Indie film news, reviews, commentary, interviews, podcasts and more, updated throughout the week.
Drawing Out Memory
By Michael Atkinson on 06/23/2009
Nobody 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 »
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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 »
Requiem for Another Dreamer
By Michael Atkinson on 04/21/2009
Filed under: On DVDWhat can be said, post-Oscar-fuggup, about this sick-hearted anti-American Dream that hasn't already been said, and kudoed: Darren Aronofsky's channeling of the Dardennes' immediacy, Mickey Rourke's Herculean self-deprecation, both of which currents combining to prove the script's essential conventionality to be irrelevant, just at a moment in American film in which we had all good reason to think the Industry was completely bankrupt of balls, curiosity, respect and a sense of America itself. (Let's consider in this broad formulation that 2007 was a modern aberration, unleashing a wave of nation-autopsying megaworks -- "There Will Be Blood," "The Assassination of Jesse... MORE »
A Tragicomedy, Split Down Its Center
By Michael Atkinson on 04/14/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe palm-sized absurdist Lebanese film "The Kite" (2003) was never released to U.S. theaters, and it's a piteous sign of the times -- even a decade ago, such a deft and humane film, bearing an armload of festival awards, would've hit screens in at least a few cities, and appeared on critics' top ten lists, and therein manage a footprint on American film culture consciousness. Perhaps the alt-distribution stream of DVD will suffice, in general; as it is, Randa Chahal Sabbag's film deserves eyeballs, trafficking in the satiric-fable tradition of "West Beirut" (1998) and "In the Battlefields" (2004) that might... MORE »
The Joy of American Avant-Garde
By Michael Atkinson on 04/07/2009
Filed under: On DVDMovieheads who like to consider themselves as alternative still often shrink from the demands and new thinking required of even the oldest and most conventional "avant-garde" film, a situation that the ubiquity of the DVD format hasn't done very much to mitigate. So be it: the hardy envelope-pushers in the crowd have enjoyed unforeseen access to the quasi-genre's history by now (the DVD menu format is a peerless mode of presentation for motley underground shorts, to be surpassed only, I suppose, once quality streaming-tube clips can be curated and thrown onto our mega TVs instead of our laptops). If you... MORE »
Pre-Code Wellman and Godard's Code Unknown
By Michael Atkinson on 03/31/2009
Filed under: On DVDWilliam "Wild Bill" Wellman was always more renowned for his reportedly rough and tumble extra-cinematic resume (delinquent, pilot, stuntman) than for his mostly orthodox films -- from his nearly 40-year career, only a handful of astute genre epics remain lodged in the cultural front-brain today: "Nothing Sacred" and "A Star Is Born" (both 1937), "Beau Geste" (1939), and "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943). They're all beautifully judged, visually eloquent and delicately acted films (compare Fredric March in "A Star Is Born" to the rest of his mannered '30s work, and you get a taste of Wellman's touch), particularly "Ox-Bow," wherein Dana... MORE »
Red Hands and Redheads
By Michael Atkinson on 03/24/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe new forensic doc "Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about His Father" is a hot-to-the-touch ignition flame for an unsolvable aesthetic debate between intellect and empathy, film-unto-itself and humanity, self-justifying culture and the life it's supposed to augment, art and love. It is in some ways a deplorable film, and a seriously compromised documentary, and yet it burns your heart. The movie's misjudgments almost become its qualities, because they are birthed out of unregulated passion and outrage; as a non-fiction film, it does not constitute an argument but a wail of grief. I had misgivings about the way... MORE »
Into the Forest with Shimizu and Visconti
By Michael Atkinson on 03/17/2009
Filed under: On DVDCriterion does it again, rescuing a major filmmaker from the quicksand of neglect, happenstance and/or canonical prejudice, and shoving them into the spotlight with state-of-the-art DVD releases that virtually demand a reevaluative reckoning. As with Larisa Shepitko, Jacques Becker, Raymond Bernard, William Klein and Jean Painlevé, you won't find mention of Hiroshi Shimizu in any major English-language film history text, and in each case the elisions are criminal. An almost exact contemporary of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Naruse, from the beginnings of their careers in the mid-to-late '20s to their last films, Shimizu echoes a good deal of their field of... MORE »
Slavoj Žižek's Film Criticism on Film, Charlie Kaufman's Autocritique
By Michael Atkinson on 03/10/2009
Filed under: On DVDWith the exception of Godard's largely-unseen (on these shores) "Histoire(s) du Cinéma," Sophie Fiennes' and Slavoj Žižek's "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" (2006) might be the greatest piece of film-criticism-on-film ever made. That's not saying a pantload, of course; despite the obvious potentialities and the seductive pleasure to be had in perusing film history in powerhouse visual swatches, it's not even a subgenre, beyond the boosterism of promotional docs and Todd McCarthy's "Visions of Light." The "video essays" by critic Kevin B. Lee constitute a pioneering version of the idea, despite the entire corpus being dropped for a while from... MORE »
The Return of Jane Fonda's long-M.I.A. "F.T.A."
By Michael Atkinson on 03/03/2009
Filed under: On DVDBy 1971, America's involvement in Vietnam had steamrolled onward in full combat-&-bombing mode for six solid years, just about as long as the U.S. has currently been occupying Iraq. They're different wars, but similar enough to make the evidence presented in the long-censored, long-buried, long-bootlegged film "F.T.A." (1972) all the more astonishing: it was then, more than midway through the first Nixon term, that a couple of full-on movie stars (Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda) helped gather together a band of lefty anti-war musicians, actors and activists, and devised a cheesy vaudeville show to act as counterpoint to the Bob... MORE »
Choosing Hedonism Over History
By Michael Atkinson on 02/24/2009
Filed under: On DVDOne of last year's the most under-distributed and underseen major European imports, Jirí Menzel's "I Served the King of England" (2006) is lovely, silly, damnable antique, willfully pre-feminist and hopelessly out of fashion. The film, after all, dares to etch out Czech life under the Nazi occupation as preposterous farce, and it hardly halts there in favoring live-it-up hedonism over the grim realities of history. Menzel and his famous co-writer Bohumil Hrabal (who was enough of an institution to warrant a detour for a visiting President Clinton in 1994, and the two hit the local public house for a beer)... MORE »
A Film Critic Digs Into His Family's Slave-Holding Past
By Michael Atkinson on 02/17/2009
Filed under: On DVDSay it again -- there's a film inside every family, and all you need is the head and heart to find it. (That is, you don't need to be the cursed Great Neck residents of "Capturing the Friedmans" or "Tarnation"'s Jonathan Caouette, and in some ways, it'd better for us all if you aren't.) Film journalist Godfrey Cheshire's "Moving Midway" (2007) has a deep ditch of historical soil to dig, but it's not a personal-regional family doc that focuses on dysfunction or tragedy; rather, its position is ironic and aciduously nostalgic. Originally from North Carolina, Cheshire may well be the... MORE »
Two From Buñuel, "W."
By Michael Atkinson on 02/10/2009
Filed under: On DVDFrankly delighted with human folly, and as fluent as a Symbolist poet with the effortlessly iconic image, Luis Buñuel may have been the greatest filmmaker of cinema's first century. Certainly, among the ten or 12 unassailable masters of the medium, he's the wittiest, the least sentimental, the most philosophically imaginative and formally the least self-conscious. At the same time, I'd imagine that many cinephiles on, say, the south side of 30 will wonder what the fuss is about -- where are the pyrotechnics, the daring rigor, the innovations, the elevation away from avant-gardish pulp and toward high art? Let's say... MORE »
Carol Reed's Comedy of Pre-Revolutionary Cuba, Plus "The Singing Revolution"
By Michael Atkinson on 02/03/2009
Filed under: On DVDFilmmaking is all about collaboration and fortuity, as much as we genuflect faithfully to the sacredness of the auteur. Take Carol Reed -- a career that spanned almost four decades, encompassing 33 features, and yet only a few are memorable (not, God knows, his late-career Oscar-winner "Oliver!"). Essentially, Reed finds his way onto the pantheon's higher shelves on the strength of only a handful of films, starting with the trio of startling, precise, infinitely rich features he made in the late '40s, one after the other -- "Odd Man Out" (1947), "The Fallen Idol" (1948) and "The Third Man" (1949)... MORE »
A Dream-Memory of Patti Smith and a Sharp-Edged Hollywood Farce
By Michael Atkinson on 01/27/2009
Filed under: On DVDThe DVD era has been very generous to low-grade biodocs focused on culty, semi-obscure pop wonders -- everyone from the Holy Moly Rounders to Roky Erickson, Benjamin Smoke, Townes Van Zandt, Gary Wilson, Joy Division, They Might Be Giants, Scott Walker, et cetera, have received their official, devotional, feature-length eulogy. Graveside homilies they are, too, there's little point in denying it -- for the aging musicians of the '60s, '70s and '80s as well as for our long-lost younger selves, now only faint traces of remembered élan, hope and indestructibility. Of course, Patti Smith, like Leonard Cohen and the Ramones... MORE »
Rituals and Royalty from Roberto Rossellini and in Mobile, Alabama
By Michael Atkinson on 01/20/2009
Filed under: On DVDRoberto Rossellini has never been the most accessible of cinema culture demigods -- his neo-realist trilogy seems more influential than timeless these days, and his Ingrid Bergman films often feel offhand and crude. In 1962, as critic Colin McCabe recounts in his essay for Criterion's release of "The Taking of Power by Louis XIV" (1966), Rossellini renounced cinema per se, and promised he would from then on make only historical films for television. It's these films, in a string that lasted 13 years, that are the hardest to see and the most frustrating; the filmmaker's perspective grew more inhospitable and... MORE »
"Blind Mountain," "Inheritance"
By Michael Atkinson on 01/13/2009
Filed under: On DVDThere are two ways to take on Li Yang's potent, concise "Blind Mountain" (2007), and both have horns: as the howling social-critique screed it was intended to be, and as a Chinese realist version of the "white trash" exploitation epics of the American '60s and '70s -- which makes the dynamic of the story universally human, not exclusively Chinese. But Chinese it is in actuality, through and through: simply put, unemployed college grad Bai (Lu Huang) accepts a job to collect medicinal herbs in the remote northern country, and after landing in a secluded village wakes up to find herself... MORE »
"The Wedding Director," Michael Powell
By Michael Atkinson on 01/06/2009
Filed under: On DVDTurning 70 this year, Marco Bellocchio has finally attained old-guard respectability, in light of the ironic, seasoned, historically quizzical mastery of "My Mother's Smile" (2002), "Good Morning, Night" (2003) and now "The Wedding Director" (2006). Notorious here as a mere provocateur (largely thanks to Maruschka Detmers' half-hearted blowjob in "Devil in the Flesh"), Bellocchio has always seemed young and ready to rumble ever since his 1965 debut "Fists in the Pocket," fashioned, when he was 26, as a sneak attack on all things Old World Catholic, provincial, late-baroque, aristocratic and traditional. Now, after many darkling family tales and adaptations of... MORE »
"Woman on the Beach," "Operation Filmmaker"
By Michael Atkinson on 12/30/2008
Filed under: On DVDAs the Korean New Wave fades and dissipates, from a throng of cultural force fields to a mere battery of individual filmographies, ambitious or withering or otherwise, one director stands as the most passionately embraced and steadily distributed in the tradition of imported art films. Strangely, it's Hong Sang-soo, not Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho, both of whose pulpy trajectories have stalled and didn't, in any event, summon the English-speaking world's eyeballs expected for their psychodramatic hyperbole. Hong's films are not crowd-pleasers, but measured, often uncomfortable meditations on Korean urbanites and their lives of power-boozing, disconnection and romantic failure. Up... MORE »
On DVD: "My Father My Lord," "Takva"
By Michael Atkinson on 12/23/2008
Filed under: On DVDBy Michael Atkinson Just in time for the holidays, particularly Chanukah and Eid al-Adha (okay, that was a few weeks ago), here come two new Mideast films that quietly tear into the bilious, ruinous hypocrisies of fundamentalist religion. It's an ironic conflict from where we stand: nothing is as ripe and ready for the firing squad as reactionary religious discipline, and yet few social codes are as ubiquitous. What's more, they all somehow demand "respect." Outside of most neighborhoods in most American and European metropoli, you can hardly throw an Orwell paperback without hitting and infuriating a narrow-minded fundamentalist, and... MORE »
On DVD: "White Dog," Herzog shorts
By Michael Atkinson on 12/16/2008
Filed under: On DVDBy Michael Atkinson At first blush, Samuel Fuller's "White Dog" (1982) seems to come packing a certain degree of high-hat critic hype -- the encomiums have rained down upon it since it finally overcame film maudit-hood and got released to theaters in 1991 -- from the sagest voices in the English-speaking critical community. But a "huh?" factor is not uncommon when eager cinephiles sit down and see it for the first time: all that cheap '80s lighting, those clumsy lines of dialogue, those graceless expository compositions, those overemphatic reaction shots, etc. Fuller himself is something of an acquired taste; what... MORE »
On DVD: "Irma Vep," "Flow: For the Love of Water"
By Michael Atkinson on 12/09/2008
Filed under: On DVDBy Michael Atkinson In the years since "Irma Vep" (1996), French iconoclast Olivier Assayas has become more of a high-profile and international filmmaker, and at the same time a less interesting one; "Alice and Martin," "Les Destinées Sentimentales," "demonlover," "Clean" and "Boarding Gate" have all been films bristling with dramatic ideas that have been, at the same time, often half-baked or unoriginal. His yen for high-nicotine, antisocial coolness seems by now a reflex he should outgrow, but in "Irma Vep" it made perfect, hilarious, seamless sense, because the film is actually about the chaotic life of "art film" production (a... MORE »
On DVD: "Still Life," Roberto Rossellini
By Michael Atkinson on 12/02/2008
Filed under: On DVDBy Michael Atkinson Every now and then, the natural world and the massive self-satisfying erections of man provide filmmakers with ready-made metaphors of massive torque and resonance. Werner Herzog is an expert at locating these visual/thematic El Dorados; Marker, Kiarostami and Ghobadi are current explorers of the paradigm, which necessitates an embrace of documentary reality. (Slavic artists are just beginning to make use out of the ex-Soviet landscape of unfinished and derelict public projects, from decommissioned nuclear power plants to entire cities left abandoned after infrastructure support dried up.) But Jia Zhang-ke is the filmmaker bringing new life and commitment... MORE »
