Guru

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

Whatever you do, don't let Starter for 10 pass you by. Quickly in and out of theaters, this British romantic comedy set in the mid-1980s is a fine example of a small movie that gets almost every aspect right -- story, themes, characters, music, writing, direction and performances -- while rarely pushing too hard or missing a beat.

Directed by Tom Vaughan (whose resume is mostly in television), the film stars James McAvoy (Last King of Scotland; Chronicles of Narnia) alongside relative newcomers Alice Eve (so good in the unfairly neglected Big Nothing), fast-rising Rebecca Hall (daughter of famed UK theatre director Peter Hall), a real standout here, and Dominic Cooper (the hunk of The History Boys). Adapted from his own novel by David Nicholls (whose new film And When Did You Last See Your Father is getting early raves), Starter for Ten effortlessly weaves a coming of age tale in a college-level quiz show setting. University Challenge is the real life quiz that will surely cause more fits of nostalgia in Brits than in Yanks, but themes of honor, politics and - of course - love are certainly universal.

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

Johnny To's Exiled [trailer] is set in Macau on the cusp of that Portuguese territory's Chinese handover in 1998, a perfect backdrop for an homage to throwback actioners, in fact, to Westerns, for that matter, in this story of an unlikely group of friends-cum-enemies pit together in a game of survival. While the transition of Macao (and neighboring Hong Kong) looms throughout, To doesn't push the analogy; the irony of a "peaceful transition" - noted by the relieved, incompetent cop who looks the other way until he retires - marks the end.

The film starts with a fantastic sequence that ends with the most prolonged Mexican stand-off ever (frankly, the whole plot is a mexican stand-off). Two hitmen hired to gun down a comrade Wo (Nick Cheung), a man running out of time for his part on an attempted hit on the boss. The hired killers break from their mob boss's orders - one (Anthony Wong), Infernal Affairs sooner than the other (Francis Ng, both were in To's The Mission, of which this serves as a sort of sequel). The trio - a male version of To's "heroic trio" (to reference an earlier film), band together to do one last score, a gold robbery.

Buoyed by humor in all the right places, the script is dryly funny. As other critics have already mentioned, Exiled serves as a fine introduction to To's work; if it's not his best film, it's certainly one of his most accessible and enjoyable (and, good Lord, the man's more than 45 films!) The plot, while complex, isn't as overly complicated as in To's Election films.

Pacing change-ups that will remind of The Mission, with gun battles and chase scenes alternating with slower, talkier scenes. For the most part, it's an equation that works out, with only a few draggy moments - and the film running its course about fifteen minutes too late.

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

It's commendable that Kevin Smith and his View Askew production group (yes, the ones responsible for the Clerks movies, Chasing Amy and Dogma) helped produce and distribute Small Town Gay Bar, a documentary explores two gay bars in small Mississippi towns. Unless we've grown up in or--less likely--moved to a small town as an adult, we have little knowledge of what it's like to be "other" in a place where almost everybody knows your business. And the movie does give us entry into that somewhat creepy and inauspicious realm. While many of the straight denizens interviewed here are quick to point out their live-and-let-live philosophy, they let us know, just the same, that they don't much care for "that type." But then we learn about one young gay man, who was murdered while still in his late teens, who obviously was not the beneficiary of this "kindly and informed" philosophy.

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

It's often said that we're again living in an era in which our entertainment is politicized, unseen since the muted tones of the seventies. Though the decade that brought us The Candidate, The Parallax View and Nashville is clearly an influence on cynical filmmaking today, I think we should cast our collective eyes to an earlier time, when we mixed our politics with fluffy romantic comedy, when highly-synchronized dancers ironically sang "We're in the Money" in Pig Latin.

Released at the height of the depression, Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933, sets the scene quickly with the aforementioned routine featuring rows of chorus girls sporting plate-sized, gold coin crotch pieces, doing Busby Berkeley (the dance director of the picture) routines, as Ginger Rogers sings "Let's lend it, spend it, send it rolling along," before the revelry is shut down by the Sherriff's Office for unpaid debts. By way of explaining the scene, Ginger exclaims "It's the Depression, dearie!"

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

In terms of providing the world with benign movies--kind, compassionate and benevolent--I would call Canada the champ. From Don McKellar's Last Night (the most benign of all the films about the end of the world) to one of the great television series (Slings & Arrows) from Wilby Wonderful to Falling Angels and so many more, our neighbor to the north insists on showing us that normal life comes with enough major problems that we humans don't really need to make things worse. Forget the serial killers and the ultra-violence: Simply dealing with each other and what life throws us is enough of a challenge. Snow Cake, the near-magical movie from Marc Evans (who, back in 2002 gave us--on a budget of about $1.98--one of the most disturbing films I've ever seen, My Little Eye) and writer Angela Pell, is the latest in a long string of humble Canuck wizardry.

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

Canadian filmmaker Alison Murray's feature debut (she's done terrific work in shorts) Mouth to Mouth, an imperfect but striking effort, is of a wholly different universe and energy. Based on Murray's own experiences as a teenage runaway, the film depicts the troubled relationship between a mother and the teenage daughter she had too young. The girl, Sherry (played with ferocity by Ellen Page, who jarringly reminded me here of an ex-girlfriend, but never mind), runs away to strike out on her own in Europe and hooks up with an charismatic group of partying activists who call themselves SPARK (Street People Armed With Radical Knowledge). They work to get people off of hard drugs, making them part of a family, travel in a sort of "Burning Van" eventually to their own compound at a vineyard, where, well, when you put the words "compound" and "family" together, you can see where this is going, and not some place good.

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): *½; add half a star if you’re a diehard Pacino fan

Shortly before and during the time that William Friedkin was shooting Cruising, the protests from the gay movement here in New York City struck me as untimely. The movie wasn't yet made: Didn't this go against the very idea of freedom of expression? I've now seen the film three times: upon its release, later on videotape and now on DVD in its much-improved, digitally re-mastered version. Protests or no, it stinks.

Seen today, the film appears almost to have been made by a crew of beginners--which is hardly the case, given the resumes of Friedkin (who acted as both director and writer/adaptor of the Gerald Walker novel on which the film is based) and his crew. From the second scene onwards, the heavily expository dialog, coupled with some terrible acting, simply embarrasses. As the film proceeds, it becomes clear that there is little "plot" per se, almost no sense of development, and the dialog remains dead--flat, expositional, and devoid of the quirks of speech that might make it seem real. The acting is mostly on the level of bad "method" (monochromatic, dreary) and this includes, I'm afraid, the lead performance of Al Pacino. When you are given no interesting dialog to work with, acting "real" can bore the pants off the average viewer.

The look of the film is bleak, seedy and mostly devoid of color--except in the apartment of the Pacino character's girlfriend Nancy (played by Karen Allen in what may be the most thankless role of her career), about whom we never learn a thing. Oddly enough, Allen is practically the only female in the film. I don't recall another movie set in a NYC so totally devoid of women. Gays actually do have female friends, but you wouldn’t glean that fact from this movie. It's all guys, all the time, mostly gays and cops, and most of these sick and unhappy. Now, I don't mind watching a movie that's dark and bleak, but I would like to be able to find some sense and meaning to it. In scene after scene, Cruising sports an air of unreality that never lifts. Its victims are characterless, the villain is essentially a cipher with but a single characteristic (the daddy issue), and the "hero"--despite his inordinate amount of screen time--is also very nearly character-free.

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

One of the few consistent DVD series devoted to short films from around the world, Cinema16's DVDs showcase everything from "the fascinating early works of some of the world's greatest directors to award-winning films from its most exciting new filmmakers," but the problem for those of us in the States is that their discs have previously been unavailable in region 1 format. This new two-disc collection focusing on European filmmakers changes that - it's actually region 0, or "all-region" but will play in US machines - and may be their best yet. Roy Andersson's WORLD OF GLORY, a contemporary classic, is certainly one of the most important films to come from Sweden in the past twenty years; yet it's only one of many highlights from this stellar collection by the UK-based Cinema16.

Andrea Arnold, the actress turned startlingly good filmmaker whose feature film Red Road gained her quite a bit of notoriety this past year, directed the short WASP included here, which merely won an Oscar for best short film in 2004. The story's basic: a poor single mother with four young children, wants to have a life, meet a bloke in a bar - her first date in years - while also keeping on eye on her kids (and keeping them hidden from him). Life is bloody hell, basically. But Arnold has such a keen visual eye and the performances are all so heartbreakingly real it scarcely matters. Watching the kids suffering from neglect is a bit hard, but again, Arnold's eye for detail - the insects that grab the kids' attention (and the titular bug making a frightening appearance in particular), their starvation causing them to pick up discarded food. It's stark but unforgettable stuff.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Some period pieces seem to be all about the art direction and costume design, every scene dripping with flourishes that seem to call attention to themselves - a plumed hat, say, or streams of 1947 Hudson Coupes driving by in an establishing shot. In Thieves Like Us, Robert Altman seems to be going for a different kind of verisimilitude, with dirt being more prevalent than heavily manicured and it feels like Altman could have a mere two cars on hand and he'd make it work. More than anything, the single most impressive thing about the movie is how much it feels like the Depression.

The second screen adaptation of the eponymous 1937 Edward Anderson novel (Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night from 1948 is the other, with Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy clearly inspired by it as well), Thieves Like Us is about a doomed couple on the run from the law taking a desperate stab at love. The movie starts with Bowie (Keith Carradine) and Chickamaw (John Schuck, 'Painless Pole' in Altman's M*A*S*H) breaking out of the state penitentiary to join their ringleader T-Dub (Bert Remsen) on an extended crime spree. In between bank jobs, Bowie meets, and sweetly falls for, Keechie - played by 70's Altman muse Shelley Duvall.