The Movie:

What causes an everyday guy to become a raging, violent bigot? The Australian indie Drown attempts to shed some light on hate crimes by deconstructing one such (fictional) incident, delving into the mind of a flinty, psychotically damaged young man who suddenly snapped one fateful night. Oh, and because it takes place in an all-male lifeguard school, you get a lot of shots of hunky guys in tiny speedos. Dean Francis' beefcake-in-trouble opus arrives from Strand Releasing in a nice-looking DVD - if the drama doesn't always score, at least the sumptuous photography looks good.

Despite the flaws (and there are many), Drown is a good vehicle for up-and-coming Australian actor Matt Levett. Levett radiates intensity as lead character Len Smithy, a cocky lifeguard whose seething, self-loathing homophobia brings about tragic results. Many took notice of the handsome actor as...Read the entire review

The Movie:

A young girl, vanished after getting picked up from a day care center by a mystery woman, serves as the catalyst for the simmering drama A Wolf at the Door. The mess resulting from a seemingly normal family coming apart propels this solid effort from first-time Brazilian writer-director Fernando Coimbra. Flawed to some degree, this film is assuredly worth checking out for fans of intense foreign-language drama. Strand Releasing's DVD offers a nice looking, spartan home video edition.

A Wolf at the Door frantically begins with a typical Rio de Janeiro suburbanite, Sylvia (Fabiula Nascimento), arriving to pick up her daughter from the local day care. Sylvia finds that the girl was already picked up, however, by a stranger whom the you...Read the entire review

Beach Blanket Bloodbath!

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The Movie:

The cheesy spectacle of the Eurovision Song Contest gets a gentle ribbing in Cupcakes, a breezy comedy from Israel. This one's about a group of disenchanted friends in Tel Aviv who are taken by surprise when their spontaneous living room jam becomes Israel's official selection for Europe's splashiest annual singing competition (called EuroSong here, presumably for legal reasons). Despite the glittery backdrop and campy soundtrack, this colorful, lightweight, cliche-filled yet entertaining flick is mostly about the value of friendship. Sweet!

Top-loaded with six main characters who all have equal placement in the plot, Cupcakes can be a little confusing at first - there's a lot of fun to be had, however, once their distinct personali...Read the entire review

John Jeffcoat's first (and only) feature-length film was 2006's Outsourced, a comedy about a manager who moves to India to supervise a call center. The movie was a success, and apparently warranted a spinoff TV series by the same name, although it would only last one season. Afterwards, Jeffcoat went to work for MTV, shooting behind-the-scenes footage of Seattle bands. While there, he met the band Tennis Pro, a trio of musicians who wanted a documentary team to accompany them overseas where they hoped to gain an audience for their music. Too bad there was no money for the trip, no script for the movie, and no idea how to get things...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Pragmatic believer in self-reliance, messiah-like founder of Objectivism, idol to Wall Street traders and slash-and-burn Republicans - Ayn Rand has become many things to many people. The Oscar-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life de-mystifies the author and philosopher, delineating her life story in the same admiring manner as a typical PBS documentary. Strand Releasing's Blu-ray upgrades the image quality while retaining the bonus materials from 2006's Director's Vision DVD set.

The way A Sense of Life portrays it, Ayn Rand's guiding principal of placing an indomitable sense of individualism above all else wasn't just a belief - she inhabited it, through and through. Eventually coined by Rand as Objectivism, it grew from a personal belief into a full-fledged dogma that wasn't without its share of controversy. Director Michael Paxton frames the docu...Read the entire review

In its home country of France, Celine Sciamma's new film is titled Bande de Filles, an appropriate summarization of a story about a group of girls who bring another into their fold and their subsequent time together. In America, the film has been retitled Girlhood, an obvious riff on Richard Linklater's critically and commercially popular Boyhood. Yet, Girlhood (in this critic's opinion) effortlessly accomplishes in less than two hours what Boyhood struggles to do in three, capturing the exuberant, reckless energy of teenagers figuring out where they feel whole and understood. Sciamma's four young women face personal and societal struggles when they're alone, but gain carefree confidence through their friendship.

The film's protagonist is Marieme (Karidja Toure), who lives in collective of apartment complexes filled with teen gangs and drug dealers. Her m...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed is a loving tribute to The Beatles' post-1965 introspective period, wrapped around a warmhearted and insightful coming-of-age story. Like The Fab Four's best work, it's an earnest, wistful, and whimsical film with a lot of emotional depth. In a way, it's the flipside to Robert Zemeckis' first film I Wanna Hold Your Hand, which represented the band's early 60s A Hard Day's Night years. That film embraced a tone of chaotic energy found in that period. Meanwhile, even though it's also about Beatles fans going to great lengths to meet their idols, Living Is Easy with Eyes Closed is about the inevitability of change, and how frightening yet life-affirming it can be.

The Movie:

I appreciate that The Way He Looks is a well-executed typical high school romance, one that we all know and love, where the love interests just happen to be gay. Instead of focusing on this aspect of the story and filling the screenplay with homophobia-related conflict that's expected from gay romances, writer/director Daniel Ribeiro deftly examines the awkwardness of first love, the way teenagers take their clumsy first steps into a relationship, may it be gay or straight.

When Dan O'Bannon wrote the first draft of Alien, he didn't assign any genders to his characters, stating that whoever would turn out to be the best choices for the roles could grab them. I long for a time when any romance could turn straight or gay solely on the casting of the best actors for the parts and the screenplay could go into production without any major changes in the story. The Way He Loo...Read the entire review

I chose to watch this movie because I like Daniel Craig. The first time I saw him was in Road to Perdition (2002). Anyone with half an eye could immediately see that this guy had talent, this strangely handsome man with bright eyes and intense depth. Since then, Americans have seen Craig in so many films: Layer Cake, The Jacket, Munich, Flashbacks of a Fool, Defiance, Cowboys & Aliens, and of course the James Bond series of films and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movies. But before all that he was a presence on British television: in shows, miniseries, and made-for-TV movies. In the late 90s he began real film work, ...Read the entire review

One of the first things people have and will continue to say about Wetlands is that it's a frank exploration of women's sexuality. That's certainly true, but it may be more accurate to call the film an exploration of women's biology. The film's protagonist, Helen Memel (Carla Juri) is certainly interested in men (especially their semen, which she saves on her fingers for eventual consumption), women (including her best friend), and sex in general (testing the qualities of various vegetables as sex toys), but also in the fortitude and resilience of her butt and vagina in the face of a germ-covered universe. They say that the best way for the body to fight infection and disease is to become afflicted in the first place, so that the human defense system can learn its enemy and prepare for it. Wetlands pulls no punches in watching Helen test this theory, in a movie that will turn a few st...Read the entire review

The Movie:

If you start off Abuse of Weakness judging the protagonist's highly questionable decisions, you are in for an extremely frustrating experience. Why would an intelligent, independent, successful film director let herself get swindled by a man she knew to be a con artist? How can she fall victim to not one, but all of the simplest, most obvious tricks this man throws at her?

When talking about fictional narrative, we always bring up the importance of believable character motivations, trying desperately to explain why a character acts the way they do. Yet sometimes decisions in real life don't make sense, and are not backed by a convenient list of reasons. As passive audience members, we watch Maud (Isabelle Huppert) write one check after the other, totaling in hundreds of thousands of Euros, to certified con man Vilko (Kool Shen), and we want to reach into the screen and ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Belgian filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, who previously collaborated on Amer a few years prior, 2013's The Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears wears the influence of Italian giallo directors like Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Sergio Martino plainly on its sleeve, almost as a badge of honor and it would seem, on the surface at least, that Argento's Inferno was particularly inspiring to the filmmakers, at least in terms of location.

When the movie begins, Dan (Klaus Tange) returns home to his fancy art deco style apartment building in Brussels from some business travel and finds that the wife he left behind has mysteriously disappeared, pretty much without a trace. Despite the fact that there's no evidence whatsoever to the contrary, Dan deduces that something sinister has taken place and assumes that she didn't leave by choice in...Read the entire review

Dan Kristensen (Klaus Tange) is a businessman, returning from a tiring trip out of town. He arrives home expecting to see his wife, Edwige, but she is nowhere to be found. He pours himself a few drinks, and becomes increasingly alarmed by her disappearance. The other people in his apartment complex are no help, and in fact even seem to be playing some sort of head game with him. He contacts the police, who send a send a somewhat suspicious detective (Joe Koener), who claims Dan has done things he can't remember and asks him questions that make him paranoid. Without anyone to help him, he dives deeper into the mystery of his apartment complex, desperate to find out what happened to Edwige. The closest thing he has to a lead is another woman living in the apartment, Barbara (Ursula Bedena), who somehow seems to know something about Edwige's disappearance.

At least, that's probably what's happening. Read the entire review

The Film:

Sophie Lellouche's Paris - Manhattan (2012) is precisely what one would expect from a French comedy about a single woman with an obsession for the movies of Woody Allen, with whom she converses in imaginary conversations patterned after Play It Again, Sam. Overly precious with forced whimsy, it's predictable and only intermittently original. Some of the performances are good, but the lead character is miscast and badly conceived. But there are also a couple of sweet moments that make it worth seeing once, and regardless of its faults it's still almost a must for Woody Allen fans.

Strand Releasing's DVD includes an interesting, unusual short film included as a bonus feature, Masha Vasyukova's Woody before Allen (2011).

Alice Ovitz (Alice Taglio...Read the entire review

The Film:

THE MOVIE:

I've seen Bicycling with Moliere compared to both My Dinner with Andre and Before Midnight (and its prequels). These comparisons are apt. Perhaps more so when you mash them together. Because Philippe Le Guay's film is a little bit of both: an artistic conversation tangled in a romantic argument. Albeit a platonic one. Platonic in all senses.

Lambert Wilson (You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet) and Fabrice Luchini (Paris) star as Gauthier and Serge,...Read the entire review

The Movie:

An ordinary guy witnesses a murder, but he's too infatuated with the killer to turn him in to the authorities. That's the basic premise of Stranger by the Lake, a film which could have been made in the noir '40s with just a few revisions. With explicit sex scenes and a diabolically simple setup, French director Alain Guiraudie turns this thriller into an atmospheric meditation on an all-consuming desire.

One of the things which makes Stranger by the Lake so different is its setting, a lakeside which serves as a cruising spot for the film's cast of characters. Day after day, the men come to this lake with its warm water, rocky white beach and overgrown vegetation to swim, sun, and have anonymous sex. It's an odd kind of pseudo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The Academy Award-nominated The Missing Picture approaches an unbelievably horrific episode in history with intimacy and grace. In this first-person documentary, director Rithy Panh uses hand-carved dolls, dioramas with plastic aquarium plants, and scratched-up old propaganda footage to recount his childhood in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in 1975-79. While the Communist dictatorship's devastating wrath has been well-documented in narrative films like 1984's The Killing Fields, Panh's unusual filmmaking techniques and personal point-of-view make this one a standout.

About those dolls… footage of the crudely carved, painted figurines make up the bulk of the film, with narration of the era's atrocities contrasting against the clea...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Updated April 17, 2014

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl completes his downer of a film trilogy with Paradise: Hope, the most youthful story of the three Paradise movies, though no less downbeat for its age or the better tomorrows falsely promised in its title.

Melanie Lenz stars in Paradise: Hope as Melanie, an adolescent girl whose mother has sent her to a diet camp for the summer to lose some weight. (Mom has gone to Kenya, as seen in Paradise: Love; her aunt is the main character in Paradise: Faith). Melanie joins the a dormitory of girls, all of whom are as unmotivated to be ...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Franco and Mathews make a meta-exploration of normal

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Mockumentaries, clever filmmaking
Likes: James Franco
Dislikes: Being preached to
Hates: Pretentious artistes

The Show
Alot of the questions about Interior. Leather Bar., a short-film experiment from big-man-on-campus James Franco and gay-documentary maker Travis Mathews, focused on just what exactly it is supposed to be. The film starts with three title cards, which sets the stage, referencing the 40 minutes of footage director William Friedkin had to remove from his 1980 film Cruising, in order to get an R rating, and Franco and Mathews' intent to re...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy is a series of films connected thematically by the three different theological tenets that give them their name, as well as by the story aspect of each film being about different sisters in the same family. Their easiest comparison is to Kieslowski's Trois Coleurs, but Paradise has even less crossover elements than that masterwork.

Paradise: Faith is ostensibly the second part of the series, though they really can be watched in any order. (True confessions, I have yet to see Paradise: Love, the initial release.) Faith stars Maria Hofstätter a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Based on the novel by Scott Heim, Gregg Araki's 2004 film Mysterious Skin takes place in rural Kansas where we meet two eight year old boys, Neil McCormack (Chase Ellison) and Brian Lackey (George Webster). When Brian was at a baseball game, he blacked out. He woke up he had blood running from his nose and he was hiding in the basement of his family's house. From here on out, for the next ten years at least, Brian continues to have nosebleeds and blackouts. When Brian is eighteen (and played then by Brady Corbet) he sees a TV show about a young woman named Avalyn (Mary Lynn Rajskub) who talks about her experience being abducted by aliens. He goes to meet her and she shows him a scar she believes to be evidence. This plants the seed in his mind and he becomes convinced that the black out at the baseball game and the ensuing nosebleeds were the result of an alien abduction....Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

In I Used to Be Darker, a young Irish girl, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), travels to Baltimore unannounced to visit her American relatives. She is supposed to be on holiday in Wales, but instead has been working by the ocean on the East Coast of the U.S. where she has been partying. Her sudden departure from there was prompted by the discovery that she is pregnant.

Her timing is pretty terrible. Her aunt and uncle (musicians Kim Taylor and Ned Oldham) are splitting up. Kim is frustrated with Chris, who has stopped making music and settled into a normal life--albeit a successful one judging by their house. She's moving in with her band. When their daughter Abby (Hannah Gross) returns from New York, things lighten up for a bit, but there's lots of thi...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from promotional materials and other sources, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

I'm a bit stymied how to even begin approaching this one. As a fan of all kinds of obtuse, high-concept art films, from Jean-Luc Godard to Seijun Suzuki to Apichatpong Weerasethakul to probably a lot of stuff a lot of you guys hate and adore with equal fervor, I'm certainly part of the core demographic that should appreciate Mexican director Carl...Read the entire review

Following the death of their parents in a car accident, Bianca (Manuela Martelli) and her younger brother Tomas (Luigi Ciardo) are allowed to live independently, with their late father's pension barely covering the cost of living. As the oldest, 19-year-old Bianca is supposed to be the "adult" between the two of them (the social worker assigned to them tells her that if she isn't up to it, Tomas will be sent to live in a foster home, while she will continue to be allowed to live at home, independently), but she doesn't put up a fight when Tomas invites two older men, Libio (Nicolas Vaporidis) and Bolones (Alessandro Giallocosta) to live with them. After a few weeks of uncomfortable co-habitation, the three men present a plan: Bianca will seduce Maciste (Rutger Hauer), a blind, retired actor living nearby, in order to suss out the location of his safe so all four of them can get rich quick.

The Fu...Read the entire review