Guru

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

Much like the terrific Traffik before it (later turned into Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-winning Traffic), State of Play is the latest miniseries from the UK that will shortly be made into a feature stateside (starring Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck). The miniseries casts a jaundiced eye at politics and journalism, two professions at least as disgraced as the drug trade.

The plot is set up with a lean but mesmerizing ferocity: a young black teenager is chased and shot in cold blood while the researcher - and illicit lover, we find out shortly - of a rising-star Member of Parliament (played by David Morrissey) is found under a train. What follows takes the shape of a newspaper's investigation into the two deaths and all the muckraking that entails. The series rewards close viewing as minor characters amble in and shortly become the focus for the run of show.

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

If you're already a fan of the work of Kurdish Iranian writer/director Bahman Ghobadi (Marooned in Iraq, Turtles Can Fly, A Time for Drunken Horses), you won't need much of a push to place his new film Half Moon in your queue. If Ghobadi is new to you, Half Moon is a good place to begin your appreciation, for it's his most disciplined and productive movie yet. Ghobadi's a filmmaker so marvelously attuned to visuals and music that you'd best prepare to have your eyes and ears quietly ravished.

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ****

Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye's fourth feature Summer Palace feels very much like a French New Wave film. Using China's turbulent political years as a backdrop, the movie focuses on a small group of students - focusing on the country girl Yu Hong - attending Bejing University in the late 1980s, and the different (sometimes even conflicting) emotions they experience as the careless enthusiasm of their youth gives way to life's disenchanting realities. Emotions, it should be noted, are conveyed accurately, and most importantly non-pornographically, in the film's many explicit sexual encounters.

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Starstruck was renowned Australian director Gillian Armstrong's second feature. After making a name for herself with My Brilliant Career (1979), a romantic period drama which garnered a number of awards and critical acclaim, Armstrong apparently wanted to get involved in a completely different project to prove herself to be a versatile filmmaker. And that she did.

Made in 1982 in Sydney, Australia, Starstruck is a campy and energetic teen musical that delightfully captures a time when that country's new wave music scene was erupting. Featuring a wonderfully silly soundtrack with rock and punkish inclinations by pop band The Swingers (supposedly they were selected over INXS and Men at Work who were also interested in writing music for the film), the movie follows Jackie (Jo Kennedy) and her cousin Angus (Ross O'Donovan) as they try to sing and dance their way out of their seemingly mundane lives into a successful music career. Due to certain plots twists, which feel more as extra excuses to break out into frantic dancing than points advancing the story, things don't go exactly as planned for the two cousins, but fear not; in the end valuable lessons are learned and everybody is happy.

Reviewer: Monica Peck
Rating (out of 5): ****

This filial drama from writer/director Philippe Falardeau reveals the bizarre story of Belgian engineer Michel Roy who learns at age forty-one that he was adopted and actually born in a barn in rural Quebec. Played by Oliviér Gourmet (L'Enfant, Les Fils), Roy embarks on a journey to uncover his lost familial roots. Humor and poignancy intermix as Roy begins to learn the truth about his birth through a series of unlikely serendipities. Out of respect for your enjoyment of Falardeau's brilliantly woven divulgences, I dare not reveal anything more of the plot. Suffice it to say, this cinematic puzzle deserves more than one viewing, if only to admire the deft way Falardeau uncovers its many-layered secrets. It is no wonder that Congorama won a Genie for Best Screenplay from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television in 2008. As a doctor remarks in the movie, "It is all so unlikely, it can't be anything but true."

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): **½ (higher for mecha die-hards)

Appleseed: Ex Machina is a follow-up to the popular first new Appleseed movie (there was a halfway decent 1988 cel-animated Appleseed as well), which was based on the characters created by Masamune Shirow in the manga of the same name. If you haven't seen the first one, don't fret - a quick, expository narration covers all the basics at the beginning. For the most part Ex Machina's a slight improvement over the original, which also looked terrific and yet featured even clunkier dialogue and plotting.

Set in 2131 AD, the story centers around a female soldier named Deunan Knute, who survived the Third World War and now lives in the utopian city-nation of Olympus. Deunan is involved romantically with her partner Briareos, a veteran soldier who happens to be more cyborg than human at this point; both serve in E.S.W.A.T., an elite special forces unit working to protect Olympus, which is run by AI and by bioroids, genetically engineered humanoids. The main plot here has the two lover-fighters finding their partnership tested in a new way by the arrival of Tereus, an experimental bioroid. (Olympus, Tereus, Briareos...the whole film is hit or myth.) When random violence by groups of terrorist cyborgs begins to escalate during a global summit, it's up to the E.S.W.A.T. team -- Robo-cops wearing suits that look like Transformers -- to save themselves and, oh yes, the course of mankind.

One of the beauties of DVDs is that you can rent a batch of similarly-themed movies and--over a weekend or a week--expand your knowledge and appreciation of our world due to the opportunity to see these films (along with their "Special Feature" extras) as a group in which one enriches the next and/or harks back to its predecessor. A single day in February saw the release of four such movies (Redacted, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah and Terror's Advocate) preceded one week earlier by Screamers and followed the week after by Goya's Ghosts , a film that surprised me by unexpectedly bringing many of the themes of the former five together under the panoply of history.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

The most amazing thing about The Dragon Painter (1919) isn't so much that it has been rescued, restored and released on DVD, or that it's quite good, but that it ever existed at all. In the early days of the 20th century, many decades before "politically correct" was invented, racial stereotypes were everywhere and went largely unquestioned. Yet the Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa (1889-1973) somehow became a major star of the American screen -- and even a heartthrob -- without changing his name or hiding his cultural background. He was born of high status, the son of a governor, but trouble with his hearing steered him toward the stage. While touring the United States, producer Thomas Ince discovered him and gave him his first movie roles. His breakthrough film was Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915). Of course, he played mainly the "exotic other," either as an alluring love interest or a captivating bad guy, but he enjoyed a long career. He worked all the way through the 1960s and even earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). By the end of the teens, Hayakawa was making as much or more money than many white stars, and he left his studio contract to form an independent company that would make purely "Asian" films. Sadly, most of these films are lost, but The Dragon Painter remains.

Reviewer: James van Maanen

My Kid Could Paint That
Rating (out of 5): ****

Who The #$&% Is Jackson Pollack
Rating (out of 5): ***

Two recent documentaries provide some fascinating glimpses into art, artists, the media, marketing and the documentary process itself, all the while slapping the viewer this way and that, as the stories told (they're both mysteries of a sort) grow stranger, sadder and funnier until they approach the ridiculous and the sublime. Often at the same time.

You've undoubtedly heard about the subjects of these films, for both were covered by the media --mostly, as is typical of our "news," in bits, pieces and sounds bites. The beauty of these documentaries is the depth of exploration they provide. You may come away feeling less certain about "Is it or isn't it?" (in the case of Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollack) or "Did she or didn't she?" (regarding My Kid Could Paint That), but you'll have entered a complicated world in which "truth" is not so easily accessed and may not exist at all. Best of all, even if you don't approach either film with any heavy-duty art credentials (or interest), both encompass so much more (class, wealth, parenting and responsibility, to start a very long list of themes) that they should easily grab and hold you.

Reviewer: Maria Komodore
Rating (out of 5): ****

L' Age D'Or (1930) marks not only Luis Buñuel's feature debut, but also the ill-fated ending of a rather unusual, yet extremely creative, collaboration. Having enjoyed a successful cooperation while making their much talked about short Un Chien Andalou (1928), Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, two of the most well respected surrealist artists of the era, attempted to replicate their experience. Sadly, well before L'Age was completed their friendship was fractured for good.

Supposedly, when the film opened for the first time in Paris it started a riot, which eventually led to it being banned by the French government. Even though L'Age makes little in the way of sense, at least in the linear, plot driven and conventional way that mainstream movies do, one can easily understand why it inspired such strong reactions.

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

It was entirely a coincidence that I watched I Am Legend on the heels of having finally watched 28 Weeks Later only two days earlier - in addition also reading through Brian Vaughan's post-apocalypse "Y: Last Man Standing" graphic novel series in which a virus kills off every male on the planet save one. Still, it was impossible not to think of these - the vampiric infected hordes for the former and the possibilities of being the last man alive in the latter. And, as the only companion for Smith's Dr. Neville is his German Shepherd, also hard not to think in passing of A Boy and His Dog, the Harlan Ellison-penned sci-fi. But of course, what comes to mind most while watching I Am Legend is its more direct predecessors. And before petering out in the final act, this third official adaption of Richard Matheson's 1954 book by the same name (the others being the fairly faithful The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price, and The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston - and no, he doesn't shout "Get your claws off me you damned dirty mutant!") is a better-than-expected reworking of that source material.

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

Like all great love stories, Wristcutters starts out with a suicide. Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous, Saved!) plays Zia, a young man so devastated from a recent break up he wakes up one morning, tidies his apartment, climbs into the tub and slashes his wrists. While drifting into death he fantasizes about his ex-girlfriend living the rest of her life in total devastation. Unfortunately, instead of being left to rest in peace, Zia wakes up in a Purgatory, a colorless wasteland inhabited by the entire population of people who ever committed suicide. Each of them is forced to live out what would have been the term of their natural life in a place described as "just like life, but crappier."

Zia then gets a minimum wage job at a pizzeria (called "Kamikaze Pizza" natch), constantly bickering with his aggressive roommate and spending most of his time staving off boredom too scared to off himself again for fear he'll wind up some place even worse. And in keeping with Croatian writer/director Goran Dukic's dark sense of humor, a disproportionate number of Russians are in residence.

Reviewer: Monica Peck
Rating (out of 5): ***½

In Peter Brosen and Jessica Hope Woodworth's beautifully shot Khadak, Mongolian nomads fall prey to a government relocation program. As part of the package, the nomads are given work in massive coalmines and housing in pink concrete high-rises. Such close parallels to actual current events can hardly be coincidental. Indeed the Chinese government, according to the BBC, is currently relocating more than 60,000 Tibetan nomads as an effort to 'prevent global warming.' Such a transparent ruse to control the mineral-rich as yet unmined lands that have been sustainably used by nomadic cultures for thousands of years, has one thinking of Hitler's Goebbels' famous quote, "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."

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

This two-hander, taking place in an upscale, by-the-hour hotel room, is a thrillingly immediate experience, thanks to the writing, direction and performances of its good looking and very talented cast. It's a wonderful thing to be able to see a relationship develop from pure sex into something more intimate, and this one is handled expertly and in nearly real time (the edit appears to happen during nap-time, between bouts of talk and lovemaking). Already a hit in Hispanic territories, En La Cama, a Chilean/German co-production, garnered a dozen top nominations at various festivals and award ceremonies in the year or so after it was made, and it won ten of these--for acting, writing, directing and best film.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****½

The pre-code era reigned in Hollywood roughly from the end of the silent era to the middle of 1934 when the Hays Code began cracking down on certain aberrant behavior in movies. In 2006, Warner Home Video released the tantalizing Volume One of its Forbidden Hollywood Collection, featuring two different cuts of the ultimate pre-code movie Baby Face (1933). That was a keeper, but pre-code fans know that there are dozens more films out there, and many not yet available on video or DVD. Forbidden Hollywood: Volume 2 has finally surfaced with -- count 'em -- five new films. Each one is more seductive than the last, though I'm afraid none of them quite rank with the astonishing Baby Face. The new set begins elegantly with two Oscar-winning Norma Shearer films, The Divorcee (1930) and A Free Soul (1931). Shearer was a star for a short while, with a strikingly angular, beautiful face (you can almost see the color of her eyes through the black and white film) and an astonishingly natural onscreen skill; her co-stars generally look clumsy in her presence. But her marriage to studio boss Irving Thalberg earned her a kind of scorn, and she didn't seem particularly suited to the limelight. She retired from film at the end of the 1930s and died in 1983.

Reviewer: Greg Birkel
Rating (out of 5): **½

The 4th Dimension started out as a twenty minute Temple University film school project for the two writer/directors, Tom Materra and Dave Mazzoni. Shot on a shoestring budget, the feature film is beautifully photographed, largely in black and white, and set in an indeterminate historical period populated with 19th century costumes and artifacts mixed with anachronistic items like refrigerators and console television sets. Adrift in this black and white world is Jack, played by Louis Morabito, a young man afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, who is seriously distracted by his musings on the nature of time and Einstein's general theory of relativity. At one point, Jack dreams that Einstein concealed a notebook, full of musings on the grand unification theory of physics, in an old clock that he (Jack) has been asked to repair. Since many of Jack's dreams tend to come true, it isn't long before he discovers the hidden notebook, deepening the intrigue.