Director Anton Corbjin has enough visual talent to make a film set in drab, waterlogged Macclesfield, England (post-punk biopic Control) one of the great cinematographic achievements of the past decade. You can imagine, then, what he does with Southern Italy. In strictly pictorial terms, Corbjin's new thriller "The American" is jaw-dropping from first frame to last, capturing a gorgeous hilltop village that sits above the clouds in the lower valley. What's even more impressive is that the film's imagery never feels like shallow postcard fodder. Corbjin coaxs all sorts of unexpected emotion out of categorically beautiful territory - paranoia from an overhead shot of strangely twisting roads, methodical determination from geometric architecture, loneliness out of a lush riverbed.

Universal Law of Cinema #436 states that the most satisfying part of any film including in its cast the actor Bill Murray will be the actor Bill Murray. In this regard, the debut film from director Aaron Schneider, Get Low (trailer), does not disappoint (Universal Law of Cinema #437 states, on the other hand, that serious films shall endeavor to avoid any titular resemblance to noted singles by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, but I digress). ]]>

Universal Law of Cinema #436 states that the most satisfying part of any film including in its cast the actor Bill Murray will be the actor Bill Murray. In this regard, the debut film from director Aaron Schneider, Get Low (trailer), does not disappoint (Universal Law of Cinema #437 states, on the other hand, that serious films shall endeavor to avoid any titular resemblance to noted singles by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz, but I digress). Low tells the story of a hermit who decides to throw his own funeral party, and Murray plays the funeral parlor owner who decides to oblige him, against most state, federal, and theological regulations.

Murray’s character Frank Quinn is not someone you would call of a man of virtue - “That’s the thing about Chicago,” he says wistfully as he laments the dearth of funeral business in his Depression-era Tennessee town, “people know how to die.” But he is still a man of fundamental principle, continually tempted by sin, by the bags of others’ money that soon end up on his desk, but only ever leaning slightly in its direction. It’s a remarkable performance, one that resounds with complexity.

Shame about the rest of the movie. It’s not that Get Low doesn’t have its pleasures. Actors like the great Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek are never exactly bad, and Duvall in particular combines his trademark ability for layering repressed emotions underneath an enigmatic veneer with a winning cantankerousness that plays well against Murray’s embodiment of deadpan. And Schneider, a former cinematographer, can certainly shoot the hell out of the backwoods of Tennessee, casting his detailed period piece environments in a sepia glow that occasionally bursts into fiery color.

But when the movie transitions from genial comic fable to serious drama, it more or less collapses. Duvall’s hermit, you see, went into his 40-year isolation because of the Dark Secret in his Past™, a sin that left him inconsolable for years and that now finally has him seeking redemption. Schneider builds his movie around the suspenseful reveal of this secret at the end, which is a dangerous game to play, since anything short of a Crying Game-level corker will inevitably end up disappointing the audience.

But on a scale from late-period Shyamalan to early-period Shyamalan, the payoff here lands at the same level as “It was all a dream” (non-Inception division). Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that the sin that is the story’s linchpin is “bad,” but it’s the kind of “bad” that can be very easily forgiven by audiences - and a redemption story without something truly worthy of redemption is nothing more than a tease.

The stock answer on how to improve this ending is to never reveal the big secret at all, but that’s a cliche itself in this day and age. No, a braver movie would have challenged its audience, assigning a genuinely transgressive act (for our age, not theirs) to the tormented hermit. As it stands, the ending is a fundamental cop-out, one that can make the rest of the movie seem like a con game.

All that said, of course, having lowered expectations for the ending will no doubt allow you to appreciate the ride there much more (you’re welcome). And if you think watching two of the greatest American actors riffing with each other is worth the price of admission, Get Low is certainly a pleasant enough time at the movies. Just be wary of false prophets promising screen redemption* - true movie salvation requires a little more than jokes and beautifully photographed candlelight.

It may surprise you to learn that the favorite film of Martin Scorsese is The Red Shoes (trailer), the 1948 movie about ballet from directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that plays at The Kentucky Theatre on Wednesday (9/1). The type of red that Scorsese is usually concerned with, after all, has less to do with footwear than with arterial sprays. But the first clue is a brief exchange between ballerina protagonist Vicky Page (Moira Shearer) and the composer she will soon fall in love with (Anton Walbrook). “Why do you want to dance?” he asks. “Why do you want to live?” she replies.

The Red Shoes soon gives Vicky the Hollywood arc of a rising star and entangles her in a love triangle with the composer and a brooding ballet troupe impresario, but it’s those questions that are the true focus of the film. Along with Vertigo and (yes) Raging Bull, The Red Shoes is one of the great cinematic stories of self-destructive obsession, the kind that makes one’s passion and one’s life mutually exclusive. And it expresses those whirlpool of emotions through operatic filmic textures that were revolutionary for the time and remain utterly awe-inspiring today.

The central example is the 17-minute dance sequence at the film’s midpoint. Up to this point, filming dance mainly involved keeping a still camera on a talented dancer for as long as possible. But Powell and Pressburger sought to replicate the expressiveness of dance and music in cinematic language.

For every crescendo and glissando, every spin and twirl, the directors created a dazzling corollary - the film gently glides behind the dancers in elegant tracking shots, pirouettes with flurries of quick edits, and leaps into arrays of psychedelic imagery that bend the laws of reality. The scene, perhaps the great dance sequence of the cinema, is stunning enough that it transcends the form of ballet and becomes a pure multi-sensory artistic expression of emotion, one that will stun viewers with simplistic preconceived notions about how ballet is always boring (read: me).

Powell’s film was a passionate plea to a jaded post-WWII generation. “For 10 years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy,” he said, “but now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.” The message still resonates today, and the fact that Lexington audiences have the chance to see this ground-breaking movie in the otherworldly vividness of authentic Technicolor film is truly special. Indeed, the real question that the film raises after a viewing isn’t why Scorsese, who supervised the film’s meticulous restoration, continually champions it - it’s why more other directors don’t.

The opening credits of Solitary Man are set to a cover of the song “Solitary Man” by Johnny Cash, which is the kind of ominous decision that suggest many further on-the-nose groaners are on the way (and yes, he is dressed all in black). The trailer certainly doesn’t help matters – it introduces Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas) as a once-successful family man turned impoverished loathsome lothario and points to a movie that will go through the typically trite rumba of reconciliation.

Are you ready to rumble (in a manufactured marketing-ploy kind of way)? Studio wonks have been spinning this weekend's release of chick flick "Eat Pray Love" and 80s-action-hero-reunion "The Expendables" into an epic battle of the sexes faster than you can say "limp attempt to conjure publicity out of nothingness".]]>

Are you ready to rumble (in a manufactured marketing-ploy kind of way)? Studio wonks have been spinning this weekend’s release of chick flick “Eat Pray Love” and 80s-action-hero-reunion “The Expendables” into an epic battle of the sexes faster than you can say “limp attempt to conjure publicity out of nothingness”. The pinnacle of tact in the phony back-and-forth is an unofficial “Expendables” YouTube trailer (unofficially co-opted by the actual campaign) which intercuts brawny “Expendable” action with shots from “Twilight” and “Sex and the City” and asks males to help the film beat “Eat” at the box office. “Take back what’s ours,” exhorts the trailer, claiming cinema for “us”, presumably along with other manly things like cars and voting rights. Of course, lost in the shuffle is the general critical drubbing of both films.

Fortunately, there’s a far more interesting battle being waged at the multiplexes this weekend. In one corner we have Edgar Wright, the wunderkind comedic director who has crafted perhaps his finest technical achievement in his new “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”. In the other corner stands Michael Cera, playing the title role of “Pilgrim” with the same limited range and anti-charisma that have marked every performance in his career. Can Wright somehow make an interesting film with the world’s dullest (yet still somehow bankable) leading man?

Remarkably, the answer is yes, and Wright’s triumph over the issues of his actor and his source material (a graphic novel series by Bryan O’Malley) is in its own way as remarkable as any of Scott Pilgrim’s battle victories over super-powered evil ex-boyfriends. The exes belong to Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and our not-terribly-heroic man-child must defeat them all in video-game-styled duels to the death before he can win her heart, all while competing for a record deal in a Battle of the Bands and trying to find some direction for his aimless slacker life. Feel free to assemble your own critique of this basic plot by skimming through old reviews of Judd Apatow movies - possible choices include “a continual dull emphasis on immature man-children”, “marginalized female characters as solely male fantasies”, and “the fact that said females invariably end up with said lowly males”.

But Wright’s formal tricks extend far beyond the Apatow trope of continual male nudity. “Pilgrim” has the same kind of ground-breaking aesthetic kick found in films like Robert Rodriguez’s “Sin City”, but it also has the wit and intelligence to back up that approach. The fusing of reality and pop culture in the world of “Pilgrim” - the screen is continually flooded with comic-book onomatopoeia, video-game indicators, and anime-style visual distortion and split-screening - has a point. Wright’s film shows the way that a media-saturated generation views the world - as almost inextricable from the technology that permeates it. The approach also allows him to be tremendously funny - few modern comedic directors know how to use editing and visual sleight-of-hand to set up punch lines quite like Wright, and the breakneck shot rhythms he establishes keep the film vibrating with comic delights in every corner of the screen. Wright also happens to be a tremendously talented director of action - the fight scenes here are more dizzyingly surreal and dreamlike than anything in “Inception”. If Wright had an actor as talented as his “Hot Fuzz” and “Shaun of the Dead” lead Simon Pegg in this role, the film might have been a comic masterpiece. As it is, some critics are simultaneously lauding the film’s technical prowess but declaring it a hollow pleasure due to that dull core plot. I’m inclined to think that eye-popping aesthetics and riotous humor alone are enough to make a film immensely satisfying.

But lest you think the men(-children) have won this weekend’s battle, be advised that Nicole Holofcener’s female-centric comedy “Please Give”, opening at the Kentucky Theatre, is just as good a film, if not better. Directing a satire of New York yuppies may initially sound like shooting caviar in a barrel. But Holofcener has plenty of new insights to bring to the story of Kate (Catherine Keener), a wealthy boutique owner paralyzed by guilt over her success and obsessed with extending charity to others. For all her external nobility, Kate’s philanthropy has more to do with her attempts to improve her self-image, and Holofcener has great fun building an ensemble of similarly self-obsessed characters to skewer: Kate’s cheating husband (Oliver Platt), her acne-plagued daughter who lusts for $200 jeans (Sarah Steele), a mouthy spray-tanning spa worker (Amanda Peet), and a viciously cantankerous old lady (Ann Guilbert).

“Give” is a modest movie, one that eschews overt drama in favor of developing piercing insights and reveling in the resulting humor. But its achievements linger with you long after the film is over. In this day and age, many people will likely have trouble sympathizing with an issue as out of step with the times as the attempts of the wealthy to get over their guilt. But Holofcener’s remarkable achievement is that she can make even the most resistant audiences understand her character’s problems - and, if nothing else, she’ll have them laughing at those problems too.

Originally published for the Ace Weekly blog.

Unsurprisingly, some of the most enduring films of that era belonged to a genre that adhered to the letter of the law but took a Tommy gun to its spirit.

Getting back to a semblance of normal scheduling - "Playtime", "Splice", "Get Him to the Greek", "Twilight" and "Twilight: New Moon" with RiffTrax]]>

Playtime (1967, dir. by Jacques Tati)

I’ve harped on in the past about movies that attempt to explain the workings of the entire world in two hours, but if anyone could do it, it’s Jacques Tati. And “Playtime” does seem to contain nearly everything - potent thoughts on urban disconnection and alienation, globalization and world homogenization, the entropic triumph of anarchy over order, and most gloriously, the power of optimism to shape the world. Everything, that is, except a plot or even a real main character. But who needs the whole song when the individual riffs are so arresting? And, to overextend the metaphor, riffs that are so gorgeously played - the magisterial dystopian terrors in glass and blue-gray metal here are worth every bankrupting penny that Tati infamously overspent on them. And while the intricate mise-en-scene arrangements are loaded with so many sight gags that they require second or third or twelfth viewings to spot, what’s particularly unique here is Tati’s continual emphasis on depth in the image. Not content with just layering two or three things in an image foreground and background, Tati continually lets his camera gaze into spatial abysses, as in the scene where a rude airline employee is seen slowly walking what seems like a quarter mile down a hallway towards Tati. That’s some real three-dimensional cinema.

Splice (2010, dir. by Vincenzo Natali)

I went into this with expectations that were far too high, mainly because the last Sundance science-fiction entry to make it to theatres was none other than Shane Carruth’s mind-bending “Primer” (what the hell happened to Carruth, anyway?). The wake-up call came soon enough - instead of the pitch-perfect depiction of engineering culture found in “Primer”, we get too-attractive and too-openly-conversational folks whose only resemblance to actual engineers (speaking as one, natch) is in their penchant for ironic-sloganed t-shirts. “Splice” is still an above-average sci-fi horror piece, mainly because of its array of nasty plot twists. There are some real freak-kink doozies here, cleverly showing that the gene-spliced abomination at the center of the film is often less monstrous than the lab-coated abominations standing around her. But (as every director and their mother have pointed out) David Cronenberg would have had a field day with this stuff, while Natali struggles with the basics of this kind of film - sustaining any sort of cohesive tension, teasing out deeper implications in the material, and most egregiously, avoiding the kind of heavy-handed foreshadowing that makes actually watching the ending here almost a foregone conclusion.

Get Him to the Greek (2010, dir. by Nicholas Stoller)

There have been sharper satires of rock stars and the music industry, but this is fun enough when it stays in wacky drugged-out farce mode - I’m almost tempted to say that Diddy’s unhinged performance here is enough to make up for his aggressively mediocre post-Biggie music career. But the film missteps badly in its pretentious “Funny People”-inspired third-act gloom. Set aside for a moment the fact that “Funny People”’s soul-searching didn’t even work that well - “Funny People” spent a whole movie setting its drama up. Here, on the other hand, we’re supposed to take Aldous Snow’s stature for granted when the only proof the film presents us is Russell Brand’s unconvincing aping of actual stage presence and stupid joke songs like “The Clap”, which is, of course, about that clap. And then this clown is supposed to be some kind of tragic rock icon - leave it to Cameron Crowe, man. The nadir is that “Chasing Amy”-inspired threesome, which fails even at being awkward enough to elicit any affect. All that said, major props to Rose Byrne, who underplays her satirical pop tart as much as Russell Brand overplays his punk buffoon, and is all the funnier for it.

Twilight and Twilight: New Moon Rifftrax (2008 + 2009, commentary by Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett)

OK, obviously, the movies themselves are bullshit, but the Rifftrax enhancement made these two the funniest viewing experiences I’ve had in ages. Largely it’s just a matter of sheer volume - these guys have clearly gone through these films frame by frame and line by line in order to have a gag flying at you every second, and their comic timing is precise enough that it’s worth fussing with the file syncing at length. But the insights are sharper than they have to be, shredding up everything from the demographic-catering (and thoroughly-mismatched) soundtrack to Kristen Stewart’s method of acting primarily through lip-biting and hair-brushing.

Looking back on a festival of supernatural mysteries and ultra-natural grit. ]]> A few final thoughts for my last entry on Cannes:

- The general consensus among critics seems to be that the 2010 was one of the worst years in recent memory for the Cannes Film Festival. The consensus has also said that there were at least a few masterpieces at the festival this year and at least a dozen or so films that were solid filmmaking of the highest order. Oh, woe is the life of the jaded film critic!

- Juliette Binoche is quite good in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Copie Conforme”, but for the festival to give the official poster-girl of this year’s Cannes a Best Actress award doesn’t so much suggest “conflict of interest” as it does scream it. No doubt that Francophilia also played some part in Mathieu Amalric’s Best Director award for his excellent but relatively minor “On Tour”.

- I will miss many things about Cannes – the movies, the breathtaking beach views, the beautiful pastel-colored beach-front architecture, the preponderance of famous and attractive people milling about, the free press espressos, etc. But perhaps what I will miss most of all is the cheapo sandwich cart which was the only place I could afford to eat at regularly, whether it was the South-France specialty pan bagnat sandwiches made from tuna, Nicoise olives, eggs, and assorted vegetables, or even the hot dogs, which were served with ultra-high quality baguette bread that was almost comically mismatched to the humble origins of the contents it would hold.

- You may have noticed that I’ve talked quite a bit about press kits, mainly because this is the first time I’ve ever had access to actual physical versions of them for writing reviews. As you may have gathered, some of them are helpful, but most of them are decidedly not, spewing fawning enthusiasm as they do. The kit for “The Housemaid” (which, as noted below, I rather like) sets some new records in this regard. This obvious rush translation job not only gushes over every person involved in the production, but even humors director Im Sang-Soo’s attempts at poetry. To quote his statement about the film:

“Our main character who looks empty-headed and naïve…
What is it that she couldn’t endure for the life of her?
That is…
Something we give and take from each other,
we stomp in agony and try to forget
but we cannot so we crush on it and live on…
It is like the hard callus stuck around out soft, erogenous zones.”

The kit also features Im’s ground-breaking costume design philosophy: “All women have to be sexy!”

As a final entry, here is a comprehensive list of everything I saw at the festival, complete with new thoughts about films I haven’t yet discussed, links and snippets from past coverage, and lazy listings of films that I am now too tired to talk about. The films are ranked in tiers I, II, and II, which respectively correspond to excellent filmmaking of the highest order, solid filmmaking with issues, and films that range from noble failures to unholy messes (the ranking within each tier is meaningless). This officially concludes my coverage for The Daily Princetonian – if you simply can’t get enough my writing, feel free to take a look at The Asphalt Jungle, where I usually write every week or so. In any case, thanks so much for humoring my humble film musings – I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this coverage at least half as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.

Tier I

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (dir. by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) – Palme D’Or Winner - In Competition

Just as it defies the basic conventions of narrative, imagery, and filmmaking itself, Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” defies any conventional form of critical analysis. But that’s precisely why it’s so exciting - more than any other film in competition, “Boonmee” stretches the limit of what can be done with filmmaking, pushing its boundaries towards new ways of sensory, allegorical, and metaphysical expression (that should give you a pretty clear idea of the level of trippiness we’re dealing with here). “Boonmee” shares a fair amount with the rest of this Thai filmmaker’s oeuvre, which includes past Cannes award-winners like “Tropical Malady” and “Syndromes and a Century”. Using an enigmatic and symbolic narrative as a framework, Joe once again focuses on painterly compositions highlighting the contrasts between the verdant lushness of Thai jungles and the plasticky, artificial radiance of Thailand’s urban spaces. He also again complements that visual emphasis with a complex sound design that pairs natural jungle recordings with ebullient pop music.

What’s new this time is a new emphasis on the spiritual and supernatural. The elliptical narrative this time focuses on Uncle Boonmee, a man dying from a kidney infection who starts to be visited by ghosts, which appear both in human form and as startling shadowy shapes in the forest with laser-bright red eyes. This central story is surrounded by other vignettes, such as an ox breaking free from his master and a beautiful fairy-tale like story of a princess seduced by a catfish, which are suggested to be past lives that Boonmee is remembering. The film treats these supernatural ideas quite earnestly, but for Joe, “past lives” aren’t solely the province of otherworldly realms - the recording of lives of film, self-image and memories of one’s past self, and even political consciousness. For Joe, flow between these lives is a universal constant, despite the emphasis we put on the transition of death. History also keeps on repeating itself, even visually - the garish Christmas lights at Boonmee’s funeral hall echo the naturally sparkling rock formations in a cave he visits near the end of his life.

I heard a critic in the press room noting that the amount of praise a certain writer bestows upon “Uncle Boonmee” is directly proportional to said writer’s pretentiousness, a statement that I find both thoroughly obnoxious and not too far from the truth. But if you can give yourself over to the mystery of Joe’s work, there are immense satisfactions to be had. Joe has made a film on a cosmic level that at the same time has deeply autobiographical elements (the kidney infection comes from Joe’s father, and the red-eyed ghosts are hilariously revealed by direct light to be men in cheap gorilla suits, an homage to the horror films of Joe’s youth). It’s a film with staggering artistic ambition that nevertheless encourages the audience to laugh with and at it, a film with laser-guided formal precision that nevertheless luxuriates in the swaying, gentle rhythm of wind rustling the palm trees. It’s a film quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and it’s a daring and truly deserving choice for the Palme D’Or.

Ha Ha Ha (dir. by Hong Sang-Soo) – Grand Prize - Un Certain Regard
Poetry (dir. by Lee Chang-Dong) – In Competition
The Housemaid (dir. by Im Sang-Soo) – In Competition

South Korea was the country to beat at this year’s festival, with all three of its films ranking as some of the best that the entire festival had to offer. My favorite of the trio was “Ha Ha Ha”, the latest film by two-time Palme D’Or contender Hong Sang-Soo, the winner of the top prize in the Un Certain Regard category, and essentially the Woody Allen film at the festival that Woody Allen himself could not provide. Hong’s detailed depictions of relationship minutiae have garnered comparisons to Allen and Eric Rohmer, but he has an extra interest in formal and structural games. Here, he tells the story of two friends reminiscing about their recent visits to a Korean shore town. They believe they went separately, but they were actually there at the same time, becoming entangled in love triangles with the same people. Hong ends up doing less with this structure than you might expect, but his writing and performances are pitch-perfect the whole way through. Hong is one of the premier poets of awkwardness, drunkenness (a trademark directorial method of his is to get drunk with his actors), and immaturity – imagine Judd Apatow’s films with less scatological humor and actual empathy for the female sex as well as the male and you’re not too far off.

Another past Palme D’Or contender, Lee Chang-Dong, returned this year with another character study after his “Secret Sunshine”. “Poetry” took home the best screenplay award on Sunday, fittingly enough given the rich, novelistic texture of this off-kilter morality tale. “Poetry” focuses on Mija (Yun Junghee), an aging grandmother who takes a poetry class hoping to counteract her gradual memory loss and starts to rediscover the beauty of the world. You’ll be forgiven for ignoring the movie based on this description – I skipped the first press screening myself – but “Poetry” quickly reveals itself to run darker and deeper. Mija’s grandson, whom she lives alone with, is implicated in a terrible crime, and “Poetry” soon becomes a fascinating parable about the parallels between personal artistic repression and broader societal repression, looking incisively into a word where hush money is enough to cover up even the most egregious offenses and writing a poem is only for the occasional rare genius. Rounding out the film is the brilliant performance by Yun Junghee, who probably deserved the best actress award for this year’s festival. Yun is brilliant as a woman rediscovering deeper emotions that shake up her shallow world, and her performance is the binding emotional glue that holds together this wide-ranging story.

The visual aesthetic of Im Sang-Soo’s “The Housemaid” reminded me quite a bit of Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” – here is a film where the human presence struggles to compete with the impossibly polished fashion-spread set design and the immaculate tailoring of the haute-couture costumes. Unlike that film however, “The Housemaid” applies this aesthetic to the kind of film to which it is best suited: a trashy tabloid romp of a thriller. On that level, Im’s latest film is some kind of idiot masterpiece, a potboiler on which the heat is ramped up until the pot starts to melt. “The Housemaid” is based on a 1960 Korean film of the same name, a film that is revered as perhaps the greatest Korean film of all time. As you might expect from a director whose last Cannes entry (“The President’s Last Bang”) played the assassination of a South Korean dictator for laughs, the irreverent Im plays fast and loose with his source material – where the original was about a psycho maid terrorizing a happy rich family, here the rich family terrorizes the maid. As said maid is seduced by the head of the family and plotted against by his vengeful wife, Im goes for broke with baroque formal gesture after baroque formal gesture – it’s safe to say that Im never met a cant angle he didn’t like. I can’t say I was ever able to take Im’s thoughts about class warfare too seriously given the fundamental silliness of the enterprise, but I was continually held in thrall by the nutzoid spirit of the work, and the sheer chutzpah of the ending is unforgettable.

My Joy (dir. by Sergei Loznitsa) – In Competition

Where the hell did this come from? I ignored this during the festival due to generally tepid reviews and went to the final repeat screening mostly because nothing else was playing at the time, only to be pretty blown away by first-time feature film director Sergei Loznitsa’s nightmarish vision of rural Russia. “My Joy” starts with a throat-grabbing opening – we see a churning maw of concrete swirling around like a vortex, followed by a shot of a body being dumped into a ditch. The rest of the film never explains these events, but they set an appropriately brooding tone for this story about a truck driver who finds himself trapped in a Russian village. Working with Oleg Mutu, the DP for “4 Months, 3 Weeks 2 Days”, Loznitsa captures much of that film’s overt-manipulation-free suspense as things get worse and worse for the truck driver in a seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape. Far more interesting is his decision at the halfway point to explode the film’s narrow focus and map out a canvas of the many sociopaths and victims of his setting, creating something like an Altman film on mushrooms. The film is probably too unrelentingly nihilistic for the social criticisms at play here to really scan, but the filmmaking holds you all the way through to the horror-show ending, which seems about as absurd as it seems right.

Copie Conforme (dir. by Abbas Kiarostami) – In Competition

On Tour (dir. by Mathieu Amalric) – In Competition

Carlos (dir. by Olivier Assayas) - Out of Competition

…It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a biopic that so thoroughly scourged its subject, and I’ve certainly never seen a movie that spent this much time doing it. “Carlos” seems like a reaction to movies like “The Baader-Meinhof Complex” (or for that matter, nearly any gangster film), which eventually get around to condemning their criminal protagonists, but not before admiring the thrilling way they live outside the law. You’ll be thrilled in “Carlos” as Assayas bounds from country to country, from criminal enterprise to enterprise. But you’ll be hard-pressed find anything admirable in this sleazily charismatic womanizer with frightening fetishes (Carlos quite literally makes his women handle his weapon), this self-aggrandizer willing to sell any cause he adopts out to the highest bidder, this dialectical materialist who couldn’t stop showing off his Mercedes…

Another Year (dir. by Mike Leigh) - In Competition

…As the synopsis may suggest, not all that much happens plot-wise. Leigh has always been much more interested in meticulously observing the way that people interact. Leigh used his trademark method of letting his actors interact in character off-camera for about a year, and then fleshing out a loose plot outline with improvisation during filming. As a result, the film’s relationships have an unforced realism - characters who have know each other for years have the kind of gentle rapport where glances can sometimes substitute for full conversations, while characters who have just met have a painfully chilled awkwardness to their interactions…

Outrage (dir. by Takeshi Kitano) - In Competition
…Kitano has the kind of exquisite formal control that makes the film’s flaws easy to forgive, at least for this viewer. Every shot is carefully crafted to exhibit the symmetry to sleek lines, to catch the play of Tokyo neon light on gunmetal gray and waxed Mercedes black, and to plant disorienting visual surprises - what appears to be an iris shot in one early scene, for example, is created through millimeter-precise placement of a camera between two suited gangsters. This intense visual focus is a joy, and Kitano uses it to depict some inventive and gut-wrenching examples of violence – the traditional yakuza collection of fingers comes in way you might not expect and Kitano’s twisting camera moves and unpredictable cuts manage to make the expected approach of death consistently surprising…

Of Gods and Men (dir. by Xavier Beauvois) - Grand Prix Winner - In Competition
…Beauvois dispassionately watches the monks as they waver in their decision to stay and continue to pray, for deliverance, for strength to match their convictions, for courage to accept their fate. And this plot focus is exactly why Beauvois’ clinical nature as a filmmaker is absolutely critical - for most materials, addressing topics like this would no doubt lead to mawkishness or sanctimony (and this film does in a few moments), when the monks try to drown out the noise of an army helicopter by loudly singing a hymn), but understatement both in formal terms and restraint in the performances lets the audience feel the full weight of the emotions at play without feeling unduly manipulated…

Aurora (dir. by Cristi Puiu) - Un Certain Regard
…Puiu has a sharp visual eye as a director, imprisoning his characters in the industrial wasteland of Bucharest with vertical barriers and Ozu-esque hallway shots, and the sheer unknowability of the early sections maintains enough suspense that you could charitably call this a crime thriller, especially in the shocking scenes of violence. But those virtues and Puiu’s own excellent performance don’t change the fact that the audience is left begging for a hint of explanation as the final scene rolls around. And in the fascinating payoff of the ending, they get it - without spoiling anything, Puiu provides all the answers we could have asked for and more in a comic rebuke to our expectations of explanations, psychological or otherwise. “It worries me that you seem to understand this,” says a character as the info begins to flow and reduces a ordinary person into a familiar type. Puiu wants the viewer to recognize the inherent falseness of attempt to patly explain the three-dimensional psychology of a real human being, and his epistemological approach to the mind reminded me a bit of Scorsese’s struggle to understand Jake La Motta in “Raging Bull”…

Tier II

Blue Valentine (dir. by Derek Cianfrance) - Un Certain Regard

As the great American indie hope of the festival, Sundance breakout “Blue Valentine” was one the best reviewed films to play at Cannes. I did find the film to be a pretty powerful experience as I was watching, although I couldn’t help shrugging my shoulders at it after it was over. The film’s central idea is to intercut the happy courtship of a couple (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) with the final days of their marriage. For the most part, this central structural device is kind of pointless, seeming to reveal only that many divorcing couples were actually happy at one point – making the film sometimes feel like empty aping of something more substantive like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. But the performances by long-time indie darlings Gosling and Williams do quite a bit to save the film, bringing believability and palatability to the shrill verbal battles of the to-be-divorcees as easily as they bring romantic charm to the courtship.

Carancho (dir. by Pablo Trapero) - Un Certain Regard

A Screaming Man (dir. by Mahamet-Saleh Haroun) - In Competition
…the heart of the movie is Haroun’s sensitive depiction of a man dealing with a shattered world. Haroun makes clear that the sense of identity created by one’s profession and the ensuing existential crisis following its loss are not solely applicable to white-collar businessmen (like the similarly struggling men of Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out” and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Tokyo Sonata”). Even in his menial task, Adam finds immense meaning, and the drastic change to his life induces a temporary madness with horrifying consequences. “Man” is all the more powerful for the understated stoicism that Djaoro brings to his performance - when cracks inevitably appear in his facade, they truly mean something…

Route Irish (dir. by Ken Loach) - In Competition
…I’m going to be vaguer than most critics have been about the film’s central moral arc, because I do think that the way it slowly and surprisingly reveals itself is quite stunning. Suffice to say though that where the first part of film takes pains to emphasize Iraq’s distance, relying on the mediating technology of cell phones and Skype to separate the two worlds and depicting the Liverpool setting with watery blues and sleek modern architecture, the second half brings Iraq home in frightening visual and thematic ways. “Route Irish” soon reveals itself to be a novel take on depicting the toxic effect of war on men returning home, employing metaphor instead of the relative realism of films like “The Messenger” or “Stop-Loss”…

Film Socialisme (dir. by Jean-Luc Godard) - Un Certain Regard
…There’s a wealth of ideas here, to be certain (I’ll spare you my rambling attempts at interpretation). There’s surely also plenty of nonsense, as well as contempt for segments of the audience. Godard’s English subtitles generally only translate nouns and the occasional preposition from the original French (although there’s plenty of German to alienate native viewers). I’m terribly suspicious of anyone who exalts or dismisses this film after a single viewing – there’s no way anyone could fully engage with the density of the flurrying images here after a single viewing. Not that many really want to – avant-garde cinema of this sort has never packed seats and was never intended to. But it’s great to see that even at the age of 79, Godard is still frustrating, exciting, and provoking viewers as he did when he was a young man…

Tier III

Udaan (dir. by Vikramaditya Motwane) - Un Certain Regard
…My least favorite scenes in movies about artists force the viewer into accepting an opinion about the art they produce. Take one scene in “Udaan”, a film about a boy who wants to be a writer and a father who wants him to go into the family business. At one point, the boy recites a poem he has written to a group of people that includes his father. The reaction that director Vikramaditya Motwane clearly is looking for from his audience is “What a talented young man! If only his father was more understanding!”. The actual reaction is “Don’t quit your day job”…

Outside the Law (dir. by Rachid Bouchareb) - In Competition
…Bouchareb is a thoroughly mainstream filmmaker - one who’s interested in bringing an Arab’s version of the history of France and its colonies to the masses - and he can achieve Spielbergian zest in his filmmaking sometimes (consider his rousing war epic “Days of Glory”). But “Law” feels like a half-hearted “Godfather” retread - oddly enough, considering that the film is about Algerian revolutionaries acting covertly in Paris. This is mainly because Bouchareb is far less interested in his character’s psychologies here than he was in “Glory”, which was gratifyingly thorough in getting into the heads of his characters….

Fair Game (dir. by Doug Liman) - In Competition
…those who were confused about why the director of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and “Jumper” had a film in the most prestigious film competition in the world were thoroughly justified. “Fair Game” isn’t ever bad, exactly, but it’s nothing to write home about (ha). It’s a pretty generic geopolitical thriller, right down to the irritatingly boilerplate score (pompous thumping percussion! little bits of electronic stuff!), and anyone who has a basic handle on the Valerie Plame CIA leak scandal isn’t going to learn anything here…

Biutiful (dir. by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) - In Competition
…In lieu of a plot summary, here is a list of things that happen to Barcelona-based Uxbal over the course of the film: cancer, poverty, a bipolar wife, a cheating wife, a wife who beats his kids, kids in poverty, spooky ghost hauntings, guilt over exploitation of illegal immigrants, more guilt after exploitation of illegal immigrants goes wrong, a drug-addled brother, a drug-addled brother having sex with his wife, spiritual uncertainty, police brutality, bloody urine, bloody urine combined with incontinence, hangnails, etc. Could all of this happen to a single person? Possibly. Are people, even in extreme poverty, generally affected by only a subset of these issues? Probably. Would a film that reined in its focus be more effective at tackling one or a few of these issues? Definitely…

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (dir. by Woody Allen) - Out of Competition
…“Stranger” seems shallow on most every level. Few of the characters are sketched with any depth (as the titular attractions, Pinto and Banderas function mostly as exotic cardboard cutouts) and the comedy is often stale (Hopkins’ slow realization of his wife’s golddigging nature seems too obvious to ever be really funny). Worst of all is the ending. Late in the film, Allen introduces some dark twists that ramp up the drama, but at the point where better movies would be rolling towards a climax, Allen simply cuts the film off, leaving only a few lazy and abrupt implications as to his characters’ ultimate fates. You get the unmistakable impression that he doesn’t care enough about these people to follow their stories through to the end - and if he doesn’t care, why should we?

The Princess of Montpensier (dir. by Bertrand Tavernier) - In Competition
…Tavernier hints in the press kit that his intent is in part feminist, given his heroine’s lack of control over her destiny and the cruelty of some of the men in her life, but he seems a little too fond of gratuitous nudity for that explanation to really pass muster. Perhaps Tavernier was aiming for something like Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (famously and unfairly slammed in its Cannes premiere), which captured a young queen’s entrapment in royal ennui with sympathy and formal ingenuity. What he ended up with is a wealth of admittedly fine production values devoted to a knockoff Jane Austen story with none of the romantic heat that made those stories work. Full disclosure: I’ll confess that I stopped paying much attention during the last 20 minutes. It was much more interesting to look around the theatre as a steady trickle of audience members walking out of the theater expanded into a flood…

Chatroom (dir. by Hideo Nakata) - Un Certain Regard
…Nakata’s hyper-caffeinated style makes the mind-games fun for a while, and if the obvious telegraphing of William as “the evil one” dampens some of the suspense, Johnson’s leering grin and nervy intensity mark a terrific step up from his bland performance in “Kick-Ass”. Ultimately, though, Nakata doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the potential wealth of ideas concerning teenagers and the internet. The eerie terror that the early scenes conjure starts to fade quickly as the plot contorts far past the breaking point. It’s a shame that the second half of the film resorts to characters acting in absurd and implausible ways (William’s climactic push to make Ben kill himself is egregiously confusing), particularly when the incidents that inspired the film involve motives and behavior that are real, terrifying, and all too understandable…