THE FILM:

There are some crimes that are obviously irrational, committed by stunted, helplessly monstrous people incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong -- the kind of crime perpetrated in films like Psycho or >Halloween and not so very often in real life, however shocking when it does happen. Much more troubling and frightening is the much more common, everyday slide into moral chaos that leads to crimes committed and rationalized by sane people in broad daylight -- the kind, to cite a recent example, committed and rationalized by certain areas of the f...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Anyone who enjoyed Gianni Di Gregorio's charming slice-of-life directorial debut Mid-August Lunch will be pleased to hear that he has returned with a sartorial sequel, the equally charming and more accomplished The Salt of Life.

In the new film, the writer/director/star plays Giovanni, a 50-year-old retiree with too much time on his hands and perhaps too many women in his life. Pushed out of the workforce early, Giovanni wasn't prepared to settle down so quickly, nor is he entirely happy being errand boy for his wife, daughter, and mother, who calls him every time her TV reception goes slightly fuzzy. He is starting to feel inconsequential as a man, and once his best ...Read the entire review

The Movie

In his 2008 documentary Kassim the Dream, filmmaker Kief Davidson trails boxing champ Kassim Ouma, interweaving vignettes from his current life with the man's clear-eyed recollections of being a child soldier in Uganda. It's a well-mounted, earnest project that hooks you in with the sports angle, then provides some unexpectedly intense, emotional moments as Ouma travels back to Africa and revisits his home town and the source of some of his most searing memories.

When Kassim the Dream opens, Ouma is portrayed in the prime of his career coming off a triumphant bout with boxer Verno Phillips (a match which happened back in 2004 - it takes a bit of an adjustment to realize this was filmed five to eight years ago). While Ouma is ess...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

An expansively thought-provoking documentary that's also a fairly unique work of intellectual ferment, Payback joins together two impressive creative minds, those of documentarian Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes) and the great Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin). The latter turned her pen to nonfiction, as she is also well-qualified to do, for the series of lectures that resul...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The first feature length live action film from The Quay Brothers is named after the titular institute where the film takes place. Located somewhere in Europe (the film hints that it might be Germany), this decaying and rundown old building is home to a school that trains men to work as butlers for a variety of well to do clients. A man named Jakob von Gunten (Mark Rylance) enrolls in the school, feeling that he would make a good servant for someone some day, and soon joins the small class of students studying at the school.

The school is run by Herr Benjamenta (Gottfried John) and his sister, Lisa (Alice Krige), a pair of disciplinarians who teach the students using some ritualistic and very unorthodox measures. As Jakob acclimates to his new life, Lisa begins to show an unusual attraction to him while Herr Benjamenta starts to seem more and more unhinged, all while Jakob ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine's documentary Something Ventured, which focuses its attention on the inner workings of venture-capitalist investing and upstart-startup entrepreneurship, is a cipher-like piece of work that, offering much information but little perspective, depends very much on context for its meaning and worth. And that context, at this point, is extremely ambivalent: On the one hand, we live in a time where widespread economic uncertainty and failure might conceivably put a damper on some people's approving, eager curiosity about or enthusiasm for the big roulette table of startups, investments, and public offerings that are the film's more or less exclusive focus. On the other, the mythology of the self-made, creative billio...Read the entire review

The Movie:
In terms of horror movies, The Shrine has a lot of elements that hearken back to seventies classics of the genre: human sacrifice, devil worship, remote villages populated with extra creepy, backwards locals, even a forest permanently shrouded in ominous fog. Eschewing the easy plot devices, cheap scares and casual cruelty of a lot of modern films, it aims more for a pervasive feeling of dread, and largely succeeds.

Carmen (Cindy Sampson) is a feisty journalist, who's been busted down to cub reporter status after writing an unspecified controversial story. Determined to get back in the big leagues, she shuns the humdrum assignment to investigate why bees are dying off in the Midwest, and instead convinces her boyfriend and photographer Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) and na ve young intern Sara (Meghan Heffern) to jet off to Poland to find out what happened to a missing hiker, ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Whether you agree or disagree with the late, great Paul Goodman's cheerfully, rigorously radical ideas, it's clear that very, very few public figures -- really, of any ideological stripe -- since his 1960s-1970s prominence as author/speaker/television guest have attained nearly the richness of thought or the lively way of expressing it that Goodman had. In Paul Goodman Changed My Life, director Jonathan Lee takes us on a trip back that, far from being yet another of the mournful, vaguely defeatist elegies for the Sixties we've been getting since Reagan, is an optimistic (but mostly levelheaded) celebration of one person's articulation and defense of hopeful ideals that can actually inspire and mitigate despair, even when the kinds of things ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I'm already on record here at DVDTalk as trying and failing to like the multimedia artist Lynn Hershman Leeson's own personal work as a filmmaker, so I was half-intrigued, half-wary as I prepared to sit down with her documentary about the omitted history of women artists in the latter half of the 20th century, !Women Art Revolution. Happily, my leeriness wasn't entirely warranted, as the subject at least diverts Leeson from the self-involved, pseudointellectual insularity I find to run rampant through her narrative/avant-garde video works. For this film, Leeson has skimmed some of the most salient pieces of a career-long project in which she ha...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

It may sound like a recipe for clich , convention, and self-indulgence, a film about the conflicts and troubles of a successful young man in his late 20s whose increasingly committed relationship, impending second-time fatherhood, and the obligatory acknowledgment of adulthood that comes along with those circumstances leave him disoriented, doubtful, and defensive. But in the 2008 film Summer Holiday (originally entitled Boogie), the Romanian director Radu Muntean, who went on to make last year's beautifully crafted Tuesday, After Christmas, proves that with enough perspective, emotional astuteness, and cinematic vision, what could have been jus...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The first emotion that springs to mind when the fantastic contemporary crop of Romanian cinema is mentioned would probably not be laugh-out-loud amusement, and the same goes for the period through which that nation lived (from the mid-'70s through the '89 fall of the Berlin Wall) under notoriously oppressive Communist Party Leader/President Nicolae Ceausescu. Practically any Romanian alive during the Ceausescu era will tell you of the privation, paranoia, and personal and public stagnation that permeated the nation then; and the most well-known of those justly celebrated Romanian cinematic exports of recent years, Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'or-winning 4 Months, 3 W...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The great Hungarian cin aste B la Tarr's 2007 film The Man from London is a striking but relatively minor work for him ("relative" being the operative word; minor Tarr is still as essential as some very respectable directors' top-notch stuff), and as such the fact that it bore such a disproportionate burden in its production and reception seems doubly unfair. First, it was the follow-up to his widely admired 2001 picture The Werckmeister Harmonies (the best film of the decade, in my opinion); secondly, the tragic suicide of one of Tarr's producers dragged out production for years, to the point that anticipation either dwindled or became irrationally demanding of ano...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

If South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo has not (yet) experienced quite the groundswell of Stateside attention and acclaim that his compatriots Bong joon-ho (The Host, Mother) and Lee Chang-dong (Secret Sunshine, Poetry) have finally, rightfully begun to enjoy, it is not because he's been any less prolific or internationally well-regarded; as the credits of his stunning achievement of 2008, Night and Day, announce, it's his eighth film. No, if the vacillations of ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The word "gritty" is frequently used to describe films that have hard-hitting, unpleasant, violent, or grim content, from The French Connection to 8mm. But the other connotation--the one that brought that descriptor to my mind as I watched Josh and Ben Safdie's 2009 film Daddy Longlegs (originally released as Go Get Some Rosemary)--is as in "nitty-gritty," the everyday, supposedly undramatic feel of life events that unusually raw fictional-narrative filmmakers John Cassavetes (Faces) and Ma...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The spry photographer at the center of Bill Cunningham New York definitely isn't a household name, unless you read the New York Times or frequently mingle in Manhattan society. By the time this film breezes through its 84 minutes, though, most viewers will be too busy grinning from ear to ear to care. This film performs the neat trick of sucking the viewer into Cunningham's uniquely frenetic world of fashion, art, and living for the moment.

Director Richard Press opens Bill Cunningham New York with shots of 81-year-old Cunningham in his daily routine: biking through the streets of Manhattan, camera at the ready to capture the city's pedestrians as they go about their business. His focus is not so much on the people as the clothing they wear, with a practiced eye for spotting certain trends (a specific shade of pink, for example) and outfits that express the pe...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

In Julie Bertuccelli's The Tree, there is an ongoing game of imagination between one of the film's central characters, eight-year-old Simone (Morgana Davies) and a playmate, in which they set themselves an age sometime in the future and verbally describe what their lives would be like as grown-up women. To say that the film itself could be one of those stories is not, unfortunately, a compliment. That's not a knock on children or childlike imaginativeness; anyone who has ever had to try to follow along as a child expresses him/herself in this way knows that the flitting-focus lack of structure, life experience, or understanding of the world can be mitigated and even made charming when it's coming from an individual child of one's acquaintanc...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Caroline Bottaro's Queen to Play (Joueuse), about an ordinary woman's discovery of a passion beyond the routines and exigencies of her working-class life, doesn't suffer from false modesty; among its numerous virtues, it genuinely is modest. But it is just that willingness to keep it simple and laid-back that lets the film's valuable insights--you could even reasonably say profundities--shine through in the end.

Sandrine Bonnaire ( nos amours, Vagabond, La C r mon...Read the entire review

Poor H l ne (Sandrienne Bonnaire) is perpetually overlooked, overworked, and undersexed. She works as a maid at a fancy hotel on the French Riviera; she cleans houses some afternoons for extra money. Her husband is a hard-working painter, while their teenage daughter is embarrassed by their lower-class status. One day, while cleaning a room, she catches a glimpse of a couple on their balcony. They're beautiful and classy and very much in love, and they're playing chess. H l ne sizes this up and decides that she'd like that please, and so she starts playing chess. The other stuff comes later.

Caroline Bottaro's Queen to Play is a charmingly low-key seriocomic drama from France; its primary selling point here in the States is that it features Kevin Kline in, surprisingly...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Next time you think about complaining about your commute, shut up for a second and pop Lixin Fan's documentary Last Train Home into your DVD player instead.

The Chinese-Canadian director begins his movie by introducing viewers to the largest annual commute in the world. Every year, 130 million migrant workers leave Chinese cities to return home to the outer provinces to visit their families. It's one mass exodus. Trains are packed with people for days on end, all rushing at once to get home in time for the New Year's holiday. Tickets sell out, and crowds gather for hours to be the first on.

Last Train Home starts in the winter of 2006, and it follows one family contending with the rush and the crowds. Changhua and Suqin Zhang are a ...Read the entire review

The Quintessential Guy Maddin!:

THE SHOW:

Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor and Other Fantastic Films by Koji Yamamura is a collection of animated shorts by experimental Japanese filmmaker Koji Yamamura. It contains what is probably his best-known work, "Mt. Head," a cartoon nominated for the best Animated Short Oscar in 2002. This, in many ways, is the middle point of Yamamura's work, even if it isn't exactly the center chronologically. The 13 programs presented here span from 1987 to 2007, arranged in reverse order, though also broken into chunks by decade. How you choose to explore is up to you.

"Mt. Head" is representative of the most compelling of Yamamura's work. It follows the travails of a miser whose stinginess causes a cherry tree to sprout from the top of his head. At first he...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Perhaps the most peculiar sidebar of the popular and critical success of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds has been the curiosity over Third Reich film--the notion, explored in that film and explained by the filmmaker, of "Goebbels as a studio head." While serving as minister of propaganda, he directly oversaw the German film industry, which produced copious musicals and comedies but was best known for their works of pro-German, anti-Semitic proselytism, including Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew, and Veit Harlan's costume drama Jew S ss.

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew S ss profiles that notorious film's creator, the T...Read the entire review

Every year on March 10th, the Tibetan exile community around the world commemorates the 1959 Tibetan uprising against China -- an armed rebellion that was brutally put down by the Chinese military. In the wake of the failed insurrection, the Dalai Lama, Tibet's temporal and spiritual leader, and nearly 100,000 Tibetans went into exile to escape Chinese persecution. In the years since, as hundreds of thousands of non-Tibetan Chinese have settled in Tibet, more Tibetans have been tortured, imprisoned, or exiled during continued unrest.

In the years immediately after the 1959 uprising, the Tibetan exile community was unified in seeking complete independence for Tibet, but since the 1980's the Dalai Lama, seeking a rapprochement with China, has advocated a so-called middle-way which would allow China to control Tibet's external affairs, while restoring complete internal autonomy. However, after near...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Agatha Christie is universally recognized as a master of the well-mannered murder mystery. Towards Zero (aka L'heure Zero) represents a 2007 effort by director Pascal Thomas to transport one of her typically deceptive plots to France. The film's slow and deliberate pace builds well to the inevitable murder. Unfortunately, the proceedings then fall flat as a plodding investigation and surprise denouement take much of the wind out of the movie's sails.

As befits the genre, the film opens with us being introduced to numerous characters that will eventually turn out to be murderers, victims or red herrings. There's the man who jumps off a cliff only to survive and realize that he may have a greater purpose in life. There's the girl who confesses to thievery even though she is innocent. Then there's Guillaume (Melvil Poupaud). He's a smarmy and privileged type with a...Read the entire review

THE FILM

Most features opt for grand statements of suspense to get by, positioning villains, weapons, and natural disasters to keep audiences glued to their seats. The Italian comedy "Mid-August Lunch" favors a more relatable route, communicating the intensity of time alone with four elderly women. A modest slice of life comedy, "Mid-August Lunch" is loaded with charm, embracing the observational opportunities that arrive with a mature cast wedged inside a restrictive condo setting.

Having trouble making ends meet while taking care of his elderly mother, Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio) seeks to soothe his mounting medical and legal troubles with a routine of wine and conversation. When an important Italian summer holiday draws near, Gianni is faced with an offer from an influential friend who wants to drop off his own mother and aunt for the extended weekend stay. Reluctant...Read the entire review

If I wasn't impatient (not to mention lazy), I might've tried to be an animator. Of course, films like Up are great because they have great stories and engaging characters and top-notch performances, but I also love watching an animated film just to study the craft of the animation itself. I don't know that I find myself drawn to stop-motion, but the idea that stop-motion is the most meticulous type of animation (lacking the complete imaginative freedom of a blank piece of paper and without any of the advantages of CG) is always hanging over my thoughts whenever I watch a film done in that style.

One of 2009's major animated films (and there were many -- it was a great year for animated features) was Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar's A Town Called Panic. Adapted from their TV show of the same name, the film follows three hapless heroes named Horse, Cowboy and Indian on a series of rid...Read the entire review

The Product:
There was a time when the artform known as stop-motion animation was more or less dead. Unless your name was Rankin and/or Bass, or you had a limited F/X budget via which to render your "money" shots, the handheld, one frame at a time process was useless to you. Oh sure, artists like Tim Burton and Henry Selick successfully resurrected the idea a few decades back, bringing to life the stellar stories of The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, The Corpse Bride, and Coraline, but unless you were trying to render your reality on the cheap, you didn't dare fly in the face of Harryhausen and his muse. Luckily, foreign filmmakers like Vincent Patar and St phane Aubier have been bucking the trend while making the irresistibly nutzoid TV show Panique au village. Translated as A Town Called Panic, it was a massive hit after app...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The neon lights might be bright on Broadway, but apparently they're just as bright in the mountains of Afghanistan. The pursuit of fame and fortune transcends geographic and cultural boundaries, as evidenced by the 2009 documentary, Afghan Star.

The movie's name refers to Afghanistan's most beloved television show, an American Idol-styled program in which amateur singers compete for the coveted title and a $5,000 grand prize. That such a show exists in the war-torn country -- much less that it's insanely popular - is extraordinary when you consider that music and dancing were banned under Taliban rule. Once elections in 2004 ended the theocracy, however, Afghans quickly brought song and dance back into their lives. "If there was no music, humans would be sad," a blind says in the documentary's open. "There would be nothing. If there was no singing, then the ...Read the entire review