Indie film news, reviews, commentary, interviews, podcasts and more, updated throughout the week.
Out of Exile
By Michael Atkinson on 11/17/2009
The first vampire film to ever win a prize at Cannes, Park Chan-wook's "Thirst" places the ethical questions of human-community parasitism front and center, as you'd expect from a man whose most famous films are slow-pig-sticking ordeals of retribution and moral poisoning. Park's resume is also notorious for its merciless pop-movie extremism, and at times (as in the still rather spectacular "Oldboy") you can't help noticing a basic conflict between his Chandleresque exploration of life-or-death moral justice and his lurid sensationalism. Going all genre in "Thirst" has obvious advantages for Park; the built-in conflicts are both familiar and as old... MORE »
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Mississippi Blues and Embarcadero Clues
By Michael Atkinson on 11/10/2009
Filed under: On DVDThere's little point in attempting to figure why Lance Hammer's "Ballast," the best American film of 2008, was whisked in and out of so few theaters so quickly, in contrast even to minimalist imports and special-interest video docs in the same span, and despite universal critical hosannas. Good films get tossed by the wayside all the time, particularly in the contemporary state of distribution, but the good news is that movies never truly disappear anymore, they just tumble into the digital slipstream and become universally available. Hammer's uneasy, seething, oblique sojourn to the wintry Mississippi midlands is surely the best... MORE »
Schizo Miracles
By Michael Atkinson on 11/03/2009
Filed under: On DVDSamuel Fuller had one of the most fascinating of Hollywood careers -- a 50-plus-year self-mythologizing rampage that began with scriptsmith work in the mid 1930s at the age of 24, evolving into one of the most distinctive auteurs America has ever produced, writing/directing some 25 movies and having a hand in writing 25 more, helplessly manufacturing himself into a crusty man's-man Hollywood gadfly in the process, readily available for manic interviews and iconic appearances in young auteurs' self-conscious films. There are always corners in his career that you, whomever you are, haven't yet explored (honestly, any single Fuller film remains... MORE »
Moody Toons
By Michael Atkinson on 10/27/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe French omnibus horror film "Fear(s) in the Dark" comes off a bit as a cataract of gimmicks -- fully animated, using comic artists with distinctive styles, no color allowed (well, a little red to pepper up the black and white palette) and focused on phobias and anxieties. Omnibus films, with which we are suddenly surrounded (Paris this, New York that), are gimmicks themselves, not much like anthologies, because you can't roam at will. Their viewing experiences are predicated on variety instead of consistency, and the often fizzling impact of clumped shorts, each more or less the total sum, which... MORE »
Back from the Grave
By Michael Atkinson on 10/20/2009
Filed under: On DVDOne of the world's great film culture apostates, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is mostly notorious for the seven-hour-plus 1977 film "Our Hitler," and for Susan Sontag's rocket-to-Mars essay, ambitiously praising it to the heavens, and for being the most recalcitrant of the New German Cinema's unholy four (with Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog). Finally, two of his famous earlier films have been released on video to contextualize that later behemoth, "Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King" (1972) and "Karl May" (1974), the three of which supposedly comprise a "German trilogy." Syberberg hardly seems disposed to ever make films about anything else, and it's... MORE »
Possessed by Unreason
By Michael Atkinson on 10/13/2009
Filed under: On DVDBy far the biggest brat to sneak his way through Eastern Bloc culture during the New Wave era, Yugoslav bomb-thrower Dušan Makavejev wasn't someone who took on his vocation with a somber air; I don't know for sure how much fun he had making movies, but he seems to have been locked into a constant euphoria of half-soused, giggling movie love. He comprised a kind of one-man Yugoslav film movement at a time when the tense Communist nation barely had a global cultural identity of its own, and his filmography reads like a litany of post-Godardian social felonies, scattered with... MORE »
Misspent Youth
By Michael Atkinson on 10/06/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe most remarkable thing about Sacha Gervasi's "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" may be that it is unarguably one of the most heart-swelling and moving films ever made about rock 'n' roll, and at the same time, it is very unlikely to convert any viewers into passionate Anvil fans. In fact, the movie barely bothers to make a case for Anvil, the orphaned band maudit from the '80s surge in heavy metal heavy hitters, as musicians, and doesn't allow you to hear a single song all the way through. (Contrast that to, say, Jeff Stein's "The Kids Are Alright," which... MORE »
Brute Launch from Nowhere
By Michael Atkinson on 09/29/2009
Filed under: On DVDLast year, American critics pretty fairly stood aghast and in awe of Ronald Bronstein's "Frownland" (2007), conjuring up some of the most intense superlatives ever thrown at a cheap New York indie (the New Yorker's Richard Brody called it "one of the most unusual and audacious American independent films ever made"), while still sweating bullets of qualification, as if holding a wolverine by the short hairs. It didn't make much of a difference to audiences, who hardly noticed, but now that the film is being rather spectacularly DVD'd by the new Brooklyn outfit Factory 25, viewers can step up to... MORE »
All the Rage
By Michael Atkinson on 09/22/2009
Filed under: On DVDSally Potter's "Rage" (2009) has made itself noteworthy as the latest effort of a name filmmaker to address -- or experiment with, or mambo around -- the fact that cinema, as it's traditionally made and consumed, is being starved by digital culture. Everyone knows the drill -- movies, TV, music, newspapers, publishing, etc. are all dying pig-stuck deaths because of the internet, although no one dares to say that the internet is, in fact, the problem, and increases its dominance at a very real and looming set of costs to us all. Filmmakers are being forced to look at inexpensive,... MORE »
The Secret History
By Michael Atkinson on 09/15/2009
Filed under: On DVDIt's been hard to forgive Peter Greenaway, above all, for the howling miscreant-ism of "8 1/2 Women" (1999). His particularized brand of hyper-structural art cinema -- and Greenaway's movies have always been stylistically distinctly his, which is no mean achievement -- had already been in self-involved decline ("The Pillow Book," etc.), but "8 1/2 Women" was a cliff edge, a film beyond which any globally respected career would have to take a good stoning, creep shamefacedly into a crawlspace somewhere and work on a sensibility overhaul while hoping we'd soon forget all about it. Greenaway has more or less hibernated... MORE »
To Be Human
By Michael Atkinson on 09/08/2009
Filed under: On DVDUnarguably one of the world's most demanding "ascetist" auteurs, and certainly North America's most dedicated "art film" provocateur, Carlos Reygadas makes movies that slow your heart rate and raise your anxiety levels at the same time. His observational gaze isn't just patient rigor, but a brand of glacial, creepy stillness, chilled further by occasional moments of graphic sex, slow exploratory camera moves that seem to perform the impossible, and a colossal sense of unspoken crisis. "Japón" (2002), "Battle in Heaven" (2005) and "Silent Light" (2007) are, most of all, living mysteries, existing scene by scene several left steps away from... MORE »
Home Movies
By Michael Atkinson on 08/31/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe decades-old cliché goes, watching other people's home movies is hell frozen over. Strangely, this is true only if you know the people, and it's their vacation in Tahoe that you're forced to sit through after a few cocktails and a bellyful of spinach lasagna, as they narrate the landscapes and sigh at their own kids' antics and wistfully recall the best restaurant sea bass they've ever eaten. As Daffy Duck said, I demand that you shoot me now. Removed from that cloying context, though, home movies are raw and beautiful cinema, mysterious, bewitching and filled with the melancholy for... MORE »
Peace and War
By Michael Atkinson on 08/25/2009
Filed under: On DVDHow do you write about Chantal Akerman's brutally demanding, three-and-a-quarter-hour "Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975) without making it sound like a Gitmo stress position? It's a film about a widowed Belgian housewife (Delphine Seyrig) who meticulously attends to housework all day, which we watch in real time, except when she's making cash being an afternoon prostitute, which is the only thing we don't watch her do. "A film about..." is a misleading construction -- Akerman's film just is, a life experience rather than a convenient story told. But it's not what you'd call a consciously pleasurable... MORE »
Husbands and Wives
By Michael Atkinson on 08/18/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe mistake that people have made about John Cassavetes, both those who fall swooning at the altar of his films and those who find them overwrought, irritating and indulgent, is in considering him as a realist. A mere realist. Cassavetes' work may look realistic, spontaneous and controlled in the moment by emotional typhoons, but this is not your Italian granddaddy's neo-realist peasant drama or anything like the new-ish introverted realism coming in thick bolts out of the global cameras of the Dardennes, Jia, Tsai, Reygadas, Costa, etc. The only Cassavetes movie that was truly improvised was his first, "Shadows" (1959);... MORE »
The Résumé Indie
By Michael Atkinson on 08/11/2009
Filed under: On DVDMostly, what Paul Andrew Williams' "London to Brighton" (2006) has in its threadbare arsenal, shy of budget and time and scale, is a small propane tank of hot nerve. This is the kind of indie that opens in mid-adrenaline-spike (two women, bloody and beaten, burst into a public restroom, running for their lives) and proceeds to paint a sparse portrait of modern life that slowly constricts on the two protagonists like a fatal case of lockjaw. It's an exercise in economy and efficiency, of course -- Williams' "London" is one of the most memorable résumé films of recent years, but... MORE »
Conspiracies and Crucifixions
By Michael Atkinson on 08/04/2009
Filed under: On DVDYou can't address the state of indie film DVD-land without being bowled over by the cataract of activist documentaries, now made so cheaply and distributed so easily, assaulting the marketplace, and once you're standing on that battlefield, you're faced with the bedevilment of 9/11 conspiracy movies. As a core sample of the American soul, what could be more naked, more pertinent, more chilling? (Of course, if they're even ten percent correct in the theories they lay out, there is nothing more relevant anywhere on the sociopolitical table.) Dylan Avery's "Loose Change," which has by now undergone a series of tweakings... MORE »
A Bell Jar Etude
By Michael Atkinson on 07/28/2009
Filed under: On DVDFamously a mere low-budget Brit horror movie produced by a softcore outfit and directed by a young Roman Polanski with only one feature under his belt, after he'd emigrated from Communist Poland, "Repulsion" (1965) is also the first truly Freudian movie. That is, not a movie that merely employs Freudian psychology to tell its story (that began, more or less, with Pabst's "Secrets of a Soul," from 1926), but a movie that harbors a silent Freudian reptile brain and insists that we search for answers to the heroine's irrational mysteries, without narrative assistance, acting like analysts ourselves in the dark.... MORE »
Lamentation for a Grand Romance
By Michael Atkinson on 07/21/2009
Filed under: On DVDFor American cinephiles of a certain age (under 50 or so, babies during the '60s if alive at all), the last year and a half has been a neo-Godardian lavishment -- month after month, there came a new sterling DVDization, or a new rarity screening (like Light Industry's showing of "Far from Vietnam" in Manhattan), or a new biography or brace of incidental footage (The Believer's "JLG in USA"), or even, as in this past January, a full-fledged American release: 1966's "Made in U.S.A.," only shown at festivals in its day before getting stalled and closeted by the producer's legal... MORE »
Going the Distance
By Michael Atkinson on 07/14/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe only authoritative voice of Israeli filmmaking prior to the recent influx of micro-masterpieces -- let's see if it constitutes a "wave" -- Amos Gitai has had a rocky time of it. He's dared to iron-maiden his audience with hyper-long one-shot sequences and elaborate camera roamings, he's seduced Natalie Portman into doing an Israeli film right after "Closer" and the second "Star Wars" prequel, he's made "Kippur" (2000), an indisputable home run that explored the soldier's experience of the Yom Kippur War. On the other hand, and at the same time, many of his films have been broad, goonish and... MORE »
Tones of Home
By Michael Atkinson on 07/07/2009
Filed under: On DVDDespite filmgoers' general lack of ticket-buying interest, the omnibus film -- thematically contiguous shorts or semi-shorts by various filmmakers, packaged together as a feature -- is enjoying an unlikely resurgence akin to its Euro heyday in the '60s. What's rousing about the phenom, then and especially now, is that its thriving fecundity is largely fed by the creative yens of directors and producers, not by the entertainment demands of a mass audience. To a certain degree, you get the sense that no one involved in, say, "Paris, Je T'Aime" (2006) (Van Sant, Assayas, Coen, Cuaron, etc.), or "To Each His... MORE »
Strangers in the Night
By Michael Atkinson on 06/30/2009
Filed under: On DVDForget Who's Your Favorite Beatle, or Who's Your Favorite Monkee, or even Who's Your Favorite Little Rascal (for me, it's Wheezer, God save him) -- if you ask someone What's Your Favorite French New Wave Landmark and they say Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961), you'd better start a endless tab for cocktails, hunker down for a long and glorious night of gamesmanship and bedevilment, and forget about tomorrow. Famous as the über-art film openly mocked by Pauline Kael and the authors of "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time," Resnais' saturnine masterpiece remains exactly the film experience it... MORE »
Drawing Out Memory
By Michael Atkinson on 06/23/2009
Filed under: On DVDNobody saw it coming -- the most unique film of 2008-09 was a head-shaking Israeli fugue between social documentary and digital animated epic. Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir" is also a direct address of a modern atrocity Americans have all but forgotten, if they knew about it at all: the Sabra and Shatila refugee massacre of 1982, the politics of which were perhaps always a little too tangled to suit American news media. But, anyway, can a documentary be animated? The moment you create a film frame by frame, how close could it be to even a historical truth? Folman's... MORE »
Love and Marriage
By Michael Atkinson on 06/16/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe new Chinese film "In Love We Trust" has an irresistible premise, one you can easily imagine being sucked up into the Hollywood processing plant and molded into a hectic piece of polystyrene, either hysterically melodramatic or slapstickily comic. Simply: a divorced couple, both now married to others, discover their six-year-old has leukemia (admittedly, not the potentially funny part), and realize that her only chance for survival -- for a bone marrow match -- is for them to have another child together, therein jeopardizing both of their marriages. I don't want to picture either version of the American remake, but... MORE »
Won't Get Fooled Again
By Michael Atkinson on 06/09/2009
Filed under: On DVDSince he emerged out of the psychotronica closet of his first potent but crude features, there have been two fairly distinct David Cronenbergs -- the extremist/obsessive who's been happy to exploit the fleshier anxieties of science fiction and surrealism, and the critic's darling that sprung up around the time of the still-underrated "Crash" (1996), all the easier to laud for having left the icky aspects of genre behind him. Relative to the psychosexual force on exhibition in "Videodrome" (1983), "The Dead Zone" (1983), "The Fly" (1986), "Dead Ringers" (1988) and "Naked Lunch" (1991), it seems to me that "eXistenZ" (1999),... MORE »
Glorious "Bastards"
By Michael Atkinson on 06/02/2009
Filed under: On DVDNothing quite stings the throat and refreshes the nasal cavities like a Seijun Suzuki film, if like most of us you're mired in contemporary pulp with an idea of style that amounts to digital inorganicity, monochromatic images, lunkhead muscles and stolid inexpression. Style is something filmmakers seem to think a lot about these days, without having any sense of what it is: not merely crisp lighting and short shots and frozen beauty, but also personality (of the actors and the filmmaker), invention, energy, pacing, wit, attitude, language, culture. (In brief, you could say that Quentin Tarantino, for better or worse,... MORE »
Point of No Return
By Michael Atkinson on 05/26/2009
Filed under: On DVDPhilippe Garrel, now in his 60s, is semi-famous for being semi-obscure, even in France, though he remains one of the last stragglers to have fallen under the New Wave umbrella. (When he was 20, he trailed Godard, who in Jonathan Rosenbaum's phrase "virtually adopted him in May '68, when both were cruising the Latin Quarter student demonstrations with their cameras.") Here, Garrel had to wait until "Regular Lovers" (2005) for a film of his to find stateside distribution. But it's a small wonder: Garrel's career project is resolutely personal and self-examining, to a degree that makes Cassavetes and even Godard... MORE »
Classic Status
By Michael Atkinson on 05/19/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe critical work on the American New Wave, it seems, has only just begun -- Robert Altman still gets a free skate (who thinks "M*A*S*H" is worthwhile anymore?), Hal Ashby has been sanctified, but Alan J. Pakula has not, and Robert Aldrich's contributions to the decade are forgotten, while the proper canonization of the films of Monte Hellman and Barbara Loden's "Wanda" is paperwork still waiting to be filed, and the few fascinating films Peter Fonda directed are still cinema non grata. The era's propensity for desperate road travel, dusty realism and pitiless narrative makes it the match for the... MORE »
Lost in Found Footage
By Michael Atkinson on 05/12/2009
Filed under: On DVDA paradigmatic New York indie of the kind that cannot be accused of star-slumming or dependie bloat, Azazel Jacobs' "Momma's Man" tells an incremental tale of modern regression, and as such it is patient and stinging. Mikey (Matt Boren), a flabby thirtysomething man of undefined profession, gets laid over in New York and bunks in his aging parents' loft instead of waiting at the airport. At least we're told so -- the next day Mikey invents a few more excuses to linger in the house in which he grew up instead of going home to his wife and child in... MORE »
The Unseen Destruction of Nations
By Michael Atkinson on 05/05/2009
Filed under: On DVDKelly Reichardt's "Wendy & Lucy" may be -- in competition only with Lance Hammer's "Ballast" -- the best film of 2008, and both movies have been so underseen by the public that they could be said to have not been released at all. (Or, at least, not publicized at all.) Critics saw them, though, and none that I know of have walked away unamazed by the simple but torrential forces of intimate storytelling told with a correctly situated camera and a respect for real people. "Ballast" is the more visually stealthy of the two, but Reichardt's film is almost a... MORE »
Heavy Cargo
By Michael Atkinson on 04/28/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe unaccented, matter-of-fact tone of Aleksei Balabanov's "Cargo 200" is deliberately disarming. The plain Jane approach leads us to expect story complexity, nuance, social relevance -- anything, really, beside what we eventually get, which is a cold-eyed slide into the human hellpit. Based on "true events," somewhat embroidered, Balabanov's movie is a poison-pen letter sent to the heart of the failing Soviet society circa 1984, and you can appropriately read its sneaky, scalding tribulations as a face-slap to the Russians, young and old, who nostalgize the old regime. What's often lamented is the passing of a sense of enforced order... MORE »
