Film Freak Central

Hot Docs '23: All You See

***½/****
directed by Niki Padidar

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Iran-born, Netherlands-based director Niki Padidar's All You See isolates its three female interview subjects in small, sparsely-dressed rooms with no fourth wall, shooting them head-on in centre-framed compositions that meet at some nexus of Wes Anderson and Errol Morris. (For her part, Padidar has cited "all Charlie Kaufman films" and Lars von Trier's Dogville as key influences on the picture's design.) From inside these cubicles, the interviewees primarily reflect on how people in their adoptive country of Holland respond to them as immigrants. Consider this staging a kind of lo-fi expressionism, then, manifesting their feelings of being under interrogation while also highlighting their exoticism, which is somewhat invisible outside its cultural context. Or is it? It seems naïve to think this movie is about a xenophobia specific to the Netherlands, no matter the notoriety of Dutch racism (e.g., Zwarte Piet) or how superior the enlightened viewer might feel to these ladies' offscreen tormentors. Beyond its formal daring, the uniqueness of All You See is that it delves into a rarely explored aspect of the immigrant experience likely to resonate with anyone whose conspicuous presence disrupts cultural homogeneity.

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott's second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is... And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics--it's all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of "MST3K"--although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto's turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here's the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino's accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There's a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, "I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you'd-a unnerstan!" while Aldo makes the "c'mon" expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the "you disappointed the hell out of me" kiss of death and, again, it's... Well, it's notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Fantasia Fest '20: The Columnist

*/****
starring Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Porro, Rein Hofman
screenplay by Daan Windhorst
directed by Ivo van Aart

by Walter Chaw Pity the hot-button Film of the Moment that is still somehow not about very much at all. Such is the fate of Ivo van Aart's The Columnist, which tackles Twitter and online trolling with style to burn and a game cast with nothing much to do and even less to say. Femke (Katja Herbers) is a widely-read columnist who's made some enemies by suggesting that Zwarte Piet is racist and that women should be treated as human beings. Addicted to social media, she makes the fatal error of reading the comments, is driven mad, sort of (I think), and starts murdering her trolls after Googling them. There's something about how she's blocked until after she kills someone, at which point she's able to pump out another widely-read piece about some meaningless piffle that keeps her employed. Worse, she's now under a deadline (haha, see what I did there?) to complete a book--a setup for either escalation or piquant irony, though in the case of The Columnist, it's setup for tepid social commentary made instantly impotent by the hellscape of our current reality.

Domino (2019)

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil's Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. "All summer long he recorded his father's telephone calls," she writes. "On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father's office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse." Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience--oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself--haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he's directed since 2012's Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner's throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who's blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It's tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that's under 90 minutes long.

Hot Docs '18: The End of Fear

***/****
directed by Barbara Visser

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Barnett Newman's divisive abstract painting "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III" becomes both a forensic site and a compelling structural absence in Dutch conceptual artist Barbara Visser's debut feature The End of Fear. What might have been an annoyingly palatable art doc about Gerard Jan van Bladeren's vandalism of the painting in 1986 (van Bladeren was so outraged by the work's abrasive shock of red, dramatic asymmetry, and obstinate refusal of representationalism that he decided he had to slash it) and subsequent failed restoration becomes something more slippery and interesting care of Visser's puckishness as not only a filmmaker but also a presence on screen, where we see her coolly hiring a hungry grad student to create a close reproduction of her own, apparently in the filmmaker's name. Though the project suffers at times from the preciousness of its noncommittal form--spanning everything from the expected talking heads lecturing about the painting's mixed critical reception and tabloid history to process-based interludes of Visser's hired gun hard at work, to abstract top-down tableaux of unnamed, black-clad gallery workers mapping out the painting's history on the jet-black floor with masking tape and archival photos--for the most part its free-roaming approach to questions of valuation, ownership, and work in contemporary art feels playful in the right way, opening up a number of avenues for discussion out of what feels like genuine curiosity.

November (2017)

***/****
starring Rea Lest, Jörgen Liik, Arvo Kukumägi, Katariina Unt
screenplay by Rainer Sarnet, based on the novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirähk
directed by Rainer Sarnet

by Alice Stoehr A propeller-shaped demon drags a cow into the sky. An elder bargains with the plague, which is incarnate as a large and ornery pig. A lovesick girl changes into a wolf and back again. Such is the occult world of November. Adapted from Andrus Kivirähk's Rehepapp, a blockbuster novel published in 2000, Rainer Sarnet's film takes place a century or two ago, in an Estonian village where the boundary between life and death is porous. A procession of ghosts files through the woods at night. The raucous devil, his voice echoing, arises at a crossroads to barter for blood. Dirt-smudged townsfolk heed their every superstition, even when it means donning trousers on their torsos. The episodic narrative meanders through these folkloric scenarios, expanding its impressions of rustic life across a single late-autumn month. Insofar as the film tells any overarching story, it's that of a love triangle between Liina (Rea Lest), the sometime-werewolf, unwillingly betrothed to a friend of her father; intense local boy Hans (Jörgen Liik), all scruff and tousled hair; and the young baroness Hans moons over as she sleepwalks through a manor house. The three of them have their hearts vexed and hexed over the course of November. Imagery takes precedence over plotting, though, and the latter often gives way to cryptic allegory. The film returns now and again to elemental motifs: barren trees, ripples in a river, a damp and leaf-strewn forest floor. It's an environment where civilization holds little sway.

Dunkirk (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

*½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I'm a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don't like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there's a real heart in there. It's a bad science-fiction movie, but it's a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it's puffed-up full of itself, and it's about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It's going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It's like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Dunkirk (2017)

*½/****
starring Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Tom Hardy
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw The bits of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk that are good are so good. The bits of it that are bad are just awful. I'm a Nolan fan. The only films of his I don't like are his remake of Insomnia and his much-lauded Inception, which is so emptily pretentious that it creates a vortex in the middle of the room and sucks the air right out of it. Though a lot of people accused Interstellar of doing that, there's a real heart in there. It's a bad science-fiction movie, but it's a great movie about fathers and daughters. (Not unlike Contact.) In other words, I have defended Nolan against charges of his being all of empty spectacle. I think his brand of operatic proselytizing works exactly right for the Batman character, who does the same and has the same sense of self-worth and wounded entitlement. I think The Prestige is a nasty, ugly, fantastic piece of genre fiction. Dunkirk is like a cornball version of Memento; that is, a Memento that is neither a noir nor a down film but just as much of an endurance test. Also, it's puffed-up full of itself, and it's about one of the most well-told tales of British pluck in WWII. It's going to win many awards because the people who give awards generally reward movies like this. It's like an adaptation of a Silver Age Amazing War Tales comic book.

Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2015) - VOD

*½/****
starring Megan Maczko, Edward Akrout, Matt Barber, Sadie Frost
screenplay by Mark Rogers
directed by Ate de Jong

by Alice Stoehr "You cannot fight," explains the villain to his rope-bound prisoner. "Your only chance of survival comes from compliance." This lecture is the starting point for Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. [sic], an erotic cat-and-mouse thriller that takes place over a long weekend in a suburban English home. Said villain is Aaron, an intruder played by handsome French actor Edward Akrout. He has a sparse moustache and a head of unkempt hair, locks of which fall dashingly across his forehead. The camera adores him. Megan Maczko, playing Aaron's prisoner Alison, receives far less flattering treatment. She spends much of her screentime tied up and in some degree of undress, her face contorted with faint disgust, eyes averting her captor's gaze. Like Akrout, she has to look hot, but hers must be a hotness coloured by mixed emotions and performed under duress. As her co-star murmurs the lion's share of the dialogue, Maczko needs to indicate reluctant arousal blossoming into full-on emotional liberation. She fails, but so would any actress, because the film's greasy sexual politics set her up to fail. Meanwhile, the third member of the cast--Matt Barber, as Alison's husband Tom--has to squirm in a bathtub and howl as Aaron mutilates Tom. He acquits himself adequately, especially given paltry lines like, "Did you touch my wife?" and, "I can't have anyone else inside you."

Love & Friendship (2016)

***½/****
starring Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Emma Greenweil, Chloë Sevigny
based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen
written & directed by Whit Stillman

by Angelo Muredda When Whit Stillman emerged from his thirteen-year sojourn in the wilderness after The Last Days of Disco, it was with the pastel-washed curio Damsels in Distress, practically a radio transmission from a planet of the auteur's own construction. Where his Metropolitan and Barcelona dropped anchor in immaculately-observed social environs (Manhattan's waning debutante scene and the European refuge of loquacious Americans, respectively), Stillman's modestly-budgeted return to filmmaking holed up in a dreamlike and not especially convincing college setting, where Gatsby-esque self-inventors sought to transform their ugly little world through good soap and new dance crazes. A deeply hermetic work even by Stillman's standards, Damsels in Distress feels in retrospect like a minor but necessary stepping stone back to the better realized but still heightened reality of Love & Friendship, a signature work that is nevertheless Stillman's most accessible to the uninitiated. Despite marking his first adaptation--of Lady Susan, a short, posthumously-published epistolary novel by Jane Austen, whom he has long worshipped--the film is as pure an expression of the Stillman style and worldview as any despite its largely English cast and the sincerity of its period trappings as a 1790s costume comedy about the machinations of the rich, the formerly rich, and the rich-adjacent.

TIFF '15: Full Contact

***/****
starring Grégoire Colin, Lizzie Brocheré, Slimane Dazi
written and directed by David Verbeek

by Walter Chaw Brilliant if often a bit too on-the-nose, Dutch filmmaker David Verbeek's Full Contact takes on the state of modern man by detailing America's drone war. I heard a thing on NPR a while back talking about how the traditional metric of tracking a battle group's efficiency by tallying its loss-to-kill ratio has been blown of late by drone groups that have thousands of kills to zero losses. It's an existentially frightening situation in which Nintendo skills not only predict military success, but also potentially engender the same sort of desensitization regarding the tactile obscenity of murder. The movie's title is a clue to its intentions, then: Verbeek follows drone captain Ivan (Grégoire Colin), sequestered away in a bunker somewhere in Nevada where he pilots drone aircraft, bristling with munitions, into somewhere in the Middle East, the better to assassinate tagged targets. He communicates via live messaging and a headset (the way a kid on an Xbox 360 might, essentially), and one day, though he suspects better, he hits a target that turns out to be a school. Outside, he befriends a stripper, Cindy (Lizzie Brocheré), telling her he's impotent although he's not.

The Vanishing (1988) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

Spoorloos
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
screenplay by Tim Krabbé and George Sluizer, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer

by Bryant Frazer What scares you the most? If you chew on that question for a while, then imagine a narrative that gets you to that terrible place, your story might look a little like the one told by The Vanishing (Spoorloos). Completed in 1988, this downbeat thriller didn't reach the U.S. until a couple of years later, when it coincidentally landed in New York within weeks of The Silence of the Lambs. The Vanishing isn't, strictly speaking, a serial-killer movie like Silence, though it shares that film's deep interest in the psychopathology of its villain. Like a good (and by "good," I mean "lurid") true-crime book, its interest is similarly piqued by the painful, quotidian details of an abhorrent crime.

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.

SDFF '13: Borgman

****/****
starring Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen
written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam

by Walter Chaw Screening at the SDFF and now travelling with the Alamo Fantastic Fest, Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman gets the Yorgos Lanthimos Award for Most Devastating Absurdist Metaphor for Familial Dysfunction. Smart as hell and unapologetically surreal, its central motivating image is a tableaux vivant of Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," tipping off not just the ethos of the film, but also that there may be running threads concerning mothers (Fuseli was Mary Wollstonecraft's lover), monsters (Mary being the mother of Mary "Frankenstein" Shelley), the empowerment of women (the mother again), nightmares, of course, and maybe Romanticism, if only in the picture's awareness and perversion of nature. Demanding a specific kind of active spectatorship, Borgman is a complex film with heat, and somewhere in the middle of it there's a performance within a performance that ends with a declaration of intent that stands as one of the most existentially chilling things in cinema this year.

SDFF '13: Tricked

Steekspel
*/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Its title maybe referring to the audience, Paul Verhoeven's newest is a pain-in-the-ass gimmick piece done by a filmmaker I used to really admire and maybe don't so much anymore. The first third is dedicated to a built-in, manic "making-of" featurette that essays, in deadly, deadening detail, how Verhoeven posted four pages of a script online, then invited anybody with a laptop and a Starbucks to submit the next five pages, and the next, and so on and so forth, thus pushing Verhoeven out of his comfort zone and inspiring him to new heights as a filmmaker. As is always the case with Verhoeven, it's very likely that this whole project is some elaborate satire of exactly how stupid we are. His RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and Showgirls have each enjoyed long, healthy second lives as critical darlings; in his way, he's the Douglas Sirk of the late-'80s/early-'90s: dismissed in the moment, but appreciated through the perspective afforded by time. I'm a fan. Enough so that I want to believe the prototypical mad-director persona Verhoeven inhabits in this thing is a piss on self-important meta stuff like The Five Obstructions. (Honestly, just the jaunty "fuck you" score suggests that Verhoeven is fully aware of the game he's playing here.) As for the short film that occupies the latter 50 minutes or so, it's a tale of corporate intrigue featuring unknown but game actors, playing out a sexual blackmail that feels more the lark for the context provided by the attendant documentary. Indeed, it's impossible to see the two halves as independent entities, however unintentionally, and as such, the product of the experiment lands as Verhoeven's most conventional film...ever. It's an example of the fallibility of giving people what they think they want and indulging what they think they understand. That doesn't make it better, though it does suddenly make it make sense.

Hot Docs 2012: ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (d. Victor Kossakovsky)

by Angelo Muredda “The world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of dry-land spots at exact opposite ends of the earth. The opening epigraph from Lewis Carroll aside, Kossakovsky gravitates to such homespun maxims rather than headier stuff, and the film is all the more dazzling for it – an intoxicating riff on the Looney Tunes bit where Yosemite Sam digs through an outcrop and lands in China. While he’s interested enough in the locals, particularly the source of that comment, two guys who ferry busted cars over their pontoon bridge in Argentina, the director generally turns his Red camera to beautiful images of animal life, fauna, and architecture, weaving strange textures out of his startling juxtapositions between, for instance, a volcanic rock formation in Hawaii and an elephant’s hide in Botswana.

The Devil's Double (2011) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Philip Quast, Raad Rawi
screenplay by Michael Thomas
directed by Lee Tamahori

by Angelo Muredda The Devil's Double might be the first bad movie about which you can non-figuratively say, "That looked like piss." Director Lee Tamahori, who started off decently with 1994's Once Were Warriors but has since become a dependable franchise killer (Along Came A Spider, Die Another Day, xXx: State of the Union) and a Hollywood hack behind the occasional Nicolas Cage abortion (Next), bathes every shot in garish yellow lights that transform white leather couches into urine-stained gilded bars. If you're willing to excuse this aesthetic for the first few seconds of every shot as an uncomfortable and weirdly xenophobic bit of formalism--what better way to depict Iraq than to give it a nice golden shower?--good luck with the rest. When characters reposition themselves in the frame, they often seem to block the light source and thrust their companions into the dark for no good reason. DP Sam McCurdy surely considers this a clever trick, as he executes it over and over again, yet Tamahori's film, a hollow adaptation of Latif Yahia's unconfirmed autobiographical account of serving for many years as Uday Hussein's political decoy, is such a bore that the effect is one of watching someone throw buckets of neon paint on a blank canvas.

Sundance '10: Double Take

***/****
starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perry
written and directed by Johan Grimonprez

by Alex Jackson Johan Gimonprez's Double Take imagines an instance where Alfred Hitchcock is interrupted from filming 1963's The Birds to talk to his "double." This doppelgänger is from 1980--the year, you may remember (or reasonably guess), that Hitchcock died--and not his "double" at all, but rather his wraith, a vision of himself on the eve of his death. Hitchcock asks him who wins the Cold War and the wraith dismisses the question as unimportant. He wants to talk about how television is destroying cinema. The bulk of Double Take is a montage of archival footage--host segments from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and television broadcasts of Hitchcock's films, commercial spots for Folger's Instant Coffee that border on misogynistic, and news coverage of the 1959 Nixon/Khrushchev "kitchen debate," the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate, the space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film calls to mind Jayne Loader and Kevin & Pierce Rafferty's 1982 curiosity The Atomic Cafe, in which the threat of nuclear holocaust is documented entirely through archival footage with no contextualizing narration or interviews. Gimonprez's digs at Richard Nixon (he match-cuts his twitchy eyes with those of a space monkey) and his facile but extremely powerful juxtaposition of The Supremes singing "Baby Love" and "Where Did Our Love Go" with footage of nuclear explosions and the escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, to take the two most obvious examples, would have had more resonance 25 or 30 years ago, when condescension to the late-'50s/early-'60s was more fashionable and we were still under the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation. In 2010, Gimonprez's boogeyman isn't nuclear war, but television. He's suggesting that television makes everything it shows equally significant, until finally none of it matters. The Cold War is as pop as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But once we establish that, the film becomes somewhat self-cannibalizing. By putting criticism of television in the mouth of Hitchcock and the defense of it in the mouth of Nixon, and by holding Kennedy up as a manifestation of its denigrating effects (he seems more like a hologram than like a man), the film itself becomes subject to its own critique. If television has made it so that nothing is important, then that means Double Take itself is not important. I came out of Double Take feeling refreshed, as though I had just woken up from a beautiful dream, but something tells me I might have been even happier seeing three back-to-back episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", complete with vintage commercials.

Sugar (2009) + Tokyo Sonata (2008)

SUGAR
***½/****
starring Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Andre Holland, Ann Whitney
written and directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck

TOKYO SONATA
****/****
starring Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki
screenplay by Max Mannix, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sachiko Tanaka
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw In case you haven't noticed, there's a cinematic trend afoot that looks to the fringes for stories of survival in a world where it's suddenly chic to shop at the thrift store. I credit Harmony Korine and David Gordon Green with first finding the poetry in destitution in this new American cycle, with maybe Gus Van Sant (with his Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho) acting as the accidental primogenitor. If it's not Frozen River's trailer-park heroine and her dalliance with human trafficking, it's Wendy & Lucy's despair from the bottom of the capitalist food chain. In the mainstream, there's Sean Penn's fantastic Into the Wild and the reboot of 3:10 to Yuma, which at its heart is a drama about the toll of being the breadwinner. Even Hancock, a movie that keeps improving in the rearview, can be read with profit as a document of how tough it is for the everyday Joe to eke out a living in a culture designed for the affluent, the physically gifted, the innately well-spoken. Like any social movement in film, however, a lot of the stuff is minimally affecting, message-oriented garbage that seems very pleased with itself as it, like the exec pushing a broken cart through Goodwill, wears its limitations as if dragging a cross uphill. There appears to be a race to the bottom: the first to total, Warholian inertia wins the booby prize. Most of it's destined to be remembered as symptoms of the affliction and not as the illness itself; the runny nose, not the Plague.

Stardust (2007) + Interview (2007)

STARDUST
***½/****
starring Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Robert De Niro
screenplay by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
directed by Matthew Vaughn

INTERVIEW
*/****
starring Sienna Miller, Steve Buscemi
screenplay by David Schecter and Steve Buscemi, based on the film by Theo Van Gogh
directed by Steve Buscemi

by Walter Chaw I do wonder about films that don't seem to be about anything, but I'll say this at the outset: Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, based on a book by Neil Gaiman, isn't about anything at all--and it's wonderful. Far from empty-headed, though, Stardust is a deeply meaningful series of sweet-nothings, wholly apolitical even in a macho supporting character revealed as a cross-dresser and hair stylist; and by its end, it wins not in spite of being so exuberant in its indulgence of flamboyant clichés, but because it is. It's so much better than the trailers and Gaiman's track record as a novelist (his métier is decidedly rooted in the comics) would lead you to believe, while the inevitable comparisons to The Princess Bride are misleading because The Princess Bride is a piece of shit. A beloved piece of shit, but a piece of shit just the same. On the contrary, Stardust is extremely well-made despite an opening half-hour that boasts of a few too many long establishing shots, directed with real snap by Guy Ritchie's former producer Matthew Vaughn (who did the same with Layer Cake) and executed by a stellar cast that includes a literally incandescent Claire Danes as a fallen star named Yvaine and Michelle Pfeiffer as a hideous bitch goddess, which, given that Stardust follows on the heels of Hairspray, appears to be the vehicle of her late-career comeback. More difficult to embrace is Robert De Niro as the film's Dread Pirate Roberts, a fencing mentor who happens, in this incarnation, to be a ballroom-dancing guru as well. The instinct is to recoil, but damned if it isn't the first De Niro performance in his self-parodic period that's both spot-on in its auto-satire and funny to boot.

TIFF '06: Black Book

Zwartboek
**/****
starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, Halina Reijn
screenplay by Gerard Soeteman & Paul Verhoeven
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The word on Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (Zwartboek) around the TIFF was that it's "Showgirls meets Schindler's List," which is a cute bit of shorthand but decidedly misleading, not that I can begin to imagine what that movie would be like. All it really means is that we're never going to let Verhoeven live Showgirls down, so who can blame him for going back to Holland, where he's still an object of veneration? Alas, you can take Verhoeven out of Hollywood but you can't take Hollywood out of Verhoeven; Black Book is not so much a return to form--by which I mean a throwback to his subversive early work--as it is a supplement to his American output, the kind of Oscar-baiting wartime saga you just know he'd been aching to make with studio resources but only had the guts to execute in his native tongue. (In the press notes for the film, Verhoeven confesses that he stuck with genre in the U.S. because it better disguised his loose grasp of the English language.) The admittedly well-paced picture follows one Dutch Jewish woman's transformation from Anne Frank into Mata Hari as Rachel-cum-Ellis (Carice van Houten, for whom big things lie ahead) takes a Gestapo general (Jeroen Krabbé doppelgänger Sebastian Koch) for a lover as well as a job at his office, hoping it will all lead to the release of some fellow resistance fighters. Intended as a corrective of sorts to the implicitly anti-Semitic Soldier of Orange, Black Book is no less a sticky wicket in that it distils espionage tropes from the Nazi atrocities; when Rachel's entire family is gunned down on a barge along with other Jewish fugitives, it's a mere catalyst, lacking much in the way of sincerity or historical resonance. With its increasingly glib machinations (at least one late-film contrivance would embarrass the writers of "Three's Company"), the screenplay by Verhoeven and long-time collaborator Gerard Soeteman could, in fact, have just as easily served as the template for a Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin turkey. Verhoeven the Auteur dutifully mimics Hitchcock here and there (and even Hitchcock heir Brian De Palma in a flagrant Carrie homage), though he's most evident in van Houten's multiple disrobings--which, despite being at odds with Black Book's commercial aspirations, give the film its strongest whiff of artistic integrity by shutting the door to the middlebrow-friendly PG-13 rating. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

Lifespan (1976) [Uncut Special Edition] - DVD

*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C-
starring Klaus Kinski, Hiram Keller, Tina Aumont, Fons Rademakers
screenplay by Judith Rascoe, Alva Ruben, Alexander Whitelaw
directed by Alexander Whitelaw

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Lifespan appears to be comprised of inserts from somebody else's movie. It huffs and puffs in expositional voiceover largely because it hasn't written any self-evident drama--we see loving shots of scenic Amsterdam and a lot of people walking in/out/through buildings, but nothing that might actually clue us into what the hell is going on. You could (as the special features on the film's DVD release do) insist that this is a Last Year at Marienbad-esque ploy, since there are other elements to support that thesis. Alas, Alexander Whitelaw is no Alain Resnais, and his rudimentary exploration of the meaning of eternal life sounds most like a biology student on the make. Aside from a bit of gratuitous skin, there's almost nothing to watch--but all sorts of terrible, pretentious things you never need to hear.

The War Within (2005) + Paradise Now (2005)

THE WAR WITHIN
**/****
starring Ayad Akhtar, Firdous Bamji, Nandana Sen, Sarita Choudhury
screenplay by Ayad Akhtar, Joseph Castelo, Tom Glynn
directed by Joseph Castelo

PARADISE NOW
***/****
starring Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel
screenplay by Hany Abu-Assad, Bero Beyer, Pierre Hodgson
directed by Hany Abu-Assad

by Walter Chaw Two films, one by New Jersey filmmaker Joseph Castelo, the other by Palestinian lenser Hany Abu-Assad, begin to make inroads into what is perhaps the most inscrutable phenomenon of the so-called War on Terror: suicide bombing. They're important films, I think, mostly because suicide bombers, like the Japanese Kamikaze pilots of WWII, make it easier to generalize and dehumanize/demonize the enemy as faceless zealots. Every manned car-bomb, every explosives-strapped martyr, creates ideological schisms on either side--more so and deeper, I'd offer, than conventional missiles or rifle shells do, because here we're striking at the very heart of the way we perceive life and the afterlife: holiness and sin, valour and cowardice. If there's ever to be some sort of olive branch in this millennia-old conflict, it has to start with an agreement not only to recognize the humanity beneath the atrocities committed by both sides in the name of defending home and hearth, but also to admit that centuries-old texts about the supernatural are piss-poor signposts pointing the light of right reason.

Heights (2005); Mysterious Skin (2005); It's All Gone Pete Tong (2005)

HEIGHTS
**½/****
starring Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Jesse Bradford, James Marsden
screenplay by Amy Fox, based on her play
directed by Chris Terrio

MYSTERIOUS SKIN
*½/****
starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Elisabeth Shue, Michelle Trachtenberg
screenplay by Gregg Araki, based on the novel by Scott Heim
directed by Gregg Araki

IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG
**½/****
starring Paul Kaye, Beatriz Batarda, Kate Magowan, Mike Wilmot
written and directed by Michael Dowse

by Walter Chaw Obsessed with doors and passages, façades and captured images, Chris Terrio's Heights takes on the dour, dark, and twisted interpersonal machinations of The Scottish Play its diva Diana (Glenn Close) rehearses for some of the twenty-four hour period covered therein. Heights is a sexual film steeped in betrayals and unmaskings at its root, clothed in symbols for discovery and disguise that are almost literary in their uniform complexity. It's therefore through a cloud of signs that its insular roundelay emerges. Wedding photographer Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), daughter of Diana and fiancée of Jonathan (James Marsden), is fired from her job on the day--on the hour, almost--that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cover a foreign war is offered her by an ex-boyfriend. Jonathan, meanwhile, has an ex-boyfriend of his own to suppress as pretty young actor Alec (Jesse Bradford) catches Diana's eye in the hours before she discovers her husband is honouring their open marriage with her understudy. Questions of female sexual jealousy abound, hand in hand with the ruthless barbs of ambition (the price of success weighed against the cost of failure), tied into a messy bow by big ugly truths and the inescapability of our pasts.

Mindhunters (2005)

*/****
starring LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathryn Morris, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Wayne Kramer and Kevin Brodbin
directed by Renny Harlin

by Walter Chaw Based ever so loosely on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, Renny Harlin's latest disasterpiece finds the Finnish fool at the helm of a slasher-cum-"CSI" episode, oiled-up and ready to apply a dangerous level of nihilism in the pursuit of cheap thrills and bad splatter effects. In Mindhunters, a few of the FBI's finest criminal profilers-in-training congregate for one last test under the Al-Pacino-in-The Recruit tutelage of crackpot Harris (Val Kilmer) at a remote military facility that's home to a phantom cinema where The Third Man plays on an eternal loop.

Alexander (2004)

*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto
screenplay by Oliver Stone and Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis
directed by Oliver Stone

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Oliver Stone's Alexander is packed tight to the girders with catchphrases like "By the sweet breath of Aphrodite" and "By Apollo's eye" and "By Dionysus yours is the very soul of Prometheus!" It's stuffed to the gills with sword-and-sandal histrionics and props that become kitsch artifacts the instant they're rolled out for display in this awards season's gaudiest rummage sale. If it's not going to set anybody's codpiece on fire, Alexander at least lays claim to being one of the funniest movies of the year. It would have worn the title Oliver! more comfortably, opening as it does with Virgil's "fortune favours the bold" and ending, after a ridiculously long time, with the not-stunning revelation that what Stone has done is imagine the travails of a fourth-century B.C. Macedonian king as his very own. Conspiracies abound, popularity in the court of public opinion fades, bottomless campaign budgets are squandered in faraway lands for mysterious personal reasons, Oedipus rears his travel-worn head, and gay subtext begins to feel a little homophobic because it's subtext. Rosario Dawson in all her animalized glory? No problem. Colin Farrell giving Jared Leto a little peck on the cheek? Not in this house, buddy.

Love Me If You Dare (2003) + Valentin (2002)

Jeux d'enfants
ZERO STARS/****
starring Guillaume Canet, Marion Cotillard, Thibault Verhaeghe, Joséphine Lebas-Joly
screenplay by Jacky Cukier & Yann Samuell
directed by Yann Samuell

VALENTIN
**/****
starring Julieta Cardinali, Carmen Maura, Jean Pierre Noher, Mex Urtizberea
written and directed by Alejandro Agresti

by Walter Chaw Former animator Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d'enfants) is painfully, dedicatedly unwatchable. It's vile and perverse in a puerile way that bears no discernable fruit. For a romantic comedy, it's conspicuously lacking in romance and comedy, and for a dark, satirical look at the Hobbesian baseness of human love and nature, it's astonishingly childish. The picture is the equivalent of a little boy eating a worm to impress the little girl he has a crush on: a tireless series of schoolyard transgressions portrayed in the whip-pan jack-in-the-box way of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie that shares with that film a strong thread of misanthropic mischief, but reveals itself the classless poseur in its constant keening for attention. Love Me If You Dare is so awful that its constant "hip" references to George Lucas films not only somehow make Kevin Smith seem current again, but also suggest of all things a rom-com directed by the clown-prince of Skywalker Ranch himself. There's an idea gnawing in my head that the reason this picture was so popular in France has something to do with a failure to translate the satirical dimensions of a film that succeeds so spectacularly in alienating its audience, yet, like Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio (the Italian version of which Jonathan Rosenbaum proclaimed one of the best films of 2002), whatever's happened in transit has handily transformed any rewarding subtext into a rising din.

Rana's Wedding (2003) + Osama (2003)

Al Qods Fee Yom Akhar
***½/****
starring Clara Khoury, Khalifa Natour, Ismael Dabbag, Walid Abed Elsalam
screenplay by Liana Badr, Ihab Lamey
directed by Hany Abu-Assad

OSAMA
*½/****
starring Marina Golbahari, Arif Herati, Zubaida Sahar, Gol Rahman Ghorbandi
written and directed by Siddiq Barmak

by Walter Chaw About thirty minutes into Hany Abu-Assad's Rana's Wedding (Al Qods Fee Yom Akhar), an old Palestinian man sets a small table down outside his building in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, places a typewriter on top of it, and watches as Rana (Clara Khoury) is almost shot by an Israeli patrol when her cell phone is briefly mistaken for a revolver. The moment isn't commented upon, and the next scene finds her wondering, as she's wondered for the first parts of the film, where her true love is on this the day that her father demands that she marry one of the suitors he's approved for her or leave for Egypt to continue her schooling. The deadline sends Rana careening across the country in an increasingly complex quest to assemble the right people together to allow her to marry the man that she loves--the one who "understands me, and puts up with me when I'm angry." The line is funny as the sentiment is familiar--it's a grace note in a picture that somehow cloaks its ferocity in a sheath of gentility. Make no mistake that not commenting on the Israeli/Palestinian situation is not the same as avoiding the Israeli/Palestinian situation; as political films go, Rana's Wedding is high among the films finding release election year 2004 (Osama, The Fog of War, Broken Wings).

Metal and Melancholy (1994) + Crazy (1999)

Metaal en melancholie
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

CRAZY
***½/****
directed by Heddy Honigmann

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Where has Heddy Honigmann been all my life? Hidden amongst the well-intentioned sheep and voyeuristic wolves that usually crowd my stays at the Hot Docs documentary festival is her ferocious intelligence and shattering compassion--which, when combined, results in wrenching, haunting films that stand alone and put most other documentarians to shame. Like no other filmmaker, she shows people caught in the crossfire of forces beyond their control, and like no other filmmaker, she captures the creative ways in which people adapt to the environment created by those forces. Furthermore, there isn't a shred of liberal self-congratulation anywhere to be found--there is no distance from the pain of her subjects, and there is no escaping the surge of confusion at the situations in which they find themselves. Her films are direct, unpretentious, and highly articulate in their evocation of the people and places they describe.

Party Monster (2003)

***/****
starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chloë Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne
screenplay by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato, based on the book Disco Bloodbath by James St. James
directed by Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover By all rights, Party Monster shouldn't work as well as it does. Not only is it flip about matters of grave seriousness (in this case, the murder of a Hispanic drug dealer by Club Kid impresario Michael Alig), but it hasn't got much on its mind beyond the endless debauchery afforded by its subject matter, and consequently gives all other matters the rhinestone-studded shaft. But despite all of this shallowness, the film is surprisingly engrossing; as Alig falls into his downward spiral, it becomes a harrowing reminder that, per the film's much-abused Blake quote, the road of excess can often lead to the path of destruction.

Enigma (2001) [Special Edition] - DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows
screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Michael Apted

by Walter Chaw The easy thing to say is that the Mick Jagger-produced Enigma is enigmatic--it's more difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons why. Stars Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet, and Jeremy Northam are fine, Tom Stoppard's screenplay would on the surface surely seem fine, and Michael Apted's polished, if unremarkable, direction is the very definition of just fine. So the onus must fall on the material adapted, Robert Harris's follow-up to his much-lauded Fatherland, which promised a Ken Follett romantic espionage page-burner while delivering a staid and occasionally incomprehensible period bodice-ripper crushed under the dual gorgons of the sophomore jinx and the Tom Clancy "guess I'm not very good at dialogue" bogey. Enigma's problems begin and end with its inability to overcome the essential faults of its inherited plot, its most interesting aspect--WWII cryptologists at London's Bletchley Park--subsumed by a run-of-the-mill mystery and a never-in-doubt love story. It appears the curse of many historical fictions that attempt to familiarize the "long ago" with a "universal" romantic story arc dooms Enigma's period and historical detail to function as mere decorative flourish.

Tsui Hark's Vampire Hunters (2003)

The Era of Vampires
*/****
starring Chan Kwok Kwan, Ken Chang, Suet Lam, Michael Chow Man-Kin
screenplay by Tsui Hark
directed by Wellson Chin

by Walter Chaw An incomprehensible bit of garbage produced and written by legendary Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark, Vampire Hunters juggles at least three plots and drops each of them repeatedly and egregiously. Its lore is confused and its heroes are unremarkable but for the unusual degree to which they're inept and disinteresting. The promise inherent in a chop-socky wuxia opus concerning a quintet of fearless vampire hunters and a cadre of zombies is almost infinite, making the abject failure of the piece something almost awe-inspiring. Though it's tempting to blame director Wellson Chin's propensity to stage fight scenes in unrelieved murk, the real culprit of the piece may be a bad guy who looks and moves a lot like a mannequin on a string. William Castle, eat your heart out.

Evelyn (2002) [Special Edition] - DVD

*/**** Image C+ Sound B- Extras B+
starring Pierce Brosnan, Julianna Margulies, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea
screenplay by Paul Pender
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw It seems as though "inspired" in the phrase "inspired by a true story" is the operative word as the 2002 Christmas season presents to us a rotten couplet of films "inspired" by true stories that, in all likelihood, were pretty interesting prior to the whitewashed variety of "inspiration" dished out in most high profile biopics. Headliner Antwone Fisher (a rancid piece of garbage I like to refer to as "Good Antwone Fishing" or "Finding Fisher-er") gains esteem just by the association of twinkly-eyed Denzel Washington behind the camera (and stentorian Denzel in front), while small foreign film Evelyn will probably gain esteem by dint of its small and foreign status. (Just like its cute-as-a-button titular waif.) Like so many horrible movies of this mongrel breed, however, both Antwone Fisher and Evelyn are so uncompromising in their saccharine manipulations that nurses should stand at theatre entrances, passing out hypodermics of insulin.

DIFF '02: The Damned

Zatracení
**½/****
starring Jan Plouhar, Jan Révai, Isabela Bencová, Dana Vávrová
written and directed by Dan Svátek

by Walter Chaw The first drug-themed film to be shot in the Kingdom of Thailand, Czech director Dan Svátek's The Damned is a handheld, vérité version of Return to Paradise (or Brokedown Palace, or Midnight Express) as two Czech nationals find themselves adrift in an island nirvana before being spirited away to a third-world prison. A handful of gritty, genuinely affecting Blair Witch moments, aided immeasurably by a gorgeously vigorous performance from Czech star Jan Révai, lend the picture an H-tinted immediacy and, now and again, a taste of the true horror of draconian drug laws to foreign nationals accustomed to broader freedoms--or, at the least, justice that is neither so swift nor so sure. (The sharpest twist of the screw comes as a woman informs a young heterosexual man just imprisoned that his days of vaginal sex are a distant memory.) Never a pretty picture, The Damned heightens the grimness of its setting with its jittery DV medium, achieving at once an intimacy and colour-bleached desolation (note a moonlit-suicide with blood cast jet-black) that transcends its amateurish score and melodramatic instincts. (The worst moment arrives when it's revealed--none-too-subtly--that a prisoner is reading the collected works of Samuel Beckett.) Missteps and amateurishness aside, The Damned is a promising work that bodes well for Svátek as well as for the DV medium, which, with the dual triumphs this year of 24 Hour Party People and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, appears to be coming into its own.

DIFF '02: Springtime in a Small Town

Xiao cheng zhi chun
****/****
starring Wu Jun, Bai Qing Xin, Hu Jingfan, Lu Si Si
screenplay by Ah Cheng
directed by Tian Zhuangzhuang

by Walter Chaw Something like a Renoir film or a Brontë novel, Tian Zhuangzhuang's first feature film in nearly a decade Springtime in a Small Town ("Xiao Cheng Zhi Chun"), a remake of the Fei Mu's 1948 classic, is painterly and patient--a map of the inner rhythms of love and jealousy and sacrifice drawn with a master's steady stroke. The film introduces its three main characters in the same gently swooping style: the sickly scholar in the antebellum ruins of his family's home; the long-suffering wife reduced to duty and malaise; and the handsome doctor debarking at a South China train station. Springtime in a Small Town pulses with sensuality and submerged anxieties--that the scholar's ruined household hangs in the entropic vicissitude of ritual is a matter of fact; that the handsome doctor disturbs that delicate equilibrium is also never in question. What amazes about the picture is the way that silence is allowed to tell the tale and swell the meaning of every sigh and each glancing touch. An extraordinary film of manners and meticulous compositions, Springtime in a Small Town unfolds at the pace of a simmer: inevitable, inexorable, and possessed of that unmistakable air of Prufrock-ian half-life spent measuring out time in meaningless units until mermaids calling each to each lull frustrated lovers to action at last.

TIFF '02: Ken Park

***½/****
starring Tiffany Limos, James Ransone, Stephen Jasso, James Bullard
screenplay by Harmony Korine
directed by Larry Clark & Ed Lachman

by Bill Chambers Making Happiness look like Dumbo, Ken Park does not push the envelope--Ken Park runs the envelope through a paper shredder, douses it in lighter fluid, and sets it aflame. And then urinates on the ashes. The latest from Larry Clark, the film was co-directed by veteran cinematographer and frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator Ed Lachman, and if you're worried that this Zaphod Beeblebrox would result in the muting of Clark's voice, think again. If anything, we sense the pair playing a wicked game of one-upmanship. Just who or what is a Ken Park? He's the Big Chill figure uniting several mixed-up youths, however incidentally. The people in the photograph that Shawn (James Bullard) illuminates for us in opening narration are all acquaintances of "Crap Neck" ("Ken Park spelled backwards"), though they socialize together only rarely on-screen, for too busy is Shawn performing oral sex on a much older woman, Claude (Stephen Jasso) averting his physically abusive father (Wade Andrew Williams), Peaches (Tiffany Limos, far less irritating than she was in Clark's Teenage Caveman) averting her psychologically abusive pop (Julio Oscar Mechoso), and Tate (James Ransome) averting his grandparents, whose crime seems to be their elderliness. Each sequence in Ken Park--a sex-themed anthology, more or less--builds to an orgasm, but the climax becomes less an occasion of joy as the film wears on. Unlike Clark's Kids, Ken Park takes the pleasure out of intercourse without preaching against promiscuity. Rather, it's an anti-family picture that reaches an almost Reefer Madness level of hysteria towards parental figures in its dogged march of dysfunction. (Wait 'til you get a load of the last line of the picture.) Clark's voyeuristic grit and Lachman's candy-coated visual sense are an odd but happy marriage--it's the slickest kiddie-porno the former has made yet, almost functioning as the next step in Britney Spears. While Clark and Lachman will be taking heat for Ken Park's explicitness for years to come, their first priority is to exploit our collective squeamishness. With this one X-worthy, ultimately heartbreaking black comedy, they become Catherine Breillat's American soulmates. Bless ya, Larry. PROGRAM: SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

The Starz Independent FilmCenter Project, Vol. 1

by Walter Chaw

BOB LE FLAMBEUR (1956)
***½/****
starring Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble
screenplay by Jean-Pierre Melville, dialogue by Auguste Le Breton
directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

With every minute of Henri Decaё's cinematography looking like a Eugène Atget photograph, Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur is a visually stunning film from a director who influenced filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who quotes Bob Le Flambeur at least twice in Breathless) and John Woo (whose The Killer takes its basic plot from Melville's Le Samourai). It is film noir of the highest order, reminding in its ensemble intricacy of Kubrick's The Killing (released a year later in 1956) and evoking the kind of chiaroscuro, gin-joint, smoke-drenched milieu where every ashtray has a name. It's a love letter to the grim American gangster drama of the Forties that subverts the genre even as it reinvents it as a lyrical ballad to gamblers, losers, hoods, and wayward dames--a snapshot of the Montmarte district of Paris 47 years before Jean-Pierre Jeunet's reinvention of the same.