Guru

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

Ti West's 2005 horror film The Roost, his first feature, gained him some notoriety as a throwback creature feature. It foreshadowed the path he'd go down as a filmmaker -- a B horror movie with a 70s/80s visual style, a refreshing lack of gloss - but it was uneven, a bit silly, and had one ending too many. His new film The House of the Devil finds a maturing West moving through similar terrain but more assuredly. It's again a return to old school horror but there's nothing campy here; it captures the vibe without winking at the audience. This isn't Scream.

A title card tells us we're in the 80s, with ominous words about the high number of Americans who believed then in abusive Satanic Cults, and the even more ominous words that the following is based – loosely no doubt -- on real events.  Even the opening credits are done in 80s horror movie font and freeze-frame style with a slightly cheesy synth-beat music score. And the film’s storyline is refreshingly simple: a broke co-ed applies for babysitting gig with the wrong family, and… it doesn't go well.

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

The steal of the Best Foreign Language Film category at last year's Academy Awards ceremony, Departures (Okuribito), the Japanese entry directed by Yôjirô Takita (Onmyoji) and written by Kundo Koyama, was a surprise winner, besting critics' darlings Waltz With Bashir (from Israel) and The Class (France), Germany's The Baader Meinhof Complex and Austria's Revanche. This bizarre combination of death, tradition and cello playing did what so many of the winning films in this category have done down the decades: It moved, surprised and enlightened its audience.

But was it the best of these films? Not by a long shot. I'd have ranked them thusly: Baader Meinhof, The Class, Departures, Revanche and Waltz With Bashir*. Having finally seen Departures, I think I understand the dichotomy experienced around the time of the awards -- reading all the negatives from most of the "better" critics, yet constantly hearing such good things about the movie from one after another of what we might call the "average" art-house moviegoer.

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

The Austrian director Ulrich Seidl makes uneasy films. There's a hint of black humor, but it's kept at a great distance, as if only Seidl were truly in on the joke; if his movies were a party, you might laugh along -- even if you didn't understand -- just so you wouldn't feel left out. There's also a mean undercurrent that, if the jokes don't work, can cause the work to feel abhorrent and cruel. His 2001 Dog Days -- released in the United States in 2003 -- divided reviewers right down the middle (this reviewer hated it) but his latest film Import Export (from 2007, but newly available on DVD) adds the welcome element of humanity to stand between the cruelty and humor.

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

The first half of Lioness, co-directors' Meg McLagan's and Daria Sommers' debut, focuses on the arcane circumstances that brought the first unit of female combat fighters (dubbed "Team Lioness") together. Since the Iraq invasion has never been officially declared a war, there are technically no combat missions being fought there. Ergo, female soldiers can be placed on the frontlines of any engagement despite it presently being illegal for them to serve in combat situations. The Marines' missions focus on following up on gathered intelligence routing out insurgents and terrorist cells, which are typically run out of private residences. Because male American soldiers frisking Muslim women in burkas could conceivably lead to a jihad that would consume the entire Arabian desert, female soldiers (none of whom speak Farsi) were dispatched to placate the locals.

But because the Lioness team members all came from the Army and were never trained in the Marines' weaponry, strategy or vernacular there were many occasions when the women were abandoned during shootouts or were nearly left behind in villages without an operational vehicle or map. Watching this documentary one understands why the the Bush administration's 'women in the military' meme was Jessica Lynch and not Team Lioness. Months after returning from their tours, the women still express deep resentment at the unnecessary dangers they faced due to what amounted to a poorly organized propaganda effort.

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

Watching the IRA-mole-gone-wild, based-on-a-true story, period piece 50 Dead Men Walking, one is put in mind of the recent iPad announcement: nice package, you couldn't come up with a different name?

The unfortunately-titled movie is an engrossing, if jumbled autobiopic based on Martin McGartland's memoir of the same name. McGartland - played with star-making verve by Jim Sturgess, last seen in the blackjack drama 21 - was a Belfast-based informant for the British army as a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army for four long years during "The Troubles" (best pronounced with maximum Irish accentage). Ben Kingsley, as always, very ably plays the part of his British handler (though his hairpiece is suspect).

Playing for the sympathy of moviegoers as an informant for the British against the outlaw IRA is predictably difficult, though director Kari Skogland makes a valiant effort to put us in neither camp and instead have us rooting for Team McGartland. Skogland keeps things moving at a good pace and doesn't give viewers a chance to ruminate too much on the unsavory parts of McGartland's rat-dom.

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

It's interesting how well the time travel subgenre goes with romance (the equivalent of a ticking clock and a beating heart?), and equally interesting to note how many of them adopt the same soft, goopy look and tone, re: Somewhere in Time (1980), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and The Lake House (2006).

The Time Traveler's Wife, recently released on DVD, was adapted from Audrey Niffenegger by Bruce Joel Rubin, who is perhaps better known for writing Ghost and Jacob's Ladder (both 1990). Ghost was another supernatural romance, but one that benefited from a fun, comic-relief supporting character (Whoopi Goldberg) as well as some steamy moments like the famous pottery wheel/Righteous Brothers sequence. Jacob's Ladder was a twisty, disconcerting nightmare that refused to stay narratively put.

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

Troubled Water has already won two of Norway's official film awards for 2007 (it was nominated for six), as well as walking away with the Audience Award at the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival -- which I find a little surprising. Audience awards almost always go to feel-good movies (even sometimes to good feel-good movies) but Troubled Water is too complicated a film to fit easily into that category. It deals with victims and perpetrators who are themselves victims, slowly piecing together past and present as it keeps looping back and in on itself -- in order that we might better understand the complexity of the situation and the pain that drives two of the leading characters forward.

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

Georges Méliès (1861-1938) may well have been just another magician, but one day in 1895, he attended a showing of films by the Lumière brothers. A year later, he had built his own movie studio and began shooting his own films. Between 1896 and 1913, he shot over 500 films, ranging from one-minute to "epics" running more than a half hour. His work covers an amazing array of genres. Many of his films are simple magic tricks, incorporating cutting and double-exposures to create fantastic illusions; his timing and knowledge of the camera are still amazing. Some of them get into more complicated stories of fantasy, using dreams and nightmares, and a few strove toward high art. He is often credited with making the first horror films, and his ten-minute sci-fi effort Le Voyage dans la lune (1902), a.k.a. A Trip to the Moon, is currently his best-known film. The shot of the rocketship crashing into the moon's eye is surely one of cinema's greatest indelible images. (Most people will recognize the picture, even if they don't know the film.)

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

Based on David Peace's novel, which is itself [loosely] based on the true story of Brian Clough's quite doomed 44-day stint as manager in 1974 of the then reigning champions of English football Leeds United, The Damned United is both a sport film and a character study and succeeds pretty damned well at both.

Different audiences will have varying levels of appreciation for the film; clearly, football/soccer fans will have higher regard for it though it is not simply a film about sport but a film about male relationships, both friend and professional, and about the damage rendered by the male ego. It is a most lovingly portrayed period piece, capturing the 60s and 70s United Kingdom with bang on accuracy. Damned United screenwriter Peter Morgan (the gifted Oscar winner behind The Queen and Frost/Nixon) also does a smart job of reducing the book's back and forth, almost subconscious (look up other ways of saying this) meandering style into a more cohesive shorthand -- while still maintaining the novel's chronological jumps.  These flashes backward and forward make the narrative more interesting than it might have been had it stayed  on a steady line through Clough's difficult, short period as Leeds manager.

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

Of all the comedians and comedy filmmakers who tried to make the switch to serious stuff, Leo McCarey (1896-1969) was perhaps the most graceful. McCarey started out in the silent era as one of the original creative forces behind Laurel & Hardy. In the sound era, he directed the best Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup (1933), the Charles Laughton comedy classic Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), and an entertaining Harold Lloyd picture, The Milky Way (1936). In 1937, he made the screwball comedy classic The Awful Truth and helped make Cary Grant a star. Incredibly, he won an Oscar for Best Director for that film, but when he accepted the statue, he gratefully thanked the Academy and then added: "You gave it to me for the wrong picture."

He was talking about Make Way for Tomorrow, which was his first real transition to drama. He went on to great success and more Oscars for films like Love Affair (1939), Going My Way (1944), The Bells of St. Mary's (1945) and An Affair to Remember (1957), but Make Way for Tomorrow remained his personal favorite. It has been very nearly a "lost" film for years. Hardly anyone saw it upon its release, and it has never -- to the best of my knowledge -- turned up on VHS or laserdisc or DVD until now. This week the Criterion Collection releases it in a gorgeous DVD package worthy of the film itself.