Indie film news, reviews, commentary, interviews, podcasts and more, updated throughout the week.
Dancing Souls
By Michael Atkinson on 11/18/2009
Envy me, because Werner Herzog's "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" is more fun to write about than it is to watch, and it is barrel-of-monkeys fun to watch. Everything about it is wrong, so wrong that categorizing it that way is meaningless, but wrong nonetheless, down to its title (that awkward "the" on the film's opening title card, that anachronistic and irrelevant "port of call," the subtitle itself, erroneously suggesting sequel-hood, etc.). Of course, the film has no relation to the 1992 Abel Ferrara film, except it involves a police detective who is "bad," insofar as he... MORE »
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Minor Tinkering
By Michael Atkinson on 11/11/2009
Filed under: ReviewsYou've heard it already, how Wes Anderson's model railroad-making and Tinker Toy-like narrative constructions, emotionally unmediated characters, pleasure with antiqued surfaces and visual tableaux-love would've led him eventually to making an animated film, more probably a stop motion animation, and thus we have "Fantastic Mr. Fox," a frame-by-frame expression of the single man's passion for particular detail that's no less obsessive than your average Jan Švankmajer. So, Andersonites will kvell, and those on whom the filmmaker's whimsical vision has been lost or squandered will wonder what in hell their children are supposed to make of the thing. I belong to... MORE »
Head Games
By Michael Atkinson on 11/04/2009
Filed under: ReviewsBearing a snarky, double-take title and a premise like a glazed pig on a platter, Grant Heslov's "The Men Who Stare at Goats" can't help but get us salivating -- be it Chayefskyian satire or schizoid paranormal headtrip or Coenesque destiny farce, we'll gobble it down, especially if it is, as this movie is, based on reported fact. American military new age telekinetic absurdism! The brown-acid substance of reporter Jon Ronson's book by the same name is the dizzying crucible at hand -- too ludicrous and all true to resist, and yet so much the sum of its chortlesome vignettes... MORE »
Doing It to Death
By Rob Nelson on 10/28/2009
Filed under: ReviewsSmooth criminal or fragile humanitarian? Eternally childlike or mortally flawed? Black or white? Might not the late Michael Jackson have been all of the above? As for Kenny Ortega, the longtime MJ associate entrusted to whittle three-and-a-half hours of rehearsal footage down to less than two, he was obviously never going to be Barbara Kopple or Albert Maysles, much less Pedro Costa or Frederick Wiseman. But at least Ortega's "This Is It" allows us to see the self-anointed King of Pop as a moonwalking mass of contradictions right to the end, which is about as much as one could reasonably... MORE »
Satan's Churches
By Rob Nelson on 10/21/2009
Filed under: ReviewsThose who say that "Antichrist" is without redeeming value don't know what the hell they're talking about. Because despite Lars von Trier's images of child death, bodily torture and forest animals in various states of evisceration, not to mention dialogue that could cause temporary damage to the brain, "Antichrist" does have genuine healing power. A short time before the grieving parents known only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are (spoiler alert!) genitally mutilated, He teaches She the "five, five, and five" method of breathing -- that's five seconds each for the inhaling, holding, and exhaling of breath.... MORE »
Wild Mood Swings
By Rob Nelson on 10/14/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIs the family-film crowd that flocked to "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" ready for the deep melancholy of Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are"? At a recent preview screening in Seattle, the audience dutifully sported the studio's gold paper crowns and acted giddy with anticipation as the film's co-writer Dave Eggers invited viewers to howl like wild things whenever the mood struck. Unless this critic's ears failed him, no one howled during the film -- a compliment of sorts to its discomfiting subversion of the kiddie-flick holla-back formula. In Jonze's admirably realist adaptation of Maurice Sendak's book, the... MORE »
Fear and Learning
By Rob Nelson on 10/07/2009
Filed under: ReviewsEvil is a bitch in "Paranormal Activity." Notwithstanding a few things that go bump in the night, Paramount's supernaturally successful Slamdance pickup -- promoted this week from midnight cult-film spooking to a limited release in normal business hours -- might more accurately be called "Scenes From a Hellish Relationship." Living sinfully in San Diego, young day trader Micah (Micah Sloat) and his English-majoring girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston) bicker over how to deal with ghosts in the house -- otherwise known as skeletons in the closet. Asserting in various ways that the place is his to protect (he paid for it,... MORE »
Drifting Out of Focus
By Sam Adams on 09/30/2009
Filed under: ReviewsJoel and Ethan Coen have an almost chronic aversion to being taken seriously. Their darkest movies are nevertheless laced with black humor, and in interviews, they tend to rebuff the idea that their work is about anything other than what appears on the surface. Even to the actors who have worked with them, their intentions are frequently opaque. One need only glance at "Barton Fink"'s withering portrait of an Odets-ian playwright nattering on about his designs for proletarian theater to see what the Coens think of artists who advertise their themes. The title of "A Serious Man," then, can only... MORE »
When Moore is Less
By Sam Adams on 09/23/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIn "Capitalism: A Love Story," Michael Moore takes on his biggest target yet, and his most elusive. Buttonholing reluctant CEOs is one thing; pinning down an abstract principle quite another. With "Bowling for Columbine" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore's seventh documentary completes a loosely affiliated conspiracy trilogy whose films rely on emotional logic and rhetorical sleight of hand to fuse superficially unrelated incidents into evidence of larger, more alarming social currents. Arriving just as the economy is showing a flicker of life, Moore's movie risks lagging behind the times. Much of the evidence he offers to support his contention that the... MORE »
Failure to Connect
By Sam Adams on 09/16/2009
Filed under: ReviewsAs the stars walked the red carpet for the Toronto premiere of "Jennifer's Body," there were fans screaming "Megan!" and "Adam!" and one, just off to the side, holding up a picture of screenwriter Diablo Cody affixed to a piece of cardboard and illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Even during this conclave of international cineastes, you'd have a hard time finding someone who could pick the average screenwriter out of a crowd, let alone find a picture of him or her to decorate. But with only a single produced script to her credit, Cody has managed to make herself the... MORE »
Destroying the World to Save It
By Sam Adams on 09/09/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIs it too late for "9" to be the action movie of the summer? Shane Acker's dystopian fable shares a subject with the latest entries in the "Terminator" and "Transformers" franchises (not to mention "Battlestar Galactica"), but his direction is a model of clarity and grace, and his animated, inhuman protagonists are more life-like and individuated than those of the average blockbuster. Acker's feature, an expansion of his Oscar-nominated short, is set in a sandblasted future littered with desiccated bodies and shattered buildings. There are no humans -- the last dies just before the film begins -- but life, of... MORE »
A Combustible Mix
By Sam Adams on 09/01/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIt's fitting that Mike Judge's last two movies have been released over Labor Day weekend, since he's one of few American filmmakers actively concerned with the world of work. Workplace dramas have dominated TV for years, effectively replacing shows that revolved around the nuclear family; none of the overachievers on "ER" or "Law & Order" had time for anything more than a fleeting assignation in between saving lives and catching perps. But movies have, by and large, been reluctant to tread the same ground. It falls to indie realists like Ramin Bahrani ("Chop Shop") and Kelly Reichardt ("Wendy and Lucy")... MORE »
"Taking Woodstock" Offers Nothing New
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/26/2009
Filed under: ReviewsApparently determined to tackle every cinematic genre known to man, Ang Lee has thus far given us his take on the popular-lit adaptation ("Eat Drink Man Woman"), the classic-lit adaptation ("Sense and Sensibility"), the Civil War western ("Ride With the Devil"), the wuxia action flick ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), the Marvel comic-book summer tentpole ("Hulk"), the WWII espionage thriller ("Lust, Caution") and, of course, the gay cowboy weepie ("Brokeback Mountain"). It was inevitable, I suppose, that he would eventually get around to the historical docudrama -- or, as I've recently dubbed that generally useless collection of bullet-point factoids, the Wiki-movie.... MORE »
A Head Without a Heart
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/19/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWhen each successive film from a new, audacious talent seems richer and more rewarding than the one before, it can sometimes be hard to tell whether the director is steadily improving or it's simply taking you some time and effort to learn how to watch his/her movies. Argentina's Lucrecia Martel arrived on the international film scene eight years ago with her unique style already fully formed; as much as I admired "La Ciénaga"'s exactingly off-kilter compositions and oppressively incestuous tone, though, I couldn't find much of interest lurking beneath that surface mastery. It took two viewings for "The Holy Girl"... MORE »
Putting a Fine Point On It
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/12/2009
Filed under: ReviewsTwelve years ago, Paul Verhoeven, ever the cynical prankster, turned Robert A. Heinlein's jingoistic '50s sci-fi novel "Starship Troopers" into a plug-ugly satire of homicidal xenophobia, making his whitebread human "heroes" even more grotesque than the giant insectoid creatures they regularly slaughtered. Trouble was, mainstream America didn't really get the sick joke, even when Neil Patrick Harris turned up in full quasi-Nazi regalia to conduct sadistic experiments on the captured bugs. Perhaps mindful of that film's commercial failure, South African director Neill Blomkamp dispenses with subtlety altogether in his similarly subversive debut feature, "District 9," crafting a political allegory so... MORE »
Minor Crises
By Mike D'Angelo on 08/05/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWhether he likes it or not -- and we're talking about a director whose characters feel so much ambivalence that you can practically see it radiating off of them in waves -- Andrew Bujalski has become the patron saint of the burgeoning grassroots indie movement misleadingly known as mumblecore. (The people in these films may not know for sure what they want, but they articulate their rococo indecision loud and clear.) To be honest, it's a movement I've mostly resisted thus far, if only because movies are among my few avenues of escape from dithering white postgrads. But while Bujalski's... MORE »
Standing Witness
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 07/30/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIn the nearly two decades that I've been writing film reviews, I can't recall another week that saw the release of three movies that are guaranteed to wind up on my year-end Ten Best list. The movies are vampire love story "Thirst" and the documentaries "The Cove," about an aquatic conservationist's attempts to stop the slaughter of dolphins, and "Severe Clear," an autobiographical account of one Marine's experiences in Iraq. Beyond their dramatic merits, all three demonstrate a front-and-center mastery of technique. They use image and sound not just for the usual, so-called "classical" purposes (to define the characters and... MORE »
War of the Words
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 07/22/2009
Filed under: ReviewsFor weeks now, I've heard fellow critics recommending Armando Iannucci's "In the Loop," a film about a verbal blunder that leads to an international crisis, as a pinnacle of screwball satire, a treasure trove of absurd situations and quotable lines, a "Dr. Strangelove" for the new millennium. I understand the fuss: the state of movie comedy is so generally dismal that when one demonstrates any wit at all, we tend to react like desert travelers who've stumbled upon an oasis. But while I agree that "In the Loop" is a breezy, amusing, committed movie -- writer-director Iannucci was responsible for... MORE »
Darkness Rising
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 07/15/2009
Filed under: ReviewsFrom Bambi's mother's death to the destruction of Alderaan, every modern generation is cursed and blessed with its very own big-screen traumas. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth film in the series based on J.K. Rowling's fantasy novels, contains a doozy; that millions of readers know it's coming won't dim its power in the least. Screenwriter Steve Kloves, director David Yates and the familiar, still-sturdy cast play the grim moment and its aftermath for incredulous shock rather than raw sentiment, knowing viewers will supply the latter in spades. As devotees know, this entry finds Hogwarts in a funk,... MORE »
Gay Panic
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 07/09/2009
Filed under: ReviewsSacha Baron Cohen's improvisational prank film "Brüno" is a conceptual mess that's satisfying as a lowball, turn-your-brain-off snot comedy, but deeply problematic as social commentary. It's this last aspect, unfortunately, that made 2006's "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" (and the character's original TV incarnation) an object of debate. Did Borat's interactions with prototypical dumb-ass Americans, and his stoking of anti-Semitic tendencies, critique the Arab world's cultural prejudice and expose the country's latent prejudice and paranoia, or merely invite smug liberal laughter and an unearned sense of cultural superiority? Was Borat a Rorschach test,... MORE »
New Wave and Old Guard
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 07/01/2009
Filed under: Reviews"The only thing important is where somebody's going." That bit of existential wisdom comes from none other than John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), the soft-spoken, bank-jacking antihero of "Public Enemies," Michael Mann's latest epic about unhappy tough guys doing what they do best. It's offered by way of flirtation, as part of Dillinger's out-of-nowhere and all-out attempt to impress a gorgeous hat-check girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) -- a pitch of woo so intense, and so divorced from what Billie considers realistic feeling, that it both unsettles and amuses her. "I'm catching up, meeting someone like you," he tells her.... MORE »
Life During Wartime
By Melissa Anderson on 06/24/2009
Filed under: ReviewsOn stage with the cast of her latest movie at the Toronto Film Festival last September, Kathryn Bigelow leaned in closely to the microphone to dramatically proffer this greeting to the audience right before the lights went down: "Welcome...to 'The Hurt Locker.'" The invitation suggested that we were about to enter both a specific physical place (Baghdad in summer 2004) and psychic space (traumatized warrior masculinity). Once in, there would be no over-explanation, little backstory, no maudlin psychologizing; Bigelow's film, written by Mark Boal, who spent several weeks embedded with a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq, is an assiduous... MORE »
Knowing It All
By Melissa Anderson on 06/17/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWoody Allen has returned to New York, but does New York want him back? For the excruciating "Whatever Works," his first Gotham-set movie since 2004's "Melinda and Melinda," Allen dusted off a script written around the time of "Annie Hall," intended as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, who died a few months after that film was released in 1977. The replacement mouthpiece for Allen's borscht-y misanthropy is Larry David, who, playing Boris Yellnikoff, frequently breaks the fourth wall, to hector, lecture and obsess. "This is not a feel-good movie," Boris, addressing the camera, pontificates at the outset. Rather, it is... MORE »
The Timing of "Pelham 1 2 3"
By Melissa Anderson on 06/10/2009
Filed under: ReviewsI first saw Joseph Sargent's original "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" at Film Forum less than a month before September 11th. The theater's later revival of the classic 1974 heist movie unspooled two weeks after the blackout of 2003. The coincidental timing of both engagements reinforced what makes Sargent's film (with a script by Peter Stone, based on John Godey's 1973 novel) one of the best movies about New York City: a group of disparate Gotham cranks, weirdoes and hotheads come together in the face of disaster. The original "Pelham" may have been made during the era when... MORE »
Four Women
By Melissa Anderson on 06/03/2009
Filed under: ReviewsWith apologies to Nina Simone, I'd like to dedicate this week in film to four women: Yolande, Mariah, Maya and Joan. In her last two lead performances, Brussels-born Yolande Moreau has shown exceptional nuance and grace in roles that could have easily toppled lesser actresses. "When the Sea Rises" (2004), which Moreau also co-wrote and co-directed, begins with a potentially disastrous premise -- a performance artist traveling with her bizarre one-woman show "A Dirty Business of Sex and Crime" begins a tentative relationship with a man who makes giant papier-mâché puppets -- and becomes one of the sweetest, most original... MORE »
All In A Day's Work
By Gene Seymour on 05/28/2009
Filed under: ReviewsSeen one, you've seen them all. That may be how you feel about zombie movies, but not me. I've been a happy, all-but-credulous consumer of the genre going as far back as the Val Lewton-Jacques Tournier gothic romance "I Walked With a Zombie" through George A. Romero's epic "Living Dead" cycle of gory, apocalyptic satires of consumer culture. Matters not to me if the socio-political context is obtrusively embedded into its storyline (as in Romero's "Dawn of the Dead") or if you have to bring whatever metaphorical baggage you can find to the party ("28 Days Later"). There are those... MORE »
Meat Puppetry
By Gene Seymour on 05/21/2009
Filed under: ReviewsThis can't possibly be the best of weeks for California's governor. Not only did Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget packages get shot down in flames by the state's voters, thereby forcing him to make service cuts that can only further brake his bid for higher office, but Friday's premiere of "Terminator Salvation" threatens to remind its millions of viewers, including the Governator himself, of the relatively bucolic life he forsook for schmoozing with legislators and managing decline. This new, jump-started "Terminator" rubs it in by inserting a cameo of Schwarzenegger's lizard-eyed countenance and bulging torso lifted through CGI magic from the 1984... MORE »
Family Values
By Gene Seymour on 05/14/2009
Filed under: ReviewsA chamber piece resolutely devoid of flash and glitter, "Summer Hours" isn't a film one would have anticipated from the director of such disparate provocations as "Irma Vep," "Clean," Demonlover" and "Boarding Gate." Then again, Olivier Assayas' new release is subtly provocative in its own right. Its willingness to lay out ideas about art and life in the age of globalization makes it his biggest dare yet. What distinguishes this Assayas movie from the others is the manner with which it sustains an unspoiled blend of the intimately emotional with the unequivocally intellectual. The cumulative strengths of "Summer Hours" as... MORE »
Space, Balls
By Gene Seymour on 05/07/2009
Filed under: ReviewsYou walk out of "Star Trek" feeling giddy, airborne and cleansed, if only for a few minutes, of all mundane worries. This is what summer Hollywood movies are expected to do -- or at least what's been expected of them since 1975, when "Jaws"'s cavalcade of jolly jolts altered the movies' economic landscape, for better and worse. "Giddy" and "airborne" aren't what you recall feeling after, say, last year's "The Dark Knight" or last week's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." But producer/director J.J. Abrams' cheeky reboot -- or, for those who dare to think long-term, resuscitation -- of the 43-year-old science fiction... MORE »
Lone Rangers
By Gene Seymour on 04/29/2009
Filed under: ReviewsBack in the early '60s, when Sonny Liston ruled boxing and hard bop could still be found on the corner jukebox, just wearing a sharkskin suit could be construed as an act of aggression, passive or otherwise. Sharkskin is the uniform of choice worn by the protagonist of Jim Jarmusch's alluring, enigmatic "The Limits of Control." Isaach De Bankolé's Lone Man (for that's how he is ID'd in the program notes, if not the movie itself) is like Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, taciturn and resolute, if also exposed to more sunlight. Lone Man's granite-slab impassiveness is buttressed by the sharkskin's implicit... MORE »
