January 8, 2009
REVIEW | Stolen Identity: Ole Bornedal's "Just Another Love Story"
by Jeff Reichert (January 8, 2009)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
If you're about to see a movie whose title is prefixed with the generic marker "Just Another," odds are it won't be "just another" anything except a strenuous exercise in subverting the tropes of said genre. This titular quirk may be just a function of rough translation, but Danish filmmaker
Ole Bornedal (director of "
Nightwatch" -- both the original and U.S. remake) lives up to his English title with "
Just Another Love Story," a coolly modulated mistaken-identity amour fou bruised and bloodied all over by healthy run-ins with familiar noir and thriller additives.
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January 7, 2009
REVIEW | Crap Artist: Robert Celestino's "Yonkers Joe"
by Leo Goldsmith (January 7, 2009)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
From the start, "
Yonkers Joe" pitches the spectator directly into a world of tough-talking gamblers and sharks, where the dice are loaded, hands move quickly, and there's always a scam in the offing. This milieu of casinos and parking lots, peopled with hustlers and hookers, is a familiar film setting, but one that's produced remarkably few good films. Though the subject at hand seems ideally suited to cinema, allowing for a closer look at all the sleights and feints of card-sharp's or crap-shooter's trade, films such as "
Hard Eight," "
Shade," "
The Cooler," and this year's "
21" all mine similar material with a range of mostly disappointing results.
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January 6, 2009
REVIEW | Magic Hour: Carlos Reygadas's "Silent Light"
by Kristi Mitsuda (January 6, 2009)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Carlos Reygadas's visceral cinematic sensibility can be felt in every frame of "
Silent Light," briefly showcased at New York's MoMA last fall and already cropping up on numerous critical year-end lists (mine included). It receives wider U.S. exposure starting this week at Gotham's Film Forum, thankfully: As with all of the Mexican filmmaker's works, it demands to be seen on the big screen; only an immersive theatrical setting can do justice to such complex visual and aural textures, painstakingly planned camera movements, and sensitivity to light. This holds particularly true in the case of "Silent Light," in which Reygadas tames his more bravura instincts, as rapturously beheld in "
Japon" and "
Battle in Heaven," resulting in a film no less gorgeous, but more delicate in its beauty.
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January 5, 2009
Reverse Shot's Best of 2008: "Flight of the Red Balloon" and 9 more
by Leo Goldsmith, Eric Hynes, Michael Koresky, Kristi Mitsuda, Jeff Reichert, Sarah Silver, Andrew Tracy, Elbert Ventura, Chris Wisniewski, and Genevieve Yue (January 5, 2009)
An acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker working in France; a young Mexican director reimagining a canonical Danish film in an obscure Mennonite community in his home country; a West Coast-based American, enamored of the somber rhythms of the blasted Mississippi delta, miraculously captures them in the kind of American independent film all too rare of late; others from around the globe watching the specificities of home --character, geography, community, and class -- evaporate around them. These were the stories of our cinematic 2008, and we'd be hard-pressed to draw any solid conclusions from them, except that passion for those few terrific films that deserve attention always lives, even in those movie years considered less than stellar. Hou Hsiao-hisen's "Flight of the Red Balloon," it should be noted, was the clear winner, with a lead tally higher than any of the past Reverse Shot first placers. There's nothing outwardly trendy about Hou Hsaio-hsien's heavenly masterwork, but it captured something that feels wholly contemporary: even as it recalls Albert Lamorisse's evocation of France in the Fifties (which also saw a terrific, restored print back in theaters this year), "Flight" locates its timeless grace amidst the stuff of 21st-century living. Digital editing, video games, piano tuning, pinball: all exist in the same continuum in Hou's film. Perhaps it is the perfect movie of the moment. -- MK & JR
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January 4, 2009
REVIEW | The Bad German: Vicente Amorim's "Good"
by Leo Goldsmith (January 4, 2009)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Midway through Austro-Brazilian director
Vicente Amorim's fascist parable "
Good," as student radicals burn books in his university's courtyard, Professor John Halder half-jokingly scoffs at his own literary ambitions, fearing that his novel-writing effort is merely "adding to the pile." Halder, a professor of literature in 1930s Germany, can't so much as get through a Proust lecture without the interruption of loud Nazi rallies outside the classroom (or indeed censures from the dean for teaching a Frenchman).
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January 3, 2009
Dead Souls: "Alexey Balabanov's 'Cargo 200'"
by Eric Hynes (January 3, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Alexey Balabanov, the Russian director best known for foisting 1997's blunt, bracing, Yeltsin-era-defining thriller "
Brother" upon the unsuspecting world, is back with a film jerry-rigged to reclaim international attention after a fallow decade since that breakthrough.
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December 23, 2008
REVIEW | Expiration Date: Joel Hopkins's "Last Chance Harvey"
by Eric Hynes (December 23, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
"
Last Chance Harvey," the second feature from writer-director
Joel Hopkins ("
Jump Tomorrow"), a meet-cute romance for the silver set starring
Dustin Hoffman and
Emma Thompson, aims to attract the same filmgoers who made "
Something's Gotta Give" a hit back in 2003. Like any fairy tale, it assumes an audience who can identify with its characters, who can enjoy vicarious satisfaction when the unlikely comes true or when knots come magically untangled. But there's a gap between pleasing and pandering to an audience, and one needn't belong to that audience to smell the difference.
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December 22, 2008
REVIEW | A Corner in Couscous: Abdellatif Kechiche's "The Secret of the Grain"
by Leo Goldsmith (December 22, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
There's no "secret" -- of cooking, of love, of financial success -- in
Abdellatif Kechiche's "
The Secret of the Grain," though there is indeed plenty of grain. Though it's also played under the simpler name of "
Couscous," the film is actually called "
The Grain and the Mullet" in French -- the latter half of the title denoting the fish and not the novelty haircut. Maybe none of these quite captures the film, which in its length and dozen-or-so characters is itself difficult to succinctly summarize, but the original title does at least point to fish and couscous, the celebrated signature dish of the now fractured Beiji family. Each Sunday, Souab, the family matriarch, still serves up her legendary couscous for her children and grandchildren, even as, by the docks across town, her divorced husband Slimane awaits a delivery of leftovers in the Hotel d'Orient where he now lives.
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REVIEW | Unforgettable: Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir"
by Chris Wisniewski (December 22, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Early in "
Waltz with Bashir," director
Ari Folman has an onscreen conversation with a friend about a psychological experiment. In the study, subjects were given photographs of themselves from their childhoods, but one picture was digitally manipulated to depict an event that had never happened. Even though the image was fabricated, half of the subjects in the study claimed to remember the event upon studying the picture. Memory, after all, is pliable ("It's alive," Ari's friend tells him), but whatever we may know about the manipulation of images, we're still inclined to believe that a photograph can't lie. This idea has preoccupied theorists and filmmakers from
Andre Bazin to
Errol Morris as they've puzzled over cinema's relationship to "the real"; for Folman, the tension between memory and photographic evidence is a point of departure.
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December 18, 2008
REVIEW | So Help Me God: Rod Lurie's "Nothing But the Truth"
by Jeff Reichert (December 17, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Over the past eight years we've witnessed all too often the efficacy with which artfully packaged media confections can erode master narratives and refigure commonly held notions of "true" via selective elisions. I don't know writer-director
Rod Lurie's politics, and his agenda with his latest ripped-from-some-headline political thriller, "
Nothing But the Truth," may, in actuality, be nothing more than spinning a ripping yarn, but it's hard to shake the feeling that, for some reason, Lurie's taken it upon himself to recast the
Judith Miller/
Valerie Plame scandal as some kind of heroic battle of principles. Yes, the first thing we see on screen is a title card informing us of the fictional nature of the proceedings to follow, but isn't this sort of attention diversion the necessary first step toward any realignment of the cultural unconscious?
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December 16, 2008
REVIEW | Leap of Faith: Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler"
by Jeff Reichert (December 18, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Labeling "
The Wrestler" a "comeback" or "a return to form," as some will undoubtedly do, would be to suggest that
Darren Aronofsky's career to date has produced anything that really demands reconsideration, save perhaps the delusional numbskullery of "
The Fountain," and only then under the influence of strong psychotropics. He's crafted cruelly effective moments -- images that stick hard and wane only over the long run -- in both "
Pi" and "
Requiem for a Dream," but my overall sense of his films thus far has been of film-school hypermasculinity run amok.
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December 15, 2008
REVIEW | Lady and Ghent: Christophe Van Rompaey's "Moscow, Belgium"
by Leo Goldsmith (December 15, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Charming comedies about unlikely romances ship out of Hollywood like genetically modified soybeans, so it seems a little unnecessary to import them here, as well. Besides, the joys -- sincere or sarcastic -- that domestic rom-coms offer are largely based on a kind of fantasy celebrity matchmaking, a process of biochemical hybridization in which you pair, say, a Reese with a Vince, or a Hugh with a whoever. The challenge of importing a foreign romantic comedy is thus twofold: first, it has to compete with the appeal of the American star system; and second, it has to justify its genre-mandated frivolity in a corner of the market ("world cinema") usually reserved for much more dour films.
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December 11, 2008
REVIEW | Someone to Watch Over Me: Jose Luis Guerin's "In the City of Sylvia"
by Nick Pinkerton (December 11, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
"
In the City of Sylvia,"
Jose Luis Guerin's odyssey of perception, is so dedicated to getting inside the act of cosmopolitan female-watching, it might as well be called "City of Women." Alert, feline-eyed Xavier Lafitte is a quiet young flaneur and diarist, an enigmatic figure introduced at loose ends in a summertime Strasbourg populated largely by drifting, bare-armed twentysomething sylphs.
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December 10, 2008
REVIEW | Travel Plans: Nacho Vigalondo's "Timecrimes"
by Michael Joshua Rowin (December 10, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Ages have seemingly passed since a filmmaker fashioned something inventive and exciting out of the time-travel subgenre. 2004's brief micro indie cause celebre "
Primer" feels a long way off now, but Spanish sci-fi entry "
Timecrimes"--relatively more polished but still modestly "small"--brings back memories of that out-of-leftfield marvel, while going its own fresh way. Unconcerned with special effects or jargon, "Timecrimes," the debut feature from writer-director
Nacho Vigalondo, makes its temporal loop-de-loops easy to follow while producing something thoroughly mind-bending and, what's more, successful as an entertaining thriller.
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REVIEW | Blues Clueless: Rachel Samuels's "Dark Streets"
by Eric Hynes (December 10, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
What do noir,
Busby Berkeley, the blues, and funhouse fantasy have in common? As "
Dark Streets" ultimately proves, not much. Aiming for the inspired style warp of
Terry Gilliam's "
Brazil" but landing somewhere in the territory of Cirque du Soleil or Disney's House of Blues, director
Rachel Samuels mashes up genre and chronology while showing little understanding or interest in the integrity of any of her sources. What motivated noir's high contrast, its cynicism and misanthropy? What motivated the blues' lament, its horny, smoky suicidal heartbreak? "Dark Streets" couldn't care less, grafting together tropes despite cultural and aesthetic incompatibility, proud to wear them as layers of shabby chic fashion.
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December 9, 2008
REVIEW | The Play's the Thing: John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt"
by Chris Wisniewski (December 9, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
On paper,
John Patrick Shanley did everything right in bringing his
Pulitzer Prize-winning play "
Doubt" to film. He adapted the screenplay and directed himself, assembled a cast with 17 Oscar nominations to their collective credit, and brought in the extraordinary cinematographer
Roger Deakins. Given the strength of the source material and the pedigree of its cast and crew, "Doubt" may be the ultimate low-risk, high-reward prestige product, and it would be wrong for me to suggest that Shanley has produced anything less than a gripping piece of work. Despite its many virtues, though, "Doubt" is also bloodless. Handsome, well played, and oddly forgettable, it never manages to live up to the promise of its big ideas and heady speeches.
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December 8, 2008
REVIEW | Mad Dog: Paul Schrader's "Adam Resurrected"
by Eric Hynes (December 8, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
There's no joy to be had in enumerating the shortcomings of "
Adam Resurrected," an ambitious and long gestating adaptation of a much-admired novel by
Yoram Kaniuk. But in most respects the film just doesn't click: tone stumbles and fumbles meaning, dialogue meanders above uneven visuals, and scenes herk and jerk, frustrating momentum. An arrhythmic quality might well evoke the literary source (which I have not read), but
Paul Schrader's feature is no better for it.
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December 7, 2008
REVIEW | Life on the Margins: Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy"
by Kristi Mitsuda (December 7, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
The Pacific Northwest on display in
Kelly Reichardt's latest film isn't restorative, as in her lovely last, "
Old Joy," the lush forests of which temporarily heal an ailing friendship; nor is the setting here milked for moody, romantic potential as in the recently released "
Twilight." In "
Wendy and Lucy," the filmmaker instead harnesses the region's notoriously forbidding grey skies to conjure an atmospheric bleakness suited to the impoverished underbelly of Portland.
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December 3, 2008
REVIEW | Stark Relief: Yen Tan's "Ciao"
by Eric Hynes (December 2, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
During a time when American independent cinema either grunts elliptically under moody skies or chatters banally cross-legged on the living room floor, the purposeful, probing dialogue in
Yen Tan's "
Ciao" feels like a throwback to an entirely different reality. When characters talk in "Ciao," they aren't being elusive or withholding for a gradual or sudden reveal, they're honestly trying to make sense--and to help one another to make sense--of difficult circumstances and emotions. The filmmaker's faith in dialogue as crucial to narrative and character development as well as to personal recovery and romance may at first seem Clinton-era quaint, but it's really just plain effective. Nothing but cheap suspense is lost when information and honest feelings are exchanged in "Ciao," and what's gained is something more lovely, complicated, and true.
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December 1, 2008
REVIEW | Blue(s) Movie: Darnell Martin's "Cadillac Records"
by Nick Pinkerton (December 1, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
When
Syd Nathan, the CEO of King Records, died in 1968,
James Brown, the label's greatest star, bought the desk from Nathan's office and had it fitted with a gold plaque reading "I Remember the Man Syd Nathan." Nathan was white, and Brown boastfully black--so how to account for this? If we were to believe the movies' official history of rock music, we can't; the narrative is one of the grudging black artist's innovation, white owner's exploitation, and cracker shyster's appropriation--the attitude summarized in
Mos Def's insipid, ahistorical song "Rock 'n' Roll."
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November 25, 2008
REVIEW | A Hero for Our Time: Gus Van Sant's "Milk"
by Chris Wisniewski (November 25, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
"Politics is theater," observes Harvey (
Sean Penn) in
Gus Van Sant's terrific "
Milk." And sometimes, of course, theater -- or cinema -- is politics. When they first embarked on this project, Van Sant and screenwriter
Dustin Lance Black could never have anticipated that 2008 would see the election of a minority candidate and former community organizer, running on a message of hope, to the highest office in the land, nor could they have expected that Obama's historic victory would coincide with the passage of Proposition 8 in California, delivering a major setback for the gay rights movement in the United States. But this is "Milk"'s political moment, and the improbable confluence of events surrounding its release will undoubtedly define the film's reception.
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November 19, 2008
REVIEW | Dream On: Tom Gustafson's "Were the World Mine"
by Michael Koresky (November 17, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
The least one could ask of a wish-fulfillment fantasy film is a little buoyancy and breeziness. Yet for all its good-natured intentions,
Tom Gustafson's "
Were the World Mine," in which a put-upon small-town gay teen converts his hopelessly straight town (including his corn-fed jock crush) to the pink team with the help of a magical, squirting purple pansy, is a mostly leaden affair, suffering as it does from a lack of realization and clarity. A film can't simply be "light as a feather" or contagiously sweet by virtue of its conception, but rather by the fine, clean lines of its craft. And this is no simple matter of budget: oodles of ingenuity have historically been wrung from more impoverished film productions than this one.
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November 18, 2008
REVIEW | Dull Flame: Shamim Sarif's "I Can't Think Straight"
by Chris Wisniewski (November 17, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.
You would think that a cross-cultural, cross-religious lesbian romance should have enough built-in conflict to sustain an 80-minute feature, but
Shamim Sarif's "
I Can't Think Straight" slumps and stretches its way from its first uninspired set piece, an engagement party for Jordanian-Christian Tala (
Lisa Ray), to its mildly embarrassing closing montage, cut to, natch,
Jill Sobule's "I Kissed a Girl" (hello, 1995!). As with her other feature, "
The World Unseen" (released to theaters earlier this month), Sarif adapts and directs her own novel here, with Ray and
Sheetal Sheth playing the lead roles. For "I Can't Think Straight," she enlists the help of co-writer
Kelly Moss, but to no avail: Sarif has crafted a movie with such paper-thin characterizations and so lacking in dramatic incident that it's frankly surprising that she was working from a novel at all -- much less one she wrote herself.
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November 14, 2008
REVIEW | Close Encounters: Yair Hochner's "Antarctica"
by Michael Koresky (November 14, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
One can't accuse director
Yair Hochner of not giving his target audiences what we want: in the opening fifteen minutes of the Israeli filmmaker's ensemble dramedy of hook-ups and hang-ups among a small group of gay men in Tel Aviv, he fills the screen with all manner of groping titillation. As one eye-catcher (
Ofer Regirer) plows through a succession of one-night-stands, Hochner dissects the screen into boxes, temporally overlapping one another, allowing for a flurry of casual indulgence; there's no music to accompany this man's seemingly endless dalliances, just heavy breathing and the occasional clipped conversation.
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November 13, 2008
REVIEW | Fan-dumb: Josh Koury's "We Are Wizards"
by Michael Joshua Rowin (November 13, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Full disclosure: I have never read any of
J.K. Rowling's
Harry Potter novels. I have never seen any of the blockbuster movies based on her series. That I plan to never do so is not entirely because of any perceived intellectual and emotional poverty of these books and movies--I know plenty of smart people who enjoy the Harry Potter stories, and there could be, at extremely generous moments, a certain side of me that would consider giving them a shot. But not as long as there are movies like "
We Are Wizards," and not as long as there exist the Harry Potter-crazed subjects who comprise this painful documentary's meretricious survey of kitschy fandom.
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November 12, 2008
REVIEW | Yawn of the Dead: Vadim Glowna's "House of the Sleeping Beauties"
by Kristi Mitsuda (November 12, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Intended as a meditation on mortality and morality,
Vadim Glowna's adaptation of a
Yasunari Kawabata novel simultaneously strives towards portentous poeticism and thriller intrigue, but falls more into tawdry B-movie territory instead. Written, directed, and produced by the German filmmaker, who also stars as protagonist Edmond, "
House of the Sleeping Beauties" follows a man in the literal and figurative winter of his life. Edmond begins to visit the titular maison upon the advice of longtime friend Kogi (
Maximilian Schell), who creepily persuades him by saying, "I only feel really alive when lying beside someone somnolent."
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November 11, 2008
REVIEW | You Can Go Home Again: Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale"
by Leo Goldsmith (November 11, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Though it often seems the nadir of schmaltz and sentimentality, the Hollywood Christmas movie has always been a bit bipolar. From "
A Christmas Story" to "
Gremlins," "
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" to (undoubtedly) the forthcoming "
Four Christmases," the subgenre requires a course of dysfunction and chaos before the dessert of earnest holiday cheer is served. Mom and Dad's best-laid plans go awry, Santa Claus gets trapped in the chimney and asphyxiates, and Arnold and Sinbad vie for the last available Turbo Man action figure -- but in the end, families are reconciled and the true, noncommercial meaning of Christmas is reified.
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REVIEW | Trivial Pursuit: Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire"
by Eric Hynes (November 11, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
A noisy, sub-Dickens update on the romantic tramp's tale, "
Slumdog Millionaire" zips around a boy's hard-luck life with a strange verve. Ragtag children run through a labyrinthine Indian shantytown with a police officer in hot pursuit. Two boys ride atop a moving train, hanging upside down over the side to steal food from a wealthy family. The same boys arrive at the Taj Mahal and give bogus tours to German tourists. Later they guide an American couple around a scenic village by foot while locals strip their fancy car for parts. The kids are cute, shots are stylishly skewed, cuts are whip-quick, and rousing remixes of
M.I.A.'s ubiquitous "Paper Planes" pop-pop and ching-ching throughout. Poverty can be so much fun.
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November 5, 2008
REVIEW | Hack Attack: Darren Lynn Bousman's "Repo! The Genetic Opera"
by Nick Pinkerton (November 5, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
A helpful shortcut for negotiating the heaps of texts in this modern world: all attempts to give something familiar or antique a self-consciously edgy, gritty makeover can be, de facto, written off as terrible. Reassuring American songbook standards ("Over the Rainbow," "What a Wonderful World," etc.) performed in breakneck pop-punk style? Terrible. Movies set in centuries past where actual rules of comport are ignored and everyone acts like frisky undergraduates with ruffled collars? Terrible. Steampunk? Terrible, terrible, terrible.
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November 4, 2008
REVIEW | The Other Side of the Fence: Mark Herman's "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas"
by Michael Joshua Rowin (November 4, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
For a little, promising while, "
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" seems to be a welcome, if belated, response to "
Life Is Beautiful." Whereas
Roberto Benigni's self-deifying exercise in Holocaust schmaltz--one of the most repugnant and false movies ever made--sincerely believes obliviousness (not imagination, as its defenders claim) can shield the innocent from horror,
Mark Herman's film understands this is not only impossible, but that any attempt to do so is unconscionably insulating and opposed to developing human awareness.
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October 29, 2008
REVIEW | Out of the Past: Amos Gitai's "One Day You'll Understand"
by Michael Koresky (October 29, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Israeli filmmaker
Amos Gitai doesn't seem to have a career so much these days as a mission. It would be difficult for this ambassador of his nation's cinema to break away from Capital-t Topics at this point, but his lugubriousness as a filmmaker indicates that he believes in his own cause as much as his admirers do. Long, slow single takes and tracking shots that call attention to themselves and humorless, self-consciously "penetrating" close-ups are normally the order of the day for Gitai. And this one-man film warrior has finally, with his latest, "
One Day You'll Understand," made his first explicit fictional work of Holocaust remembrance. While its intimacy occasionally brings out some memorable pocket-sized moments, the film is still burdened with Gitai's dry art-cinema tactics and narrative didacticism.
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October 24, 2008
REVIEW | Running Wild: Christina Clausen's "The Universe of Keith Haring"
by Michael Joshua Rowin (October 24, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
The best compliment that can be paid "
The Universe of Keith Haring," a straightforward, fast-moving documentary about the Pennsylvania phenom who made his way from New York City bohemia to the art world and transcended all to become one of the most recognizable names in popular graphics in the late 20th century, is that it is as inspiring at the level of a cinematic portrait as its subject was at the level of pure creation. As directed by newcomer
Christina Clausen, the film looks to Haring as an artistic role model for his preternatural talent, of course, but also for his infectious lust for life that had him as committed to social activism and teaching children as to his latest painting.
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October 23, 2008
REVIEW | A Matter of Taste: Philippe Claudel's "I've Loved You So Long"
by Nick Pinkerton (October 23, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Juliette, a middle-aged woman, waits alone, gray and taciturn -- two words that pretty well describe "
I've Loved You So Long." She stands to haltingly greet her rendez-vous, her sister, Lea. We gather they've been apart a long time. Juliette's been "away," her past a talked-around negative space that's filled out as the film nurses us for two hours on a drip-feed of withheld backstory.
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REVIEW | Winter Kills: Tomas Alfredson's "Let the Right One In"
by Michael Koresky (October 23, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
With its calm, wintry rural setting,
Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of novelist
John Ajvide Lindqvist's Swedish best-seller "
Let the Right One In" depicts slaughter, death, and dismemberment as though sprung from the stanzas of
Robert Frost. This is hardly the first film to drench teen angst and burgeoning sexuality in supernatural bloodletting (De Palma's "
Carrie," Romero's "
Martin," and, more recently,
John Fawcett's "
Ginger Snaps" equate, respectively, telekinesis, vampirism, and lupine transformation with pubescent turmoil), but Alfredson sets his film apart with a memorably stringent (dare I say, Scandinavian) visual design.
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October 22, 2008
REVIEW | A Self-Made Man: Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York"
by Eric Hynes (October 22, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Staring into the abyss through a kaleidoscope,
Charlie Kaufman's "
Synecdoche, New York" sees ecstatic, innumerable facets in the depths. Another of Kaufman's Alice in Wonderland narratives, his first directorial effort is more gnarled and coiled than his scripts for
Spike Jonze ("
Being John Malkovich," "
Adaptation") and
Michel Gondry ("
Human Nature," "
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), yet also more emotionally direct. Impossible to fully grasp on first pass, the film nevertheless has a rigorous -- and perversely funny -- through-line of extreme anxiety and sorrow. "I won't accept anything but the brutal truth," says his protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard (
Philip Seymour Hoffman). "Brutal, brutal," he repeats, hammering home the cliched, self-conscious overstatement, but he means it every time.
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REVIEW | Army of Shadows: Fear(s) of the Dark
by Michael Koresky (October 22, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Like any omnibus film, the
Christophe Jankovic and
Valerie Schermann-produced French collection of creepy, crawly cartoon shorts, "
Fear(s) of the Dark," succeeds on the strength of its best components. Though it seems that in animation it's easier to convey an "idea" of fear to an audience than impart in the viewer fear itself, the film nevertheless pleasantly lodges in the brain. A persuasive showcase for a handful of contemporary animators, "Fear(s)" is comprised of mostly beautifully designed segments which get exponentially better as the film continues, going deeper and deeper into an ever darkening rabbit hole. Like the famed sixties compilation "
Spirits of the Dead," which wisely saved Fellini's astonishing "
Toby Dammit" for its just-desserts course, "Fear(s) of the Dark" sends us out on a high, low note.
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October 19, 2008
REVIEW | Crash Landing: Gonzalo Arijon's "Stranded: I Have Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains"
by Michael Joshua Rowin (October 19, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
In his 1993 review of "
Alive," a film based on the infamous 1972 true story of the survivors of a Uruguay rugby team that crashed in the Andes on their plane ride to a tournament,
Roger Ebert wrote, "We care about the characters while we watch the movie. But at the end it all seems elusive. The movie characters complete their dreadful ordeal, but somehow, walking out, we feel the real Andes survivors would not quite recognize themselves." Ebert suggested that "Alive"'s problem was one of evocation: despite the attempt to impart what the survivors went through, their incredible physical endurance (72 days in freezing cold temperatures) and mental fortitude (being forced to eat the flesh of their dead comrades to continue living) couldn't even be approached, let alone translated to the screen.
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October 15, 2008
REVIEW | Like a Virgin Redux: Madonna's "Filth and Wisdom"
by Eric Hynes (October 15, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
The filmmaker of "
Filth and Wisdom" has a lot to say. She's got big ideas and some clever ones too, and she's letting it fly. She's repulsed and fascinated by hypocrisy in the world, and wants people to just get over themselves, to abandon fear, pride, and learn to fly their freak flag high. She found this cool new band and its awesome-looking Ukrainian lead singer, and made a film all about him and his friends making it in the big city.
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October 14, 2008
REVIEW | Electoral High School: Caroline Suh's "Frontrunners"
by Leo Goldsmith (October 14, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
This year's race comes down to a clear choice between vitality and experience. On the one hand, you have a young outsider running on a ticket of change; on the other, an older, more experienced candidate who nonetheless wants to "raise the bar." The former is accused of being all style and no substance, but balances this with an experienced running mate. The latter occasionally seems too intense, but has cleverly joined forces with a likable female vice-presidential candidate who might help soften his image.
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October 9, 2008
REVIEW | Junior League: Luke Eberl's "Choose Connor"
by Michael Koresky (October 9, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Often notable for the ways in which its naive, teenage protagonist's slowly eroding positive outlook seems to be duplicated by the director himself, "
Choose Connor" is a movie about politics and disillusionment made by a first-time filmmaker barely out of his teens. This film, in which a middle school-age wannabe politician finds out about how dirty and disappointing the world is, originated as a script written when actor-turned-debuting-director
Luke Eberl was just 17, and went into production when he was 20.
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REVIEW | The Naked Truth: Joe Swanberg & Greta Gerwig's "Nights and Weekends"
by Leo Goldsmith (October 9, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Joe Swanberg and
Greta Gerwig, the costars, cowriters, and codirectors of "
Nights and Weekends," spend a good part of their film naked. At the film's outset, while in a long-distance relationship, James and Mattie enter the former's Chicago apartment and promptly make love on the floor; toward the end of the film, after a year and an off-screen break-up, they fleetingly try something similar in a hotel in New York. In between, the film often pauses to ponder the many levels of these characters' self-exposure: showering, sitting on the can, dressing and undressing themselves and each other, critically scrutinizing themselves in mirrors and photographs.
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October 8, 2008
REVIEW | Taking No Prisoners: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"
by Eric Hynes (October 8, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Happy-go-lucky is a term that smacks of anachronism in both diction and meaning. Conjunctively evocative of will-o-the-wisp and devil-may-care, merry-go-rounds and tilt-o-whirls, any present use of the term usually implies irony or condescension. The word, and whomever it might describe, can't possibly survive in today's jaded world. Coming from a filmmaker who has put his share of characters through reality's ringer ("
Naked," "
Career Girls," "
Vera Drake"), and has at times (though not as often as some would assert) slipped into theatrical caricature, the title of
Mike Leigh's latest film, "
Happy-Go-Lucky," would seem like an invitation to watch the other shoe drop.
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October 7, 2008
REVIEW | The Perfect Storm: Wong Kar-wai's "Ashes of Time Redux"
by Michael Koresky (October 7, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Eradicating bad memories of the moldy "
My Blueberry Nights" in one fell swoop,
Wong Kar-wai's gussied-up reissue of his 1994 "martial-arts action epic" (in quotes because it never actually feels like any of those things) is a reminder of why we fell in love with the Hong Kong auteur in the first place. Just as "
Fallen Angels" is hardly a crime caper, "
In the Mood for Love" is never quite able to blossom into the romance we expect and hope for, and "
2046" only elegantly limns the edges of the science-fiction it intimates, "
Ashes of Time" promises a wuxia saga that never quite arrives. ("
Chungking Express," meanwhile, barely fits a genre template at all, but more than satisfies Wong's delight in sending us down blind alleyways).
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October 2, 2008
REVIEW | Easy Bake: Darren Grodsky and Danny Jacobs's "Humboldt County"
by Kristi Mitsuda (October 2, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
From its simple title font evocative of another era to its opening and closing shots reminiscent of "
The Graduate" to its casting of filmmaking icon
Peter Bogdanovich, "
Humboldt County" acknowledges its immodest aims early on. Taking as their subject matter a happy, hippie hideaway in the marijuana-rich forests of Northern California, writing and directing team
Danny Jacobs and
Darren Grodsky seem to believe that representation of the unconventional marks their debut effort as such, but the film fails to break any new aesthetic or narrative ground.
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October 1, 2008
REVIEW | Jesus Fish in a Barrel: Larry Charles's "Religulous"
by Eric Hynes (October 1, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Bill Maher has had quite a run. Fourteen years have passed since "Politically Incorrect" saved him from
Shannon Tweed vehicles and endless stand-up. A Washington meets Hollywood twist on the McLaughlin Group, "PI" proved surprisingly durable for
Comedy Central before losing steam (and some bite) on ABC. After ill-timed (if courageous) comments led to the show's cancellation, Maher moved right along to "Real Time" on
HBO (tweaking the format by losing the left-right debate and giving more time to Maher's emboldened commentary), where his notoriety, and wonky-smug shtick, hasn't waned.
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REVIEW | We Regretfully Decline: Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married"
by Michael Koresky (October 1, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
What if
Jonathan Demme threw a party and asked you to come? You'd probably initially be flattered by the invitation; after all, the Oscar-winning director and longtime music scenester has certainly racked up an impressive roster of friends over the years. But while it sure would be swell to hang out with a random cross-section of multiculti hepcats for a couple of hours, eventually you'd probably feel that you don't quite belong. This is the feeling I got not long into Demme's new self-consciously "back-to-basics" independent film, "
Rachel Getting Married," in which he shoots a script written by
Sidney Lumet's daughter as an excuse to throw a backyard soiree celebrating his handpicked community of actors, musicians, and artist friends.
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September 30, 2008
REVIEW | Just Don't Look: Fernando Meirelles's "Blindness"
by Eric Hynes (September 30, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Perhaps a decent film couldn't have been made from
Jose Saramago's "
Blindness." Like any great work of art, Saramago's novel resists transference. A gathering of words beaded into narrative, paced by rhythmic commas that both push forward and trip the eye, organized into paragraphs like economically shaped capsules of character and consciousness, and chapter breaks that arrive suddenly, stranding the reader in portentous white space, "Blindness" exists fully, necessarily, on the page.
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September 29, 2008
REVIEW | Looking for Stability in a Soggy Mississippi: Lance Hammer's "Ballast"
by Anthony Kaufman (September 29, 2008)
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Anthony Kaufman reviewed "Ballast" at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the film opens in limited release this week.]
The cool, wet misty plains of the Mississippi Delta offer little comfort to the three protagonists of art-director
Lance Hammer's bracing feature debut "
Ballast." In fact, the desolate surroundings--yards with broken cars, fields with no harvest, decrepit gas stations--only further reflect their downtrodden condition. But by the time this remarkably sure-footed first film is finished, a slight glimmer of hopefulness arises among the psychological and physical turmoil.
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September 26, 2008
REVIEW | Back to School: Laurent Cantet's "The Class"
by Leo Goldsmith (September 26, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Realism is the mode du jour of international art cinema, so it's fitting that the
New York Film Festival opens with
Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or winner, "
The Class," an exercise in naturalist mise-en-scene, improvisatory nonprofessional acting, and immediate handheld cinematography. These tropes should by now be familiar to audiences attending a festival that will also feature works by likeminded filmmakers such as
Jia Zhangke and
Kelly Reichardt (and hosted
Hou Hsaio-hsien's and
Lee Chang-dong's similar films last year). But Cantet's film impresses if even for the feat of credibly portraying the atmosphere of a classroom full of fourteen-year-old urban Parisians -- with all of the adolescent storm and stress that such a petri dish would necessarily create.
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September 25, 2008
REVIEW | The Surge: Neil Burger's "The Lucky Ones"
by Chris Wisniewski (September 25, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Maybe sometime in the next decade, the Iraq War will get its "
Platoon" or its "
Full Metal Jacket," but for now, we'll have to keep waiting for a memorably incisive, dramatically successful cinematic treatment -- at least, from a fiction film (documentaries are, happily, another story).
Neil Burger's "
The Lucky Ones" makes no effort to fill that void. Instead, it seems calculated to correct another, related problem: the anemic box-office of Iraq-themed films.
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September 23, 2008
REVIEW | Sports Wear: Ryan Little's "Forever Strong"
by Michael Koresky (September 24, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Ryan Little's "
Forever Strong" is a friendly, heaping helping of rugby porn -- in senses both erotic and non. Seemingly cast top to bottom with holdovers from "Flaunt" photo-spreads and
David DeCoteau flicks (in fact, fans of DeCoteau's boxer-brief brand of cheapo-homo horror will recognize the film's lead,
Sean Faris, from his debut in DeCoteau's Blockbuster Video fave "
The Brotherhood 2: Young Warlocks"), "Forever Strong" is a charming enough paean to muscle shirts, athletic shorts, and Faris's beauty mark.
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September 21, 2008
REVIEW | Shock Defect: Clark Gregg's "Choke"
by Nick Pinkerton (September 21, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Let's say the least you expect of art is that it shows signs of a coherent designing intelligence, and the least you expect of entertainment is that it doesn't make you wish you were looking at something else. Now let's move on to "
Choke," which is neither, adapted from a
Chuck Palahniuk novel by actor
Clark Gregg.
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September 18, 2008
REVIEW | The New World: Wayne Wang's "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers"
by Leo Goldsmith (September 18, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Since virtually inventing Asian-American cinema in 1982 with his film "
Chan Is Missing,"
Wayne Wang has built a curiously Frankensteinian body of work, mixing indie and commercial productions and spanning subjects as diverse as a lazy Brooklyn afternoon and the last days of pre-handover Hong Kong. Though films like "
Eat a Bowl of Tea" and "
The Joy Luck Club" defined his early career, Wang has, like Taiwanese contemporary
Ang Lee, consciously evaded being pigeonholed as an Asian-American filmmaker, pursuing diverse projects.
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September 17, 2008
REVIEW | Unanswerable Questions: Koji Masutani's "Virtual JFK"
by Michael Joshua Rowin (September 17, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
An inevitable byproduct of the study of history is the "What if?" game, the second-guessing of key events and decisions in light of the disasters that followed. One of the great American "What if?"s of the twentieth century is of course born from the assassination of
John F. Kennedy, the cutting short of the promise of Camelot and all the youthful hope it embodied. Of course, Kennedy came to embody much of that youthful hope once he was immortalized by untimely death, and the romanticization of his presidency by the public in the last four decades has often had less to do with what he actually did in office than what he symbolizes as a lasting pop culture icon.
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September 16, 2008
REVIEW | Don't Worry, Be Angry: Stuart Townsend's "Battle in Seattle"
by Leo Goldsmith (September 16, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
A mere couple of weeks after a polarizing Republican National Convention, it will be difficult for some of us to criticize a film like "
Battle in Seattle." For many,
Stuart Townsend's ensemble fictionalization of the 1999 protests against the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle may strike a welcome note, harkening back to a triumphant, nonviolent-turned-violent demonstration which caused -- directly or indirectly -- a collapse in trade negotiations that even some participants characterized as imbalanced. Townsend's film portrays this moment as a victory for the antiglobalization movement (and the Left, broadly defined), an example of how public opinion, voiced loudly and peaceably, can effect great change in a world that too often seems governed by cronyism and corporate interest.
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September 11, 2008
TORONTO '08 CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK | "Paris," "Agnes," Rock Stars and "Religulous"; TIFF Docs Go Personal and (Non) Spiritual
by Eric Kohn (September 11, 2008)
If a single lesson emerges from this year's crop of documentaries at the
Toronto International Film Festival, it might be this: Who needs
Paris Hilton when you have
Agnes Varda? Both the overexposed starlet and the French New Wave legend showed up in Canada this week to watch themselves on the big screen, although at least Varda had the audacity to direct herself. Like most of her famous cinephilic colleagues, the playfully existential octogenarian continually churns out unique, startlingly creative movies.
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September 10, 2008
REVIEW | Everything Is Privates: Alan Ball's "Towelhead"
by Michael Koresky (September 10, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
Not far into his feature directorial debut, "
Towelhead,"
Alan Ball offers us the sight of a thirteen-year-old girl having her first period in a bathroom stall; this is shot from a low angle, with the camera positioned near the floor, peering up through the girl's blood-stained panties as she stares down in perturbation. To acknowledge the sheer inappropriateness of Ball's framing is not to take a moral stance (
Summer Bishil, who plays the character, was close to twenty when she acted in the film), but rather to call into question the neophyte filmmaker and longtime overpraised screenwriter's level of taste, imagination, and sophistication.
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September 9, 2008
REVIEW | Troubling the Water: Irena Salina's "Flow"
by Kristi Mitsuda (September 9, 2008)
[An indieWIRE review from
Reverse Shot.]
To the long and ever growing list of pressing environmental concerns we can add the global water crisis. Despite its indispensability for human survival, water hasn't gained traction as a political issue (at least not in America), and so filmmaker
Irena Salina interjects "
Flow" into the conversation as a corrective; she wants her film to do for the world water crisis what "
An Inconvenient Truth" did for climate change. While the facts revealed in the documentary, as conveyed in interviews with numerous activists and scientists, are not exactly stunning revelations -- or maybe at this point I'm just unsurprised by tales of apathetic governments or corporate greed trumping concerns for public welfare -- it manages to bring to light an issue which merits more attention but often gets lost amidst headline-grabbers like global warming and oil shortages.
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