All right, Paul Dano, I'm coming around on you. If I may be so pretentious as to quote myself, this is an actor who whom I once wrote, "he's doing another of his sensitive, whiny mopes, a schtick that is growing more tiresome with every passing picture." And that's a criticism I stand by, while also acknowledging that he showed himself--in films like Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood--to be an actor not without talent. But he's been doing interesting work lately, shedding the repetitive persona and going some new and interesting places in films like Meek's Cutoff, Being Flynn, and Ruby Sparks. Which brings us to So Yong Kim's For Ellen, in which there is no shortage of M...Read the entire review

Following up the critical and creative success of last year's 13 Assassins remake, prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike has gone in for another samurai redo. This time he is tackling Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 classic, Harakiri. Retitled Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, this is a pretty straight remake, with Miike's only real update to this 17th-century drama being that he shot the thing in 3D.

Ebizô Ichikawa stars in Hara-Kiri as Hanshirô, a samurai who has been without rank and station since his master was killed in a power struggle some years before. Fed up with a life of poverty, Hanshirô has decided to kill himself, ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Let us consider the face of Dennis Farina. It's a great, grizzled face, the lines of age set deep, the eyes of the actor--who served 18 years as a Chicago cop--weary from the things he's seen. It's a face that you believe, that's puts a real lifetime of experience behind every character he plays, and the best moments in The Last Rites of Joe May are those that simply let us study that face; late in the film, he's just sitting on a bus, and the tragic music that's slathered over it is entirely unnecessary, because there's no way it can tell us as much as that mug does.

The Last Rites of Joe May comes via the auspices of Steppenwolf Films, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that it's an impressionistic, slice-of-life story that is more concerned with character moments than plot points. In its opening scenes, that's just fine. Farina plays the title character...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

It would be fair to say that the knuckleball is not the most respected pitch in baseball. Some call it a trick pitch, a distrusted tool of oddballs, and indeed, there are only two knuckleballers in the majors as the 2011 season begins: Tim Wakefield of the Boston Red Sox and R.A. Dickey of the New York Mets. Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg's documentary Knuckleball! takes a look at those two men, their season, and the history of this very patient pitch.

Though they both throw in the distinctive style--which one historian estimates has only been used by 70 to 80 players in major league history--their backgrounds are vastly different. Wakefield is the oldest...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

Chances are you're not going to find a critic that can resist mentioning The Ice Storm when discussing Julia Dyer's The Playroom, and you can hardly blame them: It is, after all, a tale of middle-class family dysfunction set in the mid-1970s. But the similarities aren't where the movie ends--and it is, after all, a period ripe with possibilities for examining the crumbling of the American ideal. The Cantwells, the family at the center of The Playroom, aren't quite as well to do as the Hoods of The Ice Storm; they're also more explicitly desperate and unhappy, which they attempt to smother in fantasy (the kids) or drown in booze (the adults).<...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

Confession: It was with something less than fevered anticipation that I dragged myself into a morning screening of Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. There is such a thing as too early in the day for Thomas Hardy, or for film versions of 19th century English literature. I needn't have worried: from the opening scenes, of young guys smoking cigarettes, hanging out, and driving around blasting rock music, this clearly isn't your standard Tess.

And that is a good thing, though it may infuriate the purists. Winterbottom has brought Hardy to the screen before, both faithfully (Jude) and loosely (The C...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

I am not a fan of the opera. Well, correction: I've never been to the opera, so that's probably unfair. Like (I believe it's fair to say) most people of my generation, my impressions of opera are forged from its short and usually less-than-reverential appearances in other media; the idea that it's a fundamentally silly art form for old, rich people, filled with fat ladies singing in horned helmets, grabs you at a fairly early age (never underestimate the impact of What's Opera, Doc) and pretty much holds. Yet, even with my total disinterest in the art at its center, I found myself quite involved and invigorated by Susan Froemke's documentary Wagner's Dream...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

His name was Sixto Rodriguez, though he just went by his surname when he started recording for Sussex Records in 1970. He was from Detroit, and his songs were about poverty, struggling, survival; he was called an "inner-city poet" by one of the three superstar producers who created his two studio albums. He had the right people behind him and a voice perfect for his troubled times, but it somehow didn't click; in spite of rave reviews, his two records didn't sell. His label fired him, and the man they called Rodriguez went back to working construction in Detroit. He faded into obscurity. Sorta.

What happened next is the basis for Searching for Sugar Man, a ...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

So many movie romances seem to occur out of inevitability--here's who we are, here's why we're here--that the rare film which contains a sense of surprise and discovery is commendable, even when it comes in a package as flawed as The Giant Mechanical Man. It's a film that's plagued with problematic writing and irritatingly convenient coincidences, but it has at its center a fundamentally sweet and credible relationship, in which two people find each other and are pleased by what happens next.

Jenna Fischer stars as Janice: lonely, single, thirtysomething, aimless. She work for a temp agency, taking cherry gigs like standing in front of museum doors that ha...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

Shuji (Hidetoshi Nishijima), the central character in Amir Naderi's Cut, is a figure not unknown to anyone likely to see the film in America. He lives alone, in an apartment wallpapered with lobby cards and movie stills. He hosts screenings on his roof, running prints of Keaton and Ford films. He reverentially visits the tombs of Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi. And he walks the streets with a bullhorn, shouting pronouncements of the dire state of cinema. "The artistic side of cinema is dying! Most of today's movies are simply made to entertain!" he seethes. "They have no right to extinguish pure cinema!" He has attempted to contribute to the art himself, but his films ...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

The Morton Downey Jr. Show was a pop culture phenomenon that rose and fell with equal expedition--it went on the air in New York in October 1987, went nationwide early the following year, and was cancelled in July of 1989. Within that brief but loud period in the spotlight, the show prompted endless hand-wringing and countless editorials: it was, people worried, an appeal to the viewing public's basest instincts, a show that celebrated the worst of human nature, a worrisome indication of where we were heading as a society. Ha ha, they might've been right; experiencing that circus for the first time since its heyday in the stimulating new documentary Évocateur...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

The trouble with anthology films, as I'm well aware many, many others have pointed out, is their inherent tendency towards inconsistency; it's all but guaranteed that there will be a couple of good segments and at least one that stinks, rendering it tough to recommend a film in its entirety. Joe Dante and George Miller's segments of Twilight Zone: The Movie are unforgettable, but you have to sit through that notorious Landis and woeful Spielberg to get to them; there's fun to be had in Rodriguez and Tarantino's sections of Four Rooms, but boy are the other two a drag; the Wong Kar Wai and Steven Soderbergh pieces of Eros are outstanding, but you wa...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

"I love to sing and paint," says Tony Bennett, "and as far as I'm concerned, I've never worked a day in my life." There's a reason he's remained such an enduring presence on popular culture, why he had a giant hit MTV Unplugged album when he was pushing 70, why far younger performers like Lady Gaga, Carrie Underwood, and John Mayer lined up to sing with him on his Duets albums. It's not just that he's an incredible singer or a big star--there are plenty of those. It's that he is, and always has been, cool. It's an intangible, indescribable, yet inarguable quality; some people have it, and some people don't. Tony Bennett has it. Unjoo Moon's documentary Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

The snappy opening scenes of Brian Dannelly's Struck by Lighting are so fast and funny, they might lull you into thinking the entire movie is going to run at that speed. It opens with the title event, as Carson Phillips (Chris Colfer) is zapped with a lightning bolt in the high school parking lot; he then narrates own funeral, which includes an acoustic guitar rendition of "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday." ("Aaaaand my funeral sucks"). He walks us back to his childhood as a know-it-all kid, raised after his father's abandonment by his harried single mom, played to perfection by Allison Janney. (Failing to assemble the plastic Christmas tree during their...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

"I wish my head could forget what my eyes have seen in 32 years of firefighting." Those words from Detroit fireman Dave Parnell open Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez's bracing documentary Burn, subtitled "One year on the front lines of the battle to save Detroit." It captures a city in crisis, where the population has dropped by two-thirds since the industrial heyday of the 1950s, leaving a place that is, in one observer's words, like "Katrina without the hurricane." Poverty is at 33%; unemployment hovers around 39%. Houses are trashed and abandoned, and often those houses go up in flames. The Detroit Fire Department gets about 30,000 fire calls per year, and most o...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

Three women, three ages, three cities. Winnie, 12, is a young New York City actress, gymnast, writer, and activist, funny and bright and already possessing a remarkable sense of self. Laura, 22, is a kindergarten teacher and amateur model from North Carolina, and although she's a stunner, she's decided that she badly needs expensive labial reconstruction surgery. Nichole, 32, is an exotic dancer and former adult film star; though she's out of the movies, she and her husband manage other dancers and she gives pole-dancing lessons to local professionals in her Florida home.

This intriguing cross-section of women and points of view provides the framework for Jill Ba...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

There is a thin, dangerous line between presenting listlessness onscreen and creating it, and that's a line that writer/director/actor Tom O'Brien mostly stays on the right side of in his new film Fairhaven. It's a story of three old friends from a small town, the kind of place where you spend a lot of time in bars, or working menial jobs, or sleeping with the wrong people. Dave (Chris Messina) moved away; Sam (Rich Sommer) and Jon (O'Brien) did not. Now Dave is back, for the first time in years, for the funeral of a father with whom he was not close. "I wasn't gonna come at all," he shrugs, and for much of the film, it seems that might've been the best idea for ...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

It's hard to know how Kat Coiro's While We Were Here would play under optimal conditions (still not well, I'm guessing), but the programmers of the Tribeca Film Festival did the picture no favors by slotting it anywhere near the same vicinity as Sarah Polley's Take this Waltz, a film that, like this one, deals with a marriage on the verge of rupture due to a wife's attraction to a younger, more exciting man. I saw Waltz first; While We Were Here never stood a chance. Everything that was gutsy and nuanced in Waltz is flat and obvious here, and all of the complexities th...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

The interview comes about eleven minutes into the NBC News documentary, which was called Mississippi: A Self Portrait, and which ran in 1967. His name was Booker Wright, and he was a waiter at an all-white restaurant in Greenwood, Mississippi. He spent his days running his own bar on the other side of town, and that's where Frank De Felitta interviewed him about working at the restaurant. "Some people are nice," he told the camera, "some, not. Some call me Booker, some call me John, some call me Jim. Some call me nigger." But no matter what they called him, Wright said, he smiled. "Always learn to smile. The meaner the man be, the more you smile--although you cry...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

The early passages of Alex Karpovsky's Rubberneck have an unpredictability that effectively puts the entire picture up for grabs. Paul (Karpovsky), a mild-mannered researcher, strikes up a chat with pretty new lab tech Danielle (Jaime Ray Newman) at their research and development laboratory's Christmas party. They go home together, in a scene of velvety sensuality. But the next night, Paul presses her for a second date, and it goes quietly awry--in that particularly icky way where one person keeps pushing, and can't let things be.

Eight months pass. That aborted second date was clearly the end of their brief romantic involvement, but Paul is still hung up ...Read the entire review

For the most part, I do my best to prevent my reviews from getting overtly autobiographical (because honestly, who gives a shit). But it would seem unfair, dishonest even, to attempt to appraise the documentary Journey to Planet X without acknowledging the part that my own history with no-budget filmmaking plays in my response to it. You see, the film is the documentary account of Eric Swain and Troy Bernier's two-year production of a 30-minute homemade sci-fi movie, and there are scenes within it that have the embarrassing familiarity of a high school yearbook. It is charming and funny and, in spots, almost uncomfortable to watch.

Both men work as scientists--Sw...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

Old family photos, accompanied by sad piano music and children's voices, aren't quite as reliable as a preface to tales of long-suppressed family dysfunction as home movies (the go-to cliché), but they'll do in a pinch; one of these days, some filmmaker's going to throw audiences for a real loop by using faded ephemera in the opening credits of a film about a family that gets along great and supports each other all the time. Adam Christian Clark's Caroline and Jackie is not that film. What it is, however, is a deeply felt and frequently unnerving portrayal of mental illness and sibling rivalry, one which transcends its occasional markers and dreary subject matte...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

Some documentary viewers get all hung up on objectivity and such, so let's say this right out of the chute: Let Fury Have the Hour is fiercely, proudly, snarlingly partisan. It is a positive documentary about progressive artists, who created a loose movement intended to counter the fear and divisiveness of Thatcher and Reagan. Perhaps you do not agree with that assessment of those figures, and in that event, this is not a film you should see (nor a review you should read). Those who do will find much here that is stimulating and evocative, and may very well get all worked up all over again.

The idea was "creative response," the notion of art--music, dance, ...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

Nisha Pahuja's The World Before Her is a clear-eyed and powerful look and sexual identity and feminism in India, as seen through the eyes of two young women with very different ideas about empowerment. Ruhi is one of the twenty contestants for the Miss India title, one of the few opportunities for young women to find economic success and equality in her country. "I think of myself as a very modern woman, and I want freedom," she says, simply enough. Prachi is seeking her freedom too, but via a more aggressive method: she has spent most of her life at camps run by Durga Vahini, the women's wing of the fundamentalist Hindu movement. She's tough and strong, and she ...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

When the stylish and striking comics-and-salsa opening credit sequence of Macdara Vallely's Babygirl faded and the film proper began, this viewer sat up with a jolt: is that 16mm film? In a new indie? Believe it, kids; Babygirl was shot on good, old-fashioned, grainy Super 16, and it gives the picture a defining, throwback look, recalling earlier low-budget, coming-of-age New York movies like Straight Out of Brooklyn and Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. Like those films, it is not immune to the temptations of occasional broadness or cliché. But it has an authenticity and reality that's admirable, and increasingly rare.

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

For such a collaborative medium, and one that combines so many different art forms into one smooth broth, films detailing the collaborative process are in disturbingly short supply; whether it's the act of making music, creating theater, or crafting dance, most filmmakers either shuttle the actual act of creation off-screen, or presume it's voodoo that arrives via methods unexplained, like some sort of divine intervention. If The Russian Winter offered nothing else, it would present several refreshingly straight-forward glimpses into the act of making music--an act that, for those of us not in possession of the gift to do so, seems like a miracle.

But that'...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

You gotta give Namir Abdel Messeeh this much: he's honest. Before he even rolls the credits of his free-form documentary The Virgin, the Copts, and Me, he plays a voicemail of his producer criticizing him for wanting to make a movie that's "all over the place," asking (just before the title comes up, of course) "Is the film about the Copts, the Virgin, or you?" The "Copts" he's referring to are Coptics, members of the Christian community in Egypt that never converted to Islam. The "Virgin" is the Virgin Mary, whom Coptics say appears to them as an apparition, most famously in Zeitoun in 1968. And the "me" is Messeeh, a French/Egyptian filmmaker and (to say the l...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

The true test of a great documentary is its ability to make you care about something you normally would have absolutely no interest in. I don't watch high school basketball, but I couldn't turn off Hoop Dreams; my lack of inherent curiosity in Bible salesmen didn't make me any less rapt during Salesman . Safinez Bousbia's El Gusto, for all of its good intentions and effort, doesn't quite pass that test. It concerns a group of men who have dedicated their lives to Chaabi music, a guitar and lute-heavy mix of Andalusian, Berber, Arabic, and Flamenco sounds, and while these ears recognize and appreciate the craftsmanship of the music, it's not really m...Read the entire review

Reviewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival

If the title First Winter recalls the Pilgrims, they would certainly be horrified by the activities of the people in Benjamin Dickinson's film. Their days are filled with chanting and yoga and organic food; their nights, drugs and free love. Y'know, the usual. The word "commune" isn't mentioned once--the isolated farmhouse the group of friends inhabit is referred to as "Paul's Yoga Farm," after their de facto leader (Paul Manza). It seems fairly idyllic, as far as those things go, until the power goes out, and a few members of the group take the only car into town for supplies, never to return. Their phone batteries die. Smoke billows from the city, many miles...Read the entire review