Reviews
From our vantage point in 2009, the film feels a period piece, some kind of elegy for those hazy pre-surge summers of 2005 or 2006 when casualties were at their height and the war promised to loom large over upcoming elections.
Resist the urge to check out of Tiny Furniture after the first twenty minutes. The winner of Best Narrative Feature at this year’s SXSW Film Festival (natch), writer/director Lena Dunham’s second film begins with enough self-satisfied tics to make even the hardiest filmgoer break out in indie-smirk hives.
One could have been forgiven for flippantly wondering, when George W. Bush announced in November 2001 that any country harboring terrorists would be held accountable, which British city might be first on the list for U.S. air strikes. Manchester, perhaps? Bradford? Birmingham?
In the opening minutes of 127 Hours, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of the based-on-a-true-story book by Aron Ralston, also known as the guy who cut his own arm off in order to free himself from a boulder, it seems the apparently ADD-afflicted filmmaker has found the perfect set-up for his hectic aesthetic.
No mere documentary, Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s enthralling Ne change rien is a cinematic offering laid at the feet of its bewitching singer-star, Jeanne Balibar.
This exceedingly strange bundle of nested narratives dared to introduce scores of characters and storylines (some rich tributaries, others dead ends), perspectives and locales (Mozambique-for-India, the Salado River) with an almost ceaseless stream of omniscient voiceovers.
Federico Veiroj’s pint-sized second feature, A Useful Life, runs only slightly over an hour, but the gauntlet it tosses at the feet of the cinephiles who are its most likely audience suggests a young filmmaker eager to grapple with the state of film culture.
Opening images of cloud-strewn skies, waves lapping the shoreline, and parched expanses of land coupled with an incantatory, poetic voiceover (written by Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers) set an epic tone from the start.
His form of documentary purism relies on immersion and meticulously edited observation rather than subtitles, narration, interviews, establishing shots, or any of the other tools that most nonfiction filmmakers depend on to construct their stories and propel them forward.
It doesn’t just dabble in a subject matter the filmmaker has hitherto eschewed, but goes whole hog, channeling spirits from the netherworld and envisioning the bright lights of the Great Beyond with all the loud music cues and fuzzy CG of an episode of Medium.
When first announced, Olivier Assayas’s epic nearly six-hour, three-part miniseries/cinema event seemed like it might be almost more than fans of the man’s work could stand.
Nowhere Boy concerns the late adolescent years of John Lennon, his coming to rock and roll, and the formation of his first band, the Quarrymen, but it’s not so much a music film as a behind-the-music film, fashioning a handsome soap opera out of the iconic singer-songwriter’s biographical back catalog
A clunky, rattling toy chest of tired horror tropes, The Hole will nevertheless win over the Gremlins and Matinee mastermind’s devoted fans (I’m looking at you, Jonathan Rosenbaum!), and maybe a few brave tots in the bargain.
As expected, the two best segments are from the filmmakers whose careers are most worth following: Fernando Eimbcke and Carlos Reygadas.