REVIEW | Trouble in Paradiso: Giuseppe Tornatore's "The Unknown Woman"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A deliberately titillating scene opens Giuseppe Tornatore's "The Unknown Woman": three women wearing masks, asses to audience, stand naked in a strangely gilded room to be examined through peepholes. After they're dismissed, a second round comes out, and a blonde is asked to step forward and strip; "She'll do fine," an offscreen male voice intones. As usual, the "Cinema Paradiso" director has an eye for the voluptuous female form, but the lascivious voyeurism of his camera -- contained (Tornatore thinks) in his preceding movie, "Malena," by embedding its obsessive gaze within the point of view of a horny adolescent boy -- is made explicit here by its alignment with a prurient perspective. This objectifying introduction to his film's protagonist (played by Xenia Rappoport) is curiously at odds with the rest of the film, which is filtered through her subjectivity. This slippage explains the unintentional unease which colors the movie from the start, and undermines its attempt to create a credible portrait of a woman.
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REVIEW | Muscle-Bound: Chris Bell's "Bigger Stronger Faster*"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Though it comes across as hale and hearty, Chris Bell's "Bigger Stronger Faster*," a litany of American body worship touchstones since the early Eighties, is nothing if not ambivalent towards its subject. Falling somewhere between a specific personal essay and a more vaguely targeted social commentary, Bell's documentary, a freeform expose of steroid use in the U.S., is, somewhat inevitably, a product of narcissism and insecurity, not unlike the psychological forces that compel bodybuilding and athletic determination in the first place. Fledgling feature filmmaker Bell, a self-described "fat, pale kid from Poughkeepsie" turns his camera on himself, his equally brawny brothers, and the culture at large that both tacitly supports and vocally abhors performance-enhancing drugs.
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REVIEW | Beyond the Pale: Tom Kalin's "Savage Grace"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Tom Kalin's 1992 film "Swoon" was a noteworthy entry in the New Queer Cinema canon not because of its subject matter but how Kalin navigated such precarious terrain. A recouping of the Leopold and Loeb murder as an emotionally ambivalent expression of homosexual historicity via a not necessarily unsympathetic character-study timepiece, "Swoon" purposely created a discomfiting space for viewers used to more conventional true-crime narratives.
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CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Divided Reactions: "Headless Woman," "Sonata," "Liverpool," "Robbed" Find Detractors and Fans

Cannes' perennial post-screening boos are not to be trusted. Neither, for that matter, are the standing ovations. To each his own cinema, to be sure: one viewer's masterpiece is another's misstep, depending upon your taste and even where you sit. It's been alleged that the Salles Bazin screening room is far less kind to a film than the bigger venues.
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CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | The Revolution By Night: Steven Soderbergh's "Che"

The one overwhelming message coming from the competition films at the 61st Cannes Film Festival is: shit's messed up. "Waltz With Bashir" digs into the never-fully-healed wounds of war. In Matteo Garrone's "Gomorra," organized crime isn't an aberration; it's just the shadow army of an irredeemably venal free-market system. The Dardenne Brothers' "The Silence of Lorna" expresses a horror at a not-too-underground economy in the trade of human lives. Lucia Martel's "Un Mujer Sin Cabeza" takes a still, near-surreal look at class (un)consciousness, and doesn't like what it sees. Even the period melodrama here, Clint Eastwood's fact-based "The Changeling," fairly bristles with anger at corrupt authoritarianism. And even the not-overtly socially conscious family saga here, Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" (Un Conte de Noel) emphasizes fissure and disruption over harmony and affinity.
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REVIEW | Irreconcilable Differences: Parvez Sharma's "A Jihad for Love"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Homosexuality isn't a choice, but often, many forget, neither is religion. And this is certainly the case for the world's dense population of devout Muslims, now comprising the second largest religion in the world. Since the dictates of various orthodoxies seem almost by design to painfully rub up against basic biological desires, the demonization of sexuality has been widely reported upon and dramatized, whether directly or indirectly, for as long as there has been sophisticated thought.
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CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | Auteur Fatigue, "Gomorra" Pops and Wayward Youths

Good, but not great. Accomplished, but not amazing. A consistent thread is emerging within this year's Cannes selection: Name directors are showing up with solid work that displays their talents, but doesn't transcend them or spin them into new, novel directions. A familiar refrain has been heard over the last few days: "I liked it, but it wasn't as good as their last film." Are auteurs spinning their wheels? With several new movies to go, from Steven Soderbergh's "Che" epic to Laurent Cantet's high-school study "The Class" to Atom Egoyan's latest "Adoration" (which has been rumored to be a come-back film, of sorts), it's too early to make a judgment call about Cannes' 61st, but no film is blowing audiences out of the water.
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CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | In Competition, Desplechin Out in Front; Ceylan and Jia Don't Disappoint Fans

Rainy days here in Cannes may have dampened morale, but the films, and a much-needed burst of sunshine on Sunday morning, have boosted critics' spirits. Aside from "Blindness," Fernando Meirelles' apocalyptic opener, which received a mixed response, this year's competition slate has yielded a satisfying crop of art-cinema--though no masterpieces have yet emerged. Critical consensus has Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" as the competition's front-runner so far, though the animated Israeli drama "Waltz with Bashir," which screened on day two, also played extremely well.
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REVIEW | Scattered People: Fatih Akin's "The Edge of Heaven"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A German filmmaker of Turkish descent, Fatih Akin has made hybrid cultures and hyphenated identities his great subject. "Head-On," his acclaimed breakthrough film from 2004, told a love story between two German Turks that wended its way back to the homeland. In "The Edge of Heaven," his latest, the fixation on blurred borders and social dislocation continues on a larger canvas. Several characters shuttle back and forth between Turkey and Germany, even as the quest for home and rest seems increasingly quixotic. But let the overstuffed "The Edge of Heaven" be a lesson: Just multiplying and magnifying your obsessions does not make them any more powerful.
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indieWIRE PRODUCTION REPORT | "Gigantic," "Peter and Vandy," "Phantomschmerz," "The Seminar with Robert McKee," and "You Won't Miss Me."

[EDITOR'S NOTE: indieWIRE's monthly production report looks at independent films in various stages of production. If you'd like to tell us about a film in production for future columns, please contact us.] In March's edition of indieWIRE's production column, Jason Guerrasio profiles five new films in various stages of production. This month's group includes Matt Aselton's "Gigantic," Jay DiPietro's "Peter and Vandy," Matthias Emcke's "Phantomschmerz," Bradley Glenn's "The Seminar with Robert McKee" and Ry Russo-Young's "You Won't Miss Me"
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REVIEW | Book Smart: Joachim Trier's "Reprise"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Norwegian Joachim Trier directs his debut feature, "Reprise," with such assured kineticism that it's only a matter of time before Hollywood gets his hands on him and turns him into an anonymous hack. That's not merely cynicism or a judgment call on Trier's foregrounded visual flair, which, unlike most other flashy films pitched at the speed of youth, actually contains more true invention than gimmick; it's just a sad fact of a ravenous industry that subsumes European directors the same way it snatches up the new foreign, art-house ingenue and plunks her down as the latest Bond girl--it only sees the surface sheen. Trier's considerable talents will be easy to exploit: "Reprise" courses on the amiable full-tilt thrill of first-time filmmaking. And though the film perhaps tries a mite too hard to ingratiate itself to the viewer (rarely does it leave an emotion not underlined), its rhythms are well matched to its two main characters' restless pursuits for niche fame and artistic fulfillment.
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REVIEW | Father Figurines: Christopher Zalla's "Sangre de mi sangre"

[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.
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REVIEW | Embedded: Nick Broomfield's "Battle for Haditha"

[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?
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REVIEW | Imagine That: Tarsem Singh's "The Fall"

[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."
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