[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

If writer-director Christopher Zalla's intent in "Sangre de mi sangre" was to sympathetically and realistically depict the plight of impoverished Mexican illegal immigrants trying desperately to eke out anonymous existences in urban U.S. areas, why does he litter his workmanlike debut film with characters directly out of Hispanic-cliche central casting? Though it's infinitely better than last year's execrable "Trade" (the worst movie...ever?), Zalla's film similarly traffics in south-of-the-border stereotypes, opening, of course, with the usual touristy-dangerous shots of Mexico, set to "indigenous" rhythms, which only prove to further distance the viewer from what should be a more intimate, humane experience.

One can see why "Sangre de mi sangre" ("Blood of My Blood)," originally titled "Padre Nuestro" when it won the 2007 Sundance Grand Jury Prize (one can only wonder why the film's title was changed so drastically after garnering such accolades, especially in such an overstuffed indie film climate, where it's generally hard to keep releases straight), has appealed to festival juries and audiences. It has a classical narrative structure, easily identifiable themes of redemption, a whiff of the "exotic," and careful, adept, evenly lit cinematography: in other words, it's palatable where it should be emotionally and thematically knotty. Even at the climax, when Zalla sets up the film's most provocative moral crisis, he still falls back on misdirections and narrative withholdings in the name of suspense.

The crosscut clockwork plotting works at a basic level, but too often at the abandonment of the people fueling it. So single-minded is Zalla's double-pronged storytelling that there isn't much room for nuance, a problem that's exacerbated when dealing with stock characters such as these. Juan, though somewhat redeemed by Diego's gradual embracing of his paternal instinct, is painted broadly as thieving, backstabbing, horny, and crass; Pedro, meanwhile is all wide-eyed, childish naivete--one of his establishing scenes shows him goofing around in the driver's seat of a vacant truck, playing with its CB radio--until his encounters with the world-weary, drug-addicted Magda (who's something of a silly, Dickensian construct herself) force him to desperate, sobering measures.

"Sangre de mi sangre" comes close to hitting rock bottom during a lurid interlude in which Pedro and Magda agree to perform sex acts for a greasy Benjamin Franklin look-alike in an abandoned warehouse, their tentative humping set to an inappropriately percussive soundtrack. It's the kind of scene that's right out of the "kids on the street" handbook, usually trotted out near the end of the second act as an illustration of how low the characters have fallen. The film is always as schematic as this, even if the generally captivating Hernandez and Ochoa manage some effective pathos during the film's abrupt climax. For a gimmick-free, non-pandering look at life in New York's urban outskirts, seek out Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop," a film that dares to view its characters with a sympathy free of cultural condescension.

[Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and the managing editor and staff writer of the Criterion Collection.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

"What do you wanna know?" A young Marine casually utters this question at the outset of "Battle for Haditha," and it's a fitting epigraph to Nick Broomfield's blistering, ambitious film. The query prefaces the PFC's offhand account of his service and the conditions of his barracks in Haditha, Iraq, but it could easily be Broomfield's own inquiry to his audience: In a singularly brutal and cloudy episode of the war, a group of Marines is attacked by insurgents and retaliates by unleashing their notion of justice on a small residential enclave, killing some twenty-four people. What do you want to know about these events, and what means do you have to figure them out?

With its barrage of blood and dust, "Battle for Haditha" attempts to present a ground-level and largely unmediated perspective on the motivations of the players involved, including the insurgents who instigate the skirmish and the Marines whose reaction yields devastating consequences. (Of the latter, the frazzled, but sympathetic Corporal Ramirez, impressively played by newcomer Elliot Ruiz, is the primary focus.) With actors often speaking in candid soliloquies adapted from their real-life experiences, the film's improvisatory style wavers between credible and histrionic, but the overall effect is undeniably powerful. No less confrontational than Broomfield's own on-camera persona, these scenes of voiced anger and fear -- and the harrowing brutality that ensues -- serve as a reminder that, while one is watching a film, the people and problems are real.

In the gradually expanding subgenre of Iraq War films, the question of mediation -- how we, as the non-combatants at home, experience the war, authentically or erroneously -- has become something of a cliche. From the films that documented the invasion (like Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and Jehane Noujaim's "Control Room") to more recent films about the attendant fallout ("Operation: Dreamland" and "Iraq in Fragments"), cinematic renderings of the Iraq War seem to be as anxious about who's holding the camera (or manipulating the footage) as they are about what's being filmed.

Still more recent films, like Brian De Palma's "Redacted" and especially Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure," are even in some sense less concerned with the subject of the war itself than how it is conveyed to us through the media. These films begin with the assumption that one cannot begin to tease out the experience of the war -- its true toll on human life -- without first sorting out the question of the circuitous and misleading ways that information gets to us. To be sure, this question of media distortion continues to be important, but isn't there a good deal more to be learned from our five years in Iraq?

"Battle for Haditha" addresses this issue of mediation directly in its final moments with a cable-news summation of the film's events, complete with the brutally boiled-down cable news headline: "Ramirez: Hero or Bad Guy?" But it is the event itself -- and not how it is reported or misrepresented -- that fascinates Broomfield, and this is what distinguishes his film. Debates about mediation are important, but there is also, lest we forget, an actual war going on. Perhaps this film will be branded as hubristic in its attempt to capture a "real Iraq" in a medium -- the docudrama -- that seems to inherently deny realism, while supposedly shrewder, more postmodern filmmakers have all but labeled such efforts impossible. But Broomfield's point is that these images of war, as plastic and pliable as they seem to us, nonetheless mark the deaths of thousands. As problematic and knotty as it can be, "Battle for Haditha" is still a bold effort to grapple with what truth lies behind these images, rather than simply throw one's hands up in the face of them.

[Leo Goldsmith is a frequent contributor to Reverse Shot, as well as an editor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Playwright John Guare must have had Indian director Tarsem Singh (or as he's often simply known, Tarsem) in mind when he wrote about the increasing exteriorization of the term "imaginative": "Why has 'imagination' become a synonym for style?" Singh makes films that inspire a bevy of similarly misused adjectives: "sumptuous," "surreal," "eye-popping," "hallucinatory." He specializes in audacious compositions, shoots in exotic locales, fits his actors in unique costumes that appear simultaneously futuristic and old-fashioned, and in only two features, including the new and fifteen years in the making "The Fall," has shown a predilection for stories about, yes, "the power of the imagination."

Based on the 1981 Bulgarian film "Yo Ho Ho" and cowritten by Singh with Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis, "The Fall" takes place in Los Angeles 1915 ("Once Upon a Time," of course) and stars Lee Pace as Roy Walker, a movie stunt man who winds up in the hospital after falling off a horse on the set. Laid up and unable to bear the sight of his nurse girlfriend (Justine Waddell) leaving him for a handsome star, Roy decides to kill himself by convincing five year-old Romanian immigrant Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), also in the hospital recovering from a fall, to steal him a bottle of morphine so he can take a fatal dose.

He befriends her by telling a fantastic fairy tale in which he plays the Black Bandit, Alexandria his daughter, the nurse a princess, the star the evil Governor Odious, and a group of ragtag supporting foreigners (The Indian, The Italian) from the hospital the Black Bandit's loyal followers, including a peacock-coated and monkey-aided Charles Darwin (Leo Bill), each holding their own personal grievances against the villain.

Liberally taking its structure and epic storybook whimsy from "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Princess Bride," "The Fall" squeezes every bit of "imagination" out of lavish costume designs and the two dozen countries used as settings: exotic temples, swimming elephants, a city of blue stone buildings, whirling dervishes, a huge sheet dripping blood in the middle of a desert. Add religious overtones ("Are you trying to save my soul?" Roy asks Alexandria), rich symbolism (teeth, butterflies, dolls), a self-referential paean to the magic of purely visual cinema (the film concludes with a montage of silent-era slapstick classics), and you've got a whole lotta movie.

Then why does "The Fall" end up feeling so empty? Singh should be given credit where it's due: he's followed through on his vision with a monumental undertaking, and he's also improved upon the empty-headed horror of "The Cell" by crafting a film both fun and serious in nature. But this labor of love doesn't come together because its story -- so essential in a movie about storytelling, after all -- just isn't there. The characters on the reality side of the rainbow are completely one-dimensional, which leads Singh to make terrible decisions like seemingly allowing Untaru room for improvisation (her wriggling and adorable line readings grate).

On the fantasy side, his exaggerated art direction and color schemes -- red blood is RED; desolate locations are DESOLATE -- grow punishing in their immodest scale and melodramatic excess, forcing the often sloppily told tale to take a backseat to the director's visual grandiosity. I'm not ungenerous enough to say certain moviegoers would be wrong to be moved by "The Fall," and maybe my disapproval is a simple matter of taste for the unassuming over the ostentatious; but I also can't help but compare it to Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest, "Flight of the Red Balloon," a film that so gently and delicately creates a world of enchantment out of the raw elements of everyday life that it proves wonder can be achieved without bludgeoning the viewer into submission.

[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Though it's as sullen and damp-grey as its morose 15-year-old protagonist, Argentinean filmmaker Lucia Puenzo's directorial debut "XXY" doesn't really get inside the mind of young Alex as much as watch her with an awkward combination of fascination and empathy. It's both a success and a failing on the new filmmaker's part; her intention in making "XXY," to humanely depict a character who might in other films or literature be relegated to oddball supporting status, is undoubtedly noble. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on Alex's differences (she was born with both female and male genitalia), rather than offering other facets of her life for consideration, the film slightly shortchanges what could have been a beautifully full portrait of a teenager going through radical inner and outer turmoil.

Rarely is there a conversation in the film's ninety minutes that doesn't pertain to Alex's condition: her and her parents' indecision about whether to excise her male organs, now that she has stopped taking hormone medication (though she identifies as female, would that be cosmetic or simply castration, they wonder?), does form the narrative backbone, but with so many moments devoted to family members simply staring off into ominous, windswept spaces (in one scene, her mother, nicely played by Valeria Bertuccelli, suddenly reminisces about Alex's birth at a cloudy, rocky beach), one would think they had just begun thinking about these difficult choices at the film's outset.

Similarly, when Kraken sorrowfully tries to connect with a local gas station attendant who had a sex-change operation many years ago, he stumbles over his words "I have a daughter . . . a son..."; the thought that an ostensibly loving father hasn't in more than a decade been able to properly identify his own child as either male or female speaks to a certain lack of real-world grounding here.

But it's Alex and Alvaro's desperate stabs at sexual contact and emotional understanding that form the core of "XXY," and Puenzo does depict their inelegant fumbling with penetrating, if still dour, capability. Piroyansky effortlessly enacts the slack-jawed, tortured inwardness of the dizzied teenaged male who doesn't know what to do with his sudden bursts of sexual aggression, and Efron, with her hollowed-out eyes, attenuated bone structure, and intimidating stare (if there's anything confident about her it's her anger) is a compelling figure: shot in gritty, caressing close-ups by Puenzo, she looks at least thirty years old, wise beyond her years yet hobbled by disgust at her own body. Alex dares others to look at her, embracing her oddness as an emotional strength, and Efron cunningly depicts that mix of fragility and self-possession.

If only the entire film were as daring and untidy as Alex. Puenzo's debut is too overdetermined and saddled with explicit metaphor; it's the kind of film that deigns to have a pet lizard crawling over Alex's feet (most lizards are sexually dimorphic...get it?) while she reads to herself (aloud!) from a biology book about the evolutionary and embryonic dominance of the female sex. If Puenzo had found anything compelling about her characters outside of their most sensationalistic traits, then "XXY" might have been a more forceful unorthodox coming-of-age story; instead she abandons them at a particularly gloomy shore.

[Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and the managing editor and staff writer of the Criterion Collection.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

There's rarely a moment in "Son of Rambow" that isn't polished or primped for prime demographic impact; a whirlwind for those who get nostalgic for British school-chum pictures, Sylvester Stallone actioners, early Eighties camcorders, and breakdance-era outre outfits, Garth Jennings's ingratiating lark would seem to court snorts of recognition more than active engagement. Yet this backward-looking pint-sized "Ed Wood" often sails by on the charms of its formula - it's an appealingly rambunctious boy's adventure in the guise of a paean to the artistic process (not the other way around). Along with "Be Kind Rewind," Jennings's film may be on the crest of a wave of fondness for the days of videotape, although unlike Michel Gondry's film, which infantilized a community of urban dwellers by placing them in a cultural vacuum, "Rambow" uses the creation of taped home movies as a coming-of-age vessel. The children in "Rambow," set around 1983 or thereabouts, might as well be wielding digital cameras or pocket-sized cell-phone cams (and in fact, the film might have been less self-consciously precious had it been set in the present).

Raised without music, television, or movies, Will immediately takes a shine to the dazzlingly violent images Lee shows him (Will's untapped yearning for excitement is illustrated in a series of violent flipbooks he doodles in his spare time), and, embarking on a rampage of hormone-fueled creation, the two boys record their exploits in a half-improvised narrative of action-movie tropes, even inviting the hugely popular pretty-boy French exchange student and wannabe actor Didier into the fold. The intended outcome: a slot in the local young filmmakers' contest.

A mite too glossy to vividly depict either the asceticism of Will's home life (the indifferently directed scenes of the boy and his colorless mama seem like outtakes from "Witness") or the grungy video aesthetic they mean to capture in their "Rambo" cover version (Gondry's junkyard visuals at least created a terrifically analog wonderland for his characters to play in), "Son of Rambow" jumps uneasily between gritty and surreal, never quite plumbing the depths of the childhood imagination as winningly as darker though more convincingly fanciful films like "Heavenly Creatures" or "The Butcher Boy."

Instead we get some perfunctorily designed sequences using chalky animated graphics to represent the diary-like scribblings of Will's mind as he runs through the woods, which better approximate show-off techniques of grown-up film artists than a kid's boundless imagination. And for a period piece so obsessive about specifics, there's a surfeit of logic gaps (Patrick Swayze name-dropping in 1983? An oddly perfect sound mix on bootlegged video?). Meanwhile, Jennings's depiction of the wholly alien, red leather-booted, Michael Jackson-aping Didier -- shown one too many times at the head of a dorky-cool posse strutting straight for the camera -- strikes as rather one-note, a repetitive, rude interruption to Will and Lee's process rather than a nicely dovetailed subplot.

Thankfully, for a film ostensibly about the nobilities and failures of invented role models (Lawrence, Didier, John Rambo), "Son of Rambow" stays playful and refreshingly unpreachy, spending most of its time rocketing through the empowering backwoods dangers the boys get into while creating their opus, from near drownings to close calls with at-close-range arrows (no PSA, this). Milner and especially the less blank Poulter (whose freckly, porcine features can easily morph from mischievous to touchingly humbled in the blink of an eye) never fall into Freddie Highmore-esque pathos, and the writer-director refrains from stargazing, dewy appeals to the "magic" of cinema, even at the film's effectively emotional denouement. Jennings devises a winning closing moment that nimbly ties all of his themes together, and it's the clincher that will guarantee a bevy of strong reviews: there's no better way to win the heart of a film critic than by situating the movie theater as a locus of redemption.

[Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and the managing editor and staff writer of the Criterion Collection.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Nostalgic, deeply felt, and refreshingly astute, "Fugitive Pieces" is something of a rare bird these days -- a big-budget, transnational historical drama that actually justifies its scope and subject matter with more than visual opulence. On the surface, it looks like the kind of mainstream art-house fare that marries historical romance with a superficial exoticism; with its meandering sense of space and time and its rich sensual engagement, Anne Michaels's novel has drawn comparisons to Ondaatje's "The English Patient," and similarly Podeswa's adaptation will draw comparisons to Minghella's film. But what might have been an overly sentimental romance for uptown crowds is saved by its clear intelligence and its readiness to tackle the history and representation of the Holocaust in ways that are not at all facile.

Pirouetting through Beer's life, the film employs voiceover not as expository score-keeping, but as a poetic and, I dare say, even scholarly counterpoint to what's onscreen. To be sure, the film delivers jaw-dropping seascapes and enviably languid Mediterranean afternoons -- oscillating between the grey, watery dimness of Toronto and Poland, and the gold-blonde light of Zakynthos -- but it balances these with a surprising seriousness about history and memory, companionship and love. The film recalls the recent work of Terrence Malick, even if Podeswa's use of voiceover narration is slightly more conventional, adopting a confessional, and less purely evocative, air. This is to say that "Fugitive Pieces" is satisfying and deeply engaging where it might have stopped at being simply florid.

Much of this is thanks to Podeswa's assured tone, which manages to relate Anne Michaels's source material in a way that only occasionally seems bookish or expurgated. Translating the debut novel of an accomplished poet to cinema can be no easy task, but the film manages to give enough attention to its many characters, like Jakob's neighbors, themselves survivors of the Holocaust who seem doomed not to outlive the bitterness of their experience.

As Athos Roussos, a warm, but no less conflicted father figure, the mesmerizing Rade Serbedzija offers a nice 180 from his turn as the oily Mr. Milich from "Eyes Wide Shut," and Ayelet Zurer's Michaela provides a maternal sensuality that eventually awakens Jakob from his writerly (but admittedly quite cushy) exile. Most importantly, Stephen Dillane is smartly cast as Jakob -- the actor's mix of intelligence and vulnerability sustains a voiceover that could easily have become monotonous or maudlin. His boyish looks allow one to overlook his otherwise anomalous Irish brogue and keep even a late-breaking sex scene (complete with succulent apricots and toe-sniffing) from seeming too overblown.

In some ways, the film is a Holocaust story without the Holocaust, like Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah" though of course with an entirely different intent. What Jakob, like Lanzmann, attempts is to unearth his family's experience indirectly, through records and the testimony of others, and through ghostly hallucinations and reconstructed memories. But Jakob's project is one fated to irresolution, and as his life and work progress it becomes clear that he will never satisfactorily learn the fate of his mother and sister. Unlike a lot of films about the experience of the author (Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" being only the most recent), Podeswa's film effectively demonstrates the emotional mechanics of writing, how Jakob's work functions to mitigate the scars of his early trauma and help him move on. In this way, what's most daring about "Fugitive Pieces" is that it broaches not only how to remember the Holocaust but also how to forget it, or at least how to invoke its ghosts without becoming one.

[Leo Goldsmith is a frequent contributor to Reverse Shot, as well as an editor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Sixties art-house standby Claude Lelouch is, as it turns out, alive and well and living in Paris. He's even directed a new film; the title, "Roman de gare," incessantly punned with in the film, apparently refers to those cheap paperback thrillers available at train stations, tawdry stuff good for a vacation perusal. A glance at my unusually thick press kit shows an interviewed Lelouch defensive about his alleged status as a "popular" or "mass" director (everything is relative) -- hence his adoption of X material.

Resistant at first -- naturally, as Pinon, best remembered in the U.S. from Jean-Pierre Jeunet's films, has the squelched face of a deep-sea fish -- Huguette eventually acquiesces to his offer of a ride. Is he the escaped killer? The victim-to-be ghostwriter? Something else entirely? Regardless, anyone who's seen a movie will correctly predict that Pierre ends up posing as the absent boyfriend for Huguette's rustic family (they live one of those fetishized fantasies of rural life, unchanged since Petain's stand at Verdun). Thus the second foreboding: "The fox is loose in the henhouse," the potential assassin invited into vulnerable intimacies.

The idea, I suppose, is that Pinon's ugliness could equally well be read as endearing or sinister, though the film never develops any real sense of threat. For much longer than it has any right to be, "Roman de gare" is a very watchable, even involving, movie. All of this is thanks to Mme. Dana, a French screen neophyte. It's difficult to say how much of an actress she is, but she's extraordinarily appealing -- her features are pleasingly barbaric, her voice raw and dry -- and Lelouch has the sense to allow her ample time close-up in center screen.

The inevitable droop occurs when Huguette recedes, and the film defers its attention to ponderously coiling in its harvest of red herrings, opening the field to a population of dull secondary characters and double-crosses that produce a cumulative effect more tiresome than astonishing. Paraphrasing the old "Suspiria" tagline, the only thing more tedious than "Roman de gare"'s first 10 minutes is the last half hour.

[Nick Pinkerton is a Reverse Shot staff writer, a contributor to Stop Smiling, and a regular critic for the Village Voice.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Often when it comes to Errol Morris, the more you see, the less you know. Some documentarians aim to answer and resolve, but Morris is almost too content to leave us adrift in ambiguity, regardless of the political, moral, and epistemological repercussions. After a New York Film Festival screening of his last film, the Oscar-winning "The Fog of War," the woman seated next to me was angry -- violently, vocally angry -- at what she perceived to be the film's sympathetic treatment of Robert McNamara (or should I say, its failure to unequivocally indict him?). I wondered then: why the vitriol? Was it because she disagreed with the film, or because it challenged something she had previously thought she knew to be true? Uncertainty can be an upsetting thing.

"Standard Operating Procedure" is a twisted investigative documentary that purposely doesn't add up. Morris interviews the "bad apples" who perpetrated the disgraceful acts of Abu Ghraib; he shows the photographic evidence of their misdeeds; Sabrina's letters to her partner, written at the time, are read aloud as Morris's camera scans the text; investigators describe their investigations; lurid recreations of the atrocities play out as Danny Elfman's score obtrudes on the proceedings. But the power of the film rests not in Morris's ability to create a coherent idea of Abu Ghraib through these disparate elements but rather in his ability to render such a master narrative impossible. Sabrina's letters are tortured, guilt-ridden, and sad. So how do we make sense of her smiles and thumbs-up to the camera in picture after picture? In her interview, Sabrina insists that she simply can't resist posing for the camera -- but really, thumbs up next to a dead, decomposing body, just because you need something to do with your hands? Meanwhile, Lynndie England defends herself valiantly throughout her interview, but she still lets out a damning chuckle after recalling how one prisoner was made to masturbate at length in front of her. What -- or whom -- can we trust in this movie, besides the photographs themselves?

Morris has already drawn criticism for the overt aestheticization of his reenactments; such complaints don't so much miss the point as see the point, identify it, and then misinterpret it. "Standard Operating Procedure" sets up competing levels of discourse -- the photograph, the letter, the interview, the reenactment -- and then explodes them, rendering Abu Ghraib itself incomprehensible. Still, it's the need to make sense of Abu Ghraib that drives the film. We must somehow try to understand these events, which seem to stand in direct opposition to our self-image as a nation and our idea of our military. It is not enough to look at a photograph and admit what happened. By tracking and retracking the what, Morris leaves us contending with those most troubling questions: How and why? Uncertainty can be an upsetting thing.

[Chris Wisniewski is a Reverse Shot staff writer, a regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, and director of education at the Museum of the Moving Image.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Diana and Maureen are in the girls' room, gossiping about boys and bio between classes, when shots ring out. It's the sound of an assault rifle wielded by Michael Patrick, the school nerd, on a violent, Columbine-like rampage. How do we know? "Yesterday in trig he told me he was going to bring a gun to school!" Diana explains, just as Michael Patrick bursts through the door. The two girls are cornered, and the lanky gunman, taking some time to reload a weapon that's bigger than he is, gives the girls a choice: Which one should he kill?

By a not-so-subtle elision, Perelman withholds the outcome of Michael Patrick's ultimatum, focusing instead on Diana's life just before and fifteen years after the tragedy. We get, on the one hand, scenes of Evan Rachel Wood as the high school Diana -- all hair and teeth and bubbly good will -- and, on the other, scenes of Uma Thurman as older Diana, busty, maternal, haggard, but still a kooky dresser with butterfly tattoos and an occasional hair-flip. Puzzlingly, but not inelegantly, the film's narrative seesaws back and forth between these two eras, following young Diana's tribulations as the guilt-ridden high school slut (who's contrasted with Maureen, her God-loving, plain-Jane friend) and older Diana's seemingly perfect life of suburban motherhood.

Today Diana still lives in the same town, teaches art history, is married to a dashing professor, and has an angelic, tow-headed daughter named Emma. Diana has placed Emma in the charge of the nuns at the local Catholic school, a move we're to read as a sign of her lingering trauma, like the Guatemalan worry dolls she keeps at her bedside or the vague paranoia that seems to follow her everywhere. Is her husband cheating on her? Has she grown up to be what she and Maureen always feared they'd become: "a hard woman who's angry about everything all the time"? And, as scenes of Diana's iniquitous high school past continue to haunt her present life, we ask, what happened that fateful day in the girl's room?

The answers to these questions don't ultimately amount to much more than a few weirdly puritanical positions on teen sexuality, abortion, and conscience. But if nothing else, "The Life Before Her Eyes" offers a unique take on post-traumatic stress disorder -- or is it an acid flashback? -- weaving flowers, bugs, cougars, William Blake, swimming pools, and "Alice in Wonderland" into Diana's wavy gravy of hallucinations. Cinematographer Pawel Edelman shoots the whole film with the same sort of grotesque plasticity that he brought to the sidesplitting flashback sequences in Ray. But unlike in that film, here there is at least some justification for the artificiality: I won't ruin the head-slapping, faux-Shyamalan ending, but let's just say that the film's fey title is not quite as nonsensical as it sounds.

[Leo Goldsmith is a frequent contributor to Reverse Shot, as well as an editor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot

With the controversial Beijing Olympics just around the corner, the eyes of the world continue to attentively watch the rapid and profound changes taking place in the social, cultural, and environmental life of China, currently staking a claim as the global market's most powerful economy. "Young & Restless in China," a documentary in the vein of the ongoing "Up" series, examines how these radical transformations are affecting the latest Chinese citizens to enter the workforce, a dislocated and confused generation of young people awkwardly caught in the move from, as director Sue Williams puts forth, "idealism to materialism." It's a shift directly influenced by the political and economic reforms that have turned strict, repressive communism into destabilizing, still repressive quasi-capitalism, and Williams gets close to a wide range of subjects who illumine the challenges now facing this generation and the future of China.

Williams checks in on the sampling's individuals each year from 2004 to 2007, and plans to keep doing so until 2024 for follow-up installments. It's an ambitious project, but one not beyond the grasp of someone who's been directing documentaries about China since 1989. "Young & Restless in China" displays remarkable compassion toward its subjects, all of whom feel comfortable enough in front of the camera to express their hopes, concerns, and resentments. The same level of understanding extends toward very different subjects: on one hand there's someone like Ben Wu, a so-called "returning turtle" who attended business school in America and now works full time as both a consultant and an entrepreneur attempting to create a Starbucks-like franchise of Internet cafes; on the other there's Wei Zhanyan, a dropout forced to work to make money for her brother's education as a headset wirer paid 40 cents per hour at a factory with 11 hour days.

Wu is separated from his family, often forcing him to evaluate his priorities, and must struggle with the ethical dilemma of rampant bribery that routinely greases the wheels of business in China; Zhanyan fights for her independence against a family that wishes to place her in an arranged marriage and begins a relationship with a chosen boyfriend even as she spends most of her life grinded down by tedious factory labor. All very different problems, resulting from a speeding economy with no time to slow down for those with moral or social hesitations.

Though Williams captures lawyer Zhang Jingjing and medical resident Zhang Yao's experiences within bureaucratic systems that short shrift the downtrodden (70% of China's population, for example, is uninsured), and rural housewife Yang Haiyan's reunion with her mother who was kidnapped and sold to another family, there's not a lot of action in "Young & Restless." The majority of the film is composed of candid interviews and day-to-day work. It may not make for the most immediately arresting visual material, but with her sights set on a twenty-year sociological study about a country with as many contradictions as people, it doesn't have to be.

[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon.]

An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Many Americans have never heard about the Stalag fiction phenomenon; Ari Libsker's short but valuable documentary, simply titled "Stalags," makes for a troubling, though thoughtful, introduction. Stalags constituted a genre of cheap exploitation novels that briefly thrived in Israel in the early Sixties during the period of the Adolf Eichmann trial, when the atrocities of the Holocaust were initially and tentatively broached in the public sphere. Stalags usually stuck to the same tried and true formula, pawning themselves off as translations of memoirs by American or British soldiers who had been imprisoned during World War II by the Nazis and subjected to sexual humiliation and violence by SS she-devils. In the end the soldier gets to turn the tables by raping and killing his inhuman torturers.

Libsker, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a filmmaker known for investigating uncomfortable topics in relation to Jewish culture (as in his 2004 documentary "Circumcision"), refuses to dismiss the sensationalistic hyperbole of the genre and instead takes it seriously as a product and shaper of historical confusion. He interviews collectors; Ezra Narkis, the first publisher of Stalags; authors whose identities had long been masked behind pseudonyms; and various academics and thinkers who offer opinions on the meaning of the phenomenon.

A popular explanation is that readers haunted by a perceived ethnic weakness are turned on by the coveted power of their victimizers even as this fantasy life allows them to exact ultimate revenge against their enemies. There's a "survival of the fittest" dynamic to these narratives; and, in the opinion of some, they seduce readers into scenarios in which, by desiring such intoxicating power, they may be no better than the criminals themselves.

But beyond such superficial psychology Libsker offers an incisive study of the way history informs fantasy and vice versa. The film helps trace Stalag erotica back to the influential and proto-Stalag 1955 novel "The Dollhouse" by K. Tzetnik, the pen name of Yehiel De-Nur, a Holocaust survivor whose fictional work was based on his experiences in Auschwitz. Tzetnik apparently embellished for novelistic (and, many contend, pornographic) purposes, and while his depictions of the camp's female sex slaves paved the way for open discussions about what others had gone through, they also placed undeserved emphasis on a relatively rare practice.

Tzetnik's legacy therefore became not only one of speaking out about the horrors suffered under genocide but also of a stigmatization of female survivors wrongly suspected of having prostituted their bodies for survival, as well as an overall pornographizing of the Holocaust. Libsker ends "Stalags" with footage of high-school classes touring Auschwitz, their principal reading sections of "The Dollhouse" as if it were a nonfiction account of what transpired inside its walls. It's an unsettling image, confronting viewers with the painful fact that while we elect never to forget, we may remember the titillating over the purely, methodically, and unarousingly barbaric for no other purpose than our own perverse fascination.

[Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon.]

An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

"Dark Matter" begins with a shot of Meryl Streep practicing tai chi, and therein lies a precise encapsulation of the film's attitude toward the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures. In its 90-minute duration, the film grapples with a number of weighty themes: the origins of the universe, the importing of Chinese scholarly talent by American universities, even the deep causes of incidents of campus violence, like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech. But ultimately, the film's approach to these issues is as suspect as an American movie star going through the motions, however gracefully, of the thirteen postures.

Busily running programs for Reiser while trying to adjust to this new environment, Liu Xing is at first green and unaccustomed to the ups and downs of the American Dream, but with the help of a welcoming committee headed by Streep's Joanna Silver, a wealthy "patron of the arts" and devout orientalist, he soon develops a taste for Westerns, "blonde-haired, blue-eyed American girls," and Nobel Prize ambitions. But when these ambitions run afoul of Reiser's own ideas, the American advisor seeks out -- for some reason -- to crush his students' ambitions of fame and fortune, thus instigating violent consequences.

First-time director Shi-Zheng Chen's style is nothing if not assured, presenting Liu Xing's newfound American home as a wonderland of color and possibility, and occasionally soaring into intergalactic flights of fancy which serve to suggest, if not actually to explain, the cosmological theories that the characters talk so much about. (As a curious counterpoint, Chen interpolates the American narrative with scenes of Liu Xing's parents in China, which is here shot with a grainy film stock that inexplicably suggests some kind of primitive land-before-time.)

The mysteries of the universe may lie in the titular "dark matter," Liu Xing's field of study, but the real mystery of the film is why such a charming, if socially awkward young man, played with winsome energy and pathos by Liu Ye, should be so quickly abandoned by his friends and Joanna, and so ghoulishly upended by Quinn's Reiser for not being "a team player." The film barely pauses to ponder these questions and the motivations of its characters, even as it pits its protagonist toward his inevitable actions.

To its credit, and in contrast to other portraits of campus violence, "Dark Matter" shows restraint where you'd least expect it. It doesn't dolefully intone about the would-haves and should-haves of Liu Xing's situation, and when the inevitable occurs, it treats it as such and not as a cause for hand-wringing. Furthermore, viewers have been so primed with sympathy for this charming, misunderstood graduate student -- and enmity for his naysayers -- that one can't help but partly root for him as he guns down the members of his department.

In the absence of any gas-bag morality in the film, one might accuse the filmmakers of being irresponsible, as glorifying or at least failing to appropriately sermonize on its protagonist's fateful actions. Shouldn't the point of a film about campus violence be to preach the evils of such events and thereby prevent future Virginia Techs, future Columbines? Perhaps, but it's also possible that Chen believes that by trying to empathize and not to further demonize his campus shooter, his film might have more traction with those lost souls on the margins of the campus community. Either way, such cinematic crusades against school shootings greatly overestimate the cinema's role as moral arbiter. What is probably more to the point is that "Dark Matter" is too slick and simplistic to make much point about its subject at all. Like its vague astrophysics, its treatment of its characters and their motivations is too fuzzy and superficial to offer any real insight into situations like those at Virginia Tech or University of Iowa. Like Liu Xing's ideas about dark matter, it comes off as little more than pure speculation.

[Leo Goldsmith is a frequent contributor to Reverse Shot, as well as an editor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Tom McCarthy's surprise indie hit "The Station Agent" was something of a minor miracle. A touching, big-hearted character study propelled by three vibrant performances, "The Station Agent" distinguished itself with its sensitivity and grace, qualities sorely lacking in an independent film culture that too often prizes the clever, the glib, the cute, and the smug. With his sophomore effort as a writer-director, "The Visitor," McCarthy once again proves himself to be refreshingly out-of-step with the indie mainstream, taking an improbable set-up and patiently observing as his damaged but likeable characters work their way through it. Despite its contrivances, the film is a work of quiet, restrained empathy.

Like any rational person in this (unlikely) situation, Walter turns them out, but then, realizing that they have nowhere else to go, he reconsiders and agrees to let them stay. Before long, Tarek begins giving Walter drum lessons, and the two strike a rapport.

Admittedly, this is a somewhat preposterous premise -- how long has Walter left this beautiful, spacious New York apartment unattended, and how has it remained in such immaculate condition without a caretaker? What person in his right mind would share said apartment with two perfect strangers, regardless of the circumstances? -- and to make Walter's decision-making at all comprehensible, McCarthy must, of necessity, paint Tarek and Esi in broad, sympathetic strokes. Tarek, especially, radiates an uncomplicated goodness that rings false. But the film more than justifies these small leaps of faith.

"The Visitor" quickly moves past its dubious central conceit to become, most unexpectedly, a very good social problem picture, the sort of movie that examines a major political issue with straightforward compassion. In slow takes, McCarthy gives his actors the latitude they need to give fully realized performances, and they reward him by conveying an authenticity and emotional directness that compensates for the shortcomings of the screenwriting.

McCarthy is the sort of filmmaker who might be chastised for his earnestness or his heart-on-his-sleeve emotion, but he has a knack for knowing just where and how to keep pushing and when to hold back. In one of "The Visitor"'s most disarming scenes, Tarek's mother (Hiam Abbass, excellent here) makes an ineffectual appeal to her son's lawyer, who is too busy to devote his full attention to her. The scene seems obvious and hamfisted -- overworked lawyer, Middle Eastern immigrant, etc. -- but just when it's about to completely derail, McCarthy subverts our expectations with a fleeting moment of sympathy.

McCarthy brings an affecting and effective genuineness to his film, which, like "The Station Agent," is a story about the ties that sometimes bind lost souls and marginalized others. In his own modest way, he has emerged as a vital humanist voice in an independent cinema that, frankly, needs a few more filmmakers as unafraid of a little sentimentality.

[Chris Wisniewski is a Reverse Shot staff writer, a regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, and director of education at the Museum of the Moving Image.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Can rock music and colostomy bags mix? (Insert your own hilarious "Shine a Light" joke here.) The subject of Stephen Walker's new documentary is Farmingham, Massachusetts' "Young @ Heart" chorus, a 24-member group with several international tours under its belt. The singers' median age, we're informed, is 80.

What's good about the film comes through in spite of the filmmaking, the tone of which is frequently slimily ingratiating. For comic relief, an 86-year-old designated carpool pilot's driving is soundtracked by some keyboard-preset cornpone banjo chase music. The "vigor" of the choristers is emphasized by labored behind-the-camera flirtation with a bewhiskered 92-year-old senior member. One soloist is given an at-home interview, seemingly kept in for the lone purpose of letting the camera lavish attention on a "Still a Sexy Beast" novelty figurine in his den. And, to stimulate "indefatigable spark," the film periodically breaks for risible music videos of the choir doing "Stayin' Alive" (including obviously bemused teenage dancers) and "I Wanna Be Sedated" ("I can't control my fingers/ I can't control my toes"), which skirt the grotesque.

Though it overplays the "feisty oldsters" angle and Spencer's Gifts--level ribaldry, the movie can't entirely smother its subject's inherent questions about how we relate to pop music. It's basically a question of shifting context -- as in listening to the 1977 Langley Schools Music Project recordings, in which Beach Boys and Bowie covers are invested with new level of meaning when eerily harmonized by kids in the Vancouver suburbs. Perhaps more pertinent to this is the palpable fading in the Johnny Cash recordings with Rick Rubin ("You can hear him dying," I remember one enthusiast saying of the last record). As one of the choir's octogenarians tackles his solo on Coldplay's "Fix You," you can't dodge being moved in seeing the opaque generalities of Chris Martin's wishy-washy lyrics ("When you lose someone you can't replace") slotted into the specific losses recorded within.

Also persuasive is a visit by the choir to a low-security prison. The handling of the concert is crude -- lyric cues prompt cutaways to inmates with appropriately somber and affected expressions -- but the overall effect can't be diluted. There was a time, I was recently reminded, when "the prison circuit" was a regular stop-off for gigging musicians, even real name acts. That basic humanity has evacuated a pop scene that, phony eclectics aside, limits itself to selling kids to other kids -- and so this awkward commiseration of society's unwanted is touchingly expansive.

[Nick Pinkerton is a Reverse Shot staff writer, a contributor to Stop Smiling, and a regular critic for the Village Voice.]

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

Like his 2004 film "Cafe Lumiere," Hou Hsiao-hsien's sublime new movie "The Flight of the Red Balloon" finds the director in a foreign country paying homage to another filmmaker. With "Lumiere," Yasujiro Ozu was Hou's reference point and Tokyo his canvas; here, Hou reimagines Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short "The Red Balloon" as a Parisian family melodrama. Hou's film, much like Lamorisse's, opens with the magnificent titular object hovering barely out of the reach of seven-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu); as he gets on the Metro, it floats just above the station, drifting up into the trees. The balloon, and by proxy Lamorisse's film, serves as our point of departure -- our way into Simon's world and our guide through the streets of Paris -- but the delicate, charming, quietly heartbreaking portrait of childhood and family that follows is distinctively and unforgettably Hou.

Hou's movies are always beautiful, but they sometimes suffer from a certain austerity, an emphasis on intellect over emotion. The same respectful criticism could be leveled against Binoche, who even in her most precise and effective performances ("Blue," "Code Unknown," "Cache") nevertheless remains somewhat remote, a thinking moviegoer's actress. Here, her Suzanne is anything but heady or distant. She's messy, easily distracted, mercurial, creative, selfish, and volatile, the sort of person who asks favors without realizing they are favors (she requests that Song transfer 8 mm home movies to DVD as if she were asking her to pass the salt) and gives gifts that are meaningful only to herself (offering a Chinese puppeteer a postcard from the British Museum simply because she had kept it for many years). That she loves Simon is beyond dispute, and yet she has an argument over the phone in front her son, insisting, "There's no one beside me!" Simon objects that he is beside her, but Suzanne ignores his protestations. Another performer might have romanticized or demonized this charismatic but selfish woman -- she's a bundle of thrilling creative energy and desperate emotional need -- but Binoche simply inhabits her. Suzanne emerges as someone appealingly flawed, full-blooded, and vividly real. It's a thoroughly astonishing performance that ranks as one of the finest the actress has yet delivered.

Binoche's deceptive effortlessness is appropriate for a film that has a deliberate lack of momentum: the central drama concerns a real-estate dispute; the dialogue is improvised; the camera pans and tilts mostly from a fixed position, usually within one room. But the level of craft on display (in her performance, in Hou's rigorous command of mise-en-scene and elegant camera movement, and in Mark Lee Ping Bing's exquisite cinematography) is staggering. "The Flight of the Red Balloon" could be described as quiet or mundane -- a camera pans across the floor of an apartment, cluttered with papers that have been pulled out of drawers in a fruitless attempt to locate a missing document; a boy scolds his mother after she inadvertently knocks a lamp; a woman takes a picture of her two children at play. Emotional undercurrents rise and linger just beneath the surface, and these small moments accumulate, laying bare an enveloping human drama at once unassuming and profound, serene and searing.

[Chris Wisniewski is a Reverse Shot staff writer, a regular contributor to Publishers Weekly, and director of education at the Museum of the Moving Image.]