Y KANT GORAN RITE?

KAWASAKI'S ROSE (Jan Hrebejk, 2009)

2011-11-04T18:02:00.000-07:00

**
Czech Republic

All of Hrebejk's films are didactic but usually lively and complex enough to compensate. This one is complicated rather than complex. And it has no life.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (Woody Allen, 2011)

2011-10-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

***½
USA

Hardcore Woody Allen acolytes have had a decade to learn to look past the often cheap gags, the increasingly unimaginative plotting, thin (if lively and well-acted) caricatures and over-conceived under-developed scenarios purely to bask in images and cadences that bring memories of Annie Hall and The Purple Rose of Cairo. For me at least, watching each year's fresh-yet-familiar Woody Allen frivolity is precisely and entirely about tripping on nostalgia, entering a warm, somehow cynically idealised smartalecky heart-gradually-emerging-on-the-sleeve world.

In this sense, I even thoroughly enjoyed things like Anything Else and Whatever Works. But in this sense, I've generally been in the very un-hip minority for well over a decade.

By the time I was allowed into a cinema without my parents, Allen's glory days were well and truly over and he was churning out things like Small Time Crooks (which made me laugh - I realise I'm supposed to be embarrassed about this). So to find myself queueing round the block for Allen's latest and leaving the cinema along with a beaming crowd - it's an unreal experience, and I don't know how to explain it.

This isn't some sort of return to form. It's a tender, charming, occasionally a little irritating (Woody, I love you, but name dropping is not a punchline) but perfectly satisfying concoction with a fabulous Woody surrogate and an overarching idea that is touching, thought-provoking and neither deeply nor subtly dissected.

That this particular offering has managed to strike a $50m+ chord with audiences and bring Allen out of 15 barely interrupted years of oblivion makes no sense to me whatsoever. And yet, for no rational reason, it makes me very happy.

WEST SIDE STORY (Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, 1961)

2011-09-25T23:56:00.001-07:00

**½
USA

Musical theatre and gang warfare. It's an uneasy mix. For the Sharks and the Jets, fists and guns just won't do. They settle their scores the only real way: through dance.

Yes, it's an easy target today, but once upon a time this mix of self-conscious cool and sledgehammer topicality won accolades and Academy Awards.

Admittedly the better numbers - America, the gym dance, bits of Cool - have lost none of their electric charge. In order to get to them, it's almost worth furrowing through all the posturing, the caricatures, the soggy vacant leads, the James-Cameron-hits-da-streets dialogue, the endless moralising and general endlessness (two and a half hours!).

UN COEUR EN HIVER (Claude Sautet, 1992)

2011-09-04T06:54:00.000-07:00

**½
France

Emmannuelle Béart plays a dour, meticulous, paradisiacally beautiful violinist. André Dussolier is her astonishingly patient lover. Daniel Auteuil is his best friend, and the man Emmannuelle truly loves. And he is drawn to her too, so much so that his friend will politely look the other way when she decides to throw herself at him, not realising that - hélas! - Auteuil is a Man Incapable of Love.

Yes, it's that kind of French movie. They all get together in tastefully lit venues with not a poor person in sight, communicate in strictly ponderous dialogue, smile only in order to express ungraspable pain. You want to go up to each person individually and give them a good shake.

The leads are casually arresting and Sautet utilises Ravel to sneakily hypnotic effect. But this is shallow stuff.

CASABLANCA (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

2011-08-29T00:20:00.000-07:00

*****
USA

A masterclass in atmosphere, dialogue and character colour. In popular culture and most people's memories this famously flukey classic of Warner Bros. backlot intrigue chiefly endures for its breathless love story. You remember vague talk of 'rounding up the usual suspects' and 'shock - shock! that gambling goes on in this casino'. But generally when someone says 'Casablanca' the first images that come to mind are Bogart anaesthetising a broken heart with only a searchlight for company and Bergman melting into his arms to the tune of "As Time Goes By".

So it's always a wonderful surprise to rediscover the film’s self-conscious but thoroughly beguiling aura of 'wordliness', not to mention its disarming balance of blunt cynicism and clear-eyed idealism. Yes, it's fundamentally a romance with blinding star wattage but it has brain too. The ratio of soft-focus swooning to delicious cleverness is not quite as you remember.

In any case you still have to catch your breath when a downtrodden crowd thunders the Marseillaise, when Rick delivers his farewell speech at the airport and every time the camera frames Ingrid Bergman in close-up.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956)

2011-08-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

**½
USA

"Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!" This exclamation (by a blitzed Anne Baxter) sums up not only Charlton Heston, his NRA self-righteousness and Zapp Brannigan cadences, but also the visionary mind behind this ultra-kitschy nearly-four-hour pomposity. It's probably the most hilarious of all biblical epics - and that's saying something.

JANE EYRE (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2011)

2011-08-20T03:34:00.000-07:00

**½
USA

For some reason it's never been more acceptable to poke fun at the very Hollywoodised and rather fabulous 1944 Fontaine-Welles version and its arch theatrics. But Brontë's gothic romance needs theatrics - it needs to be moody, tempestuous, pompous, passionate to an excess. Because when you tackle a plot this foggy with dialogue this mannered, you need to accept that you are dealing in fantasy.

In theory this 'gen-Y' update's handheld camerawork and murky, strictly motivated lighting are irreproachable. In theory so is the attempt at age-appropriate casting and semi-naturalistic acting. But for all their repressed hysterics and clipped line readings, Wasikowska and Fassbender don't muster up a trace of chemistry or any coherent emotional throughline.

The 1944 version was shrill and faintly tacky, but it had force, it had conviction, it was transporting. This 2011 edition is by comparison wan, unconvincing. Bloodless.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (Don Siegel, 1956)

2011-08-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

****
USA

One of those classics I feel warmly towards but can't fully get behind.

As much as I appreciate a tight, economical set-up, the plot turns and revelations here pile up without concern for even B-grade-sci-fi-level coherence. And the script gives Kevin McCarthy far too much dialogue. The best sequences have none. Or they feel like they have none.

Santa Mira is the film's great asset. It's actually more vivid and palatable than any other Hollywood 50s small-town recreation.

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986)

2011-08-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

**½
USA

Back to the Future for disillusioned 80s housewives. Never mind the usual qualms about time travel movies* - just as basic storytelling, this one is weirdly erratic and disjointed. Key scenes seem to be missing and various emotionally charged conversations have no impact on the relationships involved since the characters seem to have forgotten them when they pop up five minutes later.

Several people in the cast are under the unfortunate impression that they have the lead role, while Kathleen Turner hacks away at her big closeups with all the gusto of Charles Busch in Susan Hayward mode.

Like a lot of sunny 80s tackfests, this one is fun to revisit in a half-nostalgic, half-ironic way. But if I was watching it 1986, I'd be pretty confident it's a piece of shit.

* e.g. why would you keep talking about people standing in front of you in the past tense and why won't anybody pick you up on it? why wouldn't you run to the police and warn them to take special care with the president in Dallas in November 1962? why do people in the 60s have hairstyles from the 80s? what are all these 36 year olds doing in a classroom? what made Peggy Sue's whitebread all-American parents adopt an awkward, expressionless girl from southern Italy? how could those sketchy, unhinged actorly tics evolve into something that could net Nicolas Cage an Oscar? The mind boggles.

Melbourne International Film Festival: THE TOP 10

2011-08-08T19:43:00.000-07:00

What a fabulous year this was for Cannes. But also for MIFF!

BEGINNERS
dir: Mike Mills
MELANCHOLIA
dir: Lars von Trier
TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS
dir: Radu Muntean
A SEPARATION
dir: Asghar Farhadi
ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
POLISSE
dir: Maïwenn
TERRI
dir: Azazel Jacobs
THE FUTURE
dir: Miranda July
THE KID WITH A BIKE
dir: Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne
TABLOID
dir: Errol Morris

With very honourable mentions going out to Elena, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Michael, Take Shelter and The Turin Horse.

Best Actress:
KIRSTEN DUNST (Melancholia)
runner-ups: Mirela Oprisor (Tuesday, After Christmas), Leila Hatami (A Separation), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene)

Best Actor:
MUHAMMET UZUNER (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)
runner-ups: Dragos Bucur (Tuesday, After Christmas), Michael Shannon (Take Shelter), Thomas Doret (The Kid with a Bike)

Best Supporting Actress:
MARY PAGE KELLER (Beginners)
runner-ups: Yelena Lyadova (Elena), Maria Popistasu (Tuesday, After Christmas), Karin Viard (Polisse)

Best Supporting Actor:
TANER BIRSEL (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia)
runner-ups: John C. Reilly (Terri), Yilmaz Erdogan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), Shahab Hosseini (A Separation)

Best Screenplay:
MIKE MILLS (Beginners)
[impeccable] runner-ups: Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), Lars von Trier (Melancholia), Radu Muntean (Tuesday, After Christmas), Asghar Farhadi (A Separation)

Best Cinematography:
MANUEL ALBERTO CLARO (Melancholia)
runner-ups: Fred Kelemen (The Turin Horse), Alain Marcoen (The Kid with a Bike), Mikhail Krichman (Elena)

Best Ensemble:
TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS
[astounding] runner-ups: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Polisse, Melancholia, A Separation

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

2011-08-08T19:29:00.000-07:00

****
Turkey/Bosnia-Herzegovina

When a film opens with a police car's headlights scouring a barren, isolated hillside, you expect a certain kind of story. Nuri Bilge Ceylan is resolutely uninterested in that story, or the rhythm that tends to accompany it. Particularly in the context of this opening setup, his own narrative rhythm takes more than a little adjusting, but when you 'get' it, it's something of a revelation.

Ceylan isn't interested in epic events so much as the intricate lives, histories, pesonal demons and perspectives that inform, bring meaning and tension to even the most mundane moment. It's rare for an artist today to be so centrally concerned with the human condition, and it's even rarer to be able to dissect said condition with Chekhovian skill and insight.

BEAUTY (Oliver Hermanus, 2011)

2011-08-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

***½
South Africa

A middle-aged, self-hating, deeply closeted and (duh) fairly unbalanced family man falls obsessively in love with his daughter's tanned, toned, always smiling suitor.

The closet in small town South Africa turns out to be even more constricting and traumatising than in other places. Hermanus has a self-conscious style that proves somehat limiting, but all the same, this is compelling stuff.

ATTENBERG (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)

2011-08-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

***
Greece

A 12-year-old trapped in a 22-year-old virgin's body is confronted with a 42-year-old's problems, namely her father's terminal cancer and funeral arrangments.

A very awkward love interest is played by Giorgos Lanthimos, whose brilliant Dogtooth was co-produced by Tsangari. In what is her second stab at directing she aims for a vaguely similar slanted-world approach. But the tone of her film seems to shift from sequence to sequence.

All the same, there is a lot of warmth here, much of it stemming from the open-faced, committed Ariane Labed in the lead.

CEDAR RAPIDS (Miguel Arteta, 2011)

2011-08-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

***
USA

Likable enough but you can sense the script screeching to make each proscribed character turn.

A USEFUL LIFE (Federico Veiroj, 2010)

2011-08-06T07:51:00.000-07:00

*½
Uruguay

The first half is dry and academic, then there is a tonal shift towards something closer to tender and tedious.

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (Werner Herzog, 2010)

2011-08-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

***½
Canada/USA/France

Like every recent Herzog venture, a scuffle between ponderous and transcendent trains of thought. Thankfully the latter dominate.

He tackles the Chauvet cave paintings as a tantalising but forever obstructed pathway into not just another time but another universe. For as long as he doesn't get bogged down in inane pseudo-metaphysics,* it's a transporting, almost profound experience.

* e.g. "Is this our heartbeat we hear? Or theirs?" Uh, neither, Herr Herzog, it's a stock sound effect you tacked on in post.

THE HOLLYWOOD COMPLEX (Dylan Nelson, Dan Sturman, 2011)

2011-08-05T23:05:00.000-07:00

***½
USA

A chirpy, frightening, transfixing-like-a-car-crash look at a set of aspiring child stars and the parents that camp with them at the specialty Oakwood apartments in Hollywood during pilot week.

ELENA (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)

2011-08-05T19:54:00.000-07:00

****
Russia

There is a father-daughter hospital-bedside scene here that is blunt, witty, fiercely unsentimental yet deeply moving. It is a masterclass in acting and dialogue.

The film is otherwise a pretty straightforward [im]morality tale - schematic but convincing, compelling and elegantly mounted.

NEDS (Peter Mullan, 2010)

2011-08-05T19:42:00.000-07:00

**
UK

Murky weather, bad haircuts, youth gangs, father-son hysterics - British kitchen sink miserablism lives on.

Mullan has nothing much to contribute. Unless you consider scoring violence with cheesy pop radical. Which it hasn't been since at least the 70s.

ESSENTIAL KILLING (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2010)

2011-08-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

**
Poland

Some people will see a Taliban fighter, some people will see Vincent Gallo with a longer than usual beard. Otherwise this is a pretty routine man-on-the-run-from-men-with-guns-in-the-wilderness tale, more concerned with devising increasingly grotesque ways for Gallo to feed himself than with any kind of political statement.

SILENT SOULS (Aleksei Fedorchenko, 2010)

2011-08-04T23:38:00.000-07:00

***
Russia

A soul-searching Russian descended from an obscure Finno-Ugric tribe hits the road with his friend to bury the latter's recently departed wife in a distant lake according to ancient folk rituals.

Though the plot has a clearly defined throughline, there are so many eccentric asides and strange detours along the way that the film almost works better as a series of textured, contemplative vignettes. The various strands do ultimately cohere quite eloquently and resonantly. Though the insistent woman-is-an-exotic-body-of-water metaphors don't really belong in this century.

CLIENT 9: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIOT SPITZER (Alex Gibney, 2010)

2011-08-04T23:16:00.000-07:00

***
USA

Gibney charts a fascinating, intricate tale, if not elegantly, then at least in compelling detail. He gives Spitzer a few too many chances to compare himself to a behemoth of mythological proportions. But he also ensures that several absurd but evidently-not-made-up characters - including a bubbly 22-year-old madame, a singularly sleazy political strategist, an ever so slightly unhinged investment banker - say things that are revealing on multiple (and not always intentional) levels.

THE DAY HE ARRIVES (Hong Sang-soo, 2011)

2011-08-04T22:45:00.000-07:00

***
South Korea

It's uncanny, but in his twelfth version of the same film - insecure filmmakers, beautiful women who sleep with them anyway, lots of drinking - Hong yet again manages to wring out a new and unexpectedly resonant inflection.

However, even within a 79-minute runtime, he manages to meander unnecessarily - particularly in the closing scenes, after all his points are well and truly made and the various conundrums eloquently resolved.

It's always possible that his thirteenth film might uncover yet another arresting nuance on this same plot. But it definitely feels like his comfort zone will very soon grow constricting.

Unless his next film stars Isabelle Huppert. That would be profoundly exciting.

THE TURIN HORSE (Bela Tarr, 2011)

2011-08-03T20:03:00.000-07:00

***½
Hungary

The titular horse (which reportedly drove Nietzsche mad) only pops up occasionally, to brood and act deflated. I think the implication is that it knows something. I think the horse is playing Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia.

This is the Bela Tarr Experience cranked up to eleven. The horse's craggy owner and his equally craggy daughter are the protagonists. A force five gale has them trapped in their isolated hut amidst a barren plain. The majority of the action is taken up with six days worth of their ascetic, mind-numbing day-to-day routine: dressing the old man, drawing water from the well, sitting down to a meal of boiled potatoes, staring out the window, downing some home-made spirits, some more potatoes, then some more staring out the window.

Tarr is a pretentious filmmaker, for sure, and indulgent, and morbidly depressed. But also a little bit brilliant. He draws you into his gloomy worlds through a peerless sense for light, composition and movement and a relentless series of stark, entrancing images:
Within a single take, through a slight camera move, he can render a poky hut cavernous. When the horseman's daughter sets the potatoes to boil and takes her seat by the window, the leaves on the tattered plain flutter up at just the right moment and it's poetry. In a later section, from the other side of the window, we come across her staring out once again, this time looking ghostly and beaten. What should be a mundane, familiar sighting is instead eerie and devastating.
In a sense this feeling sums up the film itself: scenes that should be rote and ludicrous inexplicably coming off as poetic and transfixing.

AT ELLEN'S AGE (Pia Marais, 2010)

2011-08-03T03:53:00.000-07:00

**½
Germany

Jeanne Balibar plays a stewardess who discovers her lover has impregnated another woman, ditches him, breaks down mid-air safety instructions, then follows her inscrutable impulses, drifting from one faintly surreal situation to another. A dark, knowing antidote to the Eat Pray Love industry, Marais' film coasts by for a while on Balibar's natural magnetism and a nicely judged, nervy aesthetic. But eventually the heroine's misadventures start to feel arbitrary and interchangeable.

WINTER VACATION (Li Hongqi, 2010)

2011-08-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

*1/2
China

Deadpan absurdism of the Andersson-Suleiman variety pushed to a mordant, oppressive limit. It seems to be intended as some sort of satire of small-town ennui in Northern China. But you get the point pretty early on, and the joke - which consists of suppressing face expressions and stretching out the nonsensical dialogues endlessly - wears out quickly.

CIRCUMSTANCE (Maryam Keshavarz, 2011)

2011-08-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

***
France/USA/Iran

Two pillow-lipped Persian variations on Natalie Portman play out a love story against the backdrop of Tehran's privileged classes and undergruond clubs. Underground clubs in this context doesn't refer to a chic-squalid place where you are encouraged to wear the clothes your mother kept from the 80s - rather, a place where "sewing class" is the code word and the headscarf-shedding, hip-thrusting youth goes to snort, dance and hide from the morality police.

Does a difficult shoot and honourable intentions render a contrived romance into something worthwhile? Partially, yes. The glimpses into the above-mentioned underground clubs and things like video stores tucked in behind barbershop fronts make the story - which ultimately amounts to a nonsensical soap opera - much more absorbing than it should be.

PLAY (Ruben Östlund, 2011)

2011-08-01T22:03:00.000-07:00

*½
Sweden

An insufferably smug exercise in sub-Haneke sadism. Three meek children get tortured for two hours not because the narrative demands it but purely to serve Östlund's facile didactics.

HOW TO DIE IN OREGON (Peter Richardson, 2011)

2011-08-01T21:41:00.001-07:00

**½
USA

Who would pay money to check out a moody, wrenching feature-length doc about Oregon's euthanasia laws? The kind of people for whom euthanasia is a resolutely black-and-white issue.

Richardson is very much content to preach to the converted. Only one of his subjects manages to complicate his thesis when he points out what insurance companies are able to perpetrate with the wrong kind of euthanasia law. But Richardson abandons this interviewee within seconds and spends the rest of the time prying out your tears over some deeply sympathetic people's efforts of to die with dignity.

POLISSE (Maïwenn, 2011)

2011-08-01T21:28:00.000-07:00

****
France

A scrappy, immersive slice of French police life that crams in enough scenarios for a mini-series worth of special victims unit procedurals. It's a little crude, and hampered by a weirdly misjudged finale, but it's consistently enthralling. With a peerless ensemble of French veterans at her disposal, despite the busy interplotting, Maïwenn manages to bring off more than a dozen convincing and remarkably vivid characterisations. Through hectic snippets she renders the personal lives of this motley but very relatable crew just as compelling as their professional ones.

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (Sean Durkin, 2011)

2011-07-31T07:29:00.000-07:00

***½
USA

Elizabeth Olsen escapes from an enigmatic cult led by an even creepier than usual John Hawkes, but finds life on the other side even more emotionally constricting.

Minute by minute this is transfixing movie making with an arresting star turn. But ultimately it is too artificial and 'written' to be credible as a realistic psychological treatise, and it has too many gaps and convenient elisions to be a fully satisfying spin on genre. The cult seems like a rather thin invention (a bit of Mormon compound here, a bit of Manson family there, throw in some virgins with flawless complexion, and cut to the orgy).

The closing scenes are particularly unnerving and ensure that the film and the titular character are uncommonly difficult to shake off. But this in turn encourages you to further reflect on the preceeding narrative, which becomes all the more frustating the more you dwell on it.

PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES (Andrew Rossi, 2011)

2011-07-31T03:20:00.000-07:00

***
USA

Rossi is a little too much in awe of his subject - he brushes aside the NYT's collusion in the Iraq war in a matter of seconds. And while his discussion of the slow death of print media is timely, he contributes nothing new to it. The film only kicks into high gear when it gets properly behind the scenes of individual news stories as they unfold.

MAJORITY (Seren Yüce, 2010)

2011-07-31T01:05:00.000-07:00

***½
Turkey

A knowing excoriation of everything that's ape-like about the moneyed class in today's Istanbul. Yüce portrays casual monstrosities casually, and so his film makes for thoroughly unpleasant viewing. But it's addictive in its own way: it all feels very much lived.

A SEPARATION (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)

2011-07-30T22:53:00.000-07:00

****
Iran

Out of a tangle of decent people, murky intentions and jarring consequences, Farhadi devises a wrenching, escalating mess and orchestrates it impeccably.

While he very much keeps the trials and tribulations of ordinary people at the forefront and never allows the narrative to stall, via the not so subtle subtext he gives the patriarchy a thorough savaging.

THE KID WITH A BIKE (Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardenne, 2011)

2011-07-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

****
Belgium

The story is simple, potent, though pretty interchangeable for any bleak, socially conscious drama of the past few decades. It's the intensity, the sheer ferocity of the images that elevates the film.

That and the breathless pint-sized dynamo, Thomas Doret, in the lead role.

WIN WIN (Tom McCarthy, 2011)

2011-07-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

***½
USA

Technically it's about family and parenthood and love and trust. Though of course it has nothing to say about any of those things.

The main pleasure of this very huggable indie dramedy is that it follows a set formula skilfully and efficiently: you spend an hour and a half or so with people who are impossible to dislike, and whose troubles come off as credible and reasonably urgent. McCarthy piles on the saccharine in the closing stretch but by then it's too late to resist.

TABLOID (Errol Morris, 2010)

2011-07-30T03:50:00.000-07:00

****

USA

Morris' lightest documentary in decades covers the strange case of Joyce McKinney, the ex-beauty queen who may or may not have abducted a Mormon missionary in Devon for a weekend of love and chains, and who continued to lead a bizarre life long after these events.

For once Morris doesn't seek out any metaphysical underpinnings. He comes to some general, rather familiar conclusions about the subjective nature of truth. But mainly he's just out to tell a cracking, outrageous yarn.

BEGINNERS (Mike Mills, 2010)

2011-07-29T07:18:00.000-07:00

****½
USA

Where most movies scramble to develop a single credible character, this one renders indelible at least four - gently, in novelistic detail. Mills adopts several showy French New Wave-y techniques that somehow don't feel showy. His film is warm yet bracing, brooding yet witty, nostalgic yet piercing, intimate yet sprawling. It's a humble miracle.

FINISTERRAE (Sergio Caballero, 2010)

2011-07-29T01:28:00.000-07:00

**
Spain

Two ghosts, or to be precise - two Russians with bedsheets draped over their heads drift through a bleak Spanish mountainside on horseback. The steed is sometimes replaced by a wooden horse, and sometimes it disappears altogether, when the similarly disappearing-reappearing wheelchair comes in handy. In between pondering existential matters in a slurring monotone, the ghosts encounter things like talking reindeer, a talking owl, trees with earlobes as well as a fellow ghost who lifts up her bedsheet to show off some expensive-looking breast implants.

You know, now and again, you owe it to yourself to tackle one of these things. It's tedious, it's hilarious, it's singular nonsense.

THE APPLE (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)

2011-07-29T00:45:00.000-07:00

***
Iran

A rough-hewn semi-documentary about two 12-year-old girls who have never left the house or learned to speak.

Inevitably fascinating, even if it doesn't dig anywhere near as deep as you'd like.

SUBMARINE (Richard Ayoade, 2010)

2011-07-28T19:48:00.000-07:00

***
UK

A familiar, darkish coming of age tale marked by both the buzz and the pitfalls of a first feature. Ayoade borrows techniques from sources that are expected (Wes Anderson) and expected-but-encouraging (Godard). The story is ultimately too overstretched and lean on insight to allow for extended montages cut to tremulous indie tracks. But there is some truth to it and the cast - headlined by the intuitive, disarmingly confident Craig Roberts and featuring the fabulous Sally Hawkins - is pitch-perfect.

TINY FURNITURE (Lena Dunham, 2010)

2011-07-28T19:22:00.000-07:00

***
USA

You could either dismiss this as a self-indulgent serenade to over-privileged, proudly insular NYC twenty-something children of rich parents living in immaculately designed three-level Tribeca lofts. Or you could embrace it as a testament to a generation overwhelmed by too many career options and nowhere near as many job prospects.

It's actually both of those things.

OKI'S MOVIE (Hong Sang-soo, 2010)

2011-07-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

***
South Korea

Drinking, filmmaking, ineffectual men, beautiful sexually willing yet emotionally unattainable women, neurotic romances. Yes, Hong is repeating himself. And in fact, repeating himself four times - this film is structured as four interrelated short films.

But what Hong does all the time, he does better than others. And what seems like a moderately uninspired structural conceit actually works to draw out great resonance from an otherwise very familiar story.

THE FUTURE (Miranda July, 2011)

2011-07-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

****
USA

Another case of personalities and situations that should be exasperating but somehow aren't. And in this case, I'm even more stumped as to why this particular melancholy quirkfest works.

The story concerns two pseudo-hippie overgrown children who decide that adopting a cat is the end of life as they know it and they have to make the intervening days count. They quit their respective jobs but then are completely stumped as to how to fill the time as it drags on. The film then shapeshifts and takes radical, often abstract turns, but basically that is the plot. And it opens with a talking cat.

So how did it happen that I not only swallowed this ode to navelgazing but was downright enthralled? Was it Miranda July's way with dialogue? Was it her off-kilter on-screen charm? Was it the rich, gorgeous score by Jon Brion? Was it the side-splitting yet eerily sharp exchanges like "You have two options - you can tell him the truth or lie."/"Oh, the two of us are incredibly close. It's impossible for me to do either of those things."?

For some reason when July writes into her script a conversation with the moon (or a precocious child that sleeps inside a lawn or a stalking T-shirt that incites a Lynchian dance routine) it doesn't feel like hollow quirk. Instead it feels like a natural extension of an idiosyncratic but thoroughly relatable woman's search for meaning in places where people don't normally care to look.

Maybe that's it. Maybe the difference between Miranda July's output and that of the Sundance factory stems from the fact that when she puts in a talking cat, it's not a nod to any attention-seeking indie formula but rather a coherent, authentic part of the world as she spontaneously experiences it. When she unhinges the naturally, hilariously finicky strands of her imagination, when she unrolls her thoughts and follows them systematically from beginning to [obscure yet logical] end, she comes up with ideas, images and conceits that are precious in every sense of the word.

Also, it helps enormously that July is very aware of precisely how ridiculous her alter ego is. She doesn't encourage you to love these characters for their flaws, but in spite of them. And most importantly, she doesn't let her story rest on a string of tiny resonant observations, but on an elegant, idiosyncratic yet hefty statement on the inexorable passage of time.

TERRI (Azazel Jacobs, 2011)

2011-07-27T03:32:00.000-07:00

****
USA

In Azazel Jacobs' hands quirky-melancholy Sundance stereotypes - an obese outcast who wears pyjamas to school, John C. Reilly - somehow become arresting, human.

A climactic sequence in particular, which brings together a grotesquely mismatched trio of pariahs, is a revelation. It exudes the immediacy of a dream, the intimacy of a high school secret, and the penetrating insight of, well, Azazel Jacobs.

THE GUARD (John Michael McDonagh, 2011)

2011-07-26T22:34:00.000-07:00

***
UK

Brendan Gleeson plays Eddie Murphy, Don Cheadle plays Nick Nolte, instead of San Fran we're in Limerick, Ireland, and instead of 48 hours it takes a few more days to allow for some Sundance workshop soul searching.

The actors are game and it's all pretty harmless really, but this kind of slightly snarky, self-referential skewering of genre clichés has by now become something of a cliché itself.

PROJECT NIM (James Marsh, 2011)

2011-07-26T20:00:00.000-07:00

***½
USA

Undoubtedly there is a story here that is denser, grander, more profound, more thought-provoking than what Marsh delivers. (If only Errol Morris got to this subject first.) But Marsh works the heartstrings so efficiently. To resist is inhuman. Mr. Chimpsky is just too damn adorable. Even the insufferably pretentious score is easier to overlook than it should be.

MICHAEL (Markus Schleinzer, 2011)

2011-07-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

***½
Austria

For what it is it's well constructed and incredibly well thought out.

Though of course, what it is is a story about a man who keeps a 10-year-old locked in his cellar.

In the meantime, after Hitler, Fritzl, the Funny Games duo and now this guy, Austria is in dire need of a singing nun or another set of von Trapps or a kindergarten cop who isn't hiding any children.

BOBBY FISCHER AGAINST THE WORLD (Liz Garbus, 2011)

2011-07-26T06:32:00.000-07:00

***
USA

A talking-head-driven race through Fischer's life and times, it doesn't lack for hyperbole, bad puns, auto-pilot musical cues or sophomore psychoanalysis, though it makes for solid entertainment. All the same, Garbus would have done better to dwell on certain key events rather than cramming everything into a craziest-hits compilation.

AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)

2011-07-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

***½
Japan

Ozu's company is always warm, nourishing. But for a man who spent more than a decade making the kind of searching, contemplative, quietly revelatory films each of which feels like a perfect swansong, his eventual final film feels a little.. well, limited. The problem isn't so much that this story (of an elderly patriarch contemplating the crushing loneliness that will follow once his daughter marries off) feels distinctly familiar. It's that the internalised transcendence that hangs over his greatest films is missing here.

Or maybe it was just missing for me. In any case there is still plenty to savour here, not least Chishu Ryu's reliably graceful, grounding presence in the lead role.

Ozu was preparing to make another film when he passed away. You wish he got to make at least a few more in colour. In the end colour turned out to suit him surprisingly well.

THE FORGIVENESS OF BLOOD (Joshua Marston, 2011)

2011-07-25T06:11:00.000-07:00

**½
USA/Albania

In the kind of Albanian mountain village where internet access is widespread but blood feuds still take place, a blood feud takes place. You will now make several assumptions about what kind of film this is, and yes, it is that kind of film. Within 10 minutes you have a clear idea of how the story will play out, but unfortunately there are still another 90 to go.

With lyrical crafting and reasonably complex characters, this plotline could conceivably hold a feature. But the crafting here is purely polished and workmanlike. As for the characters - they are certainly believable and some even sympathetic, but complex or compelling they are not quite.

NATURAL SELECTION (Robbie Pickering, 2011)

2011-07-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

**
USA

The first act is taken up with cheap Christian baiting, the second is a straight-to-video dramedy of two quirky lost souls connecting, the third makes you swallow a rushed self-discovery.

So the overall experience is one of exasperation, followed by a vague soggy sensation, and finally resignation.

POST MORTEM (Pablo Larraín, 2010)

2011-07-25T01:03:00.000-07:00

***
Chile

Larrain seeks out the most grotesque lives on the fringes of Pinochet's Chile (in this case our blank-faced hero assists at very graphic autopsies) and parses through them for symptoms of the regime's virulence. He shapes his characters and storylines through a singular macabre/nauseating sense of humour that is in equal parts ingenious and stunting.

TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (Radu Muntean, 2010)

2011-07-24T07:10:00.001-07:00

****½
Romania

The Romanian New Wave (does it have a proper name yet or do I just keep calling it that?) is still going strong.

Unlike his more celebrated peers (think stories of undercover abortion, scruffy seniors left to die alone etc.) Radu Muntean is concerned with the first Romanian generation to achieve a modest sort-of affluence. Affluence in this context means a medium-sized flatscreen, an annual ski trip, piano lessons for the child and a reliable income that means you no longer have to live either with your parents or your spouse's parents.

So once a nation's socio-economic subsets start to shift (at least for a certain section of educated thirtysomethings living in the capital) so does the nature of its people's day-to-day conundrums and the cinema that reflects them. There is no sign here of toothless grandmas or sadistic abortionists. The case of adultery that drives this story might as well be borrowed from any generic Western European heavy-breathing prestige package.

But don't let the plot outline scare you - there is nothing generic about Muntean's film. The lived-in settings, the careful accumulation of detail, the alternately mundane and staggering dialogue, the uniformly, uncannily natural performances: for this story and these characters the point of reference isn't the European arthouse tradition - it's lived experience.

Hopefully this film's comparative success will also bring attention to Muntean's previous and similarly lacerating Boogie. And hopefully this 'New Wave' keeps going and going.

13 ASSASSINS (Takashi Miike, 2010)

2011-07-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

**½
Japan

Roughly 137 names are referenced in the opening reel - of people, clans, places, honour codes. Of course it's not necessary to follow any of them, but for a long time there is precious little else to follow. Miike relieves the hour-and-a-half-long exposition-sodden buildup with some bloodletting now and then, but it's still something of a slog.

Finally the film gets going with the famed final showdown - which is spectacular to begin with, as the body count starts to quadruple by the second and in the most creative ways. But even this ardent, extended ode to disembowelment gradually devolves into a matter of logistics more than artistry.

EXPORTING RAYMOND (Phil Rosenthal, 2011)

2011-07-24T00:27:00.000-07:00

USA/Russia

Rosenthal travels to Moscow to help the Russians turn Everybody Loves Raymond into Everybody Loves Kostya. In presenting his experience he makes two assumptions: that Raymond is some sort of miracle of screen comedy, and that American superiority is a self-evident fact.

It's more than a little disturbing to have MIFF endorse this kind of semi-blind xenophobia.

OUTSIDE SATAN (Bruno Dumont, 2011)

2011-07-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

*½
France

A peasant strolling through a paddock or a telegenic couple sunning by a motel pool - in Dumont's better films even the most mundane images become morbidly absorbing. A pervading sense of menace charges them - a sense that's missing here. Or it isn't missing entirely - it just feels artificial. Like self-parody.

TAKE SHELTER (Jeff Nichols, 2011)

2011-07-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

***½

USA

Across a gnawing, progressively unnerving two hours Michael Shannon descends into an illness somewhere within the cross-spectrum of schizophrenia and post-9/11 post-GFC middle-American anxiety.

The script shows its seams through the supporting characters. (What is it about Jessica Chastain and high-profile roles in movies by men who can't write women?) But Shannon's unravelling is not only persuasive but deeply, urgently moving.

THE SCREEN ILLUSION (Mathieu Amalric, 2010)

2011-07-23T03:05:00.000-07:00

*½
France

Made for French TV but destined for film festival limbo, this aggressively arty frivolity takes the plot of a 17th-century farce, keeps the Alexandrine couplets but ditches the sorcery and costumes in favour of LCD surveillance and contemporary dress. To what purpose, I can't say.

TOMBOY (Celine Sciamma, 2011)

2011-07-23T00:32:00.000-07:00

***
France

10-year-old Laure and her family move to a new building, and she introduces herself to the local kids as Mikael.

The opening act in particular carries the inevitable whiff of the afterschool special. But Sciamma is a sharp-eyed storyteller with a feel for texture. And amazingly, none of the many children in the cast is irritating.

ARMADILLO (Janus Metz Pedersen, 2010)

2011-07-22T22:59:00.000-07:00

***½
Denmark

In film festivals across the West the staple that used to be the incensed Iraq doc has mutated into the incensed Afghanistan doc. It's difficult to argue that there is something to glean from this one that you couldn't from the dozens that preceded it. But it is well-crafted, immersive, chilling. And it charts the dehumanising effect of war acutely and in detail.

GOOD BYE (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2011)

2011-07-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

***
Iran

Because it lacks the detail and swarming humanity of the best Iranian exports, it feels staged, somewhat muted. But obviously it's credible enough to be affecting. The actors help.

MELANCHOLIA (Lars von Trier, 2011)

2011-07-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

****½
Denmark

There is a sequence early on, where Kirsten Dunst flees her wedding on a golf buggy and pees in the middle of a golf course, staring up at the superplanet that will be obliterating Earth within days. It's hilarious, jarring and entrancing all at once. You have no idea whether von Trier is mocking you or reaching out to you on a core level. Probably both.

LE HAVRE (Aki Kaurismaki, 2011)

2011-07-22T03:27:00.000-07:00

***
Finland

The colours, the songs, the deadpan faces, the non-sequiturs -- after two decades of absurdist Kaurismaki fairytales, they've become very familiar. But they still exude the same warmth.

FOOTNOTE (Joseph Cedar, 2011)

2011-07-21T22:52:00.001-07:00

**
Israel

The rivalry between two academics - a bearish egomaniac and his sour-faced father - comes to a verbose, protracted hilt.

Cedar chucks in cheeky Tom-and-Jerry music, canted close-ups, nonsensical sight gags and various other bits of half-assed yet emphatic quirk, the kind of which you don't generally expect to see winning prizes at Cannes.

THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick, 2011)

2011-07-13T01:10:00.000-07:00

****½
USA

Terrence Malick recalibrates time, cinema and the universe in the shadow of one brother's grief for another. Memories of a sleepy small-town childhood course through a mechanical present and an abstract purgatory, following an amorphous emotional logic that gives way to an account of the universe's conception, and then to a tactile, incomparably vivid infant's-perspective of a strange, swarming planet.

So when Malick eventually settles into a linear, more easily graspable coming of age tale - despite the persisting poetry and vibrancy of the images, it's a little bit of a letdown. And it doesn't help that he chooses to cap things off with a slightly tacky conception of the afterworld.

But the overarching feeling is of flooding over the edges of everything you ever thought a movie could be. For days afterwards, the world looks new, invigorated.

BRIDESMAIDS (Paul Feig, 2011)

2011-06-22T06:08:00.000-07:00

****
USA

An all-girl anti-chick-flick evidently mounted as a challenge: can female comics plunge the hardcore gross-out depths of overgrown fratboy comedies? And also turn in a profit?

It's astounding that a venture so dubious delivers perhaps the most detailed, multifaceted woman to headline a multiplex farce in years. And even if the film didn't work so wonderfully [and profitably] as slapstick, it would still make for an absorbing, sharp-edged drama about rollercoaster female friendships and the bloodfights that go into BFF status.

(Also, it's a singularly relaxing feeling to emerge from a proudly lowbrow 3000+screen comedy which doesn't once resort to a cheap racist/homophobic/misogynist gag.)

INCENDIES (Denis Villeneuve, 2010)

2011-06-17T07:15:00.000-07:00

***
Canada

Essentially a grand tragedy of a nearly extinct, hysterical kind - so hysterical, in fact, that an entire country has to be invented, along with a decade-spanning cycle of warfare and unspeakable faith-fueled brutality, purely to accommodate the stomach-churning plot. Squalid middle-Eastern milieus, socio-political jabs, relentless brain-spattering, massacres, abstractly angsty twentysomething audience surrogates - all sorts of grim things and atrocities are stitched into the astoundingly far-fetched plot in order to render it plausible. And scarily, this works. A sadistic soap opera that should be banal and offensive comes out absurdly compelling.

THE NEW WORLD (Terrence Malick, 2005)

2011-06-16T02:23:00.001-07:00

*****
USA

Terrence Malick has always had his serene, impressionistic way of going about things, but in his take on that often-mythologised first encounter of European and Native American cultures, he takes his style to a kind of extreme.

During the opening reel, you may be wondering whether you’re watching the movie or just its trailer. He ignores every rule and technique that prizes spatial continuity. Every new image seems to bear only an arbitrary link to the preceding one – it seems to exist in and of itself. As a result, even time appears to take on its own entity.

All of these things have been done before, both in American cinema and particularly in European avant-garde cinema, but never in this way. No other picture – at least none where the narrative plays a key role - has followed this pattern for its entire feature length. It feels jarring at first – the way you’re thrown into a busy situation, on the face of it without anything tangible to hold onto. But in time the rhythm grows entrancing. You begin to experience every sound, every colour and every texture on an unusually direct, intimate level. An element of revelation may very well come over you as the movie reaches its closing, achingly gorgeous London sequences.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (Mary Harron, 2005)

2011-06-15T19:03:00.000-07:00

**½
USA

A slightly perky, slightly flat, offensively inoffensive biopic. Gretchen Mol rarely shifts from an expression of blind, sunny optimism, and when she does, it isn't to add any kind of shade or dimension (she can only muster a babyish pout). You won't come across much more insight here than you would in Page's bondage folio.

STATE OF THE UNION (Frank Capra, 1948)

2011-06-15T06:13:00.001-07:00

****½
USA

Frank Capra's last great film is a familiar and irresistible mix of vicious political satire and all-American fairy tale. This time he has Mr. Tracy go to Washington, with a huggable, hyper-adroit Katharine Hepburn out to prove that behind every great man is a great woman. A very young, very Angela Lansbury plays the bitch from hell - and by hell, Capra means Washington (which, incidentally, doesn't appear to have evolved much in the intervening six decades).

Aside from a couple of plane chases, it's a talky affair, but the talk is fabulous.

SUMMERTIME (David Lean, 1955)

2011-06-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

***
USA

In the mid-50s, this is what passed for hardcore porno to lonely spinsters and housewives across America. Husbandless in her autumn years, Katharine Hepburn carouses through Venice, traipsing and moping from one postcard composition to the next, eventually edging into the arms of a smitten, worldly Continental gentleman dripping with pomade.

He romances her one night on a moonlit balcony - they retire to her quarters, she leaves behind a shoe, tens of thousands of dollars worth of fireworks burst across the Adriatic sky, then burst some more.

In 1955 this was enough to send the evangelicals into control mode. Initially the Production Code Administration refused to classify the film because of its depiction of - gasp - Adultery! (You see, the pomaded Italian is still technically married - though long separated from his wife.) Eighteen feet of footage of implied hanky panky had to be deleted and a line of 'objectionable dialogue' trimmed before the National Catholic Legion of Decency acquiesced and gave the film a B rating, branding it merely "morally objectionable in part".

In the meantime, this gaudy beast has aged as one of David Lean's minor works - if you could call any work by David Lean minor. It's clear he had himself a ball though. In just about every frame you can sense him orgasming on the scenery (long before anybody in front of the camera gets the chance).

This is also arguably one of Katharine Hepburn's minor works. She does what she can to give her droopy spinster some detail. In individual scenes she works wonders, but most of the time she is purely called upon to gaze at decorative roofs and gargoyles with mouth-breathing admiration.

Still, if you ever have to watch someone stare at Renaissance facades for the better part of two hours, you better hope that someone is Katharine Hepburn.

TOP 10 WORKING DIRECTORS – Part 1

2011-06-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer 1: This is not a list of the greatest ever directors – as you can tell from the absence of Welles, Bergman, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Hawks, Wilder, Eisenstein, Dreyer, Hitchcock etc etc.

Disclaimer 2: This is not a list of the greatest living directors – as you can tell from the absence of Allen, Godard, Resnais, Polanski, Coppola (Sr.) and Scorsese. This list is a direct reflection of how uncontrollably, sweatily excited I get at the news of a particular director bringing out a new title. So, it’s mostly based on the kind of work these people have been doing since roughly – let’s say, 1996. Hence, I am only discussing titles released since 1996. (Coincidentally – the year of Kieslowski’s passing – so it does kind of feel like the end of one era and beginning of the next.)

Along these lines, while I remain loyal to Woody Allen (who still ranks among my Top 5 all time directors) and buy a ticket to his annual offering with great joy and optimism, I couldn’t honestly argue that, sight unseen, I get as excited about the likes of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger as I do about something like Tree of Life. (That said, I am uncontrollably excited about Midnight in Paris – but this film feels like the exception rather than the rule for the past 15 years.)

Disclaimer 3: It is humanity’s fault that there are no women on this list, not mine.

Disclaimer 4: Sincere apologies and honourable mentions are in order. All of the following are geniuses who have made vibrant, indelible and mind-expanding contributions to cinema over the past couple of decades. I will forever be impatient to see what they do next:

Mike Leigh, Jafar Panahi, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Ang Lee, David O. Russell, Todd Haynes, André Téchiné, Alexander Sokurov, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Claire Denis, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, David Cronenberg, The Dardenne Brothers, Darren Aronofsky and Bong Joon-ho.

Disclaimer 5: A super-honourable mention to Charlie Kaufman. It feels like cheating to take into consideration scriptwriting achievements on top of directing ones. But if I were to do that, Kaufman would rank among the Top 5.

So, on to business. Starting from 10.

10. DAVID LYNCH

“He’s just so amazing, and I can’t really explain why but his stuff is like so mindblowing and I don’t really get what the story’s about but it doesn’t really matter cause like it’s so surreal”... After years of getting trapped into conversation with arts grad stoners, whose favourite filmmaker Lynch inevitably is, I was starting to bear an irrational grudge against the man. But then I revisited Mulholland Drive and re-evaluated my notion of what cinema is and could be. Unquestionably one of the highpoints of this past movie decade, it won Lynch so much goodwill that a lot of people went so far as to swallow Inland Empire – ugly DV, existentially trapped bunnies, Locomotion and all. Of late, Lost Highway seems to have become a rite of passage for emerging cineastes, and fair enough (though in retrospect it feels a bit like a dry run for Mulholland Dr). Not many people however, bring up The Straight Story anymore, which is a shame. I’ve promised myself to look it up again one of these days.

9. MICHAEL HANEKE

Even when I aggressively react against a film of his (The Piano Teacher), I can’t bring myself to turn away. Not even the second time around. (Though this is equal parts thanks to Haneke as it is to Isabelle Huppert.) Otherwise, much as I enjoy his barbed, grizzly provocations (Funny Games, Caché), it’s his sprawling, tangential crystallisations of a particular moment in time that I cherish foremost. Engrossing and irresistibly sharp in its own right, Code Unknown is also a time-capsule-worthy snapshot of a certain very prominent stratum of Western European society at the turn of the millennium. (By the way, remember how much of an event and then very quickly non-event that particular turn was? Heh.) It also feels to me like the first time Haneke sincerely tried to push himself and the form. As such, it stands as a direct pointer towards the self-conscious sublimeness of The White Ribbon (which, incidentally, was the third in a continuing string of uncommonly fabulous Palme d’or winners).

8 to 1 will follow.

MEEK'S CUTOFF (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

2011-06-11T23:01:00.000-07:00

****
USA

A stark, prickly neo-Western that does for Pioneer wagon trains what McCabe and Mrs. Miller did for Pioneer whorehouses: strips the romance and idealism, punches in on the uncertainty, the dehydration and the harsh, relentless landscape that stretches on and on and on.

The narrative is never really resolved, because the narrative isn't the point. Kelly Reichardt's idea here is to immerse you into, then gradually pick apart the mindset that still defines a foundational patch of American history. She dissects the blind, institutionalised optimism and the crude dynamics that most likely defined what history has since whitewashed into 'the Pioneer spirit'.

The Native American - with a characteristic lack of fuss, credited only as 'The Indian' - is neither the noble nor ignoble savage but an ordinary, earthy man with his own equally straightforward self interests. He is enigmatic only insofar as the Pioneers themselves insist to endow him with murky motives and legends. If anything, the filthy, bearded man who has been ostensibly guiding the Pioneers throughout the dire six-week slog - that was meant to last two weeks - seems just as enigmatic and unnerving.

This inscrutable oddity, in many ways the anti-Stagecoach, is too idiosyncratic even to be pitched into the 'revisionist' bucket. The preternaturally gifted Reichardt chooses to present it in the long abandoned 'Academy' ratio (which has been out of fashion since approximately the 50s). Particularly in light of its focus on [wo]Man dwarfed by dumb, unimaginably vast Nature, you would expect majestic, imposing Widescreen vistas. But nothing in this film says that Reichardt gives a flying fuck about what you expect.

TRUE GRIT (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2010)

2011-06-08T20:38:00.000-07:00

***½
USA

For the first time in years the Coen Brothers shift away from icy, piercing existentialism towards something more traditional, something almost heartwarming until another [haunting] downer of an ending.

This remake of a 1969 John Wayne vehicle (which people remember for no other reason than its sorry-we-ignored-you-for-decades-we'll-ignore-Dustin-Hoffman-this-year Best Actor Oscar) is significantly stronger than the Coens previous shot at a remake (which people remember for no other reason than Tom Hanks playing Gargamel in a suit).
The setup here plays into their strengths: a plucky heroine, a scruffy ne'er-do-well grudgingly doing the right thing, a horde of funny-voiced small-towners and unending opportunities for grisly violence.
It doesn't resonate or obliterate narrative foundations like the Coens' finest, but it's a solid, satisfying yarn.

THE FIGHTER (David O. Russell, 2010)

2011-06-06T20:40:00.000-07:00

****½
USA

The world needs another underdog boxing drama roughly as much as it needs Jennifer Aniston to squint her way through another romcom. But David O. Russell here shows how even a thuddingly generic setup can be invigorated into fresh, exciting cinema - into a palpable, credible world of thorny, resonant relationships.

It's all about the details: the hairsprayed trailer chorus of Ward sisters parking/slamming their car into a row of rubbish bins; the half-assed heart shape Amy Adams draws around her phone number on a bar napkin; the repeated buzzer that punctuates a feral and fairly hilarious speakerphone tirade; the astounding apparition of women in a boxing drama encouraged to exhibit elements of personality beyond 'swooning', 'bruised' or 'pleading'.

PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, 1930)

2011-06-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

*****
Germany

This obscure silent docudrama is slightly less obscure than other similarly vital films of the era for several reasons:
- it provides a bracing, uncluttered glimpse at a society at a pertinent historical junture (post-Weimar, pre-Hitler);
- it continually meanders away from its very loose narrative and into disarming tangents;
- it was co-written-directed by a group of people that included Billy Wilder (fourteen years before Double Indemnity), Robert Siodmak (sixteen years before The Killers), Edgar G. Ulmer (fifteen years before Detour) and Fred Zinnemann (twenty-three years before From Here to Eternity).

A crisp, breezy, singularly beautiful film, it finds poetry in close-ups of even inanimate objects just as regularly as it does in the delicate shapes sunlight forms on faces. And such vibrant, absorbing faces, too (none of them were actors). Not an inch of the frame is ever wasted.

THE UNINVITED (Lewis Allen, 1944)

2011-06-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

****
USA

Siblings Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey purchase a Cornish seaside mansion, despite its unusually low asking price, its attic that sends pets squealing to the neighbours, and its adjacency to a very steep cliff that formed the site of a suspicious death 17 years earlier. Sure enough, they find themselves caught up in a very polite and very watchable ghost story, with the exquisitely wooden Gail Russell as the maiden in peril and a lady called Cornelia Otis Skinner playing a graduate of the Gail Sondergaard School of Sapphism and Psychiatry. The spooky effects are that much more effective for bursting out amid all the light-hearted banter and irreproachable civility.

YI YI (Edward Yang, 2000)

2011-05-31T01:53:00.000-07:00

****½
Taiwan

A tender, meditative saga founded on an old-style melancholy humanism, it begins with a wedding, ends with a funeral and in between charts in novelistic detail the mostly internalised self-questioning of each member of a bustling extended family. It unfolds in generally quiet, reflective scenes observed from a respectful distance and in a visual style that is intricate and elegant without being showy. Edward Yang doesn't for a moment leave you in doubt as to his delicate and singular sense for the pain that accompanies the accumulation of wisdom. But he seeds in a couple of particularly piercing monologues, one roughly midway and one at the finale, that are overpowering beyond anything he has led you to expect.

Recently the film popped up on multiple Top 10s among the great films of the decade. And, well, it is.

LATE MARRIAGE (Dover Koshashvili, 2001)

2011-05-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

****½
Israel

Despite healthy box office and fervent acclaim, this extra tragicomic Israeli tragicomedy was never released in Australia. So it has taken me an unforgivable amount of years to get around to it.

As a piece of filmmaking, it's a little rough around the edges (it has that primarily-writer first-time director haze), but as a piece of drama, it is astounding:

Romantic love and stone-set orthodox tradition are pitched against each other in an unhinged life-or-death smackdown when a 31-year-old bachelor from a garishly conservative Haifa household secretly engages in steamy, disarmingly and ingeniously detailed sex with a single mother, all while ostensibly courting pedigreed, school-aged virgins primped for marriage.

Though hilarity abounds, there are extended, masterfully calibrated sequences of emotional violence that leave you breathless. Koshashvili though, isn't one to get off on the shock and scandal he is eliciting. At every moment he is busy parsing through the knotty mess he has conjured up for telling social and character detail, his observations pitched at a laudable balance between caustic and empathetic.

REPRISE (Joachim Trier, 2006)

2011-05-28T04:00:00.000-07:00

***½
Norway

Norwegian hipsters in their early 20s - even when they're manic-depressive writers who wear The Smiths T-shirts - are far less pretentious and arrogant than their American (and, for that matter, Australian) counterparts. Much more likable too, and infinitely more natural actors. I'll always be dreading the notion of first-time filmmakers exploring the lives of twentysomething writers/painters/photographers/performance artists. But this was a lovely surprise.

WORLD'S GREATEST DAD (Bobcat Goldthwait, 2009)

2011-05-28T03:50:00.000-07:00

**½
USA

Equally startling for its acuity (the scary insight into parent-adolescent relationship, the cult of celebrity that develops around a tragic death) as it is for its vacuity (the ipod soundtrack, routine woman- and gay-hating).

VIDEOCRACY (Erik Gandini, 2009)

2011-05-28T03:49:00.000-07:00

****
Sweden/Denmark/UK/Finland

A staggering, comprehensive purging of Berlusconi's political abuses, it's particularly pertinent in light of recent developments.

CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH (Chuan Lu, 2009)

2011-05-28T03:45:00.000-07:00

**
China/Hong Kong

Across an elegantly lensed two hours, the human spirit is raped, then crushed, then pillaged a little, then raped again. This is war as masterfully crafted pornography.

8½ (Federico Fellini, 1964)

2011-05-28T03:35:00.000-07:00

*****
Italy

What separates Fellini's self-analysis from the plethora of rip-offs it spawned (all of which inevitably and very quickly slip into the land of wankery, never to emerge) is his generous, all-encompassing spirit. He lets you in on his private jokes and hang-ups. He doesn't look to assert his genius or delineate a status above yours. Organic, spontaneous and with an intoxicating sense of longing, his dreams speak at the level of your dreams. Few - if any - other filmmakers have mastered their craft to such a level that they've been able to capture something as vague, as mysterious and overwhelming as one's own dreamlife with such sensitivity, such intimacy and openness that, rather than a stranger's autobiography, you feel you are tuning into a raw, unfiltered materialisation of another person's rich and fabulous headspace.

ALEXANDER NEVSKY (Sergei Eisenstein, 1938)

2011-05-28T03:24:00.000-07:00

****
USSR

This celebrated biopic of a legendary 13th-century warrior who leads the Tatars to defeat a much larger invading Teutonic army isn't necessarily Communist propaganda as much as it is one big middle finger to Hitler and his cronies. (And it certainly isn't subtle - a whole sequence is devoted to the leader of the Teutonic knights coldly dumping Russian infants into a fire.)

The establishing scenes drag on, but once we get to the extended climactic battle at frozen Lake Peipus, things get pretty exciting. The fighting itself isn't necessarily convincing, but it's impeccably photographed and edited.

THE DAY I BECAME A WOMAN (Marzieh Meshkini, 2000)

2011-05-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

****
Iran

A triptych of pertinent tales about three women, who may as well be three variations on a single, oppressed woman at three crucial stages in her life. In the first story, Hava is an hour away from turning nine, and having to wear a chador as well as end her friendship with the boy next door. In the second a recently wed woman enters a bicycle race to escape from her husband and two vengeful brothers. In the third, an elderly woman goes on a shopping spree, collecting every household appliance she’d been deprived of in her youth. To varying degrees, an element of surrealism – or just plain absurdism - dominates each of the three vignettes.

Marzieh Meshkini is a sensitive and supremely talented woman. This is her first film – her film school thesis even – and already she appears to have developed a peerless sense for where to put the camera in order to most economically evoke a lifetime of deep and profound mourning.

LOVE AFFAIR; OR THE CASE OF THE MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR (Dusan Makavejev, 1967)

2011-05-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

*****
Yugoslavia

An arresting, absorbing, morbidly witty bricolage. Politically aware and very evocative of its time and place, it unfolds in the vein of the same year's "I Am Curious - Yellow", and it's inarguably valuable for providing a free-thinking, impulsive perspective on a sheltered Socialist government from within (in contrast to "Yellow"'s naive though very endearing posturing).

As far as the narrative goes, it involves a sweet, unorthodox and ultimately tragic romance in Belgrade between a free-spirited switchboard operator of Hungarian descent and a sensitive rat exterminator of Turkish ethnicity. Then there are also monologues by a criminologist and an elderly sexologist, a brutal poem about a rat, an autopsy, and footage from Esther Shub's "The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty" (1927).

HENRY FOOL (Hal Hartley, 1998)

2011-05-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

****½
USA

The people who didn't tap into the subtle wisdom and loveliness of Hal Hartley's early films mistook this one for a testament to his maturation. It's no such thing. Harley was a mature filmmaker from the outset and all that separates this very wise and lovely dramedy from his earlier ones is that this time out he's stingier with the comedy, while the melancholy that was quiet and restrained in Trust and Simple Men is here amplified and brought to the forefront. It's an approach that - working, as it is, off a plot about a pretentious writer and an antisocial garbageman-poet - reeks of undergrad hollowness to begin with, but becomes more digestible and resonant as the characters grow meatier and more life-like.

It's longer than Hartley's previous films and less contained - almost sprawling tone-wise if you compare it to The Unbelievable Truth and Simple Men. In some sense it's also more ambitious, and probably more flawed. But ultimately it's just as charming and big-hearted.

CRASH (David Cronenberg, 1996)

2011-05-24T00:49:00.000-07:00

****
Canada

A bunch of lascivious yuppies heavy-breathe and gesticulate in that once familiar straight-to-VHS style while they give into the irresistible erotic allure of car crashes and dismemberment.

Even in the confident, practiced hands of David Cronenberg, it’s difficult to take such scenes completely seriously. And yet he sets a mood and a rhythm with such (characteristic) conviction that it’s very easy to get carried away in it. Pretty much every moment of the film is both ludicrous and beguiling. And it leaves you feeling much more sensitive to the nature and workings of obsession (no matter how bizarre a form it takes).

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (Charles Laughton, 1955)

2011-03-21T05:51:00.000-07:00

*****
USA

A horror film cross-bred with a fairy tale and a religious dialectic, filtered through a baroque, Southern Gothic sensibility. It's transfixing, it's gut-wrenching and it's astounding.

With 'Love' tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and 'Hate' on the other, preacher Robert Mitchum strides out of prison and straight into his executed cell-mate's home in Depression-era rural America. With his eager piety, sinister-smouldering hang-dog expression and bewitching, stentorian renditions of staples like "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms", he seduces the widow (and the township) in no time. But it's the children that hold the vital information he's after (the money's hiding place) and they won't give in quite as easily. They embark upon a moonlit downriver flight as ethereal and disturbingly beautiful as any sequence in cinema.

James Agee based his script on a novel by Davis Grubb and was reportedly quite faithful to it. Charles Laughton summarised it as "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale" - which it is - but this doesn't account for its questioning, undermining and odd reaffirming of Christian faith and fanaticism. While the 'Reverend' symbolises the danger of faith allowed to run unchecked, the eventual saviour proves heroic precisely because she won't allow any outsider or institution to stand between her and her belief. In a sense, she's similarly intimidating in that her ferocity and conviction is equal to the Reverend's (and potentially just as destructive, if founded on false belief). It isn't her 'truer' Christianity that distinguishes her from him - it's just as much her weapon as his. The key difference between them is that she interprets faith as selflessness and humanism, whereas he calls on a transcendent force to justify his greed and bloodlust.

The film's critical and commercial failure ensured that Laughton would never direct again. But no other man with a single directorial credit to his name has invested his characters and visuals with such boldness, such mystery and intensity.

Few screen performances are as indelible (and - if you're into that sort of thing - absurdly sexy) as Mitchum's deranged, monstrous Reverend. As the abiding bedrock of Christian virtue, Lillian Gish strikes a fierce, vivid and piercingly human pitch. And the children - Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce - are hypnotic.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010)

2011-03-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

****
USA

In its own minor key it never misses a note. Everyone will have their own favourite performance. I was particularly struck by the way Julianne Moore does a lot of the heavy lifting. She shifts back and forth from comedy to hyper-detailed drama and never breaks a sweat.

Also - speaking of astonishing, hyper-detailed actressing, now nobody in Australia or America has an excuse to miss Certified Copy - still my only set of ***** for a 2010 premiere. Is it too early to brand it a masterpiece?

MY JOY (Sergei Loznitsa, 2010)

2011-03-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

***
Ukraine/Germany/Netherlands

A stark modernist journey into Russia's dark twisted peasant heart. Sharp and absorbing to begin with, but it loses focus and becomes repetitive - both in terms of narrative and meaning.

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (Fred Zinnemann, 1966)

2011-03-13T03:06:00.000-07:00

*½
UK

A historical drama that is petrified of history. Fred Zinnemann directs a Robert Bolt play that doesn’t so much tackle historical events (namely the battle of wills between Henry VIII and Thomas More) as cower before them. Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller, Orson Welles and others enunciate each syllable and hit their marks to the millimetre. Thomas More’s religious fundamentalism is mistaken for the pinnacle of human decency and never questioned. Zinneman’s energies are consumed in conjuring up an aura of respectability – there is no space for insight, imagination or oxygen. It’s the kind of constipated middlebrow pomposity that only exists to sweep up Oscars and quickly disappear into oblivion. It’s The Life of Emile Zola. It’s Frost/Nixon

CARLOS (Olivier Assayas, 2010)

2011-03-06T23:18:00.000-08:00

***½
France

Masterfully crafted, as you’d expect, and consistently compelling. And naturally, when something successfully holds your attention for 5½ hours, it’s bound to leave you feeling satisfied and pleasantly woozy. Even if all it ultimately amounts to is 5½ hours of this-happened-then-this-happened-then-he-got-fat-and-went-to-prison.

PLEASE GIVE (Nicole Holofcenter, 2010)

2011-03-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

**
USA

A pall of insularity hangs over the film, and it doesn’t just come from the characters. The closing note is particularly offensive, and yet, in some sense, it’s the perfect capper.

RABBIT HOLE (John Cameron Mitchell, 2010)

2011-03-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

***½
USA

Sure, every scene doesn’t need piano, and Aaron Eckhart does go a bit hard with the tan (there’s leathery, and then there’s just plain orange). But unlike most prestige-hampered explorations of grief, this one doesn’t get off on it. Or, it does – but in a way that feels keyed into the way grief works, the way it demonstrably feeds off itself. The dialogue is sharp, and the supporting performances, extravagantly detailed.

ANGEL (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)

2011-02-27T00:18:00.000-08:00

*****
USA

This love triangle between Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall and Melvyn Douglas isn’t necessarily the best film Ernst Lubitsch ever made. But it is wonderfully representative because - the wit, the worldliness, the casual elegance – this is where Lubitsch turns it up to eleven. He dissects such things as love and marriage and (in particular) romance, and all this with an adult, slightly dry, seemingly unfussy, almost blunt sensibility. He analyses them casually, but to the core.

And yet, despite the bluntness, despite the sharp, unwavering, somewhat confronting insight, there is something intoxicating about Lubitsch’s company (not to mention, Dietrich’s, Marshall’s and Douglas’). It’s hard to say if it’s the sex, or the elegance, or the fact that all of the characters are so thoroughly at ease with the triple-entendres and jaw-dropping interiors. Whatever it is, the film leaves you with a singular feeling: you greet the credits clear-headed, yet dewy-eyed; demonstrably wiser, yet in reverie.

The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956)

2011-02-27T00:11:00.000-08:00

***
USA

Cinema’s first foray into the mind of a serial killer with pigtails. It’s prime, hearty schlock but Warner Bros. inexplicably gave it a high gloss treatment (Mervyn LeRoy and all) and even Ampass took the film seriously. (..Even Ampass?.. Of course Ampass.) There are about eleven monologues too many and roughly three quarters of the two-hour-plus running time is spent bastardising then-trendy psychoanalytic theories. (Of course, you could also say that about every Christopher Nolan movie.) (Zing.)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

2011-02-12T22:25:00.000-08:00

*****
UK/USA

A profound film - not for the slippery mysticism that drives its hazy plot, but for the dream like force and conviction of its images - for the way it confronts you with a universe of ungraspable, frightening grace.