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 naïve 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 cliché, 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 ju...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 cinéaste Béla 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 a...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