Guru

[Even though they essentially agree on the film, we thought it'd be fun to get two reviewers' takes on this one, two perspectives for the price of one! First Erin, and then James. -- ed.]

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

[Note: Release date changed to May 15.] A more cynical viewer could see the recent popularity of vignette storytelling as a desperate move for cash-strapped productions to attract big name talent to their films with the lure of a small time commitment and big showpiece scenes without the burden of having to carry an entire narrative. But the flipside of that coin is that to effectively tell those stories a director needs very good actors who can quickly engage our imaginations.

Writer/director Karen Moncrieff's film was inspired by her experiences as a juror on a murder trial after seeing the temporary community that had sprung up around the witnesses called to testify. The Dead Girl is the story of a murder that's become ghoulish normalcy in almost any part of the country: a drug-addicted prostitute is randomly killed, her mutilated body dumped in a field and discovered a few days later by a passerby. The discovery creates a small stir in the local media, but there is very little outrage and no one is ever arrested for the crime.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Some movies may be arty, different and interesting The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes immediately comes to mind) but not be all that enjoyable overall. Tears Of The Black Tiger manages the arty/different/interesting part, while providing enormous fun in the process. Much of this, I suspect, may be due to how little knowledge many of us western film buffs possess regarding the traditions of Thailand, its culture and film history. We may have seen some of the oddities of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), the martial-artsy Ong-Bak, a genre-jumping Beautiful Boxer or a gorgeous epic like Suriyothai (the Thai movies I can immediately bring to mind), and although the Hong Kong-born Pang brothers often film in Thailand and clearly have an appreciation of that country, this is not quite the same thing as being Thai. Consequently, when we see something as bizarre, colorful, and all-over-the-place as writer/director Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears, the experience probably approximates how viewing one’s first Bollywood extravaganza might have seemed at the time.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Cevin D. Soling's mini-budget satire The War on the War on Drugs is already five years old, yet it is surprising how little the movie appears to have dated. But then, with nutty US government drug policy remaining the same--or worse--from year to year, decade to decade, this movie will probably seem hilarious eons from now. Often silly and almost always good-natured (despite the dark subject matter), Soling's parodies, musings, imaginings and comparisons are apt, thoughtful, amusing, alternately inspired and clunky, and occasionally gut-busting fun. Brevity is among his virtues, as well, so few scenes last longer than necessary. Toward the end, one does begin to sense that the filmmaker has begun to exhaust his supply of targets and/or ammunition. But all in all it's amusing, and, hey, a little experimenting never hurt anyone.

Reviewer: Isaac Bernhard
Rating (out of 5): **½

It's surely a good sign for American Go enthusiasts that a sports anime about the game of Go, designed essentially as a recruiting tool for young people – a commercial, really – has been distributed in this country. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago. I decided to give Hikaru No Go a look mainly because, as enthusiastic as I am about this particular board game, watching an anime about Go sounded a bit like watching plants grow. Sure, I might be into it, but how could Go, a game which visually consists of black and white dots on a grid, be made interesting to non-players? How could a game which takes quite a bit of study and experience merely to begin to understand its subtleties possibly be given the Rocky Balboa treatment?

Reviewer: Marc Barrite
Rating (out of 5): ***

The Canadian film Things To Do is marketed as reminiscent, if not a culmination, of other well-received indie coming-of-age films such as Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite, but it can actually be thought of as an antidote of sorts to those films. While it does tread similar thematic terrain and contain some of the same essential ingredients - malleable male lead, calculated idiosyncrasies, awkward interactions, and a quirky indie-folk soundtrack - director/co-writer Theodore Bezaire maintains a uniquely casual yet centered approach, resulting in a simple and satisfying film with more heart and honesty than those two more famous indie films.

That isn't to say Things is a masterpiece by any standard. Much like their characters, the actors are clearly in their formative stages, but the performances in Bezaire and co-writer/lead actor Mike Stasko's minimalist script, show great promise. Daniel Wilson is particularly memorable as Mac, the freewheeling, inspirational sidekick to Stasko's Adam, providing warmth and comic relief while managing to avoid overstatement. Indeed, Wilson's character even bears some resemblance to his better-known cousin Owen's in Bottle Rocket, a film more appropriately compared to this one.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½ (nostalgia and noir buffs may want to add a star)

Admiring, as I do, so many of the films of Jules Dassin, I find myself surprised that Brute Force (which I had never seen until the arrival of this new Criterion release) does not rank as highly. Though I can understand its being hailed for style, believability and originality in its time, time is the very thing that has left this film in the dust. Despite good performances and superb black-and-white cinematography, the writing and direction are so doggedly of their time and often overly didactic in terms of calling attention to class/economic differences and the dangers of unbridled power that, finally, it's hard not to snicker now and again. When, toward the end, what looks like the entire prison population is given some bad news, their reaction, I swear, sounds exactly like that of Oprah's audience when it learns something sad. (The prisoners have deeper voices, of course.) Granted, this was 1947, yet the entire penitentiary appears to house but a single black inmate. And he sings. Any hint of homosexual behavior is quite veiled, in the character of the villain, 'natch, well-played by a relatively young Hume Cronyn.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **** 1/2

In our current time of growing threats from fundamentalist religions of every sort, including increasingly rabid Holocaust deniers, a calm, thoughtful yet quite moving documentary such as Hiding and Seeking is of enormous importance. In fact, I haven't seen a more important film in quite some time. Made in 2003, released only briefly the following year, then shown on the PBS series POV in 2005, it is the work of a father/filmmaker Menachem Daum and his partner/friend Oren Rudavsky. Daum--disturbed by the idea of his two adult sons living in Israel, growing ever more circumscribed by their religious faith--organizes a trip to Poland, where he and his family can meet for the first time the Poles who saved the lives of his wife's family during WWII. Out of this grows a movie that witnesses how people come to terms with tolerance, faith, the "other," heroism, duty, and much more.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): **½

Theatrical release: May 11
DVD Release: TBD

Retelling the real story of a landmark British case in which a Punjabi woman kills her husband, burning him alive after ten years of abuse both physical and verbal, Provoked (opening in select theaters today) often feels a bit like an earnest Lifetime movie but the appealing cast and the intrigue of the Indian-British culture clash raise it above that level, at least.

Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai is truly luminous, if a little inert at times, as Kiranjit, the victim and accused, even when her character remains, in the film's first half especially, frustratingly passive. But the meek, reserved nature of her dutiful wife is part of the point, as her culture, as in many, emphasizes the subordinate role of women in marriage and how most societies do little to protect them, even if they - and their children - are physically threatened by the husband. Her story becomes one of gradual awakening and empowerment.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

Like slapstick and belly laughs along with your bloody political assassinations?

Well, Im Sang-Soo's The President's Last Bang, a pitch-black political comedy about the unlikely bumbling murder of South Korean President Park Chung-hee, should suit your particular predilections.

Last Bang is, in turns, a queasy, confusing and riveting thing as it goes about its darkly funny business. It's a lean film, working quickly and cleanly through the narrative. Sang-Soo lays it all out a bit like a chamber piece, with the events mostly playing out at one location over the course of a single night. The first half echoes The Rules of the Game or Gosford Park, sketching the social station of those involved before leading us to the proverbial Main Event - the dinner party where President Chung-hee will be killed by the director of his own Korean CIA.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

David Von Ancken's Seraphim Falls is in many ways a throwback Western, shades of Anthony Mann and John Ford: a vengeance tale, simply told, with beauty and reverence. If it sometimes feels a little too sparse and if the ending's a bit muddled, the crispness of the storytelling throughout holds your attention. In fact, the first twenty minutes or so of what is essentially a chase film - with Liam Neeson, a Confederate named Carver, and a posse tracking Pierce Brosnan's (Bond with a beard here) retired Union Colonel Gideon in the Western wilderness - are enthralling, and nearly dialogue-free as Von Ancken keeps things moving at a near breathless clip. We don't fully come to understand why Carver is so bent on cutting down Gideon until much farther into the film, but there's enough emotional weight to carry the story along. Their pursuit and battle begins in the snowy mountains and carries them through valleys and forests, and, finally to the parched, sizzling-hot desert - beautifully photographed by Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll - as they each encounter people with troubles of their own (a poor, isolated ranching family, a work camp, Mormons, thieves, and, oddest of all, a ghost-like medicine woman played by Anjelica Huston). Both Brosnan and Neeson make for terrific foils, with Brosnan giving his physical all to the more devilish Gideon (get it?) and Neeson ultimately giving the film its empathetic soul. Von Ancken's direction can be a little too heavy-handed here, but the story overall is a rather gripping yarn.

For those who pine, "they don't make 'em like this anymore" when watching a Western from the 1950s, well, here's one film just for you.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***

Kids gone bad and the parents who enable 'em have been movie staples probably since Reefer Madness and certainly since I was a kid gone bad (the Rebel Without a Cause era), so you can be forgiven for imagining that Alpha Dog will not add much to the canon. And at first, so it seems. The assortment on display of Southern California twinkies masquerading as raw sirloin--oh, the posturings, the potty mouths, the "acting" opportunities given this up-to-the-minute ensemble of young Hollywood!--is enough to induce you to grab that remote. I swear I reached for mine a number of times before realizing midway that I was beginning to care about what might happen.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): *****

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, certainly the only MFA thesis film I can name that made the Library of Congress' National Film Registry on the first ballot, really is a national treasure.

Shot in Watts over a year of weekends for less than $10,000, the film has both a timelessness and an appropriate aimlessness to it. This is an everyday world, blue-collar and poor and real, where acquiring a used engine is an all-day proposition (and the moment where the men lose the engine in an accident is the one frustrating moment in the whole film for me). The main character is Stan (Henry Gale Sanders, one of the few professionals in the cast), a sensitive father of two who has become detached from his life, and from his wife, while working too long in a slaughterhouse. He comes home crabby, and you would, too, if you worked on the killing floors, cutting up sheep for a living, being poor and tired and trying to feed your family. The film is filled with indellible images: the boy wearing a hound-dog mask; the little girl (played by Burnett's real-life daughter) who, with her doll, listens and claps to soul music; the windshield-less car; the boys throwing rocks at trains and the battered ruins of abandoned buildings in South Central L.A. (and at each other); the silhouetted dance between Stan and his lonely wife.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Comedy of Power seems to me a departure for Claude Chabrol, and probably a welcome one, so far as he and his audience are concerned. He works this time not from any dark fictional Ruth Rendell-ish source but from a real case of corporate "sleazery" at the top of the French totem pole. (Watch the DVD extras for an interesting look into this subject and how the filmmaker addresses it.) He has also left behind his oft-used small-town bourgeoisie for those in national political, judicial and corporate control. Everything is fictionalized, of course, but the screenplay offers us a thoughtful look at haute bourgeois family life and work environment--in the process giving two of France's finest actors an opportunity to shine. Isabelle Huppert is superb, as usual, as the prosecuting judge (the French system certainly differs from ours) and François Berléand (The Chorus) is funny, nasty and finally sad as her initial prey. The rest of the spot-on cast includes a wonderful Robin Renucci as Huppert's lonely husband and the director's son Thomas (this may be Chabrol's most "family" movie) as the husband’s nephew who moves in with the couple temporarily and becomes a kind of sounding board for Huppert.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Fay Grim is a follow-up to Hal Hartley's 1997 indie hit Henry Fool, but if you haven't seen that film (and I certainly recommend that you do), don't worry. You'll be caught up with who's who rather quickly in this fairly fast-moving (for Hartley), playful and sophisticated espionage comedy, which is uneven but still one of his more enjoyable films in years.

Parker Posey's Fay married the titular philosopher Henry (the underused Thomas Jay Ryan) in the last film, sired a child (now 14), then disappeared. Fay Grim, picking up seven years later, opens with Fay discovering via two CIA agents (Jeff Goldblum, who should be in more Hartley movies; The Wire's Leo Fitzpatrick) that Henry is dead. Or so they tell her. Believing Henry's entire literary work was in fact a secretly encoded history of international atrocities committed by multiple governments, they want Fay to find his notebooks (don't ask why, just go with it); in exchange, she wants her brother, Simon Grim (perfect Hartley abettor James Urbaniak) to be sprung from prison. Of course, that's only the beginning, and while the plotting may seem overly complicated it is likely that way on purpose.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ****

Ireland was in vogue in the early 1990's. The Troubles were continuing on their troubled course, epic films about the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland — In the Name of the Father, Michael Collins, Some Mother's Son — were all the rage, and heretofore flat, Midwestern-sounding Hollywood stars were trying on a wee Irish brogue. Chortles could be heard as Brad Pitt (in The Devil's Own), Jeff Bridges and Tommy Lee Jones (both in the execrable Blown Away) and Julia Roberts (in Mary Reilly) strained their vocal cords and their credibility all to pin a shamrock on their resumes, and there followed a series of glorified Irish Spring ads like the treacly Circle of Friends.

Then the woefully underappreciated Neil Jordan dropped in with the tart little gem The Butcher Boy (1997). I'd like to say that it put the nail in the coffin of those sorts of films, but no one saw the thing. It did mark the end of that era, however, with an off-kilter almost-masterpiece about a boy from a small town in 1960's Ireland who goes from merely troubled to completely unhinged.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

With Family Law, the fourth and finest film I've seen from Argentine writer/director Daniel Burman, this increasingly graceful and family-oriented filmmaker completes his trilogy about coming of age and finding one's place in relation to kin and community. It's a warm film, full of wonderful specifics--funny and real--about the life of 30-something, haute-bourgeois Argentines that should easily translate to a U.S. audience who either understands Spanish or is willing to read subtitles. And, although this film is the last in a kind of trilogy connected by theme and lead actor, it can be viewed separately with no loss of enjoyment or understanding.

Burman hit the international film festival circuit and limited U.S. exposure with his 2000 film Waiting for the Messiah, which garnered some nice reviews but was little seen. In it, lead characters Ariel (played by Daniel Hendler) and Santamaria bounce around frenetically (as does the movie), dealing with love, sex, family, work and religion. Buenos Aires' Jewish community plays a large part here, as do the effects of globalization on an increasingly broken economy. As bad as things seem, however, hope--the unspoken staple of Burman's work to date--never entirely disappears.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Perhaps it's fitting and unsurprising that a small, quiet (Canadian, natch) film about the lingering effects of war, strife and torture was unable to permeate the membrane of spangles and schmaltz that make up the awards frenzy over December releases. But people who stand up and applaud when our presidential hopefuls beat their chest demanding more torture would be well served to acknowledge the longview of becoming indifferent to state-sanctioned violence.

Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me) revisits the themes of dysfunctional introversion as coping strategy with her third film The Secret Life of Words. Sarah Polley plays Hanna, a Yugoslavian factory worker living a monastic lifestyle of repetition and solitude in grimy Belfast. The factory's manager is so bothered by both her foreignness (at one point hastily mentions "my wife is also... an immigrant!") and her unwillingness to socialize that he forces her to take the vacation she's accrued.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

Movie-watchers looking for an old-fashioned but absolutely riveting piece of fictionalized history could do no better than The Tunnel. Yes, it lasts two hours and 47 minutes, but I wager, once you've begun, you will savor every one of those minutes--particularly the final hour which builds an accumulative suspense that is breathtaking. Director Roland Suso Richter (he made a so-so The I Inside here in America after the success of this German film) may be no knock-out stylist, but everything he does is in service to the tale at hand. He draws fine performances from his cast (one of his actors, Sebastian Koch, starred in last year's Best Foreign Film The Lives of Others), and the look of the film is wonderful: in period, while using all of today's movie technology to create that period.