The title suggests something profoundly disturbing, perhaps trading cheaply in shock value, yet to dyed-in-the-wool American independent filmmaker Dan Sallitt's credit, The Unspeakable Act keeps its head well above the waters of sensationalism at all times. This is much easier said than done when your protagonist's driving motivation and your film's principal dramatic conflict is not just taboo, but the taboo, the one from which Freud's Totem and… derived its name. Yes, Sallitt's 17-year-old contemporary Brooklynite Jackie (the captivatingly lunar-faced Tallie Medel) doesn't love her one-year-older brother Matthew (Sky Hirschkron) in the usual fraternal way; she is sincer...Read the entire review

As far as I know, I greatly admire André Gregory, the now-octogenarian actor/stage director who grew up artistically in all the groundbreaking actors' revolutions of the 20th-century New York theatre world and would, in later years, garner a well-deserved name as a collaborator on film with French cinéaste Louis Malle , first as the namesake of 1981's My Dinner with André and then as the maestro of the magnificently eccentric "stage" production that Malle made into the excellent Vanya on 42nd Street in 1994. But "as fa...Read the entire review

The Movie

When I first read about Leviathan, I was excited by the description of an experimental, narration-free look at life on a fishing boat. Then, I read my colleague's review on this very site, and I was given pause. Having sat down to watch the documentary now (and only fallen asleep once), I must say that it completely deserves reactions from both ends of the critical spectrum. It is a bold experiment that so completely fractures reality while capturing it that only the most focused and open-minded viewers are probably going to fully appreciate it.

The action is captured by a number of tiny GoPro cameras posted throughout the boat, attached to fishermen, and fly...Read the entire review

"He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand…." - Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

It's almost impossible not to project an important, "Final Statement" status onto the late Raul Ruiz's fantastic film Night Across the Street, but it's also pointless to avoid thinking of it in those terms, treating it as the movie that just happened to be the last rich deposit into Ruiz's long, hugely varied, bursting filmography of over 100 films spanning five decades. Not only did th...Read the entire review

The description on the back cover of this vital DVD containing British artist Ben Rivers's mind-blowing, near-spiritual experience of a feature film, Two Years at Sea, makes it sound as if there's a story being told: It names the film's subject, a man called Jake Williams, and informs us of the origin of its title, that Williams spent two years working at sea (on a fishing boat, presumably) to finance the isolated, cabin-in-the-woods wilderness existence he's always dreamed of. But, interesting as it is, none of that information is mentioned at all in the film, nor is it in any way necessary to understanding it. Rivers's aims are not by any stretch documentarian in that way; he has littl...Read the entire review

There are at least two separate moments in Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's challenging, excellent documentary The Law in These Parts where Israel, the director's homeland, is referred to as "the only democracy in the Middle East." This is key, because the documentarian's subject -- Israel's military-legal dominance since 1967 of its neighbor, Palestine, and the Palestinian people -- and even moreso his approach, weighs and rigorously tests the idea that Israel is an exemplary beacon of democracy in a region of theocracies, dictatorships, and/or monarchies. But this film is no disgusted, denunciatory anti-Israel screed; it gives one the strong impression that it could only have been made by a nat...Read the entire review

I've never seen a Brazilian film before. I'm not even sure I've seen a South American film before. I guess, for a person who considers himself open and experimental when it comes to movies, I haven't seen that many foreign films. I mean, I've seen more than Joe Sixpack over here, but I definitely specialize in modern American film. So when I heard that Neighboring Sounds may be the best movie to have ever come out of Brazil, I had no way of judging whether or not that was true. I knew I'd just have to watch it, try my best to appreciate it, and not compare it too much to the cinema that I'm used to. Well, it turns out that...Read the entire review

Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by Cinema Guild and are not taken from the current Blu-ray edition under review.

"This place isn't haunted," says a young man, João (Gustavo John), to a potential condo buyer at one point in Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho's vital, indelible debut feature-length picture, Neighboring Sounds. João is putting his client's mind at ease because of a suicide she's heard tell of in this high-rise residential building , owned by João's affluent family, in the gentrifying northeastern Brazilian seaside town of Recife. But this immaculately moder...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I have to confess to making a flippant joke as we settled in to watch the DVD of Yi Seungjun's remarkable, lyrical, very moving documentary Planet of Snail: Knowing that the film deals intimately with profound matters of human existence, I proffered some inept crack about how disappointed I'd be if it wasn't a monster movie about a fantastical world, in a galaxy far away, run by scary warlord-molluscs. The film, as intriguing, affecting, and mysterious as it is simple and direct, in no way deserved my disposable stab at insouciance, least of all for its seemingly gnomic title, which makes perfect sense: The planet we're being taken to is our own, but the film lets us know that familiar place in new and beautiful ways through the experience ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

There's a confusing cut that comes even before the opening credits roll in Miguel Gomes's singular 2008 documentary-fiction hybrid Our Beloved Month of August: During what appears to be standard-style documentary footage of a rock band in rehearsal, the power goes out and the scene goes dark; we then cut back up to a scene of the exact same situation, as if the power has come back on after a few moments, but now we're looking at what is clearly another band playing in a noticeably different venue. This initial plunge into underemphasis and casualness, thwarting our expectations and unexpectedly taking us somewhere, possibly a loosely connected place (but we can't be entirely sure), we wouldn't have expected to be, makes a good preamble, prep...Read the entire review

THE FILMS:

The Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov, probably most famous for the astonishing technical/aesthetic single-take feat of his 2002 film Russian Ark, first came to this reviewer's attention courtesy of the accolades that critics, cultural commentators, and cinephiles such as Paul Schrader and Susan Sontag heaped upon his 1997 masterpiece, Mother and Son, which still stands as one of my personal most transformative cinemat...Read the entire review

When her husband Abe (John Diehl) has a stroke and ends up in the hospital in the middle of a sperm bank donation, Linda (Rachael Harris) struggles to make sense of her life. A devoted Christian, she's spent the last several years of her marriage grappling with her own sexual desires; she's unable to have children, and Abe doesn't feel that physical intimacy without the goal of motherhood is in keeping with their faith. Upon learning that Abe's sperm donation has been going on for decades, she heads back to the clinic looking for answers and learns that Abe has an adult son, Raymond, who she decides to track down while Abe recovers.

Actor Rachael Harris is probably best known for her brief supporting role in The Hangover (as Ed Helms' ridiculously evil wife), but there's nothing in that movie to suggest the performance she gives here. From the physical -- director / writer Robbie Pickering dre...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Seongjun is a filmmaker who made four films before abandoning the craft and becoming a professor at a small school in the Korean countryside. On the occasion of The Day He Arrives, the latest from Hong Sangsoo (Woman is the Future of Man), the emotionally wounded artist (played by Yu Jun-Sang) has returned to Seoul to visit a friend, Youngho (Kim Sang Jung). On that first day, the friend is nowhere to be found, and so Seongjun wanders his old stomping grounds, running into an actress he knows, drinking with some film students, and when deep in his cups, visiting his ex-girlfriend, Kyungjin (Kim Bo-Kyung). There is still pain between them, and also some...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by Cinema Guild, and not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.

Robbie Pickering's Natural Selection is a strange sort of anomaly, which is both a compliment and a criticism. It belongs to that school of independent American movie -- ranging from Sling Blade to Napoleon Dynamite to Junebug (a peak of the movement) and beyond -- that proudly features marginalized and/or ordinary characters, the kind of film that previously, sometime ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

From the minute the opening credits of Hong Sangsoo's The Day He Arrives start up (bright red with white Korean characters flashing on and off to the half-sprightly, half-lilting tempo of composer Yong-jin Jeong piano piece, which constitutes the film's sparsely-used "score"), you get the feeling that you're in the hands of a master, and what follows vindicates that impression absolutely. Score and credit design might seem like small, inconsequential details, but right from the outset, Hong matches the "little things" right up with his vision, enfolding them into a film whose every aspect contributes to its simultaneous relaxed open-heartedness and powerful visual elegance. That brief snatch of melody, with its perky notes up top and a deepe...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
For these kids, the play is definitely the thing

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Good documentaries
Likes: Underdog stories
Dislikes: Teen drama
Hates: A lack of perspective

The Movie
Being an East Coaster, I've always been a bit jealous of those living out in La-La Land. Having the capital of the entertainment world so close seems like an unfair advantage for those looking to get into the industry. So it's no surprise when this documentary points out that the annual Shakespeare Competition held by the Drama Teachers Association of Southern California (DTASC) counts many well-known actors among its alumni, including Kevin Spacey, Richard Dreyfus, Val Kilmer and Mare Winnngham (all of whom appear ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

It's always quite a risky undertaking when a filmmaker attempts to bring a novel to the screen, but the novels of the late, great W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz) pose an even more forbidding, less surmountable challenge. As one of the interviewees in Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald) -- the person at his British publishing house responsible for labeling books so retailers will know how to shelve them -- reminds us, the "novels" of Sebald were literally uncategorizable; told, ostensibly, in the first-person voice of Sebald, they are known and celebrated for their "meandering" ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Three cars barrel down a winding country road in the dead of the night. The middle car has three police officers, a handcuffed suspect who is supposed to be giving directions, and a sober doctor. The cops, for lack of a better topic of discussion, are debating different kinds of yogurts. They've been at this awhile. The stops they've made have yielded no results, and neither will the next one. The suspect has promised to lead them to the body he's confessed to killing. Yet, he can't seem to remember where it was. "It was dark. I was drunk. It was by the round tree." One of the other vehicles is an army jeep with soldiers. In the lead, the local prosecutor in charge of the case. He's had to stop and urinate five times.

These are the mundane details ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are stills provided by Cinema Guild and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.

"Even the embers went out."

Anything resembling conventional narrative is dispensed with quickly and tersely, at the very beginning of Hungarian film maestro Béla Tarr's superlative The Turin Horse. Following the silent, white-on-black opening credits, over a darkened screen, voiceover narration tells us, in a few sentences, the story of how, in Turin, Italy, in 1889, the German "God is dead" philosopher Friedrich Nietzche saw a carriage driver whipping his stubborn horse mercilessly in a public square, broke down sobbing, caressed the horse in frantic mourning...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are promotional and are not taken from the Blu-ray under review.

In the midst of Turkish writer/director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's (Climates, Three Monkeys) epically restrained crime drama/road trip of the soul, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, its ostensibly central murder-investigation plot takes one more in a series of strange, elliptical, apparently irrelevant or meandering turns. It's the middle of the night, many kilometers outside of the nearby town, and vehicles containing police, diggers (for an expected corpse?), a public pr...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

"I wish everyday the sun would shine
Take me to another place in my mind
Where everything is beautiful
And no wants or needs
Nor sign of greed
Could rule our soul."

I never thought about this, but I had seen the video for Fishbone's "It's a Wonderful Life (Gonna Have a Time)" before I had ever seen the Frank Capra movie from which the song takes its name and the video stole its footage. It was 1987, and I was 15 and lived and died by MTV's 120 Minutes, their 2-hour block of "alternative" music that started every Sunday night at midnight. I was still developing my musical taste and lived a fair distance from any decent radio...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Language and translation being among the main focuses of comparative literature, which was my own college major (and one that demands the acquisition of at least one additional language, readings in that language, and multiple exercises that might fall under the "translation" category), perhaps I'm more predisposed than most to find Vadim Jendreyko's The Woman with the Five Elephants a transfixing cinematic experience. Its subject is Svetlana Geier, a renowned German translator who has created, among many other works, the best-regarded German translations of Dostoyevsky from her native Russian, and it melds her life story with her philosophy and practice of translating texts, which is not just a mental process but an actually much livelier-t...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Aurora is a beguiling masterwork, a film so quietly radical and ultimately sublime that I'm ready to watch it again, right now, despite its three-hour duration. Written and directed by--and starring--Cristi Puiu (writer/director of 2005's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), the film is a murder-mystery, but the way in which that mystery is presented to us--and what is and is not felt as "mysterious" through the film's boldly unique emphases--is utterly disorienting and unexpected, singlehandedly breathing new life into a story that has been done many times before and transforming it into something urgent and uncanny.

Puiu adopts an aesthetic ap...Read the entire review