Indie film news, reviews, commentary, interviews, podcasts and more, updated throughout the week.
Life During Wartime
By Melissa Anderson on 06/24/2009
On 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 »
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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 »
Knocked Down, Then Dragged Out
By Charles Taylor on 04/22/2009
Filed under: ReviewsDespite all the terrible publicity Mike Tyson has gotten over the years, I've never forgotten seeing him nearly two decades ago on "The Arsenio Hall Show," walking out to surprise Muhammad Ali. When Hall asked who'd win if they got into the ring, Ali pointed to Tyson. Tyson, shaking his head said, "I know I'm great. But here all heads must bow and all tongues must confess that this is the greatest of all time." Every bit of scandal since has made me wonder what happened to the generosity and lyricism I saw that night. James Toback's documentary "Tyson" gives... MORE »
State of Decline
By Charles Taylor on 04/15/2009
Filed under: ReviewsIt's a measure of the smarts at work in "State of Play" that while none of the characters' motives are clean, the movie never lapses into cynicism. This tense, cleanly made thriller, directed by Kevin Macdonald ("The Last King of Scotland"), plays off the faux scandals of the Clinton years (the Lewinsky affair) and the genuine outrages that occurred under Bush (contracting mercenaries to fight in Iraq) and says that what remains of the press is no longer able to tell the difference between real news and fake news. The plot takes off with the seeming suicide of a young... MORE »
Maul Cop
By Charles Taylor on 04/08/2009
Filed under: ReviewsEven if the early buzz around Jody Hill's "Observe and Report" weren't grouping it with "The Cable Guy," the comparison would be obvious. Like that film, "Observe and Report" is said to be a "dark" comedy. In this case that means that calculated outrageousness, brutalism presented for laughs and easy cynicism passes for daring. When "Observe and Report" fails with audiences -- as it will, and as "The Cable Guy" did -- the myth will start about it being rejected because it disturbed its detractors. What disturbed me about "Observe and Report" was that the people around me who were... MORE »
The Land of Opportunity
By Charles Taylor on 04/01/2009
Filed under: ReviewsTo college students graduating into the nightmare of the current job market, the floating, companionable uncertainty of "Adventureland" must look very agreeable. Greg Mottola's gentle comedy is set mostly in a Pittsburgh amusement park during the summer of 1987. The hero, James (Jesse Eisenberg), was expecting to spend the season traveling around Europe. But money troubles at home make it impossible for his parents (hangdog Jack Gilpin and Wendie Malick, with her bruised brightness) to finance the trip they've promised him. Even his place at Columbia Journalism School in the fall is uncertain. Mottola, whose last film was the mostly... MORE »
American Earnestness and a French Soufflé
By Glenn Kenny on 03/25/2009
Filed under: ReviewsA cursory look at the filmography of writer-director Ramin Bahrani -- and by "cursory," I mean one not involving actually viewing any of his films -- will suggest to many that he's the kind of filmmaker who specializes in the oft-dreaded Movie That Is Good For You. His films invariably deal with cross-cultural exchange, or lack thereof; his characters are strangers in strange (albeit torn-from-today's-headlines) lands. They are immigrants looking for ways of belonging, foreigners trying to make peace with their obscure pasts and other species of societal outcasts. A possible précis for Bahrani's latest picture, "Goodbye Solo," wouldn't have... MORE »
The Trouble With Man Dates
By Glenn Kenny on 03/18/2009
Filed under: ReviewsThe first thing John Hamburg's "I Love You, Man" teaches us is that the mean time between the Style section of the New York Times heralding a fake trend and the creation of a Hollywood comedy predicated on that fake trend is about four years. It was in April of 2005 that the Times published an article entitled "The Man Date," which made the staggering observation that two men can have dinner and see a movie and not have sex with each other afterwards. Who knew? All those years I was doing it wrong! No wonder it took me so... MORE »
Recession, Depression and Just Plain Depressing
By Glenn Kenny on 03/11/2009
Filed under: ReviewsAfter a couple of months that for all intents and purposes defined "moribund," actual moviegoing, at least in the major cities, is getting interesting again, with several masterworks or near-masterworks creeping into theaters. Jan Troell's scrupulous, beautiful "Everlasting Moments," Olivier Assayas' genuinely Renoir-esque "Summer Hours" and Philippe Garrel's blunt, idiosyncratic "Frontier of Dawn" are all exceptionally exciting and rewarding pictures, and the fact that they're all being distributed by the sister company of the one that's hosting me as a critic this month looks...well, funny, I know. What can I tell you? IFC Entertainment's acquisitions folks have excellent taste, and... MORE »
From Russia With Obviousness
By Glenn Kenny on 03/04/2009
Filed under: ReviewsSomewhere between the 40- and 60-minute marks of Nikita Mikhalkov's "12," a sparrow flies through a window into the school gymnasium that's serving as an ad hoc jury room for a supposedly routine Moscow homicide case. This is unusual for one or two reasons, the most obvious of which is that it's the dead of winter. (The window isn't open, mind you; it's broken, as is forcefully pointed out by one juror who sees the gym's sorry shape as emblematic of "40 years of running in place.") This ups the ante for what's already shaping up to be an overstuffed... MORE »
"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist"
By Matt Singer on 10/03/2008
Filed under: ReviewsWith its title and indie rock soundtrack, "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" tries to pass itself off as the underground music lover's dream romantic comedy. But while its characters claim to listen to music and even occasionally play music, they never talk about it in any convincingly intelligent way. Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings) have exactly one minor conversation about the thing that allegedly is the source of their magical compatibility. Nick supposedly makes the best mix CDs with clever titles like "Road to Closure: Volume 2"; we don't hear them. He loves an elusive but supposedly incredible... MORE »
"Burn After Reading"
By Matt Singer on 09/11/2008
Filed under: ReviewsIt doesn't make a lot of sense to follow up a movie as dark as "No Country for Old Men" with one as downright silly as "Burn After Reading," which is why it works for the Coen brothers. Joel and Ethan have done this before -- they made "Raising Arizona" after "Blood Simple"; "The Big Lebowski" followed "Fargo" -- and if there's one thing these brothers savor, it's upending their audience's expectations. The only thing people didn't like about the almost uniformly beloved "No Country" was the film's controversial ending and its handling of a sudden off-screen death of one... MORE »
"The Wackness"
By Matt Singer on 07/03/2008
Filed under: ReviewsMany movies wax nostalgic for the good old days; "The Wackness" is the only movie I can think of that's nostalgic for a time occupied by people who are themselves nostalgic about their own good old days. Though writer/director Jonathan Levine's wistful coming-of-age film wants us to miss New York City as we knew it in 1994, the characters are all pissed off: their marriages are falling apart or their high school careers (and, thus, their lives) are coming to an end, and the new mayor is cracking down on drug use. I guess the grass — the grass, man... MORE »
"Speed Racer"
By Matt Singer on 05/09/2008
Filed under: ReviewsNothing in "Speed Racer" is real: not the cars, not the buildings, not the physics, not the stakes, and certainly not the danger. If the Wachowski brothers, creators of "The Matrix" trilogy, were trying to make a movie that looked like a video game, they've accomplished their mission — more than once, "Speed Racer" reminded me of something I'd seen just hours before while playing my new copy of Mario Kart Wii. But while absurd racing games that laugh in the face of Sir Isaac Newton can be fun to play, they're certainly not very fun to watch, especially for... MORE »
Tribeca '08: "Bigger, Stronger, Faster*"
By Matt Singer on 04/28/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsBy Matt Singer [For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.] On February 16, 2007, Sylvester Stallone was busted in Australia with 48 vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin. To some, this was a non-story; after all, Stallone was not "cheating" in the same way a professional athlete might be if he were caught with the same performance-enhancing drugs. Stallone is an actor, and he's not competing against anyone. According to his lawyer, he was using Jintropin under medical supervision. But Stallone is also the man who plays Rocky Balboa and John Rambo... MORE »
Tribeca '08: "Fermat's Room"
By Matt Singer on 04/24/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsBy Matt Singer [For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.] Four Spanish mathematicians convene for an evening of puzzle-solving at the house of a man named Fermat. But almost as soon as they arrive, their mysterious host is called away to attend to his ailing daughter. A PDA rings, giving the group a question they're told they must solve in just one minute. When they don't, the walls of Fermat's room inch towards one another. Now, they must answer the riddles while trying to find an escape before they're all squeezed to death.... MORE »
Tribeca '08: "Man on Wire"
By Matt Singer on 04/18/2008
Filed under: Festivals, ReviewsBy Matt Singer [For complete coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, check out IFC's Tribeca page.] As a boy, Philippe Petit enjoyed climbing things. Many boys do. But Petit never grew out of it, the way many boys do, and when he learned about wire walking, he found his calling in life. When he heard about a pair of towers being built in lower Manhattan — even though they were still years from completion, even though he'd never been to America, even though the very act was sheer suicide — he immediately decided that someday, he would walk on... MORE »
"Frownland"
By Alison Willmore on 03/07/2008
Filed under: Reviews[A variation of this review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2007 SXSW Film Festival] "Frownland", the first feature of New York-based projectionist-turned-director Ronald Bronstein, is the cinematic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. It was also my favorite film at the last year's SXSW Film Festival, one that dares you to walk out until you, perhaps out of spite, find yourself totally drawn in and so in its strange headspace that you harbor concerns for your sanity. When I first reviewed the film, I suggested you shouldn't expect to see it in a theater near you... MORE »
"Married Life"
By Matt Singer on 03/07/2008
Filed under: ReviewsBy Matt Singer By the end of "Married Life," the characters have caused each other a great deal of harm in order to better their own lives, and they know it. Is it wrong, they wonder, to build one's happiness on the unhappiness of others? If it is, that makes going to the movies one of the most immoral acts you can do. What are movies, after all, if not the vicarious enjoyment of the suffering of others? There's plenty of suffering here, and thus plenty to enjoy. The film focuses on four people living at the turn of the... MORE »
"The Signal"
By Matt Singer on 02/22/2008
Filed under: ReviewsBy Matt Singer Three stories, three writer/directors, one movie. That's the premise of the apocalyptic sci-fi triptych "The Signal," a movie full of stuff that should feel like gimmicks but don't. David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush tell three interconnected stories with one shared cast and manage to craft something that feels like a collaboration, but looks like a work of one vision, albeit one shared by three like-minded and very creative artists. A strange, psychedelic transmission from every television, computer, and radio in the city of Terminus has turned half the population into primordial murderers and has sent... MORE »
"Diary of the Dead"
By Alison Willmore on 02/11/2008
Filed under: ReviewsBy Alison WillmoreWith "Diary of the Dead," George A. Romero has retconned his zombie apocalypse series back to its beginnings, before the burdens of upping the scale in each installment backed things into tough-to-swallow scenarios like "Land of the Dead"'s fortress for the wealthy. In "Diary," it's present day, the dead have just commenced with the rising and the munching and everyone else is willfully resistant to accept how bad things are becoming. There's a guy, a girl, a few of their more edible friends and the end of the world -- and, oh yes, a camera with which to... MORE »
"The Band's Visit"
By Matt Singer on 02/04/2008
Filed under: ReviewsBy Matt Singer "The Band's Visit" is an antidote to the more common treatment of racial and ethnic difference on screen, which is typically characterized by tragic miscommunication and huge conflicts of monumental importance. (Think "Babel.") Instead, the focus of Eran Kolirin's feature debut is squarely on humanity's potential to overcome those sorts of roadblocks and find a common ground. The result is intentionally light, maybe even a little slight, but also unquestionably warm and charming. An Egyptian police band, led by stern conductor Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), arrives in Israel to play a special concert at the opening of an... MORE »
"Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show"
By Matt Singer on 02/04/2008
Filed under: ReviewsBy Matt Singer It is very hard to care about something and then laugh about it. This is why so few movies or TV specials featuring stand-up comedians even attempt to explore the world beyond the stage, the spotlight and the microphone. If you're lucky, you get an opening sketch, maybe a few shots of the comedian arriving at the venue, and then right into the material. So much of the stand-up's persona is their casual, conversational tone; we know it's rehearsed, but we like to pretend it's not. Showing us that it's a job — and a hard one... MORE »
