Hermanas (Julia Solomonoff, Argentina/Spain): W/O (Toronto 05)
[Eventually, somebody's bound to make a movie about post-Peronist Argentina that isn't earnest and preachy and dull. It will not have flashbacks.]

Inland Empire (David Lynch, USA): 49 (NYFF 06)
[First things first: This film looks hideous. Lynch used the Sony PD-150, the same camera that made both Tadpole and Personal Velocity resemble something spit up by a teething infant, and it's not as if he's pioneered some new and singular form of murkiness -- it's just a David Lynch movie that's been stripped of all visual texture, and it's enough to make you weep. Then again, it's not as if hi-def or even celluloid was gonna save this half-assed id upchuck, which plays exactly like what Lynch has frankly admitted it is: A bunch of disconnected scenes (some simply lifted from shorts he's been posting to his website) that he wrote hurriedly, one at a time, without the foggiest notion of how (or if) they might eventually add up. For a while, this shuffle-play approach gives Inland Empire a mesmerizingly oneiric quality, with a new Betty/Diane-style transmutation occurring roughly every five minutes; during the bugfuck middle hour, I was convinced I was watching the most aggressively avant-garde narrative feature ever made. But the audaciousness is only and merely structural -- Lynch has no vision here, only a welter of fragmentary ideas that he's scattered willy-nilly across the screen, charging us with the task of investing them with meaning, or even just import. It's as if he's filmed pages of his notebook at random. Even that might be of some value were individual moments sufficiently startling and powerful, but with the exception of Dern's big monologue (which was apparently the film's starting point), there's nothing really gooseflesh-worthy, no Silencio or Robert Blake cackling in unison with his disembodied voice on the cell phone. (And stuff like the hookers performing "The Loco-Motion" just seems desperate, a sad self-parody.) I think what I'm trying to say here is that this picture is pretty kind of Oakland in my and Gertrude Stein's opinion. But even if somebody eventually comes up with a compelling interpretation, I don't think I can bring myself to wade through all that blotchiness again.]

3 Needles (Thom Fitzgerald, Canada): 46 (Toronto 05)
[A moronic idea fairly well executed, which I suppose may be preferable to a brilliant idea utterly botched. Fitzgerald has a nice touch with moments of repose, and his multinational cast oozes conviction, but he can only disguise the film's thudding didacticism for so long. And even then, I'm not sure exactly what he's trying to say with this preposterous triptych. AIDS is bad? Don't give blood? Porn kills? Jabbing at random will inflict a few superficial puncture wounds, but that's about it.]

The Aura (Fabián Bielinsky, Argentina): 40 (Sundance 06)
[No way in hell is this one getting a doggedly faithful American remake -- Hollywood could keep a passel of script doctors hopping for months just injecting some personality into the tediously recessive protagonist (an epileptic taxidermist? talk about desperately grasping for metaphor) and whittling down the obscenely bloated 134-minute running time. And if you're going to retain one of the leads from Nine Queens, for god's sake make it Gastón Pauls, not Ricardo Darín.]

Flannel Pajamas (Jeff Lipsky, USA): 48 (Sundance 06)
[About a year ago, I wrote a piece for Esquire arguing that American movies could use a lot more incidental nudity -- that verisimilitude, should that be your goal, demands an acknowledgment that in real life people frequently don't have clothes on, even if they're not having sex or taking a shower at that particular moment. Shortly after its publication, I received a lengthy voicemail message from Jeff Lipsky*, thanking me profusely for speaking truth to power and whatnot. I don't even know how he got my number, frankly. After seeing Flannel Pajamas, though, I can see why he felt he'd found a kindred spirit: This is one of the most admirably frank depictions of a romantic relationship I've ever seen in an English-language film. (I never imagined I'd hear an actress as wholesome-looking as Julianne Nicholson say the words "I'm dripping.") Trouble is, I never remotely bought these two people as a couple, partly because I find Justin Kirk unaccountably irritating -- he was a large part of the reason I couldn't get through Mike Nichols' Angels in America -- but mostly because their personalities screamed "train wreck" right from scene one. Which you could argue is precisely the point, given the film's dispiriting narrative arc (think 5 x 2 in normal chronological order, with many more scenes)...but their initial infatuation still needs to be credible, and instead it comes off merely as a writer's fabrication (which is also a massive problem in the Ozon, but never mind). In other words, intent good, execution not so much. But I'm grateful to Kirk and Nicholson for their candor. Sets a good example.

* (who's better known as a distribution exec than as a filmmaker; he'd pilloried me in the past for dissing various Lot 47 releases, notably Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner and L.I.E. -- reputedly going so far as to claim that my negative review of the latter could only mean that I was sexually molested as a child [!])

For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest, USA): 47 (Toronto 06)
[On the one hand, I'm happy to see Guest abandon the moldy mockumentary format; on the other hand, most of the belly laughs derive from the scenes involving chat-show appearances and EPK interviews. Biggest problem, though, is that Mamet already knocked most of these gags out of the park; I love Ricky Gervais, but his three or four minutes of inane-grin improv here, wringing endless variations on "Can we make it less Jewish?," doesn't pack half the punch of Philip Seymour Hoffman holding his script up against the window (just to write on the back), thereby belatedly revealing that it's actually called The Old Mill. However, the inability of contemporary American audiences to appreciate great screen comedy is a rant for another occasion. Fact is, I tend to enjoy Guest's movies in bits and pieces, and I look forward to seeing some of these scenes again at my friend Chris' annual clip party. This year's excerpt from A Mighty Wind (rating: 50) was a hoot.]

Harsh Times (David Ayer, USA): W/O (Toronto 05)
[Give Ayer credit -- the guy's not afraid to write unsympathetic characters. Two reels of Christian Bale as a bullet-headed asshole, however, was more than sufficient. Training Day's Alonzo and Dark Blue's Eldon Perry were ambiguous, charismatic monsters; this guy's just a douchebag, and Ayer seems to be taking a little too much pleasure in his transgressions. (Jeff McCloud: "This picture sounds awesome.") Let me know if it goes somewhere other than where it pretty clearly seems to be headed.]

Iraq in Fragments (James Longley, USA): W/O (Sundance 06)
[Longley's impressionistic approach is undeniably refreshing in an age when most documentary filmmakers have zero interest in aesthetics. After 15 minutes, though, I felt like I'd already seen everything the movie had to offer; even when it switched locales and subjects (not long before I bailed), I had no sense that these particular shards of quotidian existence were adding up to anything. Or, to put it another way, there seemed to be no reason why this film needed to be 90 minutes long (as opposed to 20 minutes or six hours), except that that's how long commercially-viable feature films tend to be. Plus I was nodding off, so heck with it.]

Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, Japan): W/O (Toronto 05)
[Imagine The Commitments with dour Japanese schoolgirls in lieu of boisterous Irish layabouts. Now imagine it at half-speed. Now imagine that you're watching it through binoculars from two miles away. Got a mental picture? Ten times as dynamic as what I saw of this, though (lukewarm) local reviews claim it picks up a bit in the second half.]

Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, USA): 51 (Toronto 06)
[Am I the only one who doesn't even think the basic idea is all that clever? As a comic device, it's good for about half a dozen chuckles; as a means of exploring ideas about creativity and stagnation, it suffers from the mother of all ontological pitfalls; and as a Kaufmanesque mindfuck, this dude Zach Helm is not even remotely Charlie Kaufman. Furthermore, I'm still not buying Will Ferrell as anything more than a big broad funnyman -- hate to say it, but he just doesn't have the features to communicate complex emotions. (It's those beady little eyes.) Aims for profound, barely achieves cute.]

Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/France): 57 (Cannes 06)
[My expectations were considerably higher for Climates, since Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant, which won the Jury Prize here in 2003, was one of my favorite films that year. Shot for shot, this is the most visually evocative film I've seen so far; unfortunately, Ceylan has written a fairly banal scenario -- sort of a glum existentialist version of Albert Brooks' Modern Romance -- that depends as much on performative nuance as compositional flair, and then cast himself and his wife in the leading roles. As a result, form obliterates content to the point where you start to resent that all this dazzling cinematography has been wasted on a couple of inexpressive lumps. In years to come, I'll largely remember Climates as the movie that finally completely sold me on digital video: Shot and projected on hi-def, it looks absolutely flat-out stunning, with a level of fine detail that I'd never imagined the medium could possibly provide. Now if they can just do something about the deep blacks...]

Be With Me (Eric Khoo, Singapore): W/O (Cannes 05)
[The Fortnight opened just a few hours ago, and I bailed on the first film, Eric Khoo's Be With Me, after two reels -- long enough to work out the structure (various takes on love -- puppy love, unrequited love, enduring love) and to confirm that Khoo had no intention of doing anything very interesting with it. I occasionally catch some flack for walking out of movies (always at the end of the second reel, or about 35-40 minutes in), but the truth is that you can usually tell whether a movie's got it going on within the first few shots. That Match Point was operating on a higher plane than Allen's other recent films, for example, was apparent literally from the very first shot. I'm fairly confident that Be With Me is saccharine, uninspired drivel, but I'll check out the reviews in the trades tomorrow, just to be sure.]

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (Dito Montiel, USA): 52 (Sundance 06)
[Works reasonably well as straight-ahead memoir -- it's the present-day framing story, with its noxious air of commingled self-satisfaction (hey looka me!) and self-pity (survivor's guilt), that leaves a sour taste. Plus it's simply impossible to believe that Shia LaBoeuf could ever grow up to become Robert Downey, Jr. (whereas I had no trouble accepting Rosario Dawson as an adult Melonie Diaz). Q: Were tough Astoria street kids really listening to "Moments in Love" in 1986?]

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, USA): 80 (Sundance 06)
[This is one of those films I'd rather not talk too much about, for fear of ruining the experience for others. (Not that anyone's likely to see it -- hands up, everyone who saw Reichardt's equally terrific River of Grass in its initial commercial run.) I'll just say (a) that this is the movie I wanted Blissfully Yours to be, and (b) that afterwards I was so choked up I couldn't eat, even though my stomach was rumbling for the entire 83 minutes. Oh, and also (c) that I still can't believe that's the preacher kid from Matewan.]

The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, France): 41 (Sundance 06)
[Cinema is an inherently oneiric medium, which makes movies that overtly traffic in dream logic the equivalent of a hat on a hat. Frantic bursts of outré imagery notwithstanding, this one is mostly pretty dull, with Gael García ernal a flavorless Walter Mitty and Charlotte Gainsbourg little more than the dimples across the hall. And while Human Nature didn't really work, at least it had some ideas. This is just whimsy-a-go-go.]

Rolling Family (Pablo Trapero, Argentina): 34 (NYFF 04)
[Within ten minutes I was rooting for this intensely irritating clan to roll right over the edge of a very high cliff. Is Argentina really so white-hot right now that even a muddy, formulaic, patronizing bit of slapdash road-comedy fluff can now find favor at Venice and New York? Can somebody make a credible case for this film as more insightful or penetrating, or even just less ugly and noxious, than the average Miramax pickup -- Everybody's Famous, for example? Remember when the family's trailer predictably broke down, allowing for the de rigueur period of stasis in which various trite relationships ostensibly grow more complicated? And then later it broke down again? And did I imagine it or did they somewhere in there send the Slutty Daughter and her Oily Bohunk for gas on his motorcycle whereupon that broke down as well? Yet throughout all of this convenient mechanical failure, nobody ever fails to continue yammering and gesticulating and covertly auditioning for the forthcoming Buenos Aires production of "Tony n' Tina's Wedding." Once again, as with The Holy Girl, I found myself silently chanting "End. End. End. End." This time, however, there was well over an hour left to go.]

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick, USA): 65 (Sundance 06)
[Makes all the arguments you'd expect, but with enough wit and energy that the converted won't mind being preached to. Plus it's almost as much a procedural about private investigators as it is an exposé about the MPAA's secret cabal. The revelation of the appeal board's identities (not the allegedly average parents who decide upon the initial ratings) produced first audible gasps and then incredulous laughter at my screening; it's so ludicrously damning that Dick doesn't even bother commenting upon it. He just immmediately ends the film. Because, really, what else can you say?]

The Illusionist (Neil Burger, USA): 45 (Sundance 06)
[Clearly mediocre right from the get-go -- it's the sort of overly emphatic, plot-heavy, emotionally hollow story that you usually find in bus-station spinner racks -- but I got sucked in anyway just because, well, I dig magic. (Ricky Jay was a consultant, and I once saw him perform one of the tricks featured in this film.) If you can't guess the ending halfway through, you're not trying very hard, which incidentally puts you in good company with Ms. Jessica Biel.]

Pusher II (Nicolas Winding Refn, Denmark): 43 (Toronto 05)
[Wasn't planning on seeing these, since I didn't like the original (and despised Winding Refn's Fear X), but then a person who shall remain unnamed insisted that that they are totally awesome, etc. And so I duly subjected myself to the gritty, uncompromising tale of a poor little wannabe badass whose Daddy never gave him a hug. Awww. Anyway, that was subjection enough.]

The Ordeal (Fabrice du Welz, Belgium/France/Luxembourg): 53 (Toronto 04)
[Rating might well be lower had any other actor played the lead role, as I can't stand Laurent Lucas and thus took great pleasure in watching him being tortured and humiliated. Subtext is a bit more nuanced than some are crediting, I think -- it's significant that our "hero"'s vanity and insensitivity are repeatedly tied to his status as an object of desire to people who are themselves patently undesirable -- but with the singular exception of that bugfuck tavern hoedown (note to self: clip party), the film rarely transcends its generic horror trappings. Also, Q: Has there ever been a movie in which someone gets lost in the middle of nowhere and takes refuge in a creepy hostel populated by ominously eccentric character actors and then himself turns out to be a deranged killer? I would like to see this picture or perhaps Write it if it does not exist.]

Quinceañera (Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, USA): 60 (Sundance 06)
[Again, familiar territory, but it benefits from being set in a little-seen milieu: the Hispanic community of L.A.'s Echo Park. And while Glatzer & Westmoreland's The Fluffer felt clumsy and stilted, here they seem in total command of their material, coaxing fine, naturalistic performances from an inexperienced cast and letting the drama accrue from a series of unforced observations. Puzzling emphasis on the elderly uncle in the final reel retroactively explained by closing dedication.]

Brothers of the Head (Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe, UK): 45 (Toronto 05)
[Scrupulous, entirely credible simulacrum of a dull documentary; only the foreknowledge that it's actually fiction makes it remotely interesting, and even then my interest remained, well, remote. This Is Spinal Tap and Stuck on You are more incisive about rock and roll rivalry and separation anxiety, respectively, and funny besides.]

Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris, USA): W/O (Sundance 06)
[Blech. Bilge warned me that the comedy here is entirely predicated on what I long ago dubbed The Fallacy of the Profane Granny, and boy was he not kidding. Reliable reports indicate there's some genuinely funny stuff about child beauty pageants in the third act, but you'll have to endure a vanload of curdled quirkiness to get to it. I wouldn't even have bothered, really, except that last year's big-ticket sale/mainstream-press darling (Hustle & Flow) turned out to be surprisingly tolerable (and featured two of my Voice poll votes for 2005's best performances). Still, lesson learned: I'm typing this during the press screening for The Night Listener.]

13 Tzameti (Géla Babluani, France): 35 (Sundance 06)
[This movie's stupid. Gritty b&w 'Scope cinematography and nonstop portent got me excited for a couple of reels; alas, the payoff, when it arrives, is little more than Intacto as conceived by somebody with no imagination. Human life is cheap, fate is cruelly ironic, ho-hum. Nice to see Aurélien Recoing as a full-tilt badass, though.[

Heading South (Laurent Cantet, France/Canada): 40 (Toronto 05)
[Astonishingly smug, hamhanded and lazy, considering the source. Emblematic moment: Brenda chides the restauranteur for his racism, and the audience duly chortles at her unthinking hypocrisy. Painful to watch the actors contend with their helpful expository monologues. Basically a waste of some really gorgeous scenery, not to mention Rampling.]

The Great Yokai War (Takashi Miike, Japan): 47 (Toronto 05)
[Reminiscent of dorky '80s kidflicks like Krull and The Last Starfighter, except with creatures from Japanese folklore in lieu of the Star Wars cantina regulars. A handful of striking images and a few stray moments of wit don't remotely justify the two-hour running time. And after six years and 600+ movies, I think it's now official: Audition was a fluke.]

The Forsaken Land (Vimukthi Jayasundara, France/Sri Lanka): W/O (Toronto 05)
[Zzzzzzzzz.]

Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark, USA): 53 (Toronto 05)
[Starts off as the usual Clark nonsense -- fetishization of youth, unashamed leering, lethargy-as-dynamism, etc. -- but once the boys hit Beverly Hills the film abruptly metamorphoses into high camp, closer in spirit to early Araki than to any of Clark's previous work (with the notable exception of the undistributed Teenage Caveman). Choice comic highlights include Beverly Hills teens who seem to have taken a break from a school production of Less Than Zero; Clint Eastwood bagging himself a wetback in his backyard; and a thrash-scored fight sequence that stops dead for a minute-long interlude in which one of our heroes struggles to get his skin-tight jeans over his hip bones. Not exactly what I'd call good -- I enjoyed it on roughly the same level that I enjoyed, say, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls -- but certainly preferable to Clark's allegedly "serious" work. This one is retarded on purpose.]

Lemming (Dominik Moll, France): 56 (Cannes 05)
[The most interesting of the three [Competition films] I've seen is the movie that opened the festival, Dominik Moll's Lemming, a quasi-supernatural thriller in much the same vein as Moll's previous film, With a Friend Like Harry. I'd assumed the title was metaphorical, but in fact the plot involves an honest-to-goodness lemming, found wedged in the plumbing of the film's young model couple (Laurent Lucas and Charlotte Gainsbourg). Which is not to say the poor creature doesn't do double duty as a Symbol, but Moll and his co-writer, Gilles Marchand, are more interested in rupturing their protagonists' fragile happiness via an encounter with an older, bitter married couple, played by Andre Dussollier and Charlotte Rampling. Engrossing throughout, and Moll gets terrific mileage out of Lucas' job as the inventor of a remote-controlled flying webcam, but ultimately there's less here than meets the eye. Still, about 45 minutes into the film I had no idea where it was headed, and after the plodding inevitability of Harry and Marchand's Who Killed Bambi?, that uncertainty was a blessing.]

Dead Man's Shoes (Shane Meadows, UK): 38 (Toronto 04)
[Revenge movies should either (a) grapple with moral ambiguity or (b) appeal to our suppressed bloodlust. The best of them, of course, (c) manage to do both. This one accomplishes (d) none of the above. It is just some dude we don't care about killing a bunch of other dudes we don't care about to avenge his retarded brother, about whom we do not so much care. Neither exciting nor unsettling -- merely unpleasant, and finally rather dull.]

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania): 33 (Cannes 05/NYFF 05)
[When I walked out of this back at Cannes, it merely seemed dull and obvious; turns out subsequent scenes are actively risible, with virtually the entire nation's medical staff lining up to piss on this poor old duffer. Not that I don't believe that many doctors and nurses are oblivious, abusive, insensitive, opportunistic, imperious, etc. -- just not all of them, and especially not in the face of someone who's clearly in immediate need of emergency surgery. Like most victim films, what Lazarescu offers -- the secret of its success among a certain class of cinéaste -- is multiple opportunities for the viewer to feel smugly superior to the cartoonishly unfeeling bastards surrounding the designated martyr; at today's screening, I swear I could actually hear tongues clucking (plus one gentleman who loudly chortled at each peevish or self-absorbed line of dialogue: "Ho ho ho!" he kept ho-ing, so very proud of himself for recognizing ignobility when he sees it). Might have worked as a black comedy, and some folks seem to have convinced themselves that that's precisely what it is; Lazarescu Dante Remus quickly becomes far too pitiable for us to enjoy his tribulations, though, and on the whole the film's tone seems much more outraged and sorrowful than antic or mordant. According to the press notes, this is the first entry in a proposed Rohmeresque sextette; be still my palpitating heart.]

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Park Chan Wook, South Korea): 35 (NYFF 05)
[So I sat down just now to refute the arguments of this film's supporters, who maintain that Park is somehow interrogating the representation of onscreen violence, thereby producing in the viewer an equivocal and productively conflicted response, only to realize that I haven't actually read any such argument. All I've seen thus far are assertions. And since I have no idea what these people are talking about, given that the movie I saw consisted of 100 minutes of slick, flashy genre pyrotechnics followed by 12 minutes of patently insincere hand-wringing, there's not a whole lot I can say at this point. Steve Erickson has wondered aloud why Park isn't getting the benefit of the doubt routinely allotted to filmmakers like Cronenberg and Eastwood, who've plowed similar terrain -- perhaps it's because neither of them would demand dead-serious reflection upon thorny ethical quandaries not long after providing a cute sight gag in which an out-of-focus figure in the background soaps the floor, causing the person in the foreground to slip and be knocked unconscious. Nothing about this (emblematic) bit -- and it is a "bit," a routine, right up to the "punchline" of Geum-ja brandishing the bar of soap (as much to the camera as to her friend, given Park's deliberate obfuscation) -- anyway, nothing about this bit is designed to make us feel queasy, or blur the identification figure, or indeed do anything apart from elicit a chuckle at Park's cleverness. Even the physical type of the actress cast as the (literal) heavy suggests comedy and condones comeuppance. I can think of a dozen different ways in which Park could have started laying the thematic groundwork here (e.g. Cronenberg's gruesome carnage inserts in History of Violence), not one of which he employs. And so when we reach the ostensibly disturbing climax, and I'm suddenly expected to find myself (or at least part of myself) recoiling...sorry, I just don't buy it. The film doesn't earn that response. And while I get the impression I'm meant to feel something for the victim, or for the permanently warped souls of the perpetrators, I don't. I don't feel anything. This film made me feel absolutely nothing, apart from some grudging admiration of Park's formidable technique, which seemed more appropriate in the overtly cartoonish context of Oldboy. The conclusion doesn't feel like it's what the film has been inexorably building toward; it feels like a retroactive justification for everything preceding it. In short, I think Park is full of shit. But I eagerly await the case for the defense.]

Nathalie... (Anne Fontaine, France): 55 (Toronto 03)
[Ardant is sublime and Béart is smokin', but I saw exactly where this was headed midway through Monologue #1, whereupon a great deal of thumb-twiddling ensued. Elegant, understated, forgettable.]

The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary Harron, USA): 67 (Toronto 05)
[Shallow and hollow, but enormously entertaining, at least up until its historically accurate wet noodle of an ending. Gretchen Mol, with her fetching dimples and spectacular bod, couldn't be more perfectly cast -- indeed, I defy anyone to tell the difference between Bettie's bad acting in various auditions/class exercises and Mol's performance in Rounders. Granted, the movie has only one idea -- basically Edward D. Wood, Jr. as a pinup girl -- but there's something both poignant and (for me at least) intensely erotic about Page's goggle-eyed enthusiasm in the midst of depravity. It may not be psychologically credible (and the way the film introduces the specter of rape and childhood sexual abuse only to completely ignore them thereafter is downright weird, albeit still preferable to Tim Robbins bucking for an Oscar as Perpetually Tramautized Dave), but then this is less a character study than the further mythologizing of an icon. On those limited terms, it works.]

Drawing Restraint 9 (Matthew Barney, USA): 60 (Toronto 05)
[Not a film that's going to change anyone's mind about Barney. As usual, I grooved on a lot of the outré imagery but never had a clue what the hell various objects and rituals are intended to symbolize. Thought for a while he might simply be foregrounding the bizarre, arbitrary nature of the marriage ceremony, but how that fits in with the couple's status as "Occidental Guests" in maritime Japan I have no idea. And as with the Cremaster cycle, I don't really truly care. This one peaks early, with the parade/mold-pouring sequence (set to a fabulously moody Björk track that sounds like your upstairs neighbor's stereo system as filtered through several feet of plaster, wood and carpet), but I remained mildly fascinated throughout.]

Iron Island (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran): 61 (Toronto 05)
[One of those movies in which a vividly photogenic setting -- here, a rusting oil tanker that serves as makeshift digs for a community of squatters -- does most of the heavy lifting. Mostly observational, though it takes a somewhat harrowing turn in the home stretch; too bad Rasoulof didn't focus more on the "captain," who at times seems genuinely and intriguingly torn between altruism and opportunism. Worth a look for those with a jones for the decrepit.]

Tsotsi (Gavin Hood, UK/South Africa): W/O (Toronto 05)
[{ICON representing a movie in which somebody experiences personal growth when forced to care for a small child.} I'm thinking maybe a little floating-head pyramid: Danson, Selleck, Guttenberg.]

Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Germany/Belgium): 17 (Cannes 05)
[Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven opens and closes with an unsimulated blowjob, so expect plenty of comparisons to 2003's designated disaster, The Brown Bunny, especially from detractors. In fact, Vincent Gallo's forthright sincerity is the exact opposite of Reygadas' grandiose pretensions. I was no fan of Reygadas' feature debut, Japon, but friends of mine who admired it claimed that I'd missed the point, that what I'd taken for an overwrought drama was in fact a wry comedy. I didn't buy this argument at the time, and I'm even more skeptical after suffering through the suffocating self-importance of Battle in Heaven, which extends all the way to that godawful title. Still, the film features all the elements likely to endear it to a certain kind of cinephile. Physically repulsive actors engaging in strenuously unerotic sex? Check. Long takes in which the camera self-consciously retreats from its ostensible subject to take in a panoramic view of the surrounding world? But of course. Pointless, climactic act of sudden violence? Hey, it wouldn't be a pretentious art film without one. I dunno, I guess I'm just not the target audience for this kind of thing -- seems to me that Reygadas cares less about making a connection with the (admittedly hypothetical) viewer than about creating/maintaining a certain kind of aesthetic self-image.]

Neil Young: Heart of Gold (Jonathan Demme, USA): 57 (Sundance 06)
[Standard-issue concert doc, absent the formal experimentation Demme employed with the Heads and Hitchcock. New material remarkably good; catalog selections a little heavy on Harvest (probably my least favorite canonical N. Young platter). Although I must say that the closer to Fogeyville Young gets, the more poignant his rendition of "Old Man" becomes.]

Bubble (Steven Soderbergh, USA): 58 (NYFF 05)
[Quite possibly the strangest film I've seen all year, precisely because it's so resolutely ordinary. Working in middle America with a non-pro cast, Soderbergh goes for the creepily ascetic approach, establishing a prosaic, enervated mood right at the get-go and never modulating it one iota, even when Syd Field turns up with a late-breaking Inciting Incident. Studio or indie, all of the director's previous films -- including the wildly experimental jump-start tossoff that was Schizopolis -- are unmistakably the product of a sensibility steeped in cinema; Bubble, by contrast, feels like the work of an idiot savant, someone who's seen only a handful of movies and understood them imperfectly. With its deliberately flat performances, its transparent narrative and its muleheaded refusal to sensationalize the banal, it acts as an implicit rebuke to various dark-heart-of-America fever dreams, notablyEraserhead and Blue Velvet. But while its utter lack of affectation makes it almost as arresting as a Lynch movie, that same quality all but guarantees a lack of resonance -- indeed, the film's entire meaning appears to be contained in its primary setting (a doll factory) and, even more significantly, in its title. Shit, I'm starting to sound like Hoberman here. Point being I'm not really sure what to make of this queer curio. I admire its parsimony, up to a point, but as the closing credits appeared (over a striking montage) I still felt hungry for a bona fide movie.]

Manderlay (Lars von Trier, Denmark): 43 (Cannes 05)
[Trilogies invariably sound intriguing in theory, but they rarely work very well in practice. Lars von Trier's Dogville is my favorite film of roughly the last five years, and so I had ridiculously high hopes for the sequel, Manderlay, in which Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) happens upon an Alabama plantation and is horrified to discover that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has yet to be enforced within its walls. Alas, it suffers from massive deficiencies in both form and content. Dogville's neo-Brechtian use of a massive bare soundstage, augmented with chalk outlines and a few simple props, served a crucial purpose, underlining the tale's allegorical nature; here, employed again, it's merely a distracting gimmick, since whatever the allegorical potential of slavery (and it's pretty easy to read Manderlay as an anti-Shrub screed), it's not a subject that's very well suited to abstraction. And Von Trier's ideas regarding slavery and cultural imperialism are really pretty dumb, especially when it comes to Grace's shameful lust for the haughtiest and hunkiest of her new black friends (Isaach de Bankolé). Worst of all, the film is dull -- 40 minutes shorter than Dogville, it feels a good hour longer. A few days ago, Von Trier announced that he plans to shoot an unrelated Dogme 95 flick before proceeding to the projected third installment, Wasington (sic); frankly, I now rather hope that he forgets all about it in the interim.]

Le Monde vivant (Eugène Green, France/Belgium): 65 (Rotterdam 04)
[If Bresson did children's theater. Semi-anachronistic fairy tale played with just the right balance of dry wit and heartfelt naïveté; the non-performances -- delivered directly to the lens, Interrotron-style -- are all beautifully inflected. Early best line of the festival, from a dying knight: "Now I will never need spectacles." No doubt this assessment will repel as many folks as it attracts, but it's really kind of darling.]