Monsieur Lazhar

Set in francophone Montreal, which looks to be as much a city of immigrants as my own New York, Monsieur Lazhar is a delicately powerful reminder that you never know what kind of hard, hard story the person next to you in the street or on the train may be quietly coping with—especially if he or she is a refugee from a troubled country.

Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag), an Algerian with kind eyes and an anachronistically courtly manner, appears like Mary Poppins at a troubled grade school, brushing aside customary procedures and promising an instantaneous, irresistible solution to a critical problem: A bunch of children need the firm but sensitive guidance of an adult authority figure, whether they know it or not.

But the children in the class Monsieur Lazhar takes over have a much bigger problem than the Banks clan, who had nothing more serious than parental neglect to cope with.

The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games is a good example of what you can do with a strong plot and cast—and what you can’t.

The film faithfully follows the plot of Suzanne Collins’ mega-bestselling young adult novel of the same name, a grimly detailed fable for our times. Jennifer Lawrence gives 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen every ounce of the gravitas, cool competence, and smarts the role demands. But director and co-screenwriter Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) keeps sanding down the book’s grit and psychological nuance, once again creating unnecessary distance between his audience and an intriguing story by overstylizing the art direction and leaning a little too hard on the message.

The Kid with a Bike

The films of writer-director brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne usually pivot on a tough moral choice forced on the main character, whose life probably was no bed of roses to begin with. A Chinese box of those moral choices is nested within their latest, The Kid With a Bike, but the dilemma at the core belongs to the title character. Cyril (Thomas Doret) has to make the most essential moral choice of all: whether to live a good life or a bad one.

But this is no psychological drama. Instead, it’s a clear-eyed, almost forensic, yet immensely moving study of cause and effect in which everything hinges on what people do, not what they say.

Damsels in Distress

So what have we here? Is Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress a more broadly satiric variation on Clueless, with Greta Gerwig in the Alicia Silverstone part? Or is it what we might get if Woody Allen and John Waters (Hairspray-era John Waters, that is, not Flamingos John Waters) had a movie baby together?

Teddy Bear

Teddy Bear is playing on March 29 and 31 as part of the New Directors/New Films series.

From its title to its closing caress, Teddy Bear skates perilously close to the cliff’s edge of mawkish sentiment but never falls in. Dennis (Kim Kold), a sweet but emotionally stunted 38-year-old Danish bodybuilder, lives in a state of arrested development with his deceptively birdlike little mother, Ingrid (Elsebeth Steentoft), who’s sunk her talons deep into him and has no intention of letting go. Just one Hollywood-style speech, with Dennis ranting about being a boy in a man’s body or railing about the need to overcompensate that drove him to create that hulking carapace, would have blown this lightweight contraption right over that cliff, but cowriter/director Mads Matthiesen sidesteps that trap, letting Kold’s cartoonish body and sweet face tell the story.

21 Jump Street

Karl Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. TV shows seem to be doing the same. Judging by the trailer, Tim Burton’s upcoming fang-in-cheek remake of Dark Shadows looks to be spoofing subtexts that the campily self-serious original didn’t even know it had. And 21 Jump Street, a cheerful goof of a movie, treats a mediocre ‘80s series best known for launching Johnny Depp’s career like an empty tote bag, stuffing it full of little riffs on pop culture clichés, many of which have nothing to do with the original show.

Huan Huan

Huan Huan is playing on March 27 and 28 as part of the New Directors/New Films series.

Casual corruption, bossy neighbors who know everybody’s business, and omnipresent loudspeakers squawking about official policies and propaganda all day long make the 2007-era Chinese town in Huan Huan feel pretty bleak. Unfortunately, the film is almost as drab and demoralizing as the place it portrays.

Las Acacias

Las Acacias is playing on March 22 and 24 as part of the New Directors/New Films series.

The cab of a truck is the setting for this beautifully told love story, in which three strangers—a lonely truck driver, a young mother, and her baby—slowly and organically coalesce into something close to a family unit.

The Raid: Redemption

Half Assault on Precinct 13 and half Shaw Brothers-style old school martial arts, The Raid: Redemption is an instant classic. Writer/director Gareth Evans makes a virtue of his low budget, using one location and a relatively small cast to create an atmosphere of doom-soaked claustrophobia, galvanized by a phalanx of fiercely talented and committed fighters. There are no personal assistants listed in these credits, but there’s a long list of doctors, paramedics, and massage therapists.

Supposedly set in Jakarta (who knew they had martial arts like this in Indonesia?), The Raid really takes place in that artfully underlit, merciless post-apocalyptic world we all know from movies like The Road.

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is playing on March 24 and 26 as part of the New Directors/New Films series.

A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love," An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is a serious but never somber offering from a member of the Brooklyn boheme 2.0 generation.

The Minister

The Minister is playing on Friday March 23 and Sunday March 25 as part of the New Directors/New Films series.

You know it's hard out here for a politician. Bertrand Saint-Jean (Olivier Gourmet), who serves as France's minister of transportation in this resolutely realistic fiction (written and directed by Pierre Schöller), is smart, hardworking, and generally loyal to those who are loyal to him. But he's also a dick, often seeming more interested in protecting his image than the public interest, trampling the feelings of the people around him, and neglecting his wife and children even though he appears to love them.

Friends With Kids

Every few years, Jennifer Westfeldt writes herself a plum part in a romantic comedy that’s just topical enough to seem a little edgy, if you don’t look too closely.

In 2001, around the time the word “bi-curious” was entering the lexicon, Westfeldt co-wrote Kissing Jessica Stein and played the title character, a straight woman who tries sex with a woman as the solution to her romantic dry spell. Five years later, as the screenwriter and costar of Ira and Abby, she toyed with therapist-induced neurosis and a type of commitment phobia (the unshakeable conviction that there may be someone better in the rear-view mirror or right around the corner) that’s endemic to New York. And now, in Friends With Kids, she plays a woman convinced that she can beat the reproductive system and bypass all the problems that having babies has introduced into the lives of her formerly fun friends.

The Wise Kids

The Wise Kids is a lovely ensemble piece about three teenagers—Tim (Tyler Ross), Brea (Molly Kunz), and Laura (Allison Torem)—in Charleston, South Carolina, whose social lives revolve around each other and the Baptist church they all belong to. Loosely structured as a year in their lives, starting a semester before they graduate from high school and ending when they’re all home from college for Christmas break, it starts and ends as Austin (Stephen Cone), an adult member of their congregation, directs them in the church’s annual Christmas play.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

High school shootings are such a part of life and death in America that they’ve birthed a whole genre of movies. That genre even has its own spinoff: stories, like April Showers, The Life Before Her Eyes, and now We Need to Talk About Kevin, that are about people coping with the emotional wreckage caused by a school massacre.

Boy

The story of a Maori family dealing with the aftermath of the mother’s death and the father’s long imprisonment, Boy pulls off an elegant balancing act, diving into its characters’ emotions while maintaining a joyful lightness of spirit.

There’s no pathologizing of poverty in this lovely film, which is told from the point of view of its title character (James Rolleston). The oldest of the family’s two sons, Boy is a bright, imaginative 11-year-old who loves his life and idealizes his absent father, spinning tales of comic-book glory about him for his brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu). So when Dad (played by writer-director Taika Waititi) comes home from prison while the grandma who’s raising the boys is away for a few days, Boy is as thrilled as we (and Rocky) are wary, treating his dad like a star fallen to earth in his own backyard.

Act of Valor

All movies play either into or against our beliefs about how the world works to some degree. That’s why things can heat up so fast when we talk about them: When we insist that Tree of Life is a pretentious bore or Bridesmaids was robbed of a Best Picture Oscar nod, chances are what’s really riling us is a conviction that Hollywood is dominated by an out-of-touch elite, or that it has no room for women who don’t fit the hot-girlfriend mold.

Certain genres, like romantic comedies and fish-out-of-water buddy movies, don’t hit any hot buttons in most of us, which is probably why they work so well as escapism. But war movies hit us where we live and die, dredging up clannish feelings about our politics, identities, and national security. That’s why they can work so well as propaganda—but only for people whose values are aligned with whatever point of view they’re selling.

Let the Bullets Fly

The circle may have finally closed on Tarantino-ization with this Chinese film, which seems to borrow as generously from QT as he borrowed from Hong Kong masters.

A gorgeously filmed chow fun western set about 100 years ago in southern China, in “the age of warlords,” as the opening titles put it, Let the Bullets Fly keeps tossing us curve balls, from its comic train robbery opening to its wry coda of an ending.

Oscar-nominated shorts

Whether you’re a hard-core fan of short films or you just want to see as many nominees as possible before entering the office Oscar pool, there’s a lot to enjoy in this year’s Oscar-nominated shorts.

The strongest category is the documentaries, a parade of pain packaged with strong messages of hope and perseverance, so you don’t feel as if you’ve suffered for nothing.

Safe House

If the trailer for Safe House has you thinking you’ve seen it all before, you’d be right. But if you like a solidly made thriller with lots of fighting, that shouldn’t keep you from enjoying this one.

The déjà vu starts with the premise, which is part Training Day and part Haywire. As he did in Training Day, Denzel Washington plays an ethically compromised veteran of a law enforcement agency (this time around, the CIA) who schools a naïve recruit (Ryan Reynolds) on how things really work. And, as in Haywire and countless other spy-versus-spy movies, Denzel and Reynolds’s characters are agents on the run who must fight for their lives as they figure out who is trying to kill them and who—if anyone—they can trust.

Shot largely with that grainy, high-contrast, desaturated look that signals gritty reality in so many pictures these days, Safe House doesn’t do anything new, but it goes through its paces with style.

Cirkus Columbia

If you admired the intent behind Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey but wished you could have seen it done with Eastern European indirection rather than big-footed American sensationalism, you’ll want to check out Cirkus Columbia.

As he did in No Man’s Land, writer-director Danis Tanovic sets this modest but not insubstantial film in his homeland of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early ‘90s. Tanovic adapted the script from a novel of the same name, which addresses the turmoil that ripped the former Yugoslavia apart by focusing on one broken family.

The Secret World of Arietty

No wonder anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki had wanted to make a film about the Borrowers for pretty much his whole career, until he finally co-wrote this one a couple years ago. Mary Norton’s children’s books are a perfect match for Miyazaki’s adult-friendly children’s movies, with their strong female lead, their inventive take on living light on Mother Earth (what are Borrowers if not the ultimate recyclers?), and their deep respect for a child’s sensibilities.

But something softened that life force in The Secret World of Arietty, which feels as if it were made by Disney rather than just released by the mouse house here in the U.S.

Albert Nobbs

As numbingly inert as its title character, Albert Nobbs is a triumphant actor’s exercise that never quite succeeds as a movie.

That may be partly because its star, Glenn Close, is a co-writer and co-producer, having worked for years to get the movie made after playing the part onstage in 1982. But it probably has even more to do with director Rodrigo García (Mother and Child), whose films often feel a bit hollow and contrived despite featuring great performances by great actresses.

The Dish and the Spoon

The light is beautiful, the backgrounds artfully softened, and the actors charming, but The Dish and the Spoon starts to flatline just a few minutes in.

We start out in a car with Rose (Greta Gerwig), sniffling her way through the Lincoln Tunnel in a winter coat and pjs. Greta makes Rose easy to relate to as she rolls past seedy strip malls, scarfing down doughnuts and beer. Then she picks up a soulful teenager (Olly Alexander) and her story quickly devolves into a series of scenes that feel like acting exercises.

The Grey

The Grey is one of those macho-adventure-gone-terribly-wrong movies that aims to give you a vicarious scare, shaking you out of your over-civilized stupor and awakening you to the need to live life to the fullest and then die like a man, unafraid and unburdened by regret.

It opens with promise as John Ottway (Liam Neeson), hired by an oil company to kill the wolves that would otherwise kill the oilfield workers, stops a wolf in its tracks with one expertly fired bullet and then helps it die, laying a compassionate hand on the animal’s flank as it breathes its last ragged breaths. The terse authority of Neeson’s manly voiceover and the wolf that doesn’t so much as snarl when Ottway strokes it make it clear that we’re in mythic/fairy tale territory, and it’s a solemn, contemplative region I’d have been glad to commit to if director-cowriter Joe Carnahan had just done the same.

Pretty Poison

One of the greatest actresses and beauties of her generation, Tuesday Weld had an emotionally raw yet subtle quality on camera and a brash, sometimes crude way of expressing contempt for Hollywood—-and for social mores in general—-in real life that made more than one admirer compare her to Marlon Brando. But there doesn’t seem to have been room in the pantheon for an actress who was so openly defiant and independent-minded, especially during the gender-inflexible Eisenhower and Kennedy years when she got her start. So, while postwar Hollywood made Brando the poster boy for naturalistic method acting at its brilliant best, Weld became a cult figure, celebrated by those of us who love her for the feral intelligence and world-weary skepticism that make her characters so compelling even when the movies she’s in are … well, let’s just say not so compelling.

But when the film she stars in is as fierce or unconventional as the actress, you’re in for a real treat. That’s the case with Pretty Poison, a black comedy with then 23-year-old Weld in the title role as teen heartthrob Sue Ann Stepanek.

Haywire

With flat, dark eyes that project about as much emotion as the chunks of onyx they resemble, mixed martial arts (MMA) star Gina Carano is not quite ready for her closeups in Haywire. She also seems a little uncomfortable in the dresses her character has to keep putting on to disguise herself, as stiffly self-conscious as a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes, and to add insult to injury, director-cinematographer-editor Steven Soderbergh had to digitally manipulate her voice in post-production to achieve the cool confidence he was after. But Carano relaxes in action, owning the screen in the medium and long shots that focus on not just how good her banging body looks but how well it moves.

Soderbergh built this film around Carano (with the help of screenwriter Lem Dobbs) after seeing her MMA cage fighting, in much the same way that he created The Girlfriend Experience for porn star Sasha Grey. The chilly super-competence of these post-feminist heroines is a good fit for Soderbergh’s cool, controlled style, and their slightly unconventional routes to success resonate with his ethos as a filmmaker.

The Iron Lady

“It used to be about trying to DO something. Now it’s about trying to BE someone,” sneers The Iron Lady’s Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) of our changing social values. She’s right, of course, but the irony of The Iron Lady is that it’s a textbook example of that trend.

Not that examples are hard to come by. Celebrities who are famous just because they look good in the spotlight aren’t anything new (remember the Gabor sisters?), but for the last 10 years or so they’ve been multiplying like flu victims in Contagion, with Paris Hilton in the Gwyneth Paltrow role. A few of the reality shows that dominate network TV ratings are built around people who can actually do something extraordinary: How amazing is it when those contestants on Project Runway make stylish outfits out of office supplies? But mostly, we watch reality shows not because of what their stars can do but because of who they are and how they behave—-or, better yet, misbehave.

Crazy Horse

Asked for her definition of eroticism, one of the members of the Crazy Horse’s staff offers this: “Seduction without offering yourself. Restraint.”

That’s not a bad way of describing Frederick Wiseman’s thoughtful, undogmatic approach to filmmaking, which layers on information without commentary, letting viewers draw their own conclusions. But Wiseman’s exploration of Paris’ Crazy Horse cabaret, which bills itself as the world’s classiest purveyor of nude dancing, is the opposite of a seduction.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In ex-British spy John le Carré’s Cold War novels about his former profession, the main weapons are intellectual brilliance and psychological acuity and the prize is a secret concealed within a secret. You wouldn’t think something that heady would be very cinematic. But the winner in le Carré’s mind games is generally the best watcher, the one who notices the most about his environment and the people around him, and that makes his stories ideally suited to a visual medium like film.

While body-rush fantasies like the Mission Impossible TV and movie series turn the spy/counterspy game into a question of who has the best techno-toys (and, in the movies, Xtreme fighting skills), le Carré is pure head rush, a mental game with the added thrill of feeling scarily plausible. Done well, films of his stories sharpen your senses, making you notice things and tune into frequencies you wouldn’t ordinarily pick up on. They give you the psychological equivalent of the thrill you imagined experiencing as a kid if you’d bought a pair of those X-ray vision glasses they used to advertise in comic books. And Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the latest adaptation of one of the author’s George Smiley books, is very well done indeed.

The L Magazine's 2011 Film Poll

Here's The L's annual poll of its regularly contributing critics. We each pick 20 movies, ranked in order of preference, and the editors compile our choices into a Top 25 list.

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Like the God of Job, Malick can leave his supposed intimates struggling to make sense of themselves within his cosmos: he's burned through who knows how many editors, worked sound teams to the bone, and left composers and many actors feeling cheated. But his methods have also inspired devotional loyalty among those who've achieved their capacity for grace under his eye: in The Tree of Life, he coaxes the work of a lifetime out of Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Emmanuel Lubezki (and Jack Fisk, whose realization of Malick's hallowed spaces is his own life's work). And by prodding us to engage with our own capacities, he makes us into better, more open, attentive moviegoers. And people? Sure. Mark Asch

Women Behaving Badly

We’ll know feminism has finally taken root when the female leads in the stories we tell ourselves behave just as badly as the male leads do. We haven’t gotten there yet, but two current movies are giving us an idea of how things might look when we do.

Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the title character of David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is as grimly antisocial and borderline fanatical as any male movie vigilante (think Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name). This is one woman who could care less what people think of her, mainly because she doesn’t think much of almost anyone else. In fact, the whole purpose of the spiky Goth getup that gives the movie its name is to keep people at a safe distance.

My 2011 Top 10

1. The Tree of Life



The winner of this year’s main prize at Cannes and the subject of millions of pixels’ worth of online debate, Terrence Malick’s fifth feature as writer/director over the last 38 years is to cinephiles what Halley’s Comet is to astronomers: an eagerly anticipated and rarely seen phenomenon. Read more


2. Certified Copy



A French expat living in Tuscany with her teenage son drops in on a lecture by an Englishman on a book tour. (He’s James Miller; she never gets a name, but since she’s played by the great Juliette Binoche, she hardly needs one.) She leaves him her card through his Italian translator, and he shows up the following Sunday for a visit that turns into a day-long date.

Talking to Pariah Director Dee Rees

After a brief post-college career in marketing, Nashville native Dee Rees returned to college to major in film at NYU. She wrote the script for Pariah, which recently won her a Breakthrough Director prize from the Gotham Independent Film Awards, while interning on her professor and mentor Spike Lee’s Inside Man. I talked to her earlier this month in the Waldorf Hotel.

I was interested to read that Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara were two of your favorite authors, since they’ re favorites of mine too. What do you like about them in particular?
They write about coming of age in a different way, and identity and self and what is home. Their characters always had internal conflict. For me growing up, those were the stories that made me feel like I was not by myself.

Pariah is so detailed and emotionally authentic that it feels very personal, but you grew up in Nashville and it’s also very specifically about a slice of African-American and gay culture in Brooklyn. Did you have to do a lot of research to get the Brooklyn part right?
I don’t research. I just write and then check afterwards. When I was coming out, I was living in Brooklyn and going to these gay clubs, so this is the scene I was kind of thrust into.

The Adventures of Tintin

The two Spielberg movies opening this week represent the two sides of this prodigiously talented but often disappointing director. A mashup of deeply personal themes (mostly boys with daddy issues and/or with no parents in sight) and high-gloss Hollywood technology and tropes, Spielberg’s work seesaws between moving and maudlin. War Horse is gorgeously composed old-school schmaltz, with its relentless score and heroic low-angle shots of blue-eyed heroes against great expanses of sky. But if that stale hunk of cornbread is Spielberg at his most suffocatingly sentimental, The Adventures of Tintin is the director at his best: playful, energetic, and brimming with genuine wonder.

Coriolanus

The theory that the United States is poised to fall like the Roman empire, and for pretty much the same reasons, is hardly new, but it’s rarely been presented more compellingly than in Ralph Fiennes’ X-treme Shakespeare version of Coriolanus.

In an impressive directorial debut, the actor transposes the classical Rome of Shakespeare’s play to an ashy, underlit modern-day Europe (the film was shot in Bosnia), packing the screen with all the markers of modern warfare and civil unrest. Brutal battles between Rome and its Volscian neighbors feature Humvees and RPGs, shot-up cars with slaughtered civilians spilling out of their half-open doors, and terrified prisoners in dank torture chambers. Meanwhile, hordes of Romans take to the street at home like so many 99 percenters, protesting the hoarding of goods by a thin slice of the oligarchy while the rest of the people starve.

Like Crazy

A connect-the-dots love story, Like Crazy works as much because of what it leaves out as because of what it includes.

Director Drake Doremus, his co-writer Ben York Jones, and editor Jonathan Alberts often start or end a scene in the midst of an action or skip months at a time in the otherwise linear timeline, so we have to keep figuring out what we just missed. That helps maintain interest in what might otherwise have felt like a pretty standard story about a first love that burns alternately hot and cold but just won’t fizzle out.

Daguerréotypes

Daguerréotypes is playing on December 12 at the Maysles Cinema.

An openhearted, unpretentious film genius who often seems to be reinventing her medium as she goes, Agnès Varda is particularly gifted at uncovering fascinating stories where most people would never think to look. In Daguerréotypes (1976), she turns her camera on her own neighbors, the shopkeepers of Rue Daguerre, the street where she then lived—and still does, 60 years after she first moved in.

She plays with theatricalism, opening with and frequently cutting back to the magician who stages a show on Rue Daguerre while she’s filming, and who will, she promises, “erase logical ideas … and lull an already still world.” But this is at heart a quiet work of unobtrusive observation, an exercise in what you can see if you look long and closely enough at any “average street with people passing, talking … the silent majority with a dreadful mask,” as Varda puts it in voiceover.

London River

A Frenchman of Algerian descent, London River writer/director Rachid Bouchareb works in the didactic-humanist tradition of Alejandro González Iñárritu and Fatih Akin. When their films are good, they’re very, very good, but when they’re bad they drown out their own artistry, beating the drum so loudly for brotherhood and justice that you pull back from the story instead of leaning into it and wind up feeling numb.

London River doesn't have the emotional complexity or unpredictability of Bouchareb’s greatest film, Days of Glory, but it’s not his worst either. Grounded in a real event, the July 7, 2005, suicide bombings of three subways and a bus in London by Islamic extremists and filmed in a raw, pseudo-documentarian style, London River seems bent on reminding us that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin and that Muslims can make excellent neighbors, but stellar acting by its two leads saves it from playing like mere propaganda.

Hugo

Martin Scorsese’s latest film and his first children’s movie, Hugo starts with a tracking shot even longer and more thrilling than the one at the start of Goodfellas. After swooping down from the sky, though the streets of 1930s Paris, and into a train station, the camera slows down to introduce us to the station where almost all the action will take place. It ends with a closeup of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphan who lives in a hidden room above the ceiling, as he peers out at the passing pageant.

Hugo’s child’s-eye view exaggerates and simplifies the world of the station, but Scorsese and his team bring it to richly detailed life. Whole subcultures (like the cozy bistro’s blasé musicians) and subplots (like the budding romance between Richard Griffiths’ sweetly awkward middle-aged man and his kindly crush, played by Frances de la Tour) are sketched in just a few strokes.

House of Pleasures

Like Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (due out next Friday), Bertrand Bonello’s House of Pleasures is a feminist film about prostitution with the languorous, trapped-in-amber feel of an ominously fractured fairy tale. But where Leigh’s alienated stranger in a strange land is almost entirely defined and ultimately engulfed by the male gaze, Bonello offers up the comforts and pleasures of female friendship as a response to the cold menace of unchecked male domination.

Except on the rare occasions that their madam (Noémie Lvovsky) or clients take them out, the dozen or so prostitutes in House of Pleasures are not allowed to leave the well-appointed Parisian brothel where they work, during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. And we stay right there with them, the camera hugging close to study their faces or capture the intimate groupings they fall in and out of all day and night. Having sex in the private rooms upstairs, mingling with the johns in the ground-floor parlor in a nightly cocktail party, or banding together to sleep, eat, and prepare for work from the very early morning to the late afternoon, they live out a kind of parody of bourgeois domesticity in which nothing is as it seems except their mutual love and support.

Fall Harvest

It’s that time of year again when distributors dump high-gloss and high-class Oscar hopefuls into theaters almost faster than we can keep up with them. Here are a few of my favorites that are playing now.

After their uncomfortable flirtation with neutered political commentary in 2008’s Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, it’s a relief to see Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) return to their absurdist roots in A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas. This sweet stoner comedy is a loosely strung-together series of goofs on 3D gimmickry, classic scenes and tropes from other movies, and the growing Harold and Kumar canon (“We’ll see you in the fourth one,” Neil Patrick Harris tells the boys at the end of his third anarchically hilarious H and K cameo). There’s a happy ending too, of course, in which Kumar learns that you can grow up without giving up your joie de vivre. Or your weed.

100 Words On: Incendies

With so much heart-rippingly real drama in Incendies’s story of civil war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country—the wholesale slaughter and torture of civilians, honor killings, the vicious cycle of revenge that makes perpetrators of victims and vice versa, and the necessity and impossibility of forgetting the past once the battle has ended—the Chinatown-esque contrivance at its heart is just too much.

J. Edgar

Clint Eastwood is smart and savvy, a polished professional whose long career probably owes a lot to the talent he’s proven, both as an actor and as a director, for whittling things down to a fine polish. In rounding off his own rough edges, he lessens the risk of alienating viewers, but he also removes the passion and personality that can make a movie great.

He’s at his best when he sticks with the entertaining and solidly constructed genre movies, like The Outlaw Josie Wales, that make up most of his output. Now and then, he’s displayed a winningly light touch with a simple romance or character study (The Bridges of Madison County, Bronco Billy), and he’s directed a handful of original, quirky, deeply personal films that leave lasting emotional footprints, like his tribute to Charlie Parker (Bird) or his two very different meditations on violence and the cinematic antiheroes who were once his bread and butter: Unforgiven and Gran Torino.

But more often than not, he overreaches when he tries to make a statement or yank at our heartstrings, winding up with a clunker like Changeling or the Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima diptych.

Tomboy

Like writer/director Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies, her sophomore feature is a sensitively observed, impressionistic tale of an inarticulate adolescent girl picking her way through the gender identity/sexuality maze.

The title is a bit of a red herring, though. This isn't just a film about rejecting the trappings and physical limitations of traditional girlhood for an elongated period of freedom; it's about male impersonation and a young girl's awkward first steps toward embracing her own lesbianism.

This Is Spinal Tap

At 11:11pm tonight, 11/11/11, BAM hosts a screening of "the movie that goes to 11," This Is Spinal Tap. It also screens at 7pm, to be followed by a Skype Q&A with stars Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, in character as Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls.

The mockumentary has become such an accepted film and TV trope that, as shows like Modern Family and The Office have proven, you can sketch in that frame with the broadest of strokes, just letting your characters mug for the camera or sitting them down in front of an imaginary interviewer to comment on the action every so often. But Christopher Guest doesn’t play that game. His largely improvised, almost painfully realistic, artfully artless mockumentaries commit, both to their ludicrously earnest characters and to the cheesy conventions of bad documentary films.

Critiquing a Critic: A Life in the Dark

I started reviewing movies (not very well) in 1978, at the peak of Pauline Kael’s brilliant career and the height of my own wandering-in-the-desert phase. Alienated, aimless, and only just starting to believe that other people might be interested in what I had to say, I was still in the habit of damming up my opinions until they tumbled out in an often inchoate torrent.

My neo-hippie distrust of the mainstream media and instinctive allergy to the East Coast preppie-industrial complex prevented me from discovering Kael in the New Yorker, the elevated if uneasy perch she occupied from 1968 to early 1991, but her voice was strong enough to penetrate even my defensive fog. I don’t remember when or where I picked up a paperback copy of Reeling, Kael’s fifth fat collection of reviews and essays about the movies she loved, but I remember the thrill with which I first encountered her passionate, proselytizing prose and brilliant insights.

In Time

Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s movies must sound great in pitch meetings. The Truman Show (1998), the only script he wrote and didn't direct and, not coincidentally, by far his best movie, is a prescient look at how horribly wrong things can go when reality TV gets mixed up with reality, period. Simone (2002) is about what will happen to us humans once we’ve taken artificial intelligence far enough to create digital “people” who can pass for real. Lord of War (2005) is about the international arms merchants who feed our perpetual state of war. (It’s against them, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have some fun with those guns. Picture a bullet’s-eye view of something getting blown up and exploding into a huge fireball.) Gattaca (1997) is about a couple of beautiful kids on the run in a winner-take-all world where genetic engineering has run amok and the wall separating the haves from the have-nots is practically unbreechable. In Time is another take on that same theme, plus a cautionary message about the growing wealth gap. (It’s against that too. Hey, those Occupy Wall Street kids will love it!)

Bombay Beach director Alma Har’el: Documenting the demise of the American dream

Israeli director Alma Har’el was making a music video when she got hooked by the location, a gone-to-seed resort community on California’s Salton Sea, and two young brothers she found living there. One of the two, sad-eyed Benny Parrish (pictured above with Har’el), became one of main characters of Bombay Beach, Har’el’s first documentary and a gorgeous, quietly eloquent meditation on life on the geographic and economic edge of America.

Elise Nakhnikian: You got pretty amazing access to the people in this film. How did you get them so comfortable with the camera?
Alma Har’el: I think it was a combination of things. One is that I moved there for four or five months while I was filming. The second is that I had no crew. It was just me. I did the sound and the camera, so it was very intimate. The third is that I used a very small, cheap home video camera that it didn't have the kind of threatening presence that some cameras have. And the Parrishes, I think, trusted me very much because they saw this music video I did with their son.



That started the trust and the relationship. Pamela [Benny’s mother] just really appreciated the creative process in general, and she always wanted to take photos herself and do creative things. They’re a creative family. A lot of people have creativity and don’t get to express it.

Also, I was a pain in the ass. I just wouldn't leave. (Laughs) So they had to get used to it.

There’s a sort of innate power differential, usually, when you have a camersomeone’s doing the shooting and someone’s getting shot—
Okay. I didn’t feel that.

I was going to say that it wasn’t so much there in your movie. Did you think of it as a collaboration with the people –
What would you say the power comes from? Just the fact that you have the power over them because you have the footage?

Well, one person is choosing what’s going to get shown and how it’s going to get shown, and which parts do and don’t get used.
Yeah, yeah. That is true, but I made it my first priority on this film to use stuff that wasn’t hurting the people I was filming and that was acceptable for them.

Did you collaborate with them in deciding what to shoot?
No. But there’s a lot of stuff that I decided not to put in because I knew that they wouldn’t be comfortable. Especially the back story of Benny’s dad. His family story goes back another generation. Benny’s father’s story is very interesting, but he didn’t want to appear in the film.

A lot of people ask me about all sorts of rules of documentary that I have to say I’m not familiar with, what’s just truth and just showing life and what’s not, and what’s legitimate, and what’s moral, and all these things. I think what’s most important to me – and maybe the only thing that I really cared about – was that the family I’m filming would be happy with the film when I finished it.

So did you show them a rough cut and take out things they didn’t like?
No, I never showed them a rough cut. They saw the film at Tribeca [Film Festival].

So you just trusted your own instincts about what they’d be comfortable with?
Yeah, it was more like an instinctive thing.

One of the things that comes through really clearly in your film is the wealth gap in America and how poor people are usually invisible to us as a culture. Do you think you see that more clearly because you’re not a native so it’s new to you, or is that something you’re familiar with from Israel?
Both. I’m definitely familiar with these sort of outskirts-of-society ghost towns that are in the desert, because we do have that in Israel. I actually, for a while, spent a lot of time in one of those in Israel. I like those places. I feel that you can very much get lost but at the same time find yourself in them, and feel something very direct about life, and see things clearly for what they are. So I responded to that.

But I also just didn’t know that America had such a side. I obviously grew up on the image of Hollywood in Israel. Coming there and seeing how people lived, and seeing the broken, turned-on-its head American dream, where a kid has to move from Los Angeles to Bombay Beach to make it to college (laughs), and just seeing the health system and just the whole thing. But at the same time, seeing the beauty and the dignity that these people have in their lives. The whole combination felt like something I should capture.

And it also very much relates to the music I love. I love Bob Dylan and Beirut [whose songs are featured in the film]. This is music that I listen to all the time. They’re kind of two bookends of America to me.

Bob Dylan is obviously the blood of this country, and he’s at the same time such an outsider. He’s both one of the most American things you can think of and he also encapsulates so much history and promise for a different America. Bob Dylan in the 60s, and the whole folk thing, rose against a lot of the stuff we see today, like Occupy Wall Street. I won’t say hippie, but what do you call that?

Beatnik?
Yeah, I guess. But obviously, it didn’t go that way. And then you have Zach [Condon, Beirut’s leader], who is kind of like a modern version of the troubadour. Zach is very much an American – grew up in the desert, by the way, in Santa Fe and Albuquerque – but he’s free of a lot of history that I feel some artists carry.

I find that both of them have the ability to be genuine and authentic, and at the same time they both have so much style and so much presence and flavor. Their authentic selves and who they are as artists always shines stronger than whatever aesthetic decisions they take, but there’s so much beauty to their style and to the choices that they make.

Speaking of style, can you talk about the look of your film–the soft, warm colors and the soft feel you get by using shallow depth of field?
Yeah, I call it a digital super-8. I fell in love with this camera when I was working with an incredibly talented DP called Matthias Koenigswieser, who shot a music video for me for Jack Peñate. We did this music video in black-and-white on this very small camera, the Canon Vixia, which costs, like, $600 in Best Buy. I loved the softness of it and I loved the colors.

I took that camera to do one more video for Beirut, which was Concubine, the one I was telling you about. I had no budget so I shot it myself. That was the first time I shot anything myself, but this camera was so small I didn’t need a crew. So one thing led to another, I guess they say in English.

But I couldn’t shoot with heavy [professional film] lenses. I was running around with the kids and I was so scared I was going to drop them. Each one was, like, $10,000 and I didn’t have very much insurance. So I brought them back and I went on eBay and bought still camera second-hand lenses. They were a lot lighter and smaller, and not very expensive – just a few hundred bucks. Part of the reason that the film has sort of a vignette to it and a shallow depth of field and a softness is that I used those lenses, and some of them were older and some of them were cheaper and some weren’t as sharp.

The whole way this film was done was half inspiration, half desperation.

Did doing this make you want to do more of your own shooting?
I love shooting. I love it.

The sound is amazing too, at least now that I know you did it. I understand that sound is one of the hardest things to get right.
I recorded all the sound on two lavalier mikes, so the kids could run around and do whatever they wanted. And then in post, I had this great guy named Dror Mohar who does sound, who just as a favor came there with me for a few days and recorded a lot of background and a lot of texture and sound. When we made the film, we added a lot of that and cleared up the sound that I had recorded. So that definitely gave it the sort of clarity and richness that it has now.

But we also kept it very minimalistic. I wanted it to be very quiet, because that’s what it is like over there. It wasn’t an action film where I needed tons of sounds.

There’s a lot of sorrow in this film, which is mostly imposed by outside forces: gun violence, the criminal justice system, racism. But it’s not a sad movie because there’s so much beauty. That’s partly because of the look we’ve been discussing, but it’s also because of the relationships between the people: There’s a lot of love and kindness there. So I’m wondering how you thought about this as you were putting it together. Did you think of it as a story about individuals, or about relationships between people, or about the relationships between people and the forces that shape their lives?
All of the above. [laughs] All of the above and me. And music.

I didn’t set out to talk about an issue. I really like the idea of how, as we grow up, we have a certain mythology about our families that we build in our heads. We hear broken stories and we know certain things and we kind of make it all up. And then we take these stories on ourselves, like Benny says, ”I was in jail for 100 years.” He doesn’t really know what jail is, but he knows his father was there and he knows it was terrible. So he says he was there, and he comes up with this whole story about how it was terrible and how it had scorpions in it and no TV and they killed kids.

I wanted to capture how we all live with half-broken, half self-invented mythologies that we carry from our pasts and our parents and our countries, and how it leaves room for the imagination, because it is so broken. That place, the Salton Sea, has such a past, and I come from a country that had such a promise and turned into such a violence place.

I grew up in a place that had a lot of beauty in it and a lot of togetherness, and at the same time a lot of violence, a lot of conflict. I didn’t really care when I was a kid, but as you grow up you realize how much it was the backdrop for everything. I think that’s the same thing with this place: the reality of the American dream and its promise. What happened to it?

You used composition and framing really nicely to make points you never spell out. Like the California girl poster that looks so out of place in a bar, or the dead fish in the foreground of shots that are about something else altogether.
One of the things that really drew me to this place is that I felt like the environment and the decay and the cultural references tell such a story that you don’t need to say anything. And I love that, because when I live my life and I go to new places, there isn’t a freaking narrator telling me what to think about everything and explaining every little thing to me.

Take Shelter

Like the recurring nightmares that torment its main character, Curtis (Michael Shannon), Take Shelter is frustratingly slow-moving at times, but it lays down shock waves of dread that keep rippling outward long after it ends.

At first, Curtis hides his terrifying dreams and waking hallucinations—and, most importantly, the deepening paranoia they both reflect and intensify—from his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain). But when he finally trusts Sam with the truth, he learns the strength of the family bond that is his main motivation for trying to keep it together, and this story’s true subject.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols stages the family’s everyday life as unshowily shot kitchen-sink realism. They’re in the heartland of America, not just geographically—Curtis, Samantha, and their adorable young daughter live in a small town in Ohio—but economically, perched as they are on the uneasy edge of middle-class comfort. An elegant cut early on takes us from the big drill Curtis and his work buddy, Dewart (Shea Wigham) operate on their job site to the sewing machine Samantha is running as she sews to supplement her husband’s income. Meanwhile, references to strained family budgets and close-ups of the mac and cheese, fried pork chops, and potato salad piled onto dinner plates keep reminding us that everyone’s finances are as shaky as Curtis’ state of mind. As Curtis’s brother warns him: “You take your eye off the ball one minute in this economy and you’re screwed.”

Against that backdrop, Curtis’ dreams and hallucinations are that much more dramatic. Set during or just before spectacular, CGI-assisted storms, they are usually bathed in the brilliant, soft light of a bright sun filtered through a thick layer of clouds. The light, those clouds—broad blue-gray brushstrokes above a color-saturated blue-green landscape—and the frequent slashes of lightning or rustle of wind through the leaves are all charged with a sense of potentially catastrophic excitement. Into this surrealistic setting come figures right out of Hitchcock or zombie movies: swirling flocks of black birds and shadowy human forms that pound at locked doors or break car windows, pulling Curtis’s daughter out and away from him forever.

Curtis doesn’t know whether his dreams and waking visions are a sign of the schizophrenia that overtook his mother when she was his age or visions of a coming apocalypse that only he can see. And so, even as he seeks psychological help, he risks bankrupting his family to expand their underground storm shelter into a bunker. We don't know what to believe either, since Nichols keeps both possibilities wide open right down through the ending, which can be read literally or as another of Curtis’s visions.

Trying to figure out whether he’s a prophet or a madman gives us something to do while the pace lags during a slow, often repetitive first hour or so, during which Curtis and his family play variations on the same few themes, often with predictable consequences. But the tension builds as Curtis falls apart, coming to an almost unbearably suspenseful peak in a riveting sequence in the storm shelter.

Shannon signals Curtis’s vulnerability and instability largely through body language. Moving like a prisoner of some unseen force field, he seems stiff and tentative and awkward at the same time that his square jaw and tall body radiate menacing power. Even when his face isn’t lit from below or pooled in shadow like something from a horror film, we’re uncomfortably aware of how close he is to erupting and hurting someone, maybe even the wife and daughter he lives for.

Chastain matches Shannon’s realistic intensity beat for beat as Samantha, who is as loving a mother as the one she played in The Tree of Life but much tougher and more competent—a real woman rather than an idealized childhood memory. (Between this, her tough Mossad agent in The Debt, and her sweet peroxide ditz in The Help, Chastain has already shown more range this year than most actors do in a lifetime’s worth of roles.) When the two go head to head, especially in the storm shelter scene, Take Shelter stops meandering in and out of blind alleys and coalesces into a moving portrait of a loving family under siege.

Written for TimeOff

Drive

In one of his deceptively haimish digressions, businessman/gangster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) tells the unnamed star of Drive (Ryan Gosling) about the movies he used to produce. “One critic called them European,” Rose says. “I thought they were shit.”

That’s a neat little in-joke, since director Nicolas Winding Refn is a Danish critics’ darling (Drive won him the best director prize at Cannes this year). Refn specializes in highly stylized, pulse-pounding arthouse films about hard guys in no-win situations who see extreme violence as their only way out—or, in the case of the title character in Bronson, their sole means of expression. But that line is the only hint of irony I detected in Drive. This movie-movie appears to be dead serious about resurrecting the hard-guy American vigilante films that flourished in the last half of the last century, and updating the tradition with a Refn-sized dose of grossly graphic violence.

Gosling’s driver works in a garage during the day and moonlights as a getaway driver for professional thieves. (He also has another part-time job, but I won’t ruin the surprise by telling you what that is, since it’s revealed in a tasty little bit of misdirection.) Like the taciturn tough guys played by Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood in their prime (Bullitt was Refn’s main model for Drive), he communicates almost entirely through action, his Zen-like default mode of quiet watchfulness punctuated by brief but bloody rampages.

Even his courtship with the girl next door, Irene (Carey Mulligan), consists almost entirely of doing things together without speaking. Gosling is convincing enough as a lover to sell his half of their wordless montages, with the help of Mulligan’s melting eyes. But the expressionless stare he adopts to play tough and the slow-blooming smile he reveals one or two times too many read to me as damaged sensitivity in retreat, not smoldering anger or coiled intensity or whatever they’re meant to imply.

But not even not quite buying Gosling as a ninja-style master of evasion and hand-to-hand combat spoiled the movie for me, since there’s so much else to enjoy. Bryan Cranston and Christina Hendricks do a lot with a little in underwritten roles, and Kaden Leos is charming as Irene’s son. And Brooks makes an excellent villain, kvetching and kvelling like somebody’s loveable grandpa while plotting nefarious stuff. Just watching him kill a man with a fork is pretty much worth the price of admission. As A.O. Scott put it, “In his self-authored comic roles, Mr. Brooks often exudes a passive-aggressive hostility, a latent capacity for violence held in check by neurosis and cowardice. He lets you assume the same in Drive until the moment he stabs someone in the eye with a fork. It’s a shocking and oddly glorious moment — something a lot of us, without quite knowing it or being able to explain just why, have been waiting 30 years to see.”

Drive is generally a little light on that kind of texture or emotional resonance, but from the terrific opening scene, it’s very good at transmitting information efficiently and maintaining tension and suspense. That first scene culminates in a cat-and-mouse car chase, which our guy wins as much by knowing when and where to stop as he does by being driving fast and furiously. He never speaks a word in that sequence either, but by the time it’s over we know just how smart he is and how cool he stays under pressure.

Then there’s the style Refn soaks the script in. Some is pure noir, like the rays of light that occasionally slice through darkness to create vivid black-and-white patterns, the faces half-drowned in shadow, and the chocolate-brown night-time scenes and deserted back streets that show LA as anything but a sunny paradise. Other choices—the romantically morose, synth-heavy pop music pounding away in the background; the slow, stately pans and slow motion that turn violent crescendos operatic; the fondness for overhead shots—evoke the work of Michael Mann.

That’s an awfully high bar to try to reach, and Drive doesn’t hit it, since Hossein Amini’s self-consciously stripped-down script lacks the emotional depth that makes Mann’s best antihero tragedies so great. But if you’re looking to get lost for a couple hours in a smartly plotted, beautifully acted popcorn movie, Drive can take you there, and that’s no small accomplishment.

Written for TimeOff