Also in theaters, 6/12.

By David Hudson on 06/12/2009

So far, we've been following "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," "Tetro," "Food, Inc.," "Moon" and "Sex Positive." Also opening this weekend...

"Betty Blue: The Director's Cut"

"Two decades later," begins Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant, "the aesthetic divide between Jean-Jacques Beineix's extroverted-noir debut 'Diva' and his bloated, lusty third film 'Betty Blue' seems much less gaping, particularly for viewers intrepid enough to regard his sophomore effort, the faux-pulp kaleidoscope 'Moon in the Gutter,' as a homely missing link. 'Diva' is genre-obsessed, an unwieldy meditation on dystopian thriller tropes and clichés that distracts us from its overwritten plot with shorn scalps and sexy jump cuts; 'Betty Blue' is character-obsessed, an unwieldy meditation on the self-destructing nature of domestic relationships that distracts us from its lack of amorous insight with nipples, dicks, and the occasional fork stabbing. And while the latter film is also likely to be condemned as the most prodigal of Beineix's progeny due to its lubricious audacity and turgid running time, the three-hour-plus director's cut - which is only now reaching a handful of US theaters - ironically reveals a far less indulgent vision than that of the originally imported 120-minute digest (or, for that matter, of 'Diva')."

"Beineix has always had a penchant for the epic," notes Benjamin Sutton in the L Magazine. "For instance, the first volume of his multi-pronged autobiography clocks in at 835 pages. Appropriately, this extended 3-hour cut of his 1986 Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee 'Betty Blue' feels like a sprawling, riveting and eccentric novel (and is based on Philippe Djian's 1985 book '37°2 le matin'). At its core, as with most of Beineix's films, this is a story about youthful energy overcoming the forces that would cage and contain it, while growing up a little in the process."

"Art movie or sex romp?" asks Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "Please don't make us choose."

"[C]urvy, ripe [Béatrice] Dalle, only 21 at the time and in her first screen role, completely commits to the part, and was dubbed 'the new Bardot,'" notes Melissa Anderson in the Voice. "Yet unlike BB, who stopped making movies when she was 39 (taking up animal rights and immigrant bashing), Dalle, now 44, continues as one of France's most fearless actresses; in the years since Beineix's dormancy began, she's played a cannibal, the Queen of the Northern Hemisphere, and a fetus snatcher."

"Le combat dans l'île"

Alain Cavalier's "Le Combat dans l'Île" is "the latest in what seems to be an endless parade of obscure or half-forgotten French films to find their way to Film Forum," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "If it is not quite a lost masterpiece on the order of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 'Quai des Orfèvres' or Jean-Pierre Melville's 'Army of Shadows,' it is nonetheless intriguing and absorbing -- and also, thanks to Pierre Lhomme's silvery and smoky cinematography and the natural gorgeousness of the cast - beautiful to behold."

"It should go without saying that when Jean-Louis Trintignant props a large steel bazooka between himself and Romy Schneider, there's more than one rocket he's thinking of launching," but we can be glad Keith Uhlich says it anyway, in Time Out New York. "Yet when this image comes early in 'Le combat dans l'île,' it feels surprisingly chaste, flaccid and bloodless, a middlebrow symbol of transgression that fits in with the worst tendencies of this rediscovered film's producer, Louis Malle."

"Like its far better known contemporary 'Jules and Jim,'" writes Andrew Schenker in the L Magazine, "'Le Combat dans l'îIle' revolves around a potentially deadly love triangle with a woman's affection see-sawing between two old friends, and like Truffaut's classic it features the undersung Henri Serre in one of his few significant roles. But there the two 1962 films part company. Eschewing the air of whimsy that leavened the dour fatalism of the more celebrated offering, Cavalier conjures instead a mood of tense inescapability, alternating a political thriller framework with a drama of impressive psychological intimacy."

This "isn't a lost masterpiece - it's too unstable for that - but it's fascinatingly nervy," finds Vadim Rizov in the Voice.

"BLAST!"

"'Blast!' is about a bunch of nerds in Sweden mucking about with an unfathomable contraption attached to a hot air balloon," writes Nathan Lee in the NYT. "These nerds, it should be said, are brilliant astrophysicists, and the thing they're working on - the Balloon-borne, Large Aperture, Sub-millimeter Telescope - has the capacity, they believe, to blast open our understanding of the physical structure of the universe."

"While the magnitude of this enterprise's potential is amplified by computer-generated diagrams, the doc is more captivating in its depiction of the painstaking work that goes into pulling off the NASA-funded experiment, whose success hinges on a multitude of minute details being perfectly executed," writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"The inspiration for this globehopping video documentary, which would be more at home on TLC or PBS than in a downtown specialty theater, is director Paul Devlin's brother Mark, one of a team of scientists," notes Keith Uhlich in Time Out New York.

"[W]hile the portrayal of collaboration is respectable, and the balloon enchanting as it shimmers skyward, jellyfish-like, the doc is too flat for its own good," finds Nicolas Rapold in the Voice.

"Paul Devlin has been involved with two of the better documentaries of the 00s," Noel Murray reminds us at the AV Club: "'Power Trip,' a film he directed, about the politics of making money off electricity in a post-communist Georgia; and 'Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme,' a film he produced and edited, about the importance of improvisation in hip-hop." He gives this one a "B."

Online listening tip. The Devlins are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

"Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love"

"Most Westerners know Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour as an occasional collaborator of Peter Gabriel," figures David Fear in Time Out New York, adding: "(He's the one keening the coda of 'In Your Eyes.') Back home, N'Dour's fame is on par with that of Bono or Bowie; as the continent's first recording artist to go platinum, he's a beacon of populist Pan-African pride."

"Perhaps because the music is so good, with its purity of tone and dazzling rhythmic precision, the flaws of the surrounding movie become all the more obvious," writes Nathan Lee in the NYT. "The director, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, is in thrall to her subject, and dewy-eyed accounts of pop stars, even those with as compelling a biography as Mr N'Dour, tend to wear out their welcome."

"[S]he's mostly capturing N'Dour on stage during the tour for his album Egypt, an ill-received collection of Arab-tinged songs with pious lyrics renounced as Salman Rushdie-grade blasphemy across the African-Islamic diaspora," notes Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant.

"For all the singer's sincere intentions to build secular-religious bridges, a straight-up concert film might have been a better approach, especially given viewer fatigue with those musicians and their causes," writes Nicolas Rapold in the Voice.

"Imagine That"

"It's possible to imagine a sardonic filmmaker like Lars von Trier doing justice to the premise of 'Imagine That,' in which a character-deficient businessman tries to exploit his daughter's relationship with her imaginary friends for his own gain," writes Ryan Stewart in Slant. "Alas, it's wasted as the basis of this latest vehicle for Eddie Murphy, who phones in another typically disinterested, dispiriting performance - this time as Evan, a self-involved investment advisor who only stops neglecting his precocious toddler, Olivia (Yara Shahidi), when her make-believe playmates (a trio of fairy-tale princesses) begin to offer him investment advice, with Olivia as their intermediary."

"Are there no undivorced dads in the movies any more?" wonders the Boston Phoenix's Peter Keough. "And do they all end up going to some imaginary realm to find with their inner child and so be able to reconnect with their children? My theory: these movies are written, produced and directed by divorced Hollywood dads who are overworked and are trying to find their inner child if not to reconnect with their inner child than at least to dredge up some material the kids in the audience (or their parents might) like and thus earn enough to make child support payments."

More from Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Gary Goldstein (Los Angeles Times), Robert Horton (Herald), Vadim Rizov (Voice) and Scott Tobias (AV Club).

Kyle Buchanan talks with director Karey Kirkpatrick for Movieline.

And...

"This week, [Bai Ling] can be seen in director Anna Chi's new dramedy 'Dim Sum Funeral,' about estranged Chinese-American siblings who reunite after the death of their overbearing but misunderstood mother," writes Aaron Hillis, introducing his interview with the actress here at IFC. "Bai plays Deedee, a martial arts coordinator and lesbian partner to Meimei (Steph Song), one of the aforementioned sisters and a Hong Kong B-movie star. I caught up with Bai Ling before she went into the studio - where she's recording her first album (including a song called 'Cluck Yourself,' about her unfair portrayal in the media) - to discuss her Naked Seduction blog, the big difference between her and Meryl Streep, why she's a genius and what one of you lucky readers can possibly do for her." Related: For Justin Chang, writing in Variety, "this soapy ethnic sitcom is pure tripe - as ungainly as chicken's feet, if nowhere near as satisfying." Yikes.

"Grown men behaving like emotional infants are seldom fun to be around, a truism that 'The Last International Playboy' does nothing to disprove," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT.

In Japan

"Mental illness, as Kazuhiro Soda notes in his documentary 'Seishin' ('Mental'), is one of the big taboos of Japanese society," writes Mark Schilling in the Japan Times. "Soda, a New York-based documentary filmmaker who has screened 'Seishin' at film festivals in Busan, Berlin and elsewhere, picking up several prizes along the way, opens a rare window into[the] lives [of the mentally ill], but less as an impassioned advocate than as a fly-on-the-wall observer."

In the UK

"By now, you'll know that Ken Loach's new film stars Eric Cantona as the imaginary mentor of a Manchester postman who suffers panic attacks and can't cope with his two mouthy stepsons," writes Dave Calhoun in Time Out London. "It's a playful but never gimmicky set-up that turns hero worship on its head, as the cool-headed Cantona appears in the life of scruffy Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) to tell him in that familiar sagely mumble to pull himself together and reconnect with his pals. Oh, and Cantona takes him for a jog, shares Bishop's spliffs and shows off his own, limited, trumpeting skills." For Ryan Gilbey, writing in the New Statesman, "The problem is that this branching out into the inspirational sits awkwardly with the grittiness still insisted on by Loach. 'Looking for Eric' is not so much a game of two halves as a case of entirely different sports - bare-knuckle boxing, say, and lawn bowls - forced on to the same bill." More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Mike McCahill (Telegraph), Andrew O'Hagan (Evening Standard) and Anthony Quinn (Independent). Earlier: Reviews from Cannes; and "Eric" is Cineuropa's new "Film Focus."

Thomas Clay's "Soi Cowboy" is "a mysterious, hallucinatory and weirdly enthralling metaphysical essay," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It is defiantly unBritish and unparochial, and produced entirely outside the media radar-sweep of the British industry and its public funding bodies. With boldness and entrepreneurial flair, Clay made this in Thailand and, in doing so, fascinatingly absorbed the influence of Thai filmmakers such as Joe Weerasethakul and Pen-ek Ratanaruang."

"After 15 years expertly playing the Hollywood game, the Hong Kong director John Woo returns to his roots, and to form," announces Wendy Ide in the London Times. "And what a relief it clearly is for the world's slickest action director to spill copious amounts of blood and explosives back on native soil." But for the Telegraph's Tim Robey, "'Red Cliff' may be better than several of his American blockbusters, but it falls some way below the absurdly entertaining 'Face/Off' (1997), and the Woo picture it most resembles, oddly, is his World War II Nicolas Cage action movie 'Windtalkers' (2002)." More from Peter Bradshaw (Guardian) and Tom Huddleston (Time Out, where he also interviews Woo).

"Environmental campaigners have already warned us about the oil running out," notes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Now Rupert Murray's ['The End of the Line'] has something just as worrying to add: halfway through this century, we may have effectively exhausted our fish stocks." The film "should do for our oceans what 'An Inconvenient Truth' did for climate change," hopes Wendy Ide in the London Times. More from Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard) and Sukhdev Sandhu (Telegraph).

[Photos: "Betty Blue," Cinema Libre Studio, 1986; "BLAST!," Paul Devlin Productions, 2008; "Imagine That," Paramount Pictures, 2009]

Tags: Alain Cavalier, Bai Ling, Béatrice Dalle, Eddie Murphy, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Eric Cantona, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Jean-Louis Trintignant, John Woo, Kazuhiro Soda, Ken Loach, Paul Devlin, Romy Schneider, Rupert Murray, Steve Evets, Thomas Clay, Youssou N'Dour