlike the book, whose view is more panoramic, the screenplay by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones puts the affair front and center. Click here to read the rest of Elbert Ventura's review of Brick Lane.

Castrated twice in Sin City, stabbed and beaten to death in Bully, shot in the face in In the Bedroom, and most recently a mentally abused emotional adolescent in this year's Sleepwalkers, Nick Stahl is steadily carving out a niche for himself as the whipping boy of contemporary American independent cinema. For good or ill, Carlos Brooks's debut feature Quid Pro Quo allows Stahl to graduate from this bit of typecasting, making him less the passive recipient of violence, and more one who endures in its aftermath. A paraplegic Ira Glass-like public radio commentator, Stahl's coyly named Isaac Knott is the survivor of a childhood automotive disaster that claimed the lives of his parents and the use of his legs.

As a PWD (person with disabilities), Knott navigates an AB (able-bodied) world, which the film portrays as alarmingly antagonistic. This is, we learn, a world in which hack cab drivers won't stop for a man in a wheelchair (for fear of being mugged?) and in which no normal woman would knowingly walk into a blind date with a paraplegic. But it's also one in which the wheelchair-bound and those around them talk incessantly about their disability and precious little else -- and in which insidious, able-bodied, but nonetheless endearing perverts attempt to find ways of making themselves incapable of walking. Click here to read all of Leo Goldsmith's review of Quid Pro Quo.

Viewers of Love Comes Lately may find themselves wishing they had curled up with a Phillip Roth book instead. Not that Jan Schutte's film, awkwardly grafted together with three short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, doesn't have its share of charms, most of which are to be found in its glowing supporting cast of veteran female performers. Yet this tale of an 80-year-old Jewish writer making the literary circuit rounds and dealing with a variety of romantic entanglements, is a mostly creaky affair, evocative of not the life at its center so much as the many similarly themed (and less clumsily executed) films that have come before.

With its main narrative thread interrupted by tangential fictions and dream sequences, Love Comes Lately often comes across as a less randy version of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (which was in turn a far more randy remake of Bergman's Wild Strawberries); it's a mostly benign affair, though, and it doesn't probe far enough into its protagonist's deep-rooted neuroses or octogenarian sexual hang-ups. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Love Comes Lately.

I have been holding off writing about You, the Living by Swedish director Roy Andersson, because of a paralyzing uncertainty over how to fully express how singularly bizarro and spellbinding it is. But with so many films elbowing for space in my head, I must strike while memory is still fresh. So begins my imperfect contemplation of a film that, to my experience (I have not yet seen Andersson’s first, Songs from the Second Floor), is pretty much sui generis.

In You, the Living, there is very little resembling normalcy, save for the fact that it’s set in a bland, rather quotidian city. (Though neither the city nor its insipidity should be construed as the root cause for the oddities that transpire.) The action is delightfully unbalanced in spite of the fact that the film is blanketed in a perpetual haze. Gustav Danielsson shoots in the half-light of dawn, the semi-gloom of dusk, or else straining to peek through midday mist, a visual restraint that mutes the film and prevents it from becoming unbearably precious. Shot in single takes, slightly off-center from frontal tableaux, these pallid, largely gaunt, frequently balding Nordic folk get up to some fairly unbalanced extracurriculars, sometimes wending their way into each others’ stories, but most often staying segregated in their own little worlds. Waking hours are strange, recollected dreams even more so. You, the Living’s greatest pleasure however, lies in unexpected minute-by-minute revelations—Andersson’s coup is that the succession of shock-delights continues even when one settles into the appropriate mindset—and so I’ll hold off divulging any more. Cultural touchstones, then, to flesh out my talcum-slippery impressions: imagine a song by the Dukes of Stratosphear played under a damper pedal; a Samuel Beckett play witnessed while wearing earmuffs; an Edward Hopper painting viewed through frosted glass; all of these wrapped up together encompass You, The Living’s lopsided splendor.

You, the Living brings to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where groping for a description from any one point of view results in a skewed, dissatisfactory understanding of the whole. Taken from its episodic, loosely bound structure, it’s cerebral sketch comedy. Appreciated from its visual tenor, Danielsson is working like he’s in the era of silent-cinema proscenium photography. Script-wise, Andersson writes with a kind of contemporary vernacular surrealism, like a more esoteric and skewed Wes Anderson. And in tone, its humor is almost fey. Put these four points of the compass together, and Andersson’s worldview becomes profoundly weird and weirdly profound. Extracted as standalone pieces, the scenes that comprise You, the Living should be elevated to a museum, and dissected as installation video art. Taken individually, they are beautiful and enticing—and yet oddly distant when viewed together because they resist a single interpretation or unifying principle. Except this: being alive is a strange and fraught condition, but it’s more appealing than the alternative. —JAMES CRAWFORD

Encounters at the End of the World is the latest missive from world cinema's Marco Polo / Jack London / Great White Image Hunter, Herr Werner Herzog, out for a deserved large-screen airing before entering its inevitable Discovery Channel rotation. The spoils of Herzog's latest expedition are an enjoyably idiosyncratic series of home movies. Lured by ethereal underwater scenes shot beneath Antarctica's ice, and funded by the National Science Foundation, Herzog disembarks to the tamed final frontier, on the trail of Ernest Shackleton, whose expedition haunts the film in gray archival footage, and whose preserved base of operations is visited before film's end.

Herzog sets up camp at McMurdo Station, a collection of bunker-like dormitories arranged in a microchip grid, a patch of tainted snow overlooking the blank vastness of the Ross Sea. The town houses a few hundred residents, "people who have the inclination to jump off the map"—Herzog's interviewees include a forklift operator who freely quotes from Alan Watts and a journeyman plumber who, in one of those uncomfortably formal framings that the director loves to hang on to, holds up his big, oddly shaped mitts for the camera, citing them as genealogical evidence of royal Mayan ancestry.

In the main, though, his subjects are the descendants of Shackleton, research scientists conquering their tiny kingdoms of expertise: volcanologists describing the best tactic to duck incoming magma, cell biologists descending through punctures in the ice to swim in the protozoan soup, responsible for the movie's keystone images of spectral, ectoplasmic organisms undulating beneath the ice.

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Encounters at the End of the World.

A brace of Takashi Miike films this time, doubled up for this SFF missive because they are both parodies, albeit of radically different stripes. Sukiyaki Western Django is a hot, sticky mess, percolating Sergio Leone’s famous trilogy backwards through Yojimbo, Mad Max, Johnnie To, and Mel Brooks. In this “sukiyaki” western, the man with no name (Hidaeki Ito) arrives in the two-horse “Nevada,” which is spelled out on a weather-beaten signpost in kanji characters. He puts his services up for bidding between two rival gangs: the “Heiki” reds and the “Genji” whites, both dressed like they’ve wandered out, dazed and battered, from some entropic steam-punk future. The whites hate the reds, the reds absolutely loathe the whites, with both vying to control this dead-end backwater and then…what happens next is a little fuzzy—something about a gold rush, a secret treasure, a child born to end the feud, a Gatling gun, and a mess of violence that trips the light between slapstick and brutality. It’s America…but it’s Japan…and I just saw a shotgun blast put a hole—a literal hole a goodly fist in diameter clean to the other side—through someone’s chest. Sweet mercy, what in the holy fuck is going on?

Nothing short of fever-pitch attention will suffice when watching Sukiyaki, and it’s not merely the mental fog that comes from watching five festival movies in one day that leaves me utterly befuddled. Miike makes his Japanese cast deliver their lines in English, with varying degrees of competence, so crucial plot points remain a little vague. But though his actors speak English as through a mouthful of marbles, even the worst of them outstrips Quentin Tarantino, whose delivery, supposedly ironic, actually makes one wonder if he’s been permanently concussed. He positively butchers the opening, a surrealist pasteboard prologue, in which he dispatches some cowboys under an electric blue sky, and then returns right before the climax, to stumble through a wincing cameo of the same gunfighter, now crippled and aging. I understand Tarantino’s presence in the film—he’s given legitimacy to guilty film pleasures (which is what Sukiayki desires to be), and let’s applaud him for that. But lordy, we ought to take up a Uwe Boll–style petition to ensure his Neanderthal countenance never mars the screen again.

Not that it matters; this flick is all about manic self-indulgence, with the merest narrative thread spooled out to bind together ferocious set pieces flecked with comedy. A digression where the Genji leader compares the Red-White feud to the War of the Roses, and insists on being called Henry after Shakespeare’s Henry IV is madcap genius, on par with the mayor from Blazing Saddles. Indeed, so prevalent is the Brooks influence that I half expected to see Count Basie sitting in the desert surrounded by his orchestra. And then, as if on cue, Miike cuts to a Native American trumpeter on a mountaintop, bleating out the film’s baleful theme. There’s humor, intelligence, and an encyclopedic generic knowledge on display, but it doesn’t all hang together. It’s not idiosyncratic or hokey enough to be reckoned a true cult film, and the moments of kinetic violence are spread too thinly by weak humor and perhaps too far apart to captivate a casual audience. In terms of western viewers, I wonder where it’s pitched.

The best bits of Sukiyaki Western Django, then, have to do with language. “You gonna do something, or are you just gonna stand there, whistlin’ Dixie?” when lightly mangled by a samurai henchman, undercuts the bristling one-liners that litter popular American genres. The simple gestures manage to send up the spaghetti western with more potency than any extended fight choreography could. But that’s rather churlish, because Miike has never been a subtle director; chiding him for excess is like criticizing the crown jewels for being gaudy. It’s his entire reason for being.

Of course, he has another: straight-up cruelty, from Ichi the Killer on down. Crows Episode 0 is awash in carnage and bloodshed, but the way it’s effected makes for an incisive critique. John Stewart (or is it David Letterman?) has a recurrent skit on late-night TV where U.S. government transcripts from, for example, a House Oversight Committee are re-enacted by children. Stewart invariably selects scenes showing congressmen and women at their worst, suggesting that the public is liable to tolerate petulant discourse in adults that we wouldn’t dream of were it coming from the mouths of babes. Crows Episode 0 is the cinematic equivalent, transposing a yakuza power struggle to a high school. With teachers almost wholly absent, Crows High School’s only purpose is to beget violence, with packs of impossibly stylish teenagers vying for control of the school by beating each other, again and again to a bloody pulp. Why? For one new transfer, Genji Takaya (Shun Oguri), it’s a self-motivated quest preparing him to take over his father’s yakuza business. For everyone else, the question seems to be: Well, why not? Miike puts a lot of heavy, heavy violence on display, which, when synchronized to chest-rattling Foley work, packs a visual and physical wallop. To a point. With so much repetition, the brawls become numbing and highly unsexy and mechanical, like fisticuffs porn, especially by the time the interminably long final clash rolls around. All of Miike’s efforts are part of a strategy to destabilize the genre and undercut its glamour. The hottie from the grocery store is the gangster’s moll, a rival’s weakness is that he’s unable to meet girls, and testaments to loyalty (“I’ve known him all my life”) become laughably hollow. Against such callow kids, the gangster flick is reflected as a dead end, irredeemable genre; Takashi Miike bleeds it dry, leaving it a desiccated corpse for anyone with the temerity to follow. —JAMES CRAWFORD

There’s a comforting ease (or laziness) to writing about a new Guy Maddin, regardless of one’s ultimate opinion of the film itself. Maddin is one of those rare filmmakers who neither progresses nor retreats, neither stultifies nor excites. His intricately Lilliputian creativity, his faux-naiveté, and his not-quite smugness operate blissfully free of the relevant or the revelatory, at the comfortable junction of hobbyism and careerism. Kino Delirium, indeed—as with all Maddin (excluding, perhaps, the blessedly brief and rather exhilarating The Heart of the World), all declarations of extremity are cozily couched in quotation marks. Is the enthusiastic embrace of each new offering at least partially due to the fact that one need never risk being moved? Maddin might be or might have been a wild man in his much publicized (not least by himself) private life, but any grand passion in his films is pitched solely in the key of twee. Maddin’s cannibalized, half-imaginary evocations of the cinematic past—shreds of German Expressionism, film noir, and Soviet proletkult wrapped up with the arcana of the Canadian flatlands—renders his films blessedly harmless; indeed, their preciousness is their armor. What rough soul would fain skewer such an innocuous bauble?

What to say, then, of My Winnipeg? The same—perhaps a little more so? Certainly a higher degree of dependably mild amusement (can mildness be heightened?) and a greater volume of genuine, unforced laughs. Click here to read all of Andrew Tracy's review of Guy Maddin's My Winnpeg.

“Maybe you can never really know someone…and maybe that’s all right.” So concludes New Zealander Vincent Ward in Rain of the Children, narrating the docudrama he wrote, directed, produced, appears in—and already made 30 years earlier. Ward enters into a seamless co-production with himself, recapitulating In Spring One Plants Alone, the 1978 documentary in which he recorded the daily existence of Puhi, an elderly Maori woman from the Tuhoe tribe. Acknowledging sensitive youth’s bluster and certitude, Ward realizes how little his younger self understood Puhi, and he now undertakes an artistic archaeology. Rain of the Children excavates newsreels, still photographs, and his own prior work, melding it with breathlessly gorgeous images shot in the last few years, including dramatic re-enactments of pivotal moments in Puhi’s life and nonfiction footage. It’s all designed to essay a fuller understanding of his now-deceased subject, but as Ward’s own epilogue suggests, it’s an ingenuous act that ultimately proves futile.

By indirection, Ward finds direction out, plumbing the depths of New Zealand’s lamentable history with its natives. North America has dealt with its centuries-old native past by fobbing them off on casinos; in this part of the world, the legacy of oppression and murder is still very raw and close to the surface, because the elemental tragedies perpetrated by white folks are still remembered by living Indigenous individuals. (To bring context, newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s first act of parliament was to apologize for the “stolen generation” of children who were forcibly, and paternalistically, taken from their parents as recently as the 1960s.) The lead-in to Puhi’s story begins around the turn of the last century, following a particularly vicious bout of European-inflicted genocide. Rua, a Tuhoe bolstered by particular charisma and belief in his own divine prophecy, emerged to give his tribe new hope and identity. Melding Maori beliefs concerning the land with Old Testament Jewish Messianism, Rua led an “insodus” (as opposed to an exodus) up to their promised land, Mount Maungapohatu, in order to establish an isolated commune. Puhi was a spiritual descendent of that enclave, selected by Rua to marry one of his sons, but her life was beset by more privation and tragedy than any three people could endure.

Puhi’s first eleven children die before they reach the age of ten—Miki, the eleventh, appears in Spring, but is non copus mentis—and she becomes the scapegoat for the sickness and starvation that besets her tribe. This unfathomable suffering causes her to believe she’s cursed, an idea to which Vincent Ward becomes credulous witness and excavator. Interviewing Puhi’s descendants and relatives, Ward, slightly greying and handsome, is as much as a star as his actors, re-treading the “insodus” on horseback, and revisiting the stark and beautiful landscape that framed Puhi’s life. It’s an earnest, honest plumbing of memory and loss, butting up against the ineluctable barriers to understanding people in all their full weight and messy complexity. Ward knew Puhi only as this frail figure, perpetually bent over like a question mark from the world’s persecution. Only after all those interviews does he come to grips with the fact that part of her social exile was earned; and only from reviewing his prior footage does he realize the full meaning of her many tortured gestures. Given the apparent impossibility of full comprehension, Ward’s solution—to re-enact events according to conjecture—is just as truthful as any other, because all attempts to comprehend require creative inference. This curse, taking up a good half of Rain of the Children is a pivot where Ward is able to turn some revelations back on his own complicity in bringing Phui’s life to screen, but never at the expense of what is in actuality some very astute ethnographic filmmaking. Ward frames a tantalizing question that elicits speculation as wild and varied as the countryside that frames its narrative. With his softly spoken lilt, Ward seems eager to recede into the background, and as such has an uncanny knack to get his interviewees to tell things that ought not to be spoken of, wheedling taboo out of the elders because his emotional connection and dedication to this story is genuine. Ward leaves himself open to the potentials of the supernatural, and so emerges as a fitting spokesperson for a people whose stories too often remain untold.—JAMES CRAWFORD

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
—Excerpt from The Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman

Like few others practicing the English language, Terence Davies’s voice is capable of generating visceral pleasure. I can think of two others capable of generating, on their own, such unadulterated delight. And in these moments, it seems appropriate to summon the vernacular of perfume: Morgan Freeman, whose faintly sibilant top note gives way to a sweet heart and a faintly gravely base. Or of wine: Patrick Stewart, full-bodied and oaky, with a soft palate and silky finish. (Indeed, someone very clever once wrote that Stewart swills vowels around his mouth like so much fine port.)

Hovering somewhere between professor, politician, and prophet, Terence Davies’s lightly grizzled timbre is deep, sensual, intimate, confessional, and given over to bouts of throttled passion when the subject is ripe. It wends its way through Of Time and the City, Davies’s own documentary on his boyhood home of Liverpool (and beyond to 50-odd years of British history), a reminiscence heavily mediated through stock and archival footage, still photographs, newsreels, others’ home movies, and newly minted high definition footage of his rejuvenated Merseyside home. Crowded holiday beaches, modded-out hipsters, Beatlemania, single mothers pushing prams are the markers of time’s passage. Davies views that passage with bemused intrigue, as though incredulous that his start in life was in such a down-at-the-heels place, but almost perversely thankful that he’s been given such rich autobiographical fodder. Of these, religion proves to be the most decadent, the source of an unexpected tumble into profanity. The annual Orange Day parade is the occasion for unexpected profanity. “Fuck the Pope and all you Feinian bastards,” bellows Davies, but it’s immediately undercut—“whatever that meant,” he follows on, with measured irony, arising no doubt out of his Catholic upbringing.

The way Davies feels about his youth and adolescence, one that was built upon the four pillars of “home, school, the movies, and God,” is encapsulated in a single image: under a chuffing industrial leviathan, a legion of rowhouse chimneys smoking like Gomorrah’s aftermath. If Forties Liverpool wasn’t the poorest of Britain’s major industrial cities, it was bloody well close, rampant with unemployment, poverty, and violence in a country that was being propped up by the Marshall Plan. It must have been a difficult city to love, and yet the thrall of childhood memories imbues any home with a special, almost sacred grandeur. In unpacking his life, Davies acknowledges this fraught push-pull, proposing that “we hate the place we love,” flee from it, and then spend our entire lives attempting to recapture the feeling of that place we abandoned.

His is an elegant and supple mind, politically astute, compassionate, humane, and staggeringly well read. Davies summons Joyce, Marx, de Koenig, and Meerbach to bolster his meditations on youth, maturation, memory, time, and a broadside of other Big Ideas nearly to dense to enumerate. (Truly, Of Time and the City requires—nay, commands—a second or third viewing just to follow Davies around the room.) He quotes whole stanzas of A.E. Housman (the above poem inaugurates the film) and uses Sir Walter Raleigh to lend poetry to, for example, breathless montages of squat, abandoned cinderblock apartments, a singularly unholy amalgam of “municipal architecture and British ugliness.” Davies breaks up the barrage of witticisms, allusions, quotations, and aphorisms, by letting music do some of the heavy lifting. An unexceptional collection of still photographs: docks at dawn, an empty schoolyard shrouded in mist becomes resplendent and exalted when topped out by the ethereal strains of a boys’ choir. But those musical choices don’t always hit the mark. A vignette on the Korean War set to the full duration of “He Ain’t Heavy (He’s My Brother)” is a little too much on the nose, betraying a calculated sentimentality that ill-suits the gravity of the subject. However, taken in the overwhelming weft and weave of Davies’s poised first-person singular, it amounts to a smudge on the Sistine Chapel.

After a fashion, Of Time and the City has the air of an exquisitely structured lecture or an illustrated after-dinner talk over cigars and brandy. That is, until Davies starts to inject his own wryly impassioned views on politics, sport, art, society and sundry, which is when the film becomes something much more personal. In doing so, Davies hazards views that, if not controversial, are at least slightly out of the main. He disdained for the Beatles and the hysteria they generated, in favor of Stravinsky and Mahler (though Davies docks the seriousness of this revelation by a goodly dose of self-recriminating bemusement). He also condescends to hatred for popular sport, because football (soccer) in the modern age has become too venal, and musters volleys of acerbic scorn for the royal family.

No one is too exalted for Davies’s contempt, nothing too low for his exaltation. To he, Queen Elizabeth II is merely “Betty Windsor,” whose opulent coronation evinces at worst utter disdain, at best naïve misapprehension, for the poverty of postwar Britons. To he, public wrestling’s tensed, muscled, grappling bodies are an unapologetic a source of great voyeuristic and physical—there’s that word again—pleasure. So too is the cinema. “I loved the movies,” says Davies, “loved, them, devoured them, swallowed them whole.” But it wasn’t until he witnessed Dirk Bogarde in Victim, “that I discovered something altogether different” in a manner that rivals Serge Gainsbourg for positively dripping sex. Davies’s sexuality is very much on display here, from his awakening, first realized in the darkness of the cinema and the wrestling hall’s sweaty perfume, and actualized in boyhood crushes. Of these, the remembrance of a single moment stands above the rest: a fleeting encounter when a classmate briefly touched Davies’s arm, and he “didn’t want him to stop.” That such an ephemeral moment should stay with him down through the years is devastating—almost too much to bear. At the same time, though, such glimpses into Davies’s soul are so freely given, that, when he “says goodbye to my girlhood” there’s no sense of guilt at undue prying into private affairs. But there is also an inkling of, not quite performativity but a discrete selection of views to be paraded in front of his audience. Which I suppose is just the same as anyone’s default public persona; Davies has merely seen to have it writ large on the screen.

And in truth, there’s nothing from Of Time and the City’s easy fodder—an awful school system, an obscene monarchy, a hypocritical church, and an oppressed home life—that Roger Waters didn’t take to task in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. But Davies is gifted with a hazardously seductive mind. He finds poetry in the prosaic, and when he turns his mind to poetry, well…it has the effect of something close to intoxication. —JAMES CRAWFORD

If only someone would make a fictional gay romance that had as much feeling and depth as Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's Chris & Don: A Love Story. A wistful, at times unbearably intimate study of the life-long love affair that Los Angeles portrait artist Don Bachardy has had with now-deceased British writer Christopher Isherwood, this documentary is wholly suffused with genuine romantic longing, even as it purposefully investigates the complex bonds between the two men—as lovers, as artists, as mentor/protege, as father/son surrogates—with psychological clarity. While in description, a documentary focusing on the experiences of one pair of lovers might sound hermetic, Chris & Don comes across as remarkably expansive; rarely is love depicted onscreen with this much soul-rattling care.

Bachardy has now been living without Isherwood for more than 20 years, and that fact implicitly shapes the melancholy tone of Mascara and Santi's film. Due to their thirty-year age difference, moralizing doubts had been cast on their romance from the very beginning; when they met in 1953, Bachardy was a gap-toothed, wiffle-headed 18-year-old with a cherubic, all-American face as fresh as cream, while Isherwood was already a weathered, well-traveled, Cambridge man of letters in his late forties. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Chris & Don: A Love Story.

When historians deliver their postmortem on the American film industry, they will undoubtedly puzzle over Hollywood's recent woman problem. Just last year, the lousy box-office returns of The Brave One and The Invasion prompted the president of production at Warner Brothers to swear off female leads for good. Though such a statement is preposterous on its face, it's in this context that the theatrical performance of Sex and the City, driven overwhelmingly by women, becomes a talking point for industry analysts eager to suggest that Sex has galvanized a previously untapped audience—this, despite the fact that The Devil Wears Prada, a similarly fashion-driven urban-fantasy confection, took advantage of its appeal to the same under-leveraged demographic two years ago. And it's not just that women are dropping their twelve bucks to see Sex and the City in droves; if the sold-out crowd I saw it with on its opening night is any indication, at least some of them are getting their money's worth. This is not to say that Sex and the City is any good (it isn't), still less that it's duped unsuspecting women into an unabashed celebration of trash. But Sex and the City delivers some pleasure, nostalgic and otherwise, and I am most struck by the tendency of "smart" critics to simply dismiss it out of hand, rather than considering the appeal of this failed movie. Or to put it another way, the relative quality—or lack thereof—of the Sex and the City movie may be the least interesting thing about it.

Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski's review of Sex and the City.

Sydney Film Festival — Day 2

Quiet Chaos, Antonello Grimaldi’s sweet and muted competition entry about a mourning father and daughter, presents the perfect tonic to the blowsy, unimaginative tripe proffered by Mike Leigh on opening night. With poise and restraint, Grimaldi demonstrates the meaning of humane cinema, discreetly observing Pietro (Nanni Moretti) a middle-aged television executive who returns from an act of beachfront heroism to find his wife sprawled across the lawns of his vacation villa, dead of an apparent fall. There is no grand catharsis to be had, as a wordless credit sequence elides most of the funeral details; rather a quietly, beautifully observed working through of sorrow—the numbness that comes in tragedy’s wake and the inexorable, if painful process of returning to some semblance of animation. But Grimaldi shows us something not quite like sorrow. Wanting tears or destructive tendencies, Pietro’s daughter copes unnaturally well with her mother’s passing, betraying a calm that the father finds unsettling, especially so when he comes to the jarring realization that the daughter’s lack of outward sentiment mirrors his own. (For his part, Pietro staves off feeling by tallying lists in his head: for example, the airlines he’s flown during his life, or the past houses he’s lived in.)

Pietro’s playful promise to wait outside his daughter’s school becomes a pact dutifully adhered to, as he begins to loiter all day, every day, in the park opposite. Social anchors like work and friends recede in importance like so much ambient noise, but rather than stray into maudlin gather-ye-roses territory Quiet Chaos, sculpted by Grimaldi’s sensitive direction, slips into beguiling, ingenuous play. Pietro conducts business from his car (highlighted by a delightfully imperious cameo from Roman Polanski), but has no truck with the fraught politics of his workplace. He whiles away the hours in a local café, makes eyes with the lithe blonde who walks her dog in the park, makes games with the autistic boy who also makes a daily stroll with his carer, and generally re-connects with his sense of self. As a premise, Quiet Chaos sounds awful and saccharine; but in practice it ascends to something almost sublime.

Moretti’s hangdog charisma provides much of the film’s buoyancy, his innate mesmerizing quality waging constant war with Pietro’s beleaguered emotional state. There’s a chasm between the outer and the inner, and so Moretti’s performance is more profoundly credible as a picture of grief because of the constant tussle between the two. Pietro is clearly far from perfect, tiptoeing around the edge of several transgressions—reading his wife’s e-mails, bedding his sister in law (and former paramour)—but he always steps away. Through Moretti the father is profoundly moral, breathing grief rather than putting it up for theatrical display; and the actor’s performance is bolstered by Alessandro Pesci, whose photography sets a bar against histrionics. Under Pesci’s circumspect eye, minute gestures, like Pietro’s hand drifting towards his daughter’s—and fluttering anxiously away again, as he recalls that she’s embarrassed by such affection—come close to transcendence.

Quiet Chaos is doggedly un-cynical and wears its emotions on its sleeve, which I suppose puts it in the same stratum as Happy-Go-Lucky. But by being guarded and pensive where Mike Leigh is neither, Grimaldi’s film is a modest marvel. —JAMES CRAWFORD

Based on British writer Blake Morrison's 1993 memoir, When Did You Last See Your Father?, directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, Shopgirl), is a slightly awkward revisiting of the classic melodramatic story wherein a son or daughter must deal with the death of an adversarial parent. At once over-reliant on the visual clichés of its genre (oversaturated light for outdoor scenes, metaphor-reflecting mirrors for indoor ones, slow-motion everywhere) and thoroughly unabashed in juxtaposing the gravity of mortality with the uncouth avenues of expression people take to get through it, the film oscillates wildly between middlebrow preciousness and a genuinely messy understanding of what could very well have been in other hands by-the-numbers Oedipal angst.

When Did You Last See Your Father? is the rare kind of film that can sandwich its inevitable death scene between a depiction of our protagonist's interrupted bathtub masturbation and a lascivious reunion with a former lover, but also the typical film that unimaginatively merges a past and present father-son embrace in a circling 360-degree shot accompanied by flute and string tremolos. Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of When Did You Last See Your Father?.

Hopping a slow tramp steamer to China to avoid rough American justice, beset by pirates on the high seas and kidnapped, accepted as one of their own, and subjected to months of rum, sodomy, and the lash: oh, that some dramatic tale had motivated my exile in Australia. Alas, it hasn’t, and as I near the end of my extended working holiday down under, the 55th Sydney Film Festival has risen to take over the core of the rain-besieged city that I have called home for the past six months. Two and a half weeks will witness nearly 200 films sprawled over five downtown cinemas, across a number of loosely collated subjects. A generous soul would call it ambitious, the more curmudgeonly might say wanton and confused, but to take a more moderate assessment, the SFF, like TriBeCa, lacks a singular ambition in the name of being all things to everyone. But it is opportunistic: on hand there is an Australian section, a mini Carlos Reygadas retrospective to accompany his spare and distressed Silent Light, an Asian alley coinciding with Beijing 2008 preparations, a Mexican sidebar to capitalize on the Cuarón-Iñárritu-del Toro axis hubbub, and a “World Views” omnibus with festival stalwarts Sokurov, Chabrol, and Hong Sang-Soo. The SFF is also the latest institution to explore the dubiously ever-never-emergent revolution of Machinima, balancing its geek cachet with an homage to Deborah Kerr. Iraq war documentaries, the current nonfiction vogue, find a prominent place, nestled alongside something called “Art Cinema,” non-war docs, and a slate of films about musicians and performance. The view from the outset is of a bewildering mess, and as I slog through it all, I’ll be sending out missives as frequently as is practical.

With an overture at international relevance, the 2008 Sydney Film Festival is also the first to host an official competition, twelve films feted a