When you think outside the box, it’s amazing how novel and inventive your thoughts become. Same applies in film. These amazing examples of beyond the mainstream moviemaking shine as creative and experimental entertainments.
Director: Dylan Southern, Will Lovelace
Cast: LCD Soundsystem, Chuck Klosterman
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/s/shutupplayhits2.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 30
Display Width: 200
Shut Up and Play the Hits
The Spotify Generation finally gets its own Stop Making Sense, with a hint of The Last Waltz for good measure. Shut Up and Play the Hits captures LCD Soundsystem’s marathon workout of a 2011 farewell concert, but if frontman James Murphy feels any regret in his interviews with Chuck Klosterman, it’s concealed behind a trademark layer of cool. The film by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace offers an intimate glance at Murphy’s private life in the hours surrounding the show, but there is no revelation as arresting as the performance footage itself. Funky, captivating, and rich with cameos (including Arcade Fire, Reggie Watts, and members of Soulwax), Shut Up and Play the Hits reminds us why LCD Soundsystem was such a big deal in the first place. Zach Schonfeld
Director: Julie Wyman
Cast: Cheryl Haworth, Michael Cohen, Sheila Haworth, Natalie Burgener, Dennis Snethen
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/s/strong1.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 29
Display Width: 200
Strong!
“Nobody can quite put their finger on why they want to be strong.” Cheryl Haworth knows about being strong. As her mother recalls it, when Cheryl was just 13 years old, she pointed to a lifter in the gym and said, “I would really like to try that.”
Cheryl doesn’t press the question of why. Instead, speaking in the documentary Strong!, she focuses on how her strength has evolved, how it shapes her sense of self. “It’s all about confidence,” she adds, “And when that’s shaken, you have to remind yourself why you’re there.” For Cheryl, “there” is on a world stage, where she’s been since she was a teenager. At 15, she was an American national champion (and was for some 11 years following) and, beginning at 17, she made three US Olympic teams, in 2000, 2004, and 2008.
Yes, Cheryl knows quite a bit about being strong, the challenges and costs as well as the rewards. And as Julie Wyman’s film shows her lifting — from multiple angles and shot distances, in light and shadow, in gyms and on starkly attractive movie sets — Cheryl talks about the complicated relationship between strength and weight. “The more mass you have on your body, the more mass you can move, mass moves mass,” Cheryl explains. “It’s just better to be heavier.” Cynthia Fuchs
Director: Alejandro Brugués
Cast: Alexis Díaz de Villegas, Jorge Molina, Andrea Duro, Andros Perugorría
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/j/juanofdead1.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 28
Display Width: 200
Juan of the Dead
The title is one that will instantly turn off pretty much all but the most hardcore zombie fans at this point. “Juan of the Dead? A Spanish-language zombie film trying to trade on the success and reputation of Shaun of the Dead?” Well, yes, perhaps Cuban writer/director Alejandro Brugués could’ve done a better job with his title. But this filmed-in-Havana horror-comedy has a lot to offer. The early part of the movie shows a rare glimpse into everyday life in lower and middle-class Havana. Then the zombie apocalypse arrives in Cuba, and the government attempts to keep the populace calm by claiming that they are rabble-rousing dissidents, not infectious living-dead creatures.
Life in the city goes on pretty much as normal for awhile, and middle-aged layabouts Juan and Lazaro figure out they can make a good living as zombie exterminators. They aren’t particularly skilled at it; they’re just as likely to accidentally kill their human clients as they are the walking dead. But they’re willing to do it, and that sets them apart from the government-sponsored denial in the rest of the city. Eventually, though, the zombies start to overwhelm the humans, and Juan, Lazaro, and their friends have to fight for their lives. Brugués manages to combine laughs and great zombie kills with genuine political subtext, which makes Juan of the Dead a throwback to the classic Romero zombie films. Amazingly, he did all of this in full view of the Cuban censors, who approved his script and his shooting locations every step of the way. Chris Conaton
Director: Natalia Almada
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/f/film-elvalador-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 27
Display Width: 200
El Velador
It’s morning in Culiacán, Mexico. A rooster crows, the sound far off and faint. A dog walks with a man, making their way to the man’s workplace, the cemetery. The camera doesn’t move as they come near, slowly. The light behind them is pink and pale yellow, they pass a series of mausoleums in varying states of completion. For a moment, the pair is obscured by a pile of sheet rock, thin slabs waiting to be assembled into the next gravesite. “As soon as I wake up I take a walk around,” says Martin. “When people drink, they leave a lot of empty beer cans. I gather them up. But that’s all I do.”
The moment is one of the few in Natalia Almada’s superb El Velador (The Night Watchman) when Martin speaks. More often, he works, which means, he keeps watch over the cemetery, walking among the tombs and hosing down the desperately dry roads and walkways. But still, the film is full of sound, the clatter of construction, the music of funeral bands, the occasional wailing of mourners, as well as the sounds of children playing, a little girl who practices counting as she skips over the stones of a memorial, a portrait of the deceased on the wall behind her.
This and other images of the dead show reveal — again and again — that they’re young. The cemetery at Culiacán is a preferred site for burying victims in Mexico’s drug wars. There are many victims, gang members and police officers, as well as innocent bystanders. The TV that Martin runs at night by way of a makeshift antenna reports that some 11,000 have been killed this past month alone, some 21,915 so far during Felipe Calderón’s presidency. You come to realize, late in the documentary, that the year is 2009, when a worker arrives at the cemetery with news: Arturo Beltrán Leyva has been killed, “the capo of capos.” (“A shitload of money is going to fly, man,” observes another worker as they prepare for their day, slipping on their Nikes and pulling together their buckets.) Cynthia Fuchs
Director: Rodney Ascher
Cast: Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/r/room2371.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 26
Display Width: 200
Room 237
Like the film it explores, Room 237 is many different films in one. It’s a film about obsession, about conspiracy theories, about watching and interpreting movies. And, of course, about watching one particular movie: Stanley Kubrick’s psycho-supernatural classic The Shining, one of the most haunting and mesmerizing films ever made.
In this groundbreaking documentary, director Rodney Ascher presents five individuals who each have intricate personal theories about the “real” meaning of The Shining. For these obsessives (and surely many more), The Shining is like a cinephile’s The Da Vinci Code, with the all-powerful Kubrick offering up clue after inscrutable clue. Is it an allegory about the Native American genocide, or perhaps a coded confession to faking the moon landing? By patiently letting each subject present their case, no matter how outrageous, Ascher creates a fascinating exploration of nothing less than what movies mean and the infinite ways of watching them. Pat Kewley
25 – 21
Director: Alison Klayman
Cast: Danqing Chen, Ying Gao, Changwei Gu
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/a/ai_weiwei_never_sorry_poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 25
Display Width: 200Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
“He’s not the kind of person you are familiar with in China art circles,” says Chen Danqing, a painter and art critic in Beijing. “You know, we all graduated from the Central Academy,” he goes on, cigarette in hand, “Here we call it being an artist ‘within the system.’ But he’s not. He’s a just himself.”
Chen’s version of Ai Weiwei is one of many assembled in Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. They differ in what people know about the activist and artist Ai, what they guess about his intentions, what they think about his art, even hinting at what stakes they might have in that art or the challenges it poses. These challenges are both broad and particular in Ai’s work, as he has repeatedly targeted official Chinese political and legal structures, using Twitter and Facebook and his extended middle finger.
Such challenges have made Ai a target himself, inspiring surveillance by the government and also hope that China might change. Ai gained international fame when he collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in designing the Birds Nest Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. That fame took something of a turn — though it was still most potent outside of China — when Ai went on to take a photo of the stadium from a distance, his middle finger extended in the foreground. It’s not that he’s against the Olympics, he explains here, but “I am not for a kind of Olympics that forces immigrants out of the city, to tell the ordinary citizens they should not participate but just make a fake smile for the foreigners, and become purely Party’s propaganda. Which is very scary.” Cynthia Fuchs
Director: Jean-Pierre, Luc Dardennes
Cast: Cecile de France, Thomas Doret, Jeremie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Egon Di Mateo
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/k/kid-with-the-bike-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 24
Display Width: 200
The Kid with a Bike
This quiet little tour de force about a troubled young boy has bewitched the critics at this year’s Festival. It is one of those movies one overhears talk of while in line for a screening, the critic using words like “classic” and “masterpiece” and “genius”. Recalling such top-shelfers as 400 Blows with its unflinching but nuanced treatment of childhood psychology and emotional distress, The Kid With a Bike portrays a world that feels eminently lived in, and true to the messiness of experience.
As the young boy (Thomas Doret) struggles with an absent and immature father (Jeremie Renier), a missing beloved bicycle, a gang of local toughs that wants him to join, and the disruption of a new foster mother (Cecile de France, in a pitch-perfect turn), we struggle with a gathering concern for his well-being. It is a minimalist, impressively naturalistic picture in almost every way. A small movie, yes, but it has a deep and powerful impact. Everything here is in perfect balance, like a superior instrument. Or, perhaps, a weapon. Stuart Henderson
Director: Colin Trevorrow
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, Karan Soni, Jeff Garlin
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/f/film-safetynot-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 23
Display Width: 200
Safety Not Guaranteed
Sadly falling prey to the sheer existence of more commercial love stories and louder time travel tales, Safety Not Guaranteed slipped under a lot of radars, but it’s definitely deserving of a viewing by any legitimate cinephile. Combining the narrative intimacy of Primer with the life-affirming romance of Silver Linings Playbook, Colin Trevorrow’s quiet achievement is emotionally believable and filled with characters who could be plucked from your workspace, if not from the audience. Not only that, but in a time when uncertainty has gripped the planet in a way never before seen, it offers more than the slightest glimmer of hope and is seeded with optimism, something rarely seen in the time travel travel subgenre that is so often clouded with despair, desperation and hopelessness. Kevin Brettauer
Director: Lee Toland Krieger
Cast: Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Chris Messina, Ari Graynor, Will McCormack, Emma Roberts, Elijah Wood
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-celeste-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 22
Display Width: 200
Celeste and Jesse Forever
Rashida Jones has played a lot of put-upon love interests in her career. She was the unfairly-suffering fianceé in I Love You, Man, it’s how her character started on Parks and Recreation, and it even happened in Our Idiot Brother, where she was playing a straight-laced lesbian. So when Jones got the opportunity to write her own romantic comedy, she swerved. Celeste & Jesse Forever begins with the titular couple (Jones and a low-key Andy Samberg), in the middle of divorce proceedings, but attempting to remain best friends. Celeste kept the house, but Jesse still lives on the property, in the garage. They hang out as a couple even though they’re not a couple anymore, and generally annoy everyone around them with their bizarre “we’re divorcing but we still wanna be best friends!” shtick.
At first it looks like Celeste, the successful career woman, just can’t bring herself to kick man child Jesse to the curb. But then Jesse gets into a serious new relationship and Celeste finds out that she’s the one who can’t deal with it. This is a comedy that isn’t afraid to get messy, and Jones and Samberg dig deep to unearth the serious emotional scars that are left when a long-term relationship disintegrates. Celeste & Jesse Forever is a better showcase for Samberg than any Adam Sandler-backed movie, and Jones is in top form here both as an actor and a writer. Chris Conaton
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Cast: Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel, Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan, Firat Tanis, Ercan Kesal
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/o/once_upon_a_time_in_anatolia_poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 21
Display Width: 200
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia begins with a shot pushing slowly into a window. Your view is obscured, though you can make out a TV screen, blue and bright, and three figures, blurred. As the focus clears, you see three men, hunched over a meal and laughing. drinking and laughing. One of them rises and comes to the window, his face filling your frame, under sounds of traffic, a thunder crack, a dog barking. The scene cuts outside, a long shot of the garage where the men work, framed by huge truck tires and a cloudy sky, a dog tied outside. A truck passes, a black shadow that wipes the screen.
You never see what happens, how Kenan kills his companion. Instead, you see distant cars at night, winding along hilly roads. They stop, men exit, they look for the spot where the body is supposed to be, but isn’t. The cops — along with the prosecutor, the doctor, and the two men who’ve buried their friend — resume their search. And as they drive, they talk about yoghurt: the camera takes up another slow push in, past Commisar Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the driver Ali (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), whom everyone calls “Arab” — to their suspect in the back seat, crammed between Cemal and Nusret. By the time the shot becomes a close-up of Kenan’s face, you see that he is, in fact, nodding off, exhausted as they make their way through the dark.
Over the next two and a half hours, the men continue to talk, about the case, their jobs, their expectations. Naci has an ailing child, and his wife presses him on the phone to be sure to get medication from the doctor. The Arab extols the pleasures of hunting (“I love it here,” he says, “I load up my pockets with bullets, 40 or 50, and I come here and fire away, it’s a way of letting off steam”), then explains to the doctor the other uses of his weapon. Describing the basic brutality of his work and the bad men he sees every day, he says. “If it comes to it, you have to be ruthless and shoot them right between the eyes. That’s how it is around here, doctor, you’re kind of forced to take matters into your own hands.” As he speaks, the camera pans slowly, revealing grass that waves in the wind, eerily lit by their parked cars’ headlights, Cemal’s still profile, weary or resistant, and the Arab’s eye, wet, though it’s unclear whether from wind or torment. Cynthia Fuchs
20 -16
Director: Daniel Nettheim
Cast: Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Frances O’Connor, Morganna Davies, Finn Woodlock
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/h/hunter_poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 20
Display Width: 200The Hunter
Director Daniel Nettheim’s meditative thriller The Hunter is as much about Willem Dafoe’s hired gun as it is the beautiful Australian countryside it lovingly depicts. Shot in cold blues and grays, Tasmania has never looked more alluring. Of course, it helps the story is a good one. Dafoe thrives as a meticulous hunter stalking an ever-elusive tiger that may be merely a myth. His daily searches are always intriguing, as is his relationship with his innkeepers—a comatose mother and her two children. The Hunter may not break new ground in its story, but the physical ground it depicts is more than enough to justify another involving tale of self-discovery. Ben Travers
Director: Gareth Huw Evans
Cast: Iko Uwais, Doni Alamsyah, Ananda George, Pierre Gruno, Yayan Ruhian, Ray Sahetapy, Tegar Satrya, Verdi Solaiman, Joe Taslim
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/t/theraidredemption2.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 19
Display Width: 200
The Raid: Redemption
Based around the Indonesian martial arts form known as Silat and set-up to be nothing more than 90 minutes of mind-blowing beat-downs, The Raid: Redemption is amazing. It’s not deep, and dwells in subject and storyline superficiality in ways that would make even the most brain dead Hollywood effort appear complex, but it still bests the West without question. While there is some clear character motivation (our lead wants to return home to his concerned spouse and there’s a family oriented plot twist toward the end) and some locational subtext, this is really nothing more than a clothesline production, the narrative only existing to hang some insanely impressive action scenes upon.
Yes, this is a movie where many will be discussing the brilliantly choreographed confronts, each one delivering intense, in your face ferocity – and it deserves the attention. Like John Woo, or perhaps more appropriately, Yuen Woo-ping, brutality is turned into a ballet, the balance of power shifting from fighter to fighter until a crescendo of death has been reached. There is inherent drama in these knock down drag outs, as well as a great level of directing skill. Transplant filmmaker Gareth Evans (he was born in Wales but now lives in Indonesia) understands the beauty in leaving the camera be. While there are a few instances where the lens goes loopy, the overall feel is a watchful eye keeping track of some creative chaos. Bill Gibron
Director: Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass
Cast: Mark Kelly, Steve Zissis, Jennifer Lafleur, Julie Vorus, Reid Williams
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-dodeca-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 18
Display Width: 200
The Do-Deca Pentathlon
The Duplass brothers have always specialized in casually shot, sparsely decorated films with enough heart to make you forget about their technical shortcomings. It’s all in the writing for these two brothers, and their latest feature about a 25-sport Olympics between two battling bros doesn’t disappoint. I’m not sure how much of The Do-Deca-Pentathlon was autobiographical, but the Dupli made the wise decision to cast two relative unknowns in their roles rather than take on the challenge themselves. Mark Kelly and Steve Zissis thrive in scenes where their characters’ competitive nature gets the better of them. Love, laugh, and listen up—like all Duplass comedies, there’s a relevant moral to be learned between giggles. Ben Travers
Director: Jake Schreier
Cast: Frank Langella, James Marsden, Susan Sarandon, Peter Sarsgaard, Liv Tyler, Jeremy Strong
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-robotfrank-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 17
Display Width: 200
Robot and Frank
No doubt the strangest film I’ve seen all year, but one with heart in spades and a real sharp wit. Frank Langella’s late-career role goes on as he plays a weary ex-con gifted a robot companion by his son (James Marsden), tired of making the constant visits to see him in his onsetting demented state. Frank eventually discovers the robot can be useful enough to get him back in the grifting game. Still on board? Alright!
A movie that tries to get away with as much as Robot and Frank does probably isn’t a wise idea in most cases. The movie is part-heist, part-family comedy and part meditation on old age and deterioration of the mind. Director Jake Schreier keeps things from becoming too imbalanced and precious, and gets great performances out of Langella and Marsden, though the former is certainly no stranger to them.
Robot and Frank is a movie so fun, you’re almost surprised when you’re forced to remember that Frank is a bad guy, and his arc is not going to end well, one way or another. This is one of those movies movie where the interesting character study that gets us there is more important. Steve Lepore
Director: Todd Solondz
Cast: Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair, Mia Farrow, Christopher Walken, Justin Bartha, Aasif Mandvi
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/f/film-darkhorse-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 16
Display Width: 200
Dark Horse
Aptly chosen, the title of Todd Solondz’s seventh feature film describes itself as well as it does its pathetic hero (Jordan Gelber), a hapless 35-year-old manchild who lives with his parents, works lazily for his father, and somehow stumbles into marriage with a fellow loner who carries a mysterious disease. In its best moments, Dark Horse blurs reality and fantasy (including some rather paranoid episodes in a Toys ‘R’ Us) as it surveys the stranger crevices of mind-numbing suburbia. Solondz mostly withholds judgment but makes use of Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken as Gelber’s parents, alternately pitying and contemptuous of the drifting mystery they’ve produced. Zach Schonfeld
15 – 11
Director: Jason Tippet, Elizabeth Mims
Cast: Garrison Saenz, Kevin Conway, Skye Elmore
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/o/only_the_young_poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 15
Display Width: 200Only the Young
“Everything that goes into your life never comes out,” says Skye. “Just like me.” Garrison agrees: “Like a stain.” Skye keeps going, “And no Tide can get rid of it.” The teens are lying on the floor in her bedroom and as you first see them, they look upside down. A cut to a long shot from behind them shows a camera perched over them. “I got involved in being your friend,” Skye concludes, “and now I’m stuck in your black hole, and you couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”
Skye’s assessment of their relationship — intense, affecting, and so forever — is laced through the film Only the Young, which tracks their experiences over a few months. Skye and Garrison live in Canyon County, California, one of those mostly sunny west coast locales with palm trees and dusty deserts in equal measure. As you come to see right away in the documentary, they’re typically, vaguely rebellious: he’s a skater determined to improve their go-nowhere environment by building a half-pipe with his best friend Kevin, “so we can skate somewhere that no one knows about.” Right, Kevin agrees, and with no adults in sight, they can “do whatever the hell we want out here, there’s no one to stop us.”
The film bears out this fantasy, showing both its thrills and its limits. Directed by Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims, Only the Young records, remembers, and conjures a bit of what it’s like to be these three kids, smart white punks who think about the world and see their place in it through a lens that’s simultaneously specific and indefinite. While they belong to their local Baptist church’s Ignition Skate Ministry, they don’t so much preach as explore, occasionally meeting people at charity events but mostly hanging out at the auto shop, where they work on their boards and help out the mechanic Shannon, whom Garrison calls “way older than me.” Shannon laughs and scratches his greying temple at this jibe, the three guys posed perfectly in Shannon’s vintage car with pale green interior, boys in the wide back seat and Shannon at the king-sized steering wheel. Cynthia Fuchs
Director: Antonio D’Ambrosio
Cast: Chuck D, Eve Ensler, Shepard Fairy, Wayne Kramer, Tom Morello, John Sayles
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-letfury-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 14
Display Width: 200
Let Fury Have the Hour
“Once upon a time, we were, I’m told, citizens with rights,” says Hari Kunzru. His half-smile as he speaks, along with his phrasing, are at once precise and also ambiguous, so as to pose the question, what is a citizen? DJ Spooky answers, “A citizen is someone who participates.” Jonah Lehrer refines that notion with another question: “It’s not just how will this decision affect me, but how will it affect everyone else?” And Eve Ensler punctuates, “It’s trying to create a structure and systems that supported the majority.”
This understanding of citizenship as a relationship, a commitment to a community, is currently under siege, submits Let Fury Have the Hour. Antonio D’Ambrosio’s documentary assembles an impressive array of talking heads, intercut with split screens of archival footage, to argue for that commitment, and against the account of citizenship as an individual condition. In that condition, “rights” are a function of personal benefit, not community.
The film makes effective use of news footage from a period when such rights were sensationally restricted, during the era of Thatcher and Reagan in particular. As artists seek alternatives to power systems, as they make visible the crises that governments and corporations do their best to cover over (or drum up and exploit, in some instances), they might seem, as the MC5’s Wayne Kramer puts it, to be “troublemakers.” He goes on, “Democracy requires participation.” Cynthia Fuchs
Director: Joachim Trier
Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Hans Olav Brenner, Ingrid Olava
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/o/oslo1.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 13
Display Width: 200
Oslo, 13 August
Considering its subject matter — a suicidal former drug addict returns to his hometown and searches for a reason to keep living — Oslo, August 31st should be much more depressing than it is. Instead, Joachim Trier’s gorgeous drama is one of the most deeply human, sympathetic, and moving character studies to come along in recent memory. Working again with lead actor Anders Danielsen Lie, who starred in Trier’s excellent Reprise in 2006, Trier paints a portrait of a lost soul who seems to have drifted hopelessly beyond the point of no return, and yet still remains frighteningly relatable and familiar. Lie’s heartbreakingly honest performance is one of the very best of the year, and Trier’s direction manages both gritty realism and stunning visual poetry — Lie and Oslo each bloom before his camera like icy flowers opening their petals amidst the snow. Pat Kewley
Director: Philippe Falardeau
Cast: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Néron
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/blog_art/m/monsieurlazhar1.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 12
Display Width: 200
Monsieur Lazhar
When a Montreal elementary school teacher commits suicide, an Algerian refugee named Bachir Lazharfills the vacated position. Unbeknownst to students and faculty, Bachir had sought asylum in Canada following the murder of his wife and children at the hands of terrorists in his homeland. Unaware of his pain, Bachir’s pupils come to accept their new teacher who bridges the cultural and emotional gap between his students. When Bachir gives the children a forum for their grief, he finds himself facing barriers put in place by a stringent school administration, bent on compacting human emotion into a tidy, inoffensive “process”. Monsieur Lazharbeautifully illustrates the universal language of suffering and friendship, as well as the ability to recognize both with a sense of empathy and compassion. Lana Cooper
Director: Lynn Shelton
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia, Jeanette Maus
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/y/your_sisters_sister_poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 11
Display Width: 200
Your Sister’s Sister
Every once in a while, up pops a movie made simply for the actors to show off. It’s usually plainly directed and simply written, allowing for ample improvisation (coughDoubtcough). Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister is more than merely an actors’ movie. It’s a minimalist piece on friendships, secrets, liquor and what happens when they all come together. That’s not to say its cast isn’t at the top of their games. Rosemarie Dewitt handles what could have been a tertiary character with grace, making her memorable and empathetic. Emily Blunt and Mark Duplass find a friendly chemistry I didn’t expect and a bond I absolutely believed. Low-budget doesn’t mean your movie has to feel like a play. Thanks for the reminder, Miss. Shelton. Ben Travers
10 – 6
Director: Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin
Cast: Louise Grinberg, Juliette Darche, Roxanne Duran, Esther Garrel, Yara Pilartz, Solene Rigot, Noemie Lvovsky, Florence Thomassin, Carlo Brandt, Frederic Noaille, Arthur Verret
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-17girls-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 10
Display Width: 20017 Girls
The waking-dream atmosphere of 17 Girls is located somewhere between the razor-wire tension of a Joyce Carol Oates story and the gauzy meanderings of a Sofia Coppola film. This can make for a raw admixture at times, with the floaty camerawork and pungent soundtrack suggesting the girls are immersed in a kind of innocently disobedient game-playing.
In this scenario, their opponents seem overmatched, as the adults around them seem little more than baffled clowns. At a fractious school meeting, parents berate the school principal (Carlo Brandt) for not handling the situation, as though they weren’t involved. This satiric approach to the adults’ incompetence has the advantage of putting the viewer even more solidly inside the girls’ perspective, where everything is now, now, now, and the future seems limitless. But at the same time, the filmmakers make sure to highlight the problems already visible in the girls’ seeming united front: Clementine (Yara Pilartz) ends up paying a boy to impregnate her; some pregnancies don’t go smoothly; and jealousies and rivalries begin to breed in this hothouse environment.
Besotted by the dream of families without parents or rules, the girls in 17 Girls might drive without licenses and drink like there’s no tomorrow, but they are still innocents. The wonder of this remarkable film is that it retains an innocence of its own, even while alluding to the darkness on the horizon. Even as the girls’ fantasy is wildly impractical and self-sabotaging, the film understands its appeal. Chris Barasanti
Director: Sarah Burns, Ken Burns, David McMahon
Cast: Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Calvin O. Butts, Jim Dwyer, Saul Kassin
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-centralpark5-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 9
Display Width: 200
The Central Park Five
Ken Burns has made a name for himself as the dean of documentary film in the United States by tackling grand historical subjects and providing us with a sweeping, worthy history of their significance to American cultural life. Think Jazz, The Civil War, Baseball, The National Parks. Here, working with Sarah Burns and Jim McMahon, although the work is on a smaller scale, the themes and implications remain huge, profound, central to the broad sweep of American social history.
Offering a slow, careful, forensic examination of the case for the innocence of the so-called “Central Park Five” — the group of black and Latino teenagers who were railroaded and wrongfully convicted in the 1989 rape and attempted murder of the “central park jogger” — this is not easy viewing. But it sure feels like it should be required viewing.
Recalling such classics of the police-frame-up documentary genre as Errol Morris’ Thin Blue Line — indeed, repeated shots of cigarettes burning down and ticking clocks during the interrogations seems lifted from his stylized playbook — is hardly innovative filmmaking. But, when the result is a lucid, damning, and riveting study of what can go wrong in American jurisprudence when racial tension is at fever pitch (as it was at the tail end of the crack and crime epidemic of the late 1980s), it hardly matters. Stuart Henderson
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Alice Braga, Marie-Ginette Guay, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/o/on-the-road-movie-poster-200.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 8
Display Width: 200
On the Road
In adapting Jack Kerouac’s famously skittish book On the Road, Walter Salles has conjured a movie that’s raging and serene, always looking over the horizon while grooving on the beauty of the here and now. This is no small feat. Salles made The Motorcycle Diaries, the only other great road film of recent memory, but still, there are many ways for a Kerouac film to go bust (see The Subterraneans), and this one avoids nearly all of them. Maybe it leaves too much of the book’s kinetic language on the floor; this is a story about words almost as much as it is about movement, the road. But as these burning, dreaming, and frustrated wanderers blast back and forth across postwar America in search of what they don’t know, the smoky poetry of its wide vistas and clangorous urban buzz provide a kick, a true kick. Chris Barsanti
Director: Richard Linklater
Cast: Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew McConaughey
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/f/film-bernie-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 7
Display Width: 200
Bernie
Bernie is a docudrama about a murder in a small Texas town, and about how nobody in that town seemed to believe, and later care, that Bernie Tiede was the culprit. Director and Texan Richard Linklater loves his home state, and Bernie is full of that love from the film’s opening frame. Linklater also seems to bring out the very best in Jack Black (see: School of Rock), and he does it again here, casting Black against type as the tidy, well-mannered title character.
Bernie, a local mortician, is well-liked all around town. His companion, rich, old, and mean Marjorie Nugent (Shrirley MacLaine), is roundly despised. So even when it’s discovered that Bernie killed Marjorie and hid the body for nine months, the town as a whole merely shrugs and says, “good riddance.” Linklater enhances the small-town feel of the movie by getting many actual residents of Carthage, Texas, to comment onscreen about what happened in the case.This is one of those strange-but-true crime stories that just keeps getting weirder (the case was tried 50 miles away so that the prosecution could get a fair trial), and everyone involved seems to be having a great time telling the tale. Chris Conaton
Director: Peter Nicks
Cast: Cynthia Y. Johnson, Veronica Couvson, Matthew Rehrer, Davelo Lujuan, Eric Morgan, Demia Bruce
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-waitingroom-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 6
Display Width: 200
The Waiting Room
“I’ve had that pain for years, and I’ve just worked with it, I’ve just lived with it,” says Davelo Lujuan. “But the last six weeks it started growing.” Now that x-rays have revealed he has bone spurs, he goes on, “They said they were gonna have a doctor see me, but it’s been a week.” CNA Cynthia Johnson (CJ) shakes her head. “They won’t call you within a week, it may be a month before…” her voice trails off and Davelo looks surprised. “Even though I’m hurting and in extreme pain?” “Well, sometimes,” she begins, then stops. “Yes,” she say, not so simply.
It’s a familiar scene in the emergency room at Highland, the Oakland, California hospital where Peter Nicks shot his documentary, The Waiting Room. Every day and night, patients wait: they wait to be seen, they wait to be treated, they wait to learn diagnoses. They’re expectant and frustrated, earnest and afraid, a complex jumble of feelings the film makes almost painfully accessible.
This sense of waiting shapes the film, filmed over many months and shaped to look like one day. It’s punctuated by close-ups of tense faces and tapping feet, forms to be filled out and blinking computer screens are set alongside long shots of halls lined with gurneys, people waiting for beds, doors opening and closing, rows of chairs, filled. People talk on their phones, share stories (“So, like, that just kind of like puts things in perspective, you know, like maybe how long you guys could be waiting: even with a referral we’ve been waiting like three days, four days”), and pray (“He needs to be healed and clean in the name of Jesus,” says one woman, before she tells the nurse, “He got a bullet in him that they left when he was shot two days ago. He’s numb”). Cynthia Fuchs
5 – 1
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Jean-Louis Tintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Alexandre Tharaud
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-amour-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 5
Display Width: 200Amour
For me, Amour hit a bit too close to home. Having suffered a near decade with a dying relative, the free-flowing frustration and lack of answers exhibited by the characters here was a reminder of horrors past…and in some cases, still very, very present. It’s the closest thing to living with a lost family member that any modern movie has ever offered. Haneke doesn’t strive for saccharine. He doesn’t try to turn his incapacitated matriarch into anything noble or nuanced. Instead, she’s a moaning, groaning “thing,” a creature unrecognizable in a world where we avoid pain and appease conflict. As her slow decent into human hopeless continues, it’s up to her suddenly struggling husband to find a way to cope – and he doesn’t do a very good job of it. Not at all. For many, this will be a glimpse into personal Hell that they’ll gladly prey upon others. For those of us who’ve been through it, it’s like looking through a dark, and very depressing, mirror. Bill Gibron
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Cast: Logan Lerman, Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, Mae Whitman, Erin Wilhelmi, Adam Hagenbuch, Nina Dobrev, Nicholas Braun, Dylan McDermott, Kate Walsh, Joan Cusack, Paul Rudd
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/p/perks-of-being-a-wallflower-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 4
Display Width: 200
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The bildungsroman, the coming of age story, whatever you would like to call it… it’s been done many times before. And with the imprint of John Hughes movies still existing in pop culture, the follies of teen angst have been put to celluloid more times than can be counted; this means that no matter how much Charlie (Logan Lerman) suffers, it’s hard to feel like you haven’t heard it before. But despite how numerous its predecessecors are, The Perks of Being a Wallflower manages to stand out as a deeply affecting story of the pains of growing up, as well as a love story with a sophistication that most other young adult films could do well to emulate.
Author Stephen Chbosky, who both adapted and directed the movie version of his lauded novel, rises to the task of putting a beloved text to the screen, perfectly capturing the spirit of his writing. A good majority likely knew this as “that movie with Emma Watson in it;” and while Watson’s first major post-Potter role is sweet and emotive, it’s the film’s supporting actor Ezra Miller (in the role of Patrick) that really drives the emotional turmoil home. Youth is a time long taken for granted, but The Perks of Being a Wallflower reminds us that for all the hurt we may suffer—as a result of our parents, school, or social stigma—being young is a time of having the world at your fingertips. Like Charlie, we must embrace the wallflowers that we are and dive headfirst into the endless possibilities ahead. Brice Ezell
Director: Benh Zeitlin
Cast: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Jonshel Alexander, Marilyn Barbarin, Kaliana Brower, Joseph Brown, Nicholas Clark, Henry D. Coleman, Levy Easterly, Pamela Harper
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/b/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 3
Display Width: 200
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Quvenzhané Wallis, six years old when Beasts of the Southern Wild was filmed, has dominated most conversations about the movie. And rightly so, because as Hushpuppy, the entire film is based on her point of view, and she narrates it, to boot. She’s a magnetic screen presence and she proves up to the task of telling Hushpuppy’s story. But director Benh Zeitlin and his co-writer, Lucy Alibar, deserve equal credit for making the a film that is simultaneously surreal and coherent.
In the near future, the bottom half of Louisiana is entirely sealed off by a statewide levee. Hushpuppy lives in a forgotten bayou community called The Bathtub with her single father (Dwight Henry). Her father’s increasingly erratic behavior is compounded when a hurricane destroys The Bathtub, sending Hushpuppy on a wild journey through the swamps, rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way Hushpuppy has encounters with frightening government officials, benevolent prostitutes who live in the ocean, and ancient aurochs freed from melting ice caps. Beasts of the Southern Wild is a movie filled with amazing, idyllic imagery, but it’s really the story of a relationship between a lonely little girl and the volatile father who is ill-equipped to care for her. Chris Conaton
Director: Béla Tarr
Cast: János Derzsi, Erika Bók, Mihály Kormos
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/t/turin-horse-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 2
Display Width: 200
The Turin Horse
Since the late ’70s, Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr has seemed to operate on a separate planet from most other filmmakers. His existential, glacially-paced films demand incredible patience from audiences, but offer unparalleled rewards to those who endure them. With The Turin Horse, which he claims will be his final film, Tarr has delivered what could be the definitive artistic statement of his career. Set almost entirely in a dilapidated one-room cabin in some unnamed, wind-scoured wasteland, the film charts the dread-filled daily drudgery of a father and daughter amidst a decaying world after some unnamed catastrophe. Beautifully shot by master cinematographer Fred Kelemen, each painterly frame could hang on a gallery wall. For an artist dedicated to exploring man’s deepest philosophical questions, The Turin Horse serves as a perfect culmination to the career of one of cinema’s most extraordinarily unique and ambitious directors. Pat Kewley
Director: Léos Carax
Cast: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, Elise Lhomeau, Jeanne Disson, Michel Piccoli, Léos Carax
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-holymotors-poster.jpg
Display as: List
List number: 1
Display Width: 200
Holy Motors
How to describe this oddball French offering? It appears to revolve around a future world where people hire professional “pretenders” to show up and help them in life, be it with a brutal death or a delightful accordion romp. Our central human chameleon is Denis Lavant, who plays everything from an impatient father to a weirdly disfigured man who lures a supermodel away from a fashion shoot. In between, director Leos Carax seems to be channeling every major film genre ever conceived, with bows to musicals, comedies…even horror. It may be meta as Hell, but it’s also deeply entertaining and quite moving. It also argues for the value of remembered narrative, the quaint cliches we seem to scream about while embracing without warning. From its drive and determination to its refusal to explain itself, Holy Motors is a lot like a fancy fever dream. You experience it more than understand it, and love it even if you can’t quite fathom it fully. Bill Gibron
![Call for Papers: All Things Reconsidered [MUSIC] May-August 2024](https://www.popmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/all-things-reconsidered-call-music-may-2024-720x380.jpg)
