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

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

A new almost-musical from Ireland, "Once" neatly transcends even the hoariest of cliches about the sublime communicative powers of pop music. This is a treat and a surprise, as films this slight and unassuming often seem more apt to curl up into themselves than approach any sort of expansiveness. And make no mistake, "Once" is slight. A tentative love story between two musicians framed through the lens of an erstwhile folk musical, "Once" is a tiny movie in the best sense: full of minuscule gestures and glances laden with meaning, and carrying the sense of something intricately labored over so as to provide the impression of simplicity and ease.

Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert's review.

"One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again."
-Thomas Paine

The abovementioned describes the spectrum over which Jean-Claude Brisseau's filmmaking hopscotches, and it's the tension in that risk-taking that makes him essential—even (especially?) when he produces a frustration like The Exterminating Angels. François (Frederic van den Driessche), a middle-aged filmmaker, burrows into a vaguely defined new project that aims to excavate mysteries of intimacy: generally, the feminine sexual imagination; specifically, the female orgasm. Such a film being necessarily a collaboration, he begins an unusually rigorous audition process: actresses masturbate in front of him and, inhibition uncorked, encouraged by their director's stoical receptivity, reveal intimate details of their sexual history.

Read the rest of Nick Pinkerton's review of Jean-Claude Brisseau's Exterminating Angels.

I doubt that anyone will ever match the balanced stridency and sentimentality that Jonathan Richman's song "Give Paris One More Chance" manages as a bursting, corny catalog of everything right about "the home of Piaf and Chevalier," but Avenue Montaigne takes a crack. The film's helmed by Daniele Thompson, a relative latecomer to direction but a professional screenwriter since 1966, with a resume that covers all of subsequent popular French cinema. I mean popular, not acclaimed: she had a hand in the eighties teen romp La Boum, the generational impact of which in France was at the seismic level of John Hughes—if you think, based on the art-house stuff that makes it stateside, that the average French moviegoer is a creature of immaculate, elevated taste, think again. Having worked at a video store, I can testify that La Boum still out-rents Claire Denis films by a 1000:1 margin among Francophones.

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton’s review of Avenue Montaigne.

A whole hoard of reviews of new releases from Reverse Shot are up and ready to read over at indieWIRE…so if you’re trying to figure out whether to go see Nicole Kidman giving Robert Downey Jr. a full body shave or Ashley Judd pulling herself up by her Southern bootstraps (hint: just go see Iraq in Fragments, instead), check ‘em out. And there’s more to come this week, on The Aura, Fast Food Nation, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes and For Your Consideration.

“…of course characters reference mutual acquaintances who never actually show up in the movie (preferably with funny nicknames—the gold standard is still Menace II Society's Willie Lump-Lump). Toss in a calm-before-the-storm, south-of-the-border idyll a la Peckinpah—Ayer currently has a remake of The Wild Bunch in production—and you have Harsh Times: a movie for guys who like movies (that feel exactly like other movies).”

Nick Pinkerton on Harsh Times

“Though it's at once distant, almost artless in its documentary-style directness, it retains an intimacy in its loving attention to detail.”

Kristi Mitsuda on The Cave of the Yellow Dog

“As with many other actor-turned-directors, Joey Lauren Adams focuses on performance rather than the visual capacities of the medium. Come Early Morning is neither a cinematic achievement nor is it highly original; but if you look closely, it's less middling and more provocative than it first appears.”

Kristi Mitsuda on Come Early Morning

“The details surrounding Diane's marriage are smeared to imply that our heroine's creative soul's been carapaced by the expectations of Fifties domesticity—and already uneducated reviewers are buying this reductive story wholesale…”

Nick Pinkerton on Fur

“Despite its flaws, Iraq in Fragments marks an important turning point in the still short history of the Iraq War documentary. No longer content to simply portray the American side of the conflict, filmmakers are finally showing what things look like from various Iraqi perspectives.”

Michael Joshua Rowin on Iraq in Fragments

It's pretty obvious to anyone who's paying attention that each week brings far more movies to the screen than humanly possible to keep up with. In honor of the steady glut, we're working with indieWIRE to revamp and expand our weekly column. Now, instead of one review a week done by three writers, the Reverse Shot cabal and assorted friends and family will put out more traditional single reviews of up to 20 films a month. This all starts today with Jeff Reichert's review of Volver.

Enjoy.

Check out our latest indieWIRE roundup on Andrew Bujalski's second feature Mutual Appreciation. This is one of our longest in recent memory--it's nice to see how a film (and filmmaker) so ultimately modest in means and intents can still spark a dialogue about the definition and role of independent film in the theatrical marketplace. It's also a pretty good movie. I'd call it "not-too-shabby," except, well, it's tremendously shabby. In a good way.

This caps five weeks in a row that we've devoted our column to new works of American "Independent" Film. To recap: Quinceanera, Half Nelson, Factotum and The Quiet. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the first time this has happened in the nearly two years we've been running it. Some of these films are actually performing quite well at the box office, and I'd be tempted to label this a kind of mini-resurgence, except that our panelists' feelings on all of these films are largely mixed, when not downright hostile. This begs the question: Should we celebrate the success of homegrown narrative features, even if we don't particularly like the movies in hopes that this might be a short-term loss/long-term gain situation? Does the success of these films work to remind folks that there's more to independent cinema than Little Miss Sunshine or the next Hott Topics documentary? Or do they merely restate tropes we decry in Hollywood features, but on a smaller scale, one marked by the "authenticity" of the indie scene? Discuss.

And don't go see The Illusionist. Blech. But why would you when the terrific Miami Vice is still on screen...

...another Sundance Alum takes flight. And Reverse Shot is there. Half Nelson fares far better at the hands of our panel than last week's Quinceanera.

So, have you heard about this hott new indie film that picked up a bunch of major awards at Sundance? It's called Quinceanera, opens Friday and this week's RS on indieWIRE panel doesn't exactly care for it. Hateful, hateful.

Another week, another indieWIRE column. This time out we tackle Patrice Chereau's superlative Gabrielle starring Isabelle Huppert and Pascal Greggory. For more, check out our New York Film Festival review from last year and a little additional blogging. This is a film not to be missed.

Laurent Cantet, director of Human Resources and Time Out, has a new film out tomorrow called Heading South. I've already written about it for this very blog, and our new indieWIRE column is devoted to it.