REVIEW | Caught in the Middle: Andre Techine's "The Witnesses"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Once again, with his new film "The Witnesses," great French filmmaker Andre Techine surveys the intersections of sexuality and politics, while offering up a compelling study in human strength and weakness. Instructive without ever falling into cheap bromides, dramatic without ever veering into overzealous melodrama, "The Witnesses" is a penetrating, even essential narrative. Techine is fascinated by the ways in which lives interact, personalities cross-pollinate, wounds are compounded, exacerbated, or even healed, yet never in that increasingly mundane American style of overlapping stories that prize fate or coincidence; he paints specifically, creating not vague character sketches but full lives, however defined by enigma or contradiction. Here, as in his superlative (and admittedly more vivid) "Wild Reeds," Techine introduces complicated people who may evolve throughout the course of the narrative but who are also unavoidably wedded to their specific time and place in history.
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iW REVIEW | Gays and the Good Book: Daniel Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So"

EDITORS NOTE: This review was originally published during the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Smorgasbord moviemaking means director and co-writer Daniel Karslake can tell the stories of five conservative families grappling with gay children in his sprawling social message film "For the Bible Tells Me So." The fact that the religious right uses a literal, and arguably incorrect, interpretation of the Bible is nothing new and Karslake (working with screenwriter Nancy Kennedy) offers no additional insights into the culture war between evangelicals and the gay community.
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REVIEW | Morning Glory: Zabou Breitman's "The Man of My Life"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Ebbing and flowing on the buzz of one all-night conversation, French director Zabou Breitman's "The Man of My Life" sketches the blossoming relationship between two fortysomething men: the happily married Frederic and his unattached, gay neighbor Hugo. And though occasionally its strength is sapped by heavy-handed symbolic gestures, "The Man of My Life" is a surprisingly unsentimental take on somewhat dubious character types. Just when it seems like Breitman's made another case study in how much the free-spirited homo can teach the sheltered hetero, the director actually manages to free her two main men from the burden of most cliches.
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REVIEW | Return of the Repressed: William Friedkin's "Cruising"

[An indieWIRE Review from Reverse Shot.] There are untold artistic benefits to living in a culture of critical reassessment--otherwise, what would current generations think of "Vertigo?" But if the glut of superfluous "special edition" DVD packages over the past ten years is any indicator, then there are also some sorry side effects. Falling somewhere between the enshrined camp package ("Mommie Dearest"'s Hollywood Royalty Edition, complete with John Waters commentary track!) and the sober-minded resurrection of the long unavailable and disenfranchised as crucial artifact (the recent "Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky" box set, featuring "El Topo") will surely be Warner Home Video's imminent deluxe edition of William Friedkin's 1980 film maudit, "Cruising."
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REVIEW | Love Among the Ruins: Eytan Fox's "The Bubble"

[An indieWIRE Review from Reverse Shot.] Of course, it would follow that an Israeli filmmaker would center his films mostly around dichotomies, doubles, and impasses. Popular gay filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose previous two films, "Yossi and Jagger" and "Walk on Water," enjoyed healthy limited-run success in the U.S., returns with "The Bubble," and again proves that his strengths lie in establishing tender, fraught human relationships within volatile settings. Fox has a sharp ear and an open heart, and his characters' interactions are never less than believable, their struggles plainspoken and heartrending. Yet in shuttling these fragile souls through stock tragic frameworks, he sometimes undermines them, both personally and politically; though "The Bubble" makes for a mostly impassioned liberal plea, Fox's need to spin its central gay romance into a star-crossed present-day "West Bank Story" leads him to fall into some unnecessary stereotyping. Which is unfortunate since there's so much loveliness in "The Bubble."
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Out to Sea: Marco Kreuzpaintner's "Summer Storm"

[indieWIRE's weekly reviews are written by critics from Reverse Shot.] Independent cinema was once regarded as the cinema of the disenfranchised. It's common knowledge now that the parameters of what was once defined as "indie" have been dissolved, and pat, mainstream, easy-to-swallow do-gooder liberal fantasies like "Good Will Hunting," "Chocolat," and "Crash," still labeled as independent, have all but replaced the films of the true trailblazers in the public eye. Likewise, the indie subsets, films made by those even further outside of the white straight male hegemony, films by African-Americans, gays, Hispanics, and other voices kept out of the mainstream except when propped up as comic relief stage right, have also descended into their own form of staleness.
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For the Boys: Paul Etheridge-Ouzts' "HellBent"

[indieWIRE's weekly reviews are written by critics from Reverse Shot.] Though it's far from the "first gay slasher film," as it has been momentously touted (hello? "A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge" anyone?), Paul Etheridge-Ouzts's "HellBent" might be the first horror movie that's quite so unapologetically gay-friendly. Serial killer films have been chockablock with homosexual psychotics from day one, yet rarely is the gay sensibility refracted back throughout the texture of the film itself—both the worst offending tripe ("Cruising," "Hard," "Haute tension") and the eminently defensible yet unquestionably questionable masterpieces ("Silence of the Lambs," "Psycho," "Dressed to Kill") place blame squarely on sexual identity frustration. While hardly a cutting curative to such phobic Freudian foolery, "HellBent" nevertheless delivers a quick and pleasurable mélange of sex and death aimed squarely at the middlebrow gay indie niche—what it lacks in nuance it more than makes up for in unabashed glee and a parade of horror stimuli that seems alien only in terms of orientation.
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