Also in theaters, 5/8.

By David Hudson on 05/08/2009

A better week than most, seems to me. Your choices: "The Window," "Star Trek," "Rudo y Cursi," "Outrage," "Adoration," "Objectified," "Julia" and...

"Little Ashes"

"The tangled three-way friendship of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca - important artistic figures of the 20th century whose paths crossed in Madrid early in their careers - could make for a fascinating movie," offers AO Scott in the New York Times. "Instead, we have 'Little Ashes,' directed by Paul Morrison and written by Philippa Goslett, a painfully sincere study in creative passion, sexual ardor and political zeal that embalms a mad and exuberant historical moment within the talky, balky conventions of period-costumed highbrow soap opera."

"Come for the surrealism, stay for the gibberish," sighs Ray Pride. "Terrible in a dull way that used to be more commonly called 'unreleasable,' 'shelved' or 'deservedly forgotten,' Paul Morrison's 'Little Ashes,' starring 'Twilight' biter Robert Pattinson, doesn't rise to the level of dreadful."

"While Pattinson may be the name that draws the crowd (and his performance is certainly discussion-worthy), the most fluid interpretations here come from Javier Beltrán as Lorca and Marina Gatell as Magdalena, his rejected girlfriend who becomes his closest companion and constant supporter." Sarah Silver in Reverse Shot: "Some of the film's intentionality may be difficult to decipher (is Pattinson's fish-out-of-water act as Dalí indicative of sheer brilliance or mere callowness?), and some choices baffling (the cacophonous recitation of Lorca's poems in Spanish, with simultaneous English translation dubbed over top), but I can attest to having been moved by 'Little Ashes,' perhaps in the quietest moments when it wasn't even trying."

"'I brake for genius,' Morrison seems to want to tell us, and he gives us a cheesy score and lots of laughable quotes about art and life," writes Mimi Luse in the L Magazine.

More from Walter Addiego (San Francisco Chronicle), Melissa Anderson (Voice), Xan Brooks (Guardian), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Betsy Sharkey (Los Angeles Times), Scott Tobias (AV Club), Armond White (New York Press) and Lauren Wissot (Slant).

"Audience of One"

"Even the greatest filmmakers need a high capacity for self-delusion, but it's one thing to dream big and another to assume that God will save you from budget overruns and incompetence-related production delays," writes Ben Kenigsberg for Time Out. "Praying for a miracle is more or less the only strategy of Pastor Richard Gazowsky, a Pentecostal preacher from San Francisco who, with no filmmaking training, sets out to direct a Christian epic with a budget he eventually projects at $200 million - a 65mm, futuristic version of the biblical story of Joseph that he describes as 'Star Wars' meets 'The Ten Commandments.'"

"Part cautionary tale for would-be filmmakers, part case study in spiritual craziness, 'Audience of One' illustrates how smoothly delusions of show business grandeur can dovetail with religious zealotry." Nathan Lee in the NYT: "Movies work in mysterious ways."

"Ridiculous as it is, 'Audience of One' is more chilling than funny," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Last seen, Gazowsky is happily exhorting his followers to keep the faith; he has a plan for 47 feature films, a theme park, eight TV channels, an airline, a new generation of 'organic' computer chips, 27 resorts, trips to outer space, and the colonization of another planet. Call it the future of an illusion.

More from Matt Hunger (L) and Michael Tully (Hammer to Nail, where he also interviews director Mike Jacobs).

"The Garden"

"'The Garden' has all the elements of a John Sayles drama," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT: "hard-working immigrants, self-serving politicians, a greedy land developer and Daryl Hannah. Yet this intricate and compelling documentary about the tug of war over a 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles paints a portrait of American politics not even Mr Sayles could render more saddening."

"Thinly painted as sinister Goliaths, the city and real estate developers are not given much attention compared to the clearly suffering, bulldozed farm workers, cementing 'The Garden' as a one-sided portrait." Adam Keleman in Slant: "But even if everyone's motivations aren't fully fleshed out, the documentary digs deep into the racial and monetary problems of a tumultuous, melting-pot community, shedding light on still-embittered tension that bubble under the surface of LA city and its people."

"The power of Scott Hamilton Kennedy's 2002 documentary 'OT: Our Town' lay in the way Kennedy unobtrusively captured the racial tensions at Compton's Dominguez High School, and in the ways that students and faculty used art to celebrate difference and transcend animosities," writes Ernest Hardy in the Voice. "What makes ['The Garden'] worth seeing is how Kennedy's camera captures a complex assortment of real-life personalities and hidden motivations, which are made all the more staggering for being slowly unpeeled (although the film never drags). 'The Garden' makes it clear that, regardless of the battle's outcome, there is victory in the fact that the farmers fought at all."

"The Limits of Control," round 3.

"The idea of a Jim Jarmusch spy thriller is as puzzling as it is weirdly compelling, and 'The Limits of Control' lives up to both of those qualities - puzzling and compelling - in just about every way imaginable," writes Paul Constant in the Stranger. "It is an undeniable success."

The Boston Phoenix's Peter Keough: "Jarmusch is trying to fulfill cinema's seldom exploited potential for numinously recording a specific reality. (Nobody has filmed desert landscapes quite the way Christopher Doyle does in this movie, not to mention his close-ups of the equally mysterious landscapes of Isaach De Bankolé's face.). More than that, he's trying to grasp this reality's inner meaning."

"Facile allegory, tone-deaf tone poem, and genre deconstruction of a genre that need be deconstructed no more, Jim Jarmusch's new film is going to inspire loads of hyperbole, googly-eyed defenses of his artistic courage on one end and derisive charges of pretension on the other," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling. "But I can't summon up much concern for 'The Limits of Control.' I hate the film, but I hate it for being small in the ideas to which it's true rather than for falsifying big ones."

"When Bankole engages in his routine, when he stares at a single painting on each visit to the museum and the camera pushes in on that painting as the sound design and score swell so as to further focus our vision and convey import not in the work of art but the movement towards it, I found the film as thrilling as the thriller it is masquerading as isn't." David Lowery

"While it's undeniable that Jarmusch has always worn his Burroughsian influences on his black velvet sleeve, his own 'Limits of Control' is less an explicit pastiche of Burroughs's theories than a nod to his unique creative methodology," writes Erik Morse for the San Francisco Bay Guardian; he also interviews Jarmusch.

"I like road movies, minimalism and nice pictures of Spain," writes the Herald's Robert Horton. But 'The Limits of Control'... left me feeling like I was standing on the side of the road, waiting for the bus to come by. Based on his record, I'd still buy a ticket for Jarmusch's next trip."

Half-a-star from Roger Ebert.

Scott Tobias talks with Jarmusch for the AV Club.

This is a Focus Feature, so naturally, FilmInFocus has a lot of related material. Scott Macaulay, for example, talks with Jarmusch about the soundtrack and Nick Dawson "looks back at a number of other notable American productions which used Madrid and the surrounding area as a backdrop."

Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

And...

"An ungainly hybrid of stoner comedy and gangsta drama, 'Next Day Air' is 'Pulp Fiction' by way of 'Half Baked,'" writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "Hip-hop video director Benny Boom can't seem to decide whether he wants to make a straight-up crime movie or a tongue-in-cheek riff on the genre, and he lacks the wherewithal to do both at once." More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Robert Horton (Herald), Nathan Lee (NYT), Ryan Stewart (Slant) and Michaelle Orange (Voice).

"'If you can't join 'em, film 'em' could be the tagline for 'Brothers at War,' yet another Iraq war documentary," writes Laura Kern in the NYT. Vadim Rizov in the Voice: "Certainly, it's a good thing that someone documented a group of decent, righteous soldiers with strong moral convictions doing the best they can, and I can't fault [Jake] Rademacher's sincerity or intentions." Still, Vadim allows himself to object "to the filmmaker's belief that support for our troops and support for their mission are one in the same. Just because Rademacher believes his film to be 'non-partisan' does not make it so."

And again, Vadim Rizov in the Voice, this time on "Powder Blue": "Timothy Linh Bui's second feature is one of those solipsistic, overwrought only-in-LA projects, in which four strangers are alone in the big city, etc."

In the UK

"It isn't easy to translate the defiantly non-chronological writing of Colette to the screen and Stephen Frears, assisted by the screenplay of Christopher Hampton, hasn't done it with complete success," writes Derek Malcolm, reviewing "Chéri" in the Evening Standard. "What he has managed is a sumptuous vision of the Belle Epoque, further decorated by a performance from Michelle Pfeiffer as the courtesan Lea de Lonval. If looks alone could kill, it might be a dead ringer for another Oscar nomination to add to the one she received for the memorable 'Dangerous Liaisons.'"

"Michelle Pfeiffer deserved the finest vehicle for her comeback," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "This is the film-equivalent of a knackered Trabant with four bald tyres and a farting exhaust."

"If 'Dangerous Liaisons' was a chess tournament, 'Chéri' is charades." Ryan Gilbey explains in the New Statesman.

The Telegraph's Tim Robey finds it "not quite toothy enough as social satire, a little too dry to unlock real pain, full of trinket-sized pleasures that never add up to more."

Wally Hammond in Time Out London: "Frears, who also supplies a knowing narration, is content to leave much of the film's metaphor to exquisite architecture and design: notably the exotic, perfumed gardens of Chéri's mother's grand house in Neuilly where Lea repeatedly recalls her halcyon days with the boy, only compounding an impression of the film as a mere picture-book remembrance."

Peter Bradshaw would clearly recommend "Blue Eyelids" instead: "Boy-meets-girl is the oldest story in the cinema, and yet this gem of a film from Mexico shows that it can always be made to live again. Ernesto Contreras's debut feature finds its own kind of heightened, dreamy realism, a kind that skirts the frontier of reverie and hallucination in one direction, and that of gloomy disillusion in another; but it is always rivetingly down to earth on the most down-to-earth of subjects: love, sex, loneliness and the dating game."

In Australia

"Warwick Thornton's debut feature 'Samson and Delilah' opens on a tiny remote community somewhere in Warlpiri country, north-west of Alice Springs," writes Jennifer Mills for newmatilda.com. "It is an odd setting for a classical allusion. But, by the time young Delilah cuts her hair out of respect for a dead relative, about a third of the way into the film, 'Samson and Delilah' has given its title a subtly layered meaning, and her act becomes a heartbreaking moment in which Indigenous mourning tradition resonates with the Bible story. Thornton thereby sets Aboriginal culture in place as one of the world's great traditions, Aboriginal religion on a par with Christianity, and simultaneously speaks to the fact of colonisation: these cultures are already infected with one another. This resonance becomes beautifully ironic when, rather than being his downfall, Delilah becomes Samson's strength."

Jim Schembri talks with Thornton for the Age.

[Photo: "Little Ashes," Regent Releasing, 2008

Tags: Audience of One, Christopher Doyle, Christopher Hampton, Ernesto Contreras, Federico García Lorca, Isaach De Bankolé, Javier Beltrán, Jim Jarmusch, Luis Buñuel, Marina Gatell, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mike Jacobs, Paul Morrison, Philippa Goslett, Robert Pattinson, Salvador Dalí, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, Stephen Frears, Warwick Thornton