Film Freak Central

TIFF '14 Wrap-Up: The Gift of MAGI and some quick takes

by Bill Chambers I try my best to stay away from the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto's state-of-the-art cinematheque, during the Festival, because for a goodly portion of those ten days it becomes Pandaemonium with a red carpet. But I made what I hope is a self-explanatory exception for the Industry conference "Ad Infinitum: Bigger, Faster, Brighter Movies - The Changing Creative Landscape of Digital Entertainment," where Douglas Trumbull--who designed the lightshows for, among others, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner; directed the cultish SF movies Silent Running and Brainstorm; and engineered Back to the Future: The Ride--debuted/previewed his new MAGI process, a digital replacement for his late, lamented Showscan. Trumbull took the podium to introduce a featurette on his work that set the context for UFOTOG, a short subject shot in 4K resolution and 3-D at 120 frames per second (fps). Although the piece dovetails with Trumbull's geeky interest in space invaders (the title is a portmanteau of "UFO" and "photography," just as MAGI is a weird anagram-cum-abbreviation for "moving image"), its raison d'être is to serve as MAGI's proof of concept. Good thing, too: as a narrative it's pretty incoherent.

Fantastic Fest '14: Spring

***½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Vanessa Bednar, Shane Brady
screenplay by Justin Benson
directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead

by Walter Chaw Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Spring is sensitive, smart, romantic, and disturbing in the best ways. Flip to call it Cronenberg's Before Midnight, but how else to describe a warm, resonant relationship drama-cum-travelogue that happens to feature tentacles and extreme body mutations? It's a compliment. Evan (a tremendous Lou Taylor Pucci) loses his mother to a wasting illness in the same week he loses his job, so he packs it up and goes to Italy, where he encounters a beautiful, mysterious woman named Louise (Nadia Hilker) who happens to have an accent he can't place. No one could.

Fantastic Fest '14: The Incident

El Incidente
½*/****
written and directed by Isaac Ezban

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ideas hidden in Isaac Ezban's The Incident, packed in there amongst an impenetrable payload of dreck. It shows some promise only when it suggests William Sleator's House of Stairs, the book it most resembles when it works. Unfortunately, the book it wants to resemble is Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint, which, you know, it just doesn't. It's the tale of two time loops following a mysterious celestial explosion: the first strands a pair of petty robbers and their cop pursuer in an Escher painting, while the second strands a squabbling, awful family on an endless highway TO NOWHERE. Portents and signs everywhere hang low like significantly meaningful storm clouds, leading to a thirty-minute exposition--in what feels like the fourth or fifth hour of a hundred-minute film--that's delivered with the careful precision of a slow adult explaining something s/he doesn't entirely understand to a slow child. Painful? It's at least painful. Ironic, too, that this movie about temporal looping makes you a victim of it.

Fantastic Fest '14: Everly

½*/****
starring Salma Hayek, Jennifer Blanc, Togo Igawa, Gabriella Wright
screenplay by Yale Hannon
directed by Joe Lynch

by Walter Chaw The film opens with a brutal, just-offscreen gang-rape perpetrated on hooker Everly (Salma Hayek) by a gaggle of Yakuza scumbags. Escaping into the bathroom, Everly retrieves a pistola, secreted away The Godfather-like, tries to call her mother and the daughter she's never known on her cell, and then goes all spree-killer on her tormentors. But Everly is neither a rape-revenge flick nor a declaration of feminism, really, what with its constantly declaring every single woman character a "whore" in its first half-hour. No, what Joe Lynch's reductive, big-dumb flick is, is a sub-Robert Rodriguez ripper, marking it as sub-sub-Tarantino. To be fair, it also rips off, shot for shot, moments from Sam Raimi; from Reservoir Dogs in a poor, bleeding-out schlub dubbed "Dead Man" (Akie Kotabe), who fans of "The Simpsons" will recognize as Frank Grimes; and from Luc Besson, in particular (and if you're a carbon copy of Besson, the image fidelity is a field of giant pixels at this point). There's so little imagination in the imitation, in fact, that the director himself has described his picture as "Die Hard with boobs." Classy.

Fantastic Fest '14: Wyrmwood + Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead

WYRMWOOD
**/****
directed by Kiah Roache-Turner

Død Snø 2
***/****
directed by Tommy Wirkola

by Walter Chaw Zombie movies are pretty played-out by now, strung out to the point of zombie romances, but I feel like there's room, yet, for innovation. Alas, neither Kiah Roache-Turner's Wyrmwood nor Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead does much to reinvent the wheel, although both seem to know and appreciate their sources. Start with Wyrmwood's faithfulness to the frenetic vibe of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, stirred in with some of the costuming and road-play of the "Mad Max" series, in its tale of a zombie invasion that leads to the partnering-up of Barry (Jay Gallagher) and Benny (Leon Burchill). When Barry's sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) gets abducted by an evil Save the Green Planet! extra and sent along an endless highway with newly-developed powers, it's up to Barry and Benny to splatter a couple hundred zombies to save her bacon.

Fantastic Fest '14: John Wick

***½/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Derek Kolstad
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw Essentially a remake of Kim Jee-woon's A Bittersweet Life shot through with oodles of late-'80s John Woo gunplay, stuntman-turned-director Chad Stahelski's John Wick is, damnit, really just so much fun. Existing in a fascinating universe that marks it as one of the better comic-book adaptations without origins in an actual comic book, it features Keanu Reeves as the titular angry guy, taking on the Russian mob because they killed his dog. That's it. The way John Wick gets from point A to point B, though, with a reliance on what appear to be practical effects and a strong, smart use of Reeves's sinewy grace and muscularity, is a thing of action-movie beauty. Ultimately, it's a showcase for elaborate stunt-work and fight choreography, and, because I'm starting to think of Stahelski's film like the films directed by Yuen Wo Ping, that's totally all right.

Fantastic Fest '14: It Follows

****/****
starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Zovatto, Jake Weary
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

by Walter Chaw For me, David Robert Mitchell's The Myth of the American Sleepover occupies a space in recent nostalgia films alongside stuff like Adventureland or the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko. It properly identifies a certain period in adolescence as grand drama and surreal dreamscape--when everything takes on magnified import both romantic and Romanticist--and paints that world in rich, velvet strokes. Mitchell's follow-up, It Follows, exists in the same time and place, pools in the same crepuscular half-light of fading youth. It's a horror movie, it's true, and it has a bogey, sure, but what works about the film is that it's actually about a fear of experience as it progresses, inexorable and unstoppable. Its bad guy is time, should you survive--which is really, truly fucking terrifying.

Fantastic Fest '14: Man from Reno

**/****
directed by Dave Boyle

by Walter Chaw Dave Boyle's Man from Reno is agreeably mediocre. It doesn't do anything particularly badly, doesn't do anything particularly wonderfully, overstays its welcome a little, and appears to not know whether to be a Father Dowling mystery or a Patricia Highsmith novel before settling on being a bit of both. It starts with the permanent vacation of popular/reclusive Japanese mystery author Aki (Ayako Fujitani), who travels to visit friends in San Francisco, where she finds herself involved with a handsome stranger (Kazuki Kitamura) and shady dealings. Meanwhile, grizzled small-town sheriff Paul Del Moral (Pepe Serna) investigates an abandoned car and a hit-and-run, only to cross paths with plucky Aki. An unlikely buddy comedy? You bet, though one that only flowers for a moment when Aki interrogates a woman as erstwhile interpreter but actual prime-investigator while poor Sheriff Del Moral stands by, asking questions never properly translated. It's charming. All of Man of Reno is charming. So terribly, terribly charming.

Fantastic Fest '14: The Babadook

***/****
starring Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinney, Daniel Henshall
written and directed by Jennifer Kent

by Walter Chaw Though taut and incredibly well-performed, Jennifer Kent's assured debut The Babadook has a general lack of faith that subtext is most effective when it remains subtext. There's irony there, somewhere, in saying this about a horror movie that's essentially about the concept of a Jungian Shadow. The Babadook concerns a mysterious children's book featuring the titular bogey, who, after knocking to announce itself, bloody well lets itself in, thank you very much. Discovered one night by troubled little Samuel (Noah Wiseman) and read to him by his mom, long-suffering palliative-care nurse Amelia (Essie Davis--stardom awaits), the book foretells the arrival of a Jack White-looking thing (Tim Purcell) that serves as an unfortunately obvious metaphor for repressed grief. It’s a pity, because for all the wonderful moments of the film, it never feels truly menacing--I never believed that it would be a fable that ended in a moral, hard-won, rather than a fairytale with a happily ever after.

Fantastic Fest '14: Darkness by Day

El día trajo la oscuridad
****/****
starring Pablo Caramelo, Marta Lubos, Romina Paula, Mora Recalde
screenplay by Josefina Trotta
directed by Martin De Salvo

by Walter Chaw A girl closes a gate, one of those rural gates that spans an entire driveway entrance, and director Martin de Salvo shoots it with a camera mounted on the end of the gate itself. It's innovative and intimate, and there's something adoring in it, so we adore her. She's Virginia (Mora Recalde), a caretaker of her father, a doctor, at a house in the middle of nowhere. One night, he carries in her cousin, Anabel (Romina Paula), mumbles that she's ill, and takes her up to a bedroom, closing the door. Darkness by Day, de Salvo's second feature, is beautiful, unfolding in long, contemplative wide shots that in their composition and subject remind a great deal of Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive. It resembles that film, too, in the way it moves like a nightmare--the kind where nothing's wrong, except everything feels bad. Virginia begins to sleep a lot. Her cousin wakes up and they spend time together talking, listening to old records, drinking wine. There's a story between them told only through glances that linger maybe a beat too long and a dance that seems fuelled less by wine than by nostalgia. And nobody seems to be answering the telephone at Anabel's family home anymore.

Fantastic Fest '14: Closer to God

**/****
written and directed by Billy Senese

by Walter Chaw What Billy Senese's small, reasonably smart, moderately ambitious Closer to God really has going for it is that it doesn't make many mistakes along the way to becoming a pleasantly-tame Larry Cohen knock-off. The problem is that it muddies its own waters by engaging in the human-cloning debate, only to fall back on the hoary "clones are monsters" trope and concur that science is bad. Its constantly-mentioned Frankenstein's monster allegory is defeated, too, when our good Dr. Victor(-not-Frankenstein) (Jeremy Childs) turns out to have a couple of adorable moppets of his own, thus negating, generally, the read of the Shelley source material that masculine procreation is spawned by "natural" childlessness. What's faithful is the uncompromising nature of the picture's solution; a pity that its hopelessness is more a product of its missed opportunities than of any pathos generated by its execution.

Fantastic Fest '14: Tusk

*/****
starring Michael Parks, Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Genesis Rodriguez
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Walter Chaw Apparently based on an obnoxious shit-shooting session from one of Kevin Smith's outrageously-popular podcasts, Tusk is Smith's The Human Centipede, sort of, in which a crazed mariner (Michael Parks), mourning a long-lost, large-land-mammal buddy, abducts outrageously-popular podcaster Wallace-sounds-like-"walrus" Bryton (Justin Long) and proceeds to surgically turn him into a walrus. Here's the thing: I always seem to like parts of Kevin Smith movies. I think he's a smart guy; I like what he likes. He's wordy and mannered but, shit, so are Whit Stillman and David Mamet. And yet, somewhere along the way, without fail, no matter how smart something of his is in the beginning (Dogma), Smith tosses in a literal shit-monster. He's puerile. He can't help it. Tusk has Michael Parks going for it--the rest of it is shit-monster. If I dislike Smith more than I dislike other people who aren't as clever as he can be, it's because every single one of his films is a missed opportunity.

TIFF '14: 99 Homes

**/****
written and directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Angelo Muredda Where was there to go for Ramin Bahrani after the ghastly critical Americana of At Any Price--complete with race cars, ominous cornfields, and home movies--but a wildly over-cranked story about the housing crisis? Another silly, histrionic look at America Today, 99 Homes continues Bahrani's curious late run as the unaccomplished middlebrow answer to Nicholas Ray. It stays afloat where his last sank, though, largely thanks to some inspired scenery-gorging by the perpetually-vaping Michael Shannon, playing slick Rick Carver, a side-armed real estate broker who makes his bones seizing other Floridians' foreclosed houses and flipping them to the banks that probably shouldn't have given them a loan in the first place. Enter Andrew Garfield as working-class angel and struggling single-dad Dennis, who cedes his keys to the devil in the tan jacket only to go to work for him for a shot at getting his family home back. What are the odds he'll keep his house and, more importantly, his soul?

TIFF '14: Seymour: An Introduction; Love & Mercy; Whiplash

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
***½/****
directed by Ethan Hawke

LOVE & MERCY
**½/****
directed by Bill Pohlad

WHIPLASH
**/****
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Bill Chambers Ethan Hawke's first documentary isn't the affected thing its Googler-confusing, appropriated-from-Salinger title would suggest. (And perhaps we should be grateful he didn't go with Suddenly Seymour, Seymour Butts, or I Know What You Did Last Seymour.) Intimate but not prying, Seymour: An Introduction profiles the homuncular Seymour Bernstein, a former pianist of some renown who withdrew from the concert circuit in his prime to focus on teaching piano, hoping to stave off the neuroses of fame. Hawke decided to make the film after receiving some life-altering advice from Bernstein at a gathering, as if compelled to share his good fortune with the world, and that generosity of spirit courses through a piece that looks for wisdom, not pathology, in its subject's hermetic existence (57 years alone in the same New York apartment) and monk-like devotion to music. A forgotten genius, Bernstein also proves an unsung raconteur in enthralling stories that place him at the centre of a real-life Sunset Boulevard or on the front lines of Korea; he commands the screen in lingering close-ups and holds court with equally-captive audiences of confrères and disciples, despite his professed stage fright. The picture builds to Bernstein's first live performance in decades, a recital Hawke has arranged in a gesture that seems like a betrayal yet has the not-undesirable effect of making Bernstein look oddly heroic. If possible, he's an even more expressive individual when filtered through the keys of a Steinway.

Godzilla (2014) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

click any image to enlarge

***½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston
screenplay by Max Borenstein
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Gareth Edwards's Godzilla, the 32^nd Godzilla film just including the Toho series and the three previous American contributions, manages somehow to walk the line between nostalgia for the guy-in-a-suit heroism of the earlier installments and the demands and expectations of the modern CGI wonderland. It has Japanese actor Ken Watanabe be the mournful, grave centre of the piece, allowed at one point to utter "Gojira" (later, on a radar, we see it spelled out in obeisance to the movie's origins) and given the film's most crowd-pleasing line, right before shit gets real in San Francisco. It cares deeply about the monster's place in Japanese culture as a simultaneous reminder of what happened to the country during the war, its humiliation afterwards, and its ambiguous place in the world as Japan reconstructed its image. What confused me most when I watched the Toho flicks on Saturday afternoons on a 9" b&w television was that Godzilla seemed heroic--every bit as nuanced, as conflicted, as ronin as a Mifune samurai; a hero who would return, like Arthur did for England, when the nation needed him. The Godzilla legend is a fable of reconstruction and self-sufficiency--a Leda and the Swan story, where power is drawn from the very source of victimization. He's a complex national symbol, perhaps the definitive cross-cultural Japanese signifier, and the movies that get that (my favorite is Destroy All Monsters, with its dabbling in female hive minds) are brilliant bits of sociology and history. Edwards's Godzilla gets it.

Death Spa (1989) [Unrated] - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

click any image to enlarge

Witch Bitch
**/**** Image B+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring William Bumiller, Brenda Bakke, Robert Lipton, Merritt Butrick
screenplay by James Bartruff and Mitch Paradise
directed by Michael Fischa

by Bryant Frazer The title sounds awkward in a not-ironic way and the 1987 copyright date suggests a cheap direct-to-video cheesefest. But director Michael Fischa is swinging for the B-movie fences from the very first shot--a Steadicam number that pans across its view of Sunset Boulevard, animated lightning bolts flashing over the Hollywood Hills, before craning down into the parking lot in front of the Starbody Health Spa. Dreamy, Tangerine Dream-esque synths well up on the soundtrack. Upon touchdown, the Steadicam glides forward towards the building as another lightning strike knocks out most of the figures on the whimsically-lettered neon sign up front, so that only eight letters remain lit: DEATH SPA.

TIFF '14: Men, Women & Children

½*/****
directed by Jason Reitman

by Bill Chambers We've entered a golden age of movies that use state-of-the-art technology to rail against the use of state-of-the-art technology. An ensemble piece sardonically narrated in the third-person by Emma Thompson (think Little Children by way of Thompson's own Stranger Than Fiction), Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children paints a glum picture of the Internet's hold over the American middle-class. In no particular order, husband and wife Adam Sandler and Rosemarie DeWitt seek out extramarital affairs online while their insipid son Travis Tope streams BDSM porn and sexts with cheerleader, classmate, and aspiring famous person Olivia Crocicchia. Crocicchia's mother Judy Greer is a former model living vicariously through her daughter's burgeoning career, posting predator-baiting snapshots of her to the tut-tutting of overprotective mom Jennifer Garner, who thinks nothing of printing out daughter Kaitlyn Dever's private messages to read like the evening paper. (She is, in all sincerity, more infuriating than Piper Laurie in Carrie.) Bookish Dever, meanwhile, finds herself the Jane Burnham to a Ricky Fitts played by dreamy Ansel Engort--a former football hero who, to the chagrin of sports-nut father Dean Norris, retreated into the world of online gaming after his mother left home. Also, there's a thread involving anorexia and rapey boys that never doesn't feel grafted onto the narrative out of some insecure impulse to physicalize the abstract threat of cyberspace.

TIFF '14: Phoenix

***/****
directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda A smart, tidy film about dumb people with messy histories, Christian Petzold's Phoenix walks the line between psychological thriller and earnest postwar allegory with grace when a little gangliness might have been nice. Petzold MVP Nina Hoss knocks it dead as Nelly, a Jewish Holocaust survivor betrayed by her wormy husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), left for dead, and now come back to life à la Franju, under a heavily-bandaged face. Instead of wanting revenge, Nelly yearns to recapture herself so that Johnny will recognize her as Nelly, opting to have her features restored to their original appearance as closely as possible. Never one to pay the most attention to detail (which is seemingly a satire of beefy husbands as much as it is of postwar German denial), Johnny welcomes back the reconstructed Nelly not as herself but as a woman who looks a lot like her, and who may just be the key to capturing his dead wife's inheritance, if she can play the part well enough.

TIFF '14: Top Five

**½/****
written and directed by Chris Rock

by Bill Chambers Chris Rock's Top Five seems to begin in medias res and then backtrack, but in retrospect the opening sequence--a nicely-sustained tracking shot of Rosario Dawson and Rock taking an afternoon stroll in New York, bickering about whether Obama has actually paved the way for other minorities to become president--could be a flash-forward to the post-film future of these characters. That's kind of a comforting notion; the problem is I'd rather be watching that light relationship comedy, where they're already together and routinely engaging in these Woody Allen dialectics, than this one, in which Dawson's Chelsea and Rock's Andre do the Forces of Nature/A Guy Thing boogie on the eve of Andre's marriage to one of Bravo's many profligate reality-TV subjects (Gabrielle Union). A comic-turned-megastar who made bank starring in a cop-movie franchise as a machine-gun-toting bear (Rock may have an even lower opinion of the filmgoing public than Mike Judge), Andre is asking to be taken seriously with his newest project, Uprize, about the slave revolt in Haiti. To that end, he relents to a NEW YORK TIMES profile, even though the paper of record has never given him a good review; Chelsea is the writer they send, and she comes with something of a hidden agenda. At the risk of spoiling what that is, by the end of Top Five, one thing is abundantly clear: Chris Rock hates critics.

TIFF '14: My Old Lady

*/****
directed by Israel Horovitz

by Walter Chaw Israel Horovitz's My Old Lady, written by Israel Horovitz based on a play by Israel Horovitz, is adorable. Just adorable. Really. It's like a great, fat, French cat, or that sneezing baby panda movie, except that it stars Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith, and--I've never much liked her, I'm realizing now--Kristin Scott Thomas. Kline is destitute yankee Mathias Gold, who, upon inheriting an apartment in Paris, learns that it comes with a nonagenarian accoutrement, Mathilde Girard (Smith), who seems to have the girl-French version of Mathias's name. Isn't that precious? Because he's spent every last dime to get to Paris to sell this apartment he's not able to sell because there's this just-darling old lady squatting there, My Old Lady begins to take on a minor whiff of Arsenic and Old Lace, which is also awful--er, cuddly. Lest there be any doubt as to how sweet the whole thing is, Mark Orton's saccharine score--the only thing not by Israel Horovitz, it seems--makes sure there's absolutely no room for even a tiny, niggling one.

TIFF '14: Cub

Welp
½*/****
directed by Jonas Govaerts

by Bill Chambers Cub--or Welp, as it is humorously called in the original Dutch--has a killer hook, or at least a viable-enough premise that some considerable buzz has built up around this Midnight Madness entry. A troop of cub scouts goes camping in Belgian woods allegedly occupied by Kai, a boy who becomes a werewolf by night; the two young scout masters, Peter (Stef Aerts) and Chris (Titus De Voogdt), build their own buzz about the cryptozoic creature to have something for the campfires (also because they seem to like antagonizing children), unaware of course that Kai does exist in the form of a lightning-quick feral kid wearing a mask fashioned from tree-bark. Sam (Maurice Luijten) actually stumbles on Kai's treehouse, where the child stows trinkets purloined from campers, The Final Terror-style, but being an apparent charity case gives Sam zero credibility with those he tells--particularly Peter, who takes sadistic glee in isolating Sam from his peers and targeting him for military punishments that Chris, the more empathetic and merciful of the two, is never around to avert. Seriously: even with a wild child who can't figure out how to work a can opener living large in a treehouse worthy of I.M. Pei, Chris's constant absence is the movie's most confounding mystery.

TIFF '14: Clouds of Sils Maria

***½/****
starring starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Lars Eidinger
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda A master class on acting played simultaneously to the orchestra and the cheap seats, Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria is an odd, beguiling thing. Juliette Binoche is Maria, an international star of film and theatre (naturally) on her way to accept an honorary award on behalf of the director and dramaturge who made her career when she was only eighteen in his infamous Maloja Snake, which sounds a lot like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by way of All About Eve. When he dies, Maria finds herself commissioned to star in a remake by a hotshot talent of the German stage, who sees her now as Helena, the older woman in the same-sex romantic drama, giving her role of the young seductress and abandoner Sigrid to rising starlet Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz). If that isn't enough, the text--a younger man's treatise on the loves and rivalries of women, as Maria has come to see it--has seemingly taken on a radioactive agency of its own, creeping into Maria's hip-joined relationship with soulmate, line-runner, and personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart), who's becoming yet another Sigrid at about the same pace Maria is settling into Helena's skin.

TIFF '14: The Look of Silence

Senyap
****/****
directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

by Bill Chambers Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing is devastating because it doesn't offer any moral opposition to the glibly boastful first-hand accounts of Indonesian death squads; and his The Look of Silence is devastating because it does. A B-side to The Act of Killing but no mere Blue in the Face afterthought, The Look of Silence follows Adi, a 44-year-old door-to-door optometrist whose senile father is 103 and whose mother improbably claims to be around the same age. The father has forgotten but the mother has not that Adi was preceded by a brother, Ramli, who was killed during the "communist" purge (the picture reiterates that anyone who didn't immediately fall in line with the military dictatorship was tarred with the same brush, regardless of political or religious affiliation)--though "killed" somehow undersells his execution, a two-day ordeal that culminated in Ramli's castration. Adi watches Oppenheimer's footage of the murderers describing his brother's death in that animated, kids-playing way familiar from The Act of Killing, though these are not the same two "actors" who appeared in that film, underscoring that a desensitization to the atrocities committed has happened on a national, not individual, scale.

TIFF '14: Nightcrawler

**½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton
written and directed by Dan Gilroy

by Angelo Muredda What would we do without Jake Gyllenhaal, who's grounded every self-serious and thinly-sketched high-concept Movie About Something he's appeared in since Rendition at least? The committed star pulls off the same magic trick to even more impressive effect than usual with Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy's directorial debut after toiling away as a screenwriter on less pedigreed fare like Real Steel and Two for the Money as well as big brother Tony's most recent Bourne franchise effort. The Nightcrawler partisans--and they'll be numerous and vocal--will likely downplay such hacky origins along with the filial leg-up that producer Tony no doubt provided. (How many first-timers get to work with DP Robert Elswit?) But why should they when Gilroy's own film is about nothing so much as the corrosive effects crony capitalism wreaks on that heretofore-unsatirized American institution (certainly not covered more intelligently and presciently by a nearly forty-year-old film whose title rhymes with get work) of headline news?

TIFF '14: Maps to the Stars

*½/****
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers There's something vaguely pathetic about Bruce Wagner continuing to write these Los Angeles tapestries that send up the movie business, since his Hollywood career peaked in the early-'90s (and the vision of these satires is ossified thereabouts). And getting David Cronenberg--someone so insularly Canadian, and probably the last filmmaker to pore over the trades--to direct one of them is lunacy, albeit potentially inspired in the way that getting a German to helm Paris, Texas was. Indeed, though, Maps to the Stars is the blind leading the blind, taking place in an obsolete world where Carrie Fisher, playing herself, is some kind of industry gatekeeper and a remake of an old black-and-white melodrama is the hottest project in town. Fresh off the bus from Florida, the mysterious, lightly-disfigured Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) arrives in L.A. with an ally in Fisher, who helps get her a job as the personal assistant to high-maintenance Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an actress haunted by both her own former glory and the superstardom of her late mother (Cronenberg's paper-doll muse Sarah Gadon). Havana has regular, sexually-charged sessions with self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), father of teen sensation Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), a nightmare of Bieberian entitlement who, like Havana, has lately been receiving unwelcome visitations from the dead.

Telluride '14: '71

****/****
starring Jack O'Connell, Paul Anderson, Richard Dormer, Sean Harris
screenplay by Gregory Burke
directed by Yann Demange

by Walter Chaw I'm old and stupid enough to have contextualized the "Troubles," the armed conflict in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants, the IRA and the Brits, into a few U2 songs and that Paul Greengrass movie named after the same incident as...um, that one U2 song. I believed it was a tense period marked by a few unpleasant incidents. Yann Demange's debut feature '71 has shown me exactly how ignorant I've been of recent history, with a film he himself describes as an excoriation of our propensity, across nations and time, for sending our young men off to fight "dirty" wars. It's absolutely harrowing, and it provides no respite to its tension. The best type of history, it's alive and vital, thought-provoking and utterly, dispiritingly familiar. It reminded me a lot of Gallipoli; and as with Gallipoli, I feel like '71 will be the moment a young actor (Jack O'Connell this time) becomes a star. It's brilliantly shot, smart, and brutal. I went in it not knowing a thing about the film or what it portrayed and left a true believer.

TIFF '14: Ned Rifle

***/****
written and directed by Hal Hartley

by Bill Chambers The third, shortest, and presumably final entry in an improbable film series of seesawing returns, Hal Hartley's Ned Rifle is the religious component of a triptych that has thus far loosely tackled Art (Henry Fool) and Politics (Fay Grim). Titular Ned (Liam Aiken) is the offspring of drifter Casanova Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and hapless Fay Grim (Parker Posey), the latter of whom begins this movie in prison as a result of Henry's antics, consigning Ned to the care of a reverend (Martin Donovan) and his family. Wanting to biblically avenge his mother, Ned follows a trail of breadcrumbs back to his deadbeat dad; yes, the film has the same basic quest premise as Fay Grim, though it takes the form of an askew It Happened One Night this time instead of another globetrotting "Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" journey. Ned's interloping travelling companion is Susan (Aubrey Plaza--not a fan, but she curtails her most irritating mannerisms here, and looks dynamite), a grad student with a hidden agenda that somehow entails writing her thesis on the poetry of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) and ghost-authoring Fay's memoirs. ("Susan's brilliant, and she's a good person, but she's totally fucked-up," Simon warns Ned. He could be describing any Hal Hartley protagonist.) A God-fearing Born-again, Ned fends off what he perceives as her advances, but he bristles with jealousy once they track down Henry at a mental hospital and she becomes drawn into his father's orbit, like so many before her.

Telluride '14: Showcase for shorts

Toutes des connes **/**** (France, 6 mins., d. François Jaros) Recently redubbed Life's a Bitch, Toutes des connes is a fitfully-engaging relationship dramedy composed of a few dozen ultra-shorts featuring a guy (scriptor Guillaume Lambert) who breaks up with his girlfriend, goes through stages of grief and acceptance, then gets back together with the girl. It's well-done for what it is but feels like it needed half the time to be what it is. Toutes des connes doesn't do anything surprising or innovative, announcing itself conspicuously as a calling-card film for director Jaros. Yes, I see that you can shoot and edit, though the grieving dude with the shaving-creamed face staring at the mirror thing was funnier in Raising Arizona.

TIFF '14: Waste Land

**/****
written and directed by Pieter Van Hees

by Bill Chambers Ominously chaptered after the weeks in a pregnancy, Waste Land begins with an encouraging but deceptive touch of absurdity, as Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) placidly stands in for the victim at a nauseatingly fresh crime scene while the addled perpetrator tries to reconstruct the murder for a forensics team. Leo's next case, involving the occult-related death of a young Congolese immigrant, coincides with wife Kathleen (the appropriately-named Natali Broods) announcing she's with child--her second, Leo's first--and planning on aborting it due to her husband's grim attachment to his profession. He goads her into keeping it by pledging to quit the force once he's through with this latest investigation, but it proves an unreasonable vortex that soon has him becoming infatuated with the dead man's sister (Babetida Sadjo) and going off the grid, as well as the proverbial deep end.

Telluride '14: Rosewater

*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Haluk Bilginer, Shoreh Aghdashloo
screenplay by Jon Stewart, based on the book Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari
directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart's hyphenate debut Rosewater, based on briefly-imprisoned Iranian-born Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari's memoir Then They Came For Me, is painfully earnest, suffering from the first-timer disease of being both unimaginatively-shot and laboriously About Something. It's a message movie, and there's no crime in that, but it's laid out so carefully that any sense of tension--or drama, really--is sapped out of it, simplifying its message to the point of inconsequence and, eventually, making the picture vulnerable to mockery. Rosewater is one of those movies that makes you cringe because although you believe in its politics, it isn't helping the cause. Consider the moment where one of Bahari's jailers cracks wise about Abu Ghraib because America, see, is just as bad as Iran, maybe in many ways: I was distracted by the moist sound of 1,200 eyes rolling at the same time. It also doesn't help that this issue film casts Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as Iranian-Canadian Bahari. This "best actor for the role" nonsense has to have a limit, lest Daniel Day-Lewis one day play Martin Luther King; this Christmas, Leonardo DiCaprio is Buddha. Chill out, we're post-racial, brah! Rosewater is the kind of shit that gives liberals a bad name, and for as much as I like and often admire "The Daily Show", it's very much the movie the host of "The Daily Show" would make.

Telluride '14: Two Days, One Night

Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one-thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she's too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It's Petula Clark's French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon's "Needles and Pins," "La Nuit N'en Finit Plus." Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she's so natural in this moment--in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It's stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable--a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter ("Thank you, goodbye") is identical each time. It's through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there's ever been.

Telluride '14: Foxcatcher

***½/****
starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
directed by Bennett Miller

by Walter Chaw Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher is timely because of its excoriation of the 1%--and timeless because of the care with which it handles relationships between men, and between men and their mothers. It has faith in its audience in a way that's rare and always has been, leaving wide swaths of exposition buried in glances and gestures, making itself into something that's very much like the amateur wrestling it ably recreates in the film. It's a big movie composed of subtle movements; it's reticent. It's also grounded by unbelievable performances from Mark Ruffalo, an actor I really like who's never been better; and Channing Tatum, who reduces himself to a pure distillation of his masculinity and will probably be underestimated as a result. An early moment with Ruffalo and Tatum--playing Olympic champion wrestlers and brothers Dave and Mark Schultz, respectively--as they train in a dingy little college gym, is grim and wordless, bloody and violent, and capped by Dave cuffing his little brother and asking for a hug as he drops him off. It's brotherhood in its intimate complexity in just a few gestures.