Guru

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

I’ve seen Paris 36 three times, twice on the big screen (it opened the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2009 Rendezvous with French Cinema) and now on DVD.  Those who hate the movie (and there are plenty: A.O. Scott in The New York Times, for one) will think me a masochist.  But no, there is much to enjoy in this piece of old-fashioned French cinema made new again via some smart handiwork: newly-written “period” songs that capture the sound and feel of the 1930s (and performed so well), a story of the death and multiple rebirths of a French music hall that simultaneously encompasses politics, unions, anti-Semitism, French Nazis, the performing arts, a love story and a family drama.  For starters.

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): ****

I'm always of two minds when I see another laugh-a-minute expose of the nuttier side of American Christianity. Sure, religious nuts can be funny (when they aren't being scary), but it's hard to think of an easier target, and in the end many "religious comedies", as you might call them, wind up seeming cheap. This goes both for documentaries (Audience of One is a traditional documentary) as well as fiction films.

But Michael Jacobs' film Audience of One, though it looks like one, is not a cheap invitation to laugh at funny people singing about how much they love Jesus with a disturbingly corporeal ardour. It is actually a fairly serious and thought provoking (as well as funny) film. Richard Gazowsky, pastor of a Pentecostal church in San Francisco, believes he is given a mission from God: to make the greatest Christian blockbuster movie the world has ever seen. Neither he nor anyone in his (sparsely attended) church knows anything about making movies, but he does have the requisite knack for wringing money from his mostly lower income flock.

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

Given The Edge of Love is both a biopic of a famous writer and a film about the horrors of war, it's a wonder that the combo wasn't automatically showered with prizes. But instead it arrives here without much fanfare, after a quiet run in England, and too late for awards season. The Edge of Love tells the story of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (Matthew Rhys). His wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and his childhood sweetheart Vera (Keira Knightley) meet up during the Blitz of 1940 and become best friends. Dylan flirts with Vera, but she falls in love with a soldier, William (Cillian Murphy), who of course is just about to be shipped out to war and of course leaves her pregnant. In-between, Dylan tries to write, reads poetry, acts outrageously, drinks and argues with his employers, while the others smoke and lay about in shirtsleeves and bathrobes. Later, we're privy to a lot of fighting and yelling, and when William returns from the front, some shooting as well.

Director John Maybury (Love Is the Devil, The Jacket) tries hard to film this routine material with some cinematic flourish; he very often creates a kind of odd, out-of-body feel, as in Knightley's nightclub singing sequences, coaxing and cooing and gazing directly at the camera.

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

When Michael Chabon had his first novel –"The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" – published in 1988, it created a literary sensation, became a best-seller and sent the young author onwards toward a major career, which he has sustained to this day. Because of the gay and bisexual references in that novel, the author’s initial fan base was perhaps wider than it might have been otherwise, but the sense of young adults experimenting with “forbidden fruit,” from crime to transgressive sex seemed just that: experimentations that may or may not prove conclusive. The widely-panned-upon-release movie version of the novel turns out to be better than expected, due in some part to a deserved backlash against those negative reviews but just as much to the charismatic performances from two of its three leads, and a nicely understated one from the other. For me, these characters proved more involving on-screen than on-page. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is no gem, but it’s no disaster, either. Basically a coming-of-age story, it traffics in cliché but dresses its characters and situations in enough new clothes and conceits to make them live and shine – at least for the 95-minute running time.

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

Gigantic is one of those movies that checks off a list of Quirky Things: The hero works in a warehouse selling expensive beds. He wants to adopt a Chinese baby and has dreamed of doing so since he was a kid. He meets a girl called "Happy," who says and does weird, spontaneous things, when she comes into the mattress store and falls asleep on the merchandise. Happy's father has back trouble and must ride in cars lying horizontally. His father is 80 years old. At one point, he meets with his father and brothers to eat psychedelic mushrooms and go hunting. A random homeless man continually tries to beat up or shoot the hero. As always in movies like this the hero, Brian Weathersby (Paul Dano, Little Miss Sunshine), is quiet and sullen and sort of depressed. He has at least one friend who dispenses quirky advice. The director photographs things in half-darkness, in widescreen, with little movement and lots of pauses for the quirky dialogue. Everything works out in a happy, quirky kind of way.

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

Israeli director Amos Gitai can be one of the world's most graceful and effective filmmakers, as in his extraordinary war film Kippur (2000), or in certain sections of his Natalie Portman-starrer Free Zone (2005). But he's equally susceptible to ham-fisted episodes, as with the clunky Kedma (2002). Unfortunately, his new film One Day You'll Understand (a.k.a. Plus tard) also earns that dubious distinction.

It's 1987, during the time of the Klaus Barbie trials. Jeanne Moreau -- at 80, she's by far the most striking creature in the film -- stars as Rivka, a grandmother who refuses to talk about her past with her grown son, Victor (Hippolyte Girardot, Flight of the Red Balloon, Jump Tomorrow). Victor is obsessed with the Holocaust and wants to find out what happened to his grandparents. But Rivka deftly evades questions and we get a sense of the pain and denial involved in her long life. Too bad this wasn't a short film; in the first 20 minutes or so, we get all the information we need from Moreau's performance. Oddly, Moreau had the same affect in François Ozon's Time to Leave, an at times insufferable film that was buoyed by Moreau's unbearably beautiful moments as the grandmother of the dying hero. Far from a grandmotherly grand dame of cinema, she's still vital.

Reviewer: Amy Monaghan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"What happened?" It's a question that's haunted fans of the cult classic Grey Gardens ever since David and Albert Maysles' cinema verité portrait of Big Edie and Little Edie debuted in 1975. The HBO original movie Grey Gardens endeavors to show just how this mother-daughter duo ended up living like a cross between the Collyer brothers and Miss Havisham in a derelict mansion in the Hamptons by filling in the Bouvier Beale women's glittering Park Avenue pasts. So we see mother Edie canoodling with a sybaritic music teacher straight out of 1930s screwball comedies like The Awful Truth and My Man Godfrey, as well as what happens after her husband leaves her. Young Edie escorts her little cousin Jacqueline Bouvier to the beach before lighting out for Manhattan, where she aspires to be an actress and falls in love with a married man. Edie never does find an appropriate beau from the exclusive Maidstone Club to marry. Instead she is summoned home to resume the suffocating codependent relationship she tried to flee.

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

Confession: I’ve never read anything by journalist/novelist/ex-movie producer, Dominick Dunne. Yet I imagine somehow that I know who he is. That’s the nature of celebrity; it wraps its cloak of reflective fame around those who possess it, lighting them up even as it obscures the person underneath. Celebrity is what this excellent Australian documentary is all about. In fact, its original title was "Celebrity: Dominick Dunne," though its Americanized one – Dominick Dunne: After the Party – works as well. It was a party, after all, that turned Mr. Dunne’s life around and sent him spinning toward the thing he loved most: being near those who were famous and, eventually, becoming so himself.

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

Former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson previously appeared in two James Toback films, Black and White (1999) and When Will I Be Loved (2004). Apparently the director and the boxer share a strange kind of friendship, and so Toback's new documentary Tyson promises an undiluted look into Tyson's psyche, deeper than anything we've seen since Terry Zwigoff's Crumb. Unfortunately, it appears that Toback is out to protect and defend his friend as much as anything else, and so -- while Tyson is indeed fascinating -- it's also a missed opportunity.

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

Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) has been notorious for so long, mainly because of its extreme unavailability on video, because of its lengthy running time, and having a reputation that seemingly nothing happens in it. But now that the film has been officially released on DVD, via Criterion no less, all those things should fall by the wayside as the film itself can now be seen for what it is: a masterpiece.

Review by Aaron Hillis (originally appeared on GreenCine Daily)

Absurdistan
Directed by Veit Helmer
2008, 90 minutes, In Russian with English subtitles

First Run Features

Heterosexually speaking, one of the greatest manipulative powers women have had over men since perhaps the dawn of time is the ability to withhold sex. From Aristophanes' ancient comedy Lysistrata (about a battle between the sexes that erupts after the women of Greece lock up their chastity belts in protest of the Peloponnesian War) to the Kenyan women's activist groups who even got prostitutes to take part in a sex strike this past April, this practice has long been effective, and deftly illustrates how foolish and base we men can be. While Veit Helmer's bawdy burlesque Absurdistan seems, at first glance, like a fanciful folktale reimagining of Lysistrata, it's actually based upon a real-life Turkish incident that the Tuvalu director had read about in a 2001 newspaper article.

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

Imagine a police-procedural in which the investigator, possessed with an (unknown to her) sixth sense, captures very odd things on a tape recorder, and you’ll have some idea of the unusual French "mystery" Ecoute Le Temps (which means literally, Listen to Time, though the English translation is the more marquee-ready but less meaningful Fissures). While the character mentioned above might sound like Patricia Arquette on TV’s Medium, this is a small-budget French film, after all, so there’s more grit and less gloss to the proceedings. (The cinematography, by Dominique Colin (L'auberge Espagnole, Russian Dolls), is wonderful, however: wide, well-composed vistas that are often as both bleak as they are beautiful.)

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

Animator Emily Hubley, the daughter of renowned animators John and Faith Hubley (A Windy Day, Voyage to Next), is perhaps best known for her work on Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but she's also director of a wealth of fine animated shorts. The Toe Tactic is both her first feature and her first live action film and, as you'd expect and hope, that live action is interspersed with her wonderfully wobbly, colorful cartoons. In the post-screening Q&A, Hubley confessed that her original intent was to make an all-live action film, with one brief animated sequence, but then things took off, evolved... and now, animated dogs control the universe in playfully self-deprecating interludes that do a fine job of carrying the film forward.