Film Walrus Reviews

Top 20 Films of 2018

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 23:39:00 +0000

November

These are my favorite films from 2018. I'm trying to get caught up to the present day (late 2019) as this year has felt pretty dry, but I'm excited for the rush of good films that come out in the final months.

As always, counting down to #1. Perhaps I'll do descriptions at a future date.

20. On Body and Soul (Hungary, Ildiko Enyedi)
19. First Reformed (USA, Paul Schrader)
18. A Simple Favor (USA, Paul Feig)
17. Happy as Lazzaro (Italy, Alice Rohrwacher)
16. Widows (UK, Steve McQueen)
15. Beats Per Minute (France, Robin Campillo)
14. Sorry to Bother You (USA, Boots Riley)
13. Annihilation (USA, Alex Garland)
12. Burning (South Korea, Lee Chang-dong)
11. BlackKklansman (USA, Spike Lee)
10. First Man (USA, Damien Chazelle)
9. Sweet Country (Australia, Warwick Thornton)
8. A Quiet Place (USA, John Krasinski)
7. Leave No Trace (USA, Debra Granik)
6. The Favorite (UK, Yorgos Lanthimos)
5. November (Estonia, Rainer Sarnet)
4. Roma (Mexico, Alfonso Cuaron)
3. Hereditary (USA, Ari Aster)
2. A Star Is Born (USA, Bradley Cooper)
1. The Tale (USA, Jennifer Fox)

Runners-Up: Mission Impossible - Fallout, Searching, Mandy, You Were Never Really Here, A Fantastic Woman, The Shoplifters, Blindspotting, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Loveless, Foxtrot, Upgrade, The Hate U Give, Vice, The Death of Stalin, Revenge, Support the Girls, Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse, Capernaum

Overall: I might be in the minority, but I think 2018 was a great year for films! It was hard to cut off the runners-up list there were so many more I could have included. Two surprise actors-turned-directors made my top 20. Women had a solid showing. Almost every genre had something worth seeing. Some of this got overshadowed by easily the worst nominee winning the best picture Oscar. And while a politically dark time, Obama's impressively eclectic best-of-the-year list reminded me of better days.

I liked Estonia's gorgeous and original folktale-fantasy-horror November so much and it was so under-recognized that I've used only screenshots from it for this post. But other than that, I think I missed a lot of the more obscure and foreign films from 2018. Any recommendations?

Top 20 Films of 2017

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 23:10:00 +0000

Birdboy

Catching up the backlog of my top 20s! As always, counting up to #1. Sorry for the lack of descriptions at this time.

20. Soul Mate (China, Derek Tsang)
19. Baby Driver (USA, Edgar Wright)
18. Phantom Thread (USA, P.T. Anderson)
17. Personal Shopper (France, Olivier Assayas)
16. Mother! (USA, Darren Aronofsky)
15. Raw (France, Julia Ducournau)
14. The Square (Sweden, Ruben Ostlund)
13. Thoroughbreds (USA, Cory Finley)
12. The Meyerowitz Stories (USA, Noah Baumbach)
11. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (Spain, Alberto Vazquez & Pedro Rivero)
10. The Nile Hotel Incident (Egypt, Tarik Saleh)
9. A Ghost Story (USA, David Lowery)
8. Dunkirk (UK, Christopher Nolan)
7. Call Me By Your Name (Italy, Luca Guadagnino)
6. Your Name (Japan, Makoto Shinkai)
5. Get Out (USA, Jordan Peele)
4. The Florida Project (USA, Sean Baker)
3. Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri (USA, Martin McDonagh)
2. Lady Bird (USA, Greta Gerwig)
1. Blade Runner 2049 (USA, Denis Villeneuve)

The Nile Hotel Incident

Runners-up: The Teacher, The Big Sick, It Comes at Night, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, The Insult, The Lure, Wind River, My Friend Dahmer, The Beguiled, Coco, Summer 1993, Graduation, Creepy, Icarus

Overall: Perhaps not a stand out year for cinema, but a year that saw some rejuvenation from relatively fresh blood in the US and a few established names that continue to push themselves hard. Also maybe my favorite grieving scene: Rooney Mara eating an entire pie.

A Ghost Story

Top 20 Films of 2016

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 22:45:00 +0000

I've put off posting my favorite films of 2016 too long. The laziness must end before 2018!

Last year saw Hollywood studios determined to push ever onward down the same well-rutted road despite record-setting financial failures. The curtain of generic superhero uniformity still smothered the multiplexes, but it was pierced here and there by little stabs of originality through which hints of a more complicated moral universe flickered. A serious renewal in terms of substance, style, and structure has yet to emerge, but maybe there's hope.

More exciting is the huge number of debuts and breakthroughs in 2016, with major new voices both inside the US and abroad. I call out a few below. My picks are all over the place, and I struggled to spot a pattern. Maybe the only thing they have in common is an ability to sustain deep and opinionated conversations. In a time where the culture wars of the 1960s and 70s have escalated to all-new heights, perhaps that's the best gift cinema can give us.

So without further ado, my top 20 of 2016 (counting down, of course):'

20) Chevalier

Six Greek men on a yacht obsess over who is best, competing in a bizarre tournament with dubious criteria ranging from how you look when you sleep to building IKEA furniture. A snapshot of contemporary masculinity in self-defeating crisis. Bonus trivia: Chevalier joins K-19: The Widowmaker, The Descent, and The Women (1939) among films featuring exclusively a single gender, but directed by the opposite gender.

19) The Wailing

South Korea's underrated Na Hong-jin serves up a long, dark, and enigmatic horror-mystery about a an ineffective cop investigating a local outbreak: a feverish rash that culminates in violent insanity. He tracks down a Japanese hermit who's either perpetrator or protector. Demons plague the hills. Doubt plagues his heart.

18) Elle

Isabelle Huppert plays Michele Leblanc, a no-nonsense video game designer who has a complicated response to being raped during a traumatic home invasion. Huppert's icy intensity sells a role that should be completely ridiculous; she's the daughter of a serial killer as just one barely-relevant aside. Veteran director Verhoeven learned French in order to direct her.

17) 20th Century Women

Annette Benning, Elle Fanning, and Greta Gerwig are the 20th century (1979, to be specific) women of the title. Collectively they turn in one of the most likable ensemble performances of the year. They shape the life of well-meaning Jamie, based on director Mike Mills as a teenager, who's unfortunately the official "center" of a film that barely needs him. Fortunately the sensitive and funny script rescues this from becoming just another good-guy-coming-of-age nostalgia-fest.

16) Eye in the Sky

The ethics of drone warfare play out via a joint UK-Kenyan anti-terrorist operation. A tense, well-cast, and extremely topical thriller that lives a second life in the debates you'll have afterwards.

15) O.J.: Made in America

A hugely-compelling 467-minute documentary, complete with historical context and in-depth cultural analysis, on orange juice production and distribution in America.

14) Moonlight

A coming-of-age triptych following one man's early life and first love, with sexual identity, race, and poverty not giving him any easy breaks. Moonlight is a cultural milestone, an underdog award-winning masterpiece, and a beautiful heartfelt story. Best of all, every indication is that director Barry Jenkins is just getting started.

13) The Fits

Toni is an 11-year-old boxer who decides to go in for dance. She watches the older girls: their physical confidence, their tough talk, their feminine sexuality. When an epidemic of unexplained fits creeps across her school, she watches that too. Inspirational sports/music movies take place on the surface, where we literally see and hear everything. The Fits is something else. It operates underneath.

12) The Handmaiden

Sarah Water's Dickensian novel about British con artists, lesbian lovers, and rare books is transposed to 1930s South Korea. This is the sexy, twisty, period piece thriller you didn't know you needed!

11) La La Land

You saw it. You have a strong opinion. It made me smile all over the place, and I hate smiling, so save your "overrated" and "they can't sing/dance" stuff for someone else.

10) Midnight Special

Jeff Nichols, the master of rural noir, my favorite micro-genre, mixes in some sci-fi and road movie to deliver Midnight Special. Two men transport a messianic telekinetic child to a mysterious rendezvous point in the Southern swamplands, while pursued by the NSA and a cult. Dusky cinematography and an accent-infested cast also help.

9) Hell or High Water

Speaking of rural noir! Wikipedia also calls this a "neo-Western" which will do equally well. See this for Jeff Bridges doing full-on Jeff Bridges. Or in case you were ever thinking of robbing a bank in West Texas (TLDR: everyone has a gun). Music by Nick Cave.

8) The Salesman

Every film by Asghar Farhadi is gold. His territory is the precise elevation where the moral high-ground shifts beneath you, and the rockslide starts to gain momentum. In The Salesman, a couple move into a new apartment. Off-screen, Rana is surprised by an unexpected intruder. Her husband, Emad, struggles to understand what happened, why, and who to blame. Like Farhadi at his best, there are no clear, easy answers.

7) The Witch

A stubborn Puritan exile homesteads his family in a godforsaken New England meadow circa 1600s. When their newborn disappears, the patriarch suspects a supernatural threat, and consumed by mounting paranoia, turns on his own daughter. Who'd have guessed that the year's most harrowing horror film would be delivered in difficult-to-decipher but utterly rich vernacular dialog?

6) Jackie

Jacqueline Kennedy (portrayed by Natalie Portman) recounts her days in the immediate aftermath of her husband's assassination. Putting Pablo Larrain, a politically-minded Chilean, at the helm of a Kennedy profile is bold (US - Latin America relations being what they were), and partially accounts for the depth and ambiguity rarely seen in patriotic biopics. The formal rigor of the compositions, editing, and sound design are highlights. Discordant music breaks the hermetic seal.

5) Toni Erdmann

So very good, and yet hard to classify or explain. A futile and useless summary: unhappy businesswoman is visited by prankster father. Only slightly better: a character-driven cringe comedy woven from criss-crossing contradictory emotions. Perhaps I had better pitch it based on its unforgettable dinner party scene or as a modernist family drama sustained with wry humor for almost 3 hours primarily on the painfully honest non-chemistry of two non-heroes. Director Maren Ade is another talent to watch.

4) Arrival

Towering black extraterrestrial ellipsoids position themselves around the globe. Governments scramble to understand the technology, the intentions, and, most critically, the language of these cryptic visitors. The US military tasks a linguist (Amy Adams) to make meaningful contact. This is the type of ambitious, cerebral, and yet supremely entertaining genre film I miss. A master class in the possibilities of visual storytelling. Denis Villeneuve may be my favorite director at work today; but can he pull off a Blade Runner sequel?

3) The Lobster

Imagine a European hotel where you can stay for 45 days. You must either fall in love with another guest or be turned into an animal of your choice. You can hunt loners, vagrant forest-dwelling locals, to extend your time. David (Colin Farrell) is shy, lonely, has poor eyesight. If cupid does not intervene, his chosen animal is the lobster. You need a taste for dark, imaginative, deadpan comedy to enjoy this, but if that's your thing, you're in for a very rare treat.

2) Manchester by the Sea

Lee (Casey Affleck) inherits custody of his brother's son, teenager Patrick (much-lauded newcomer Kyle Chandler), much to their mutual chagrin. As they bond, they slowly open up. We see the still-raw nerves of Lee's broken past and Patrick's inarticulate hunger for guidance. An uncompromising depiction of grief and getting by, one day at a time. Writer-director Lonergan (You Can Count On Me, Margaret) is 3 for 3 in my books.

1) The Forbidden Room

What is this? Your grandpa's old instructional bathing tapes? A recovered crooner-era music video about brain surgery and pygophilia? Why is squid theft the greatest crime? How can a saplingjack (an apprentice lumberjack) just "shows up" aboard a submarine deep below the ocean surface? Are those lithesome skeleton women secretly perpetrating insurance fraud? Can perusing even "The Book of Climaxes" tie this mess together?

Canadian experimental pioneer Guy Maddin segues with unpredictable dream logic between dozens of sparkling interlinked stories, depicted in an encyclopedic array of silent and early sound era techniques complete with artful deterioration and distortion. What is it? "Dreams! Visions! Madness!" Not for all tastes.

Some honorable mentions: Victoria, 13th, Don't Breathe, Nocturnal Animals, Zootopia, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Dheepan, Don't Breathe

Zulawski Dies

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 06:06:00 +0000

Yesterday, Andrzej Zulawski, the director of my favorite film, died.

He wasn't the greatest director or even a very consistent one. I doubt he'll appear on the Oscar death montage. He was never much interested in entertaining or educating. Instead, he strived always to transcend: to get behind and beyond the limits of story, character, intellect, morality, sexuality and even the very medium itself. More than anything he brought intensity to cinema, to a degree that often drove his films into incoherence and himself into bout of madness.

His films include the monumental unfinished sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe, which got his expelled from communist Poland, bizarre but compelling adaptations of authors as diverse as Dostoevsky and Madame de La Fayette and a quartet of unrated/NC-17 films starring his wife Sophie Marceau (probably best known as the bond villain from The World Is Not Enough).

I've been a longtime fan, once checking out an English language libretto translation of the Russian opera Boris Godounov so I could follow along with a bootleg of his adaptation.

Possession (1981), the art-horror cult film most often atop my fluctuating top ten favorites, is his masterpiece. Back when the film was a rare collector's item, I found it at an old library on VHS and gathered together a group of like-minded friends for our first viewing. It left me dazed and overwhelmed. It was the moment I realized cinema would be a lifelong passion.

Almost a decade ago, I wrote a long and loving review.

Zulawski's obituary in the NYT.

His final film, Cosmos, an adaption of Witold Gombrowicz's novel, was finished just last year. I look forward to it.

Film Atlas (Estonia): The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Sat, 13 Feb 2016 16:44:00 +0000

Country: Estonia

Title: The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel / ‘Hukkunud Alpinisti’ Hotell (1979)

An avalanche traps a police detective, an innkeeper, a physicist, a terrorist and the mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Moses in a remote alpine ski resort. The same night, a semi-delirious stranger shows up and a Scandanavian fop is found dead, his neck twisted by some impossibly powerful force. It’s up to the policeman, Inspector Glebsky, to solve the case. Although the setup is consciously designed like an Agatha Christie mystery, it was actually penned by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, Russia’s most famous sci-fi writers, and they have something much weirder in mind. The innkeeper speculates about zombies. Glebsky suspects hypnosis. The physicist raves about aliens. This is a case that logic cannot solve.

Although the fashion on display is admittedly dated, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel was impressively ahead of its time in terms of style, structure and theme. The night-shrouded neo-noir cinematography and Sven Grunberg’s ominously dreamy synth score anticipate cinema’s dominate mood through the 1980s. The self-conscious deconstruction of mystery conventions (isolated locale, locked room murder, dogged cop, femme fatale, flowery narration) and the unlikely fusion of genres feels strikingly modern.

The initially sympathetic Glebsky ultimately winds up as an anti-hero who, blinded by an outmoded obedience to logic, duty, and authority, fails to adjust to a dramatically changing world. It’s a theme that registered as a powerful anti-Soviet sentiment during the Cold War (In a final monologue Glebsky justifies murder by saying, “Either they were human, and thus criminals who got what they deserved, or they were inhuman and thus can’t be murdered.”) and continued to be relevant now, when scientific progress has far outpaced the layperson’s ability to understand the reality we live in.

Some other random notes:

The film was released in August 1979, within months of the vastly more famous Strugatsky adaptation Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
At one point a character ponders, “Maybe I’m an android? How would I even know?” anticipating Android (1982) and Blade Runner (1982) to name a few.
The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn novel was only recently translated into English (March 2015), but it has previously been adapted as a notoriously awful videogame. The player spends 5 hours doing chores in a hotel before having the entire plot narrated during the last 20 minutes, apparently due to funding being abruptly cut.
Those of you who’ve read this blog since its giallo days know that I enjoy sourcing paintings that appear in the background of films. The large mural that the innkeeper claims is the dead mountaineer of the title, is actually Chuck Close’s mezzotint of artist Keith Hollington. A version hangs in my home city of St. Louis, but the one used here appears to match the version in the Pace Gallery of New York City.

Chuck Close's large-scale portrait "Keith."

My Favorites:

November
The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel

Spring / Kevade

Franky & Wendy

Film Atlas (Latvia): In the Shadow of Death

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 03:48:00 +0000

Country: Latvia

Title: In the Shadow of Death / Naves Ena (1971)

A group of Latvian fisherman are stranded at sea when the peninsula of ice they are on breaks free from the mainland. One man leaps into the water and attempts to swim back, but dies immediately in the churning cold. An old man says a brief funeral oration over him: “There was a man and then there was not.” This grim unadorned stoicism characterizes the film as the remainder are left to confront death, and each other, as their supply of fish dwindles and their iceberg shrinks.

Our viewpoint character is Birkenbaums, an affianced slightly angsty young man. Through flashbacks he reflects on his previously charmed existence, his faith that he would always remain unscathed by misfortune, and his lover back home, who once playfully wrestled with him while dressed as a grim reaper (ominously foreshadowing the real thing). He witnesses various reactions to their predicament in the men around him: a rich old patriarch hoards fish (one of the few explicit concessions to the Soviet propaganda agenda), another turns to prayer, a third succumbs to madness.

Birkenbaums’s closest friend, a fair-haired teen, begins to fade first. When the others vote against killing their only horse to provide him nourishment, Birkenbaums feeds him with his own blood. As time and space melts away, a chance of rescue presents itself, but their hardest moment is yet to come, for there is not enough room to save them all.

Leveraging the best elements of two survival genres, mountaineering disaster films and lifeboat/shipwreck dramas, In the Shadow of Death is a cold, harsh thriller about impending death and its psychological effects, bringing out nobility and sacrifice here and selfishness and despair there.

The film is short and rather terse. I expected the flashbacks to flesh out more of the characters, but the camera so rarely leaves their diminishing iceberg that its few brief leaps ashore have to be savored by the audience; a subtle decision by director Gunare Piesis. Although this is a film about facing hard truths and hard choices, it is also a film about hope and practical survival. You can see as much in words as in actions, like taking turns holding a makeshift flagpole because digging a hole to plant it in risks splitting their frozen island. It brings home the delicacy of civilization and of life.

Review of Empty Night / Noite Vazia

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 05:43:00 +0000

Sexy philtrums,

Fulsome tantrums,

Unfulfilling sex

The Brazilian film Noite Vazia (1964) is variously but blandly retitled as ‘Eros’ or ‘Men and Women’ in English. Far more evocative, and more fitting, is the direct translation: Empty Night.

Luisinho and Nelson, two jaded playboys, prowl Sao Paolo searching for “something new” and end up spending the night with high-end prostitutes Regina and Mara. Sounds sexist and a snooze, but… there’s something there.

Luis and Regina, the older pair, have a painfully tense anti-chemistry, like two veterans from opposite sides of a war. They hate how much they recognize in each other: bitter tongues, calloused hearts, boredom dulling their wits, age seeping into their bodies. Luis says she’s #367. He counts. He would. Regina says he’s #1800. But I doubt she counts.

Nelson and Mara are less interesting, but at least for them there might still be hope. Nelson’s inarticulate anger masks a sensitive soul, or maybe he’s just another misogynist-in-the-making. Maybe I’m falling into the same trap as his prey: mistaking him for deep and mysterious. Mara, meanwhile, is hopelessly unfit for her line of work: she still feels pity for men, still cares whether they seek her out a second time. But then again, her naïve longing (is the word ‘love’ ever spoken in this film?) might be a lifeline of sorts.

There are tons of little ups and down. Moments of emotion and humanity that, like weeds coming up through pavement, still struggle to express themselves despite a lack of sustenance. Rudolf Icsey’s velvety, inky cinematography provides little sunlight. Rogerio Duprat’s skittish, jaggy bossa nova is hostile soil.

Mirrors and male gaze.

Two scenes are almost perfect.

A teenage bellboy tries to break in, looking for a place to make out with his timid girlfriend and assuming the suite to be unoccupied for the night. Luis, initially outraged, awkwardly invites the couple to join them. The girl bolts. The boy follows, less certain of what he’s escaping. From their balcony, the four leads watch them reunite in the street, upset with each other, out of hearing. A lot is running through their heads, across their faces: nostalgia, mockery, envy.

Noite Vazia reminds me how much I miss filmmakers who know how to do deep compositions. Almost nobody, appropriately enough, is on the same plane. The girl hides from the moment. The plant fits perfectly.

Late in the night the two couples wake up to a storm. Without words they strips off their clothes and walk out into the rain. It is arguably the film’s most erotically charged scene. It is the only time they experience the sensual pleasure they only pantomime in the bedroom. They can only drifts indolently downhill from there.

The film ends with minor acrimony and a return to lonely routine. Any one of them could have learned something, but they’ve chosen not to. And that’s perhaps the film’s most telling observation.

Odete Lara, if you can't bring in some Google image search hits, nobody can.

Walrus Rating: 8.5

Top 20 Films of 2015

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Sat, 26 Dec 2015 20:47:00 +0000

2015 was an odd year.

I caught ~60 releases, but still felt a bit tuned out this year. Perhaps it’s just December, a month where I’m always consumed with regret and shame over all the films I missed. I’m only half kidding.

Still, I’ve put together a top 20, and jotted down some of my thoughts on the year. I’ll do the countdown first, and then the cranky, analytical, frankly skippable stuff afterwards.

20. Love & Mercy – A great cast and savvy attention to sound design allow this Brian Wilson musician biopic to transcend the genre’s typical reverential history lesson pitfalls. Paul Dano is great as young Brian, somewhat overshadowing the serviceable John Cusack as washed-up Brian, while Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti are great is supporting roles.

19. Marshland – True Detective’s Spanish nephew. Marshland is a 1980s-set noir, in which a pair of anti-buddy cops attempt to solve a series of murders in rural swamp country, uncovering the usual conspiracy, but also some personal secrets of their own. Wallow in the offhand perfectionism of the period detail and immaculate sense of place supplemented by occasional overhead “god’s-eye” cinematography.

18. The Invitation – Two years after the death of their only son and subsequent divorce, Will, along with his new girlfriend, is invited to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife Eden and her new husband, ostensibly to achieve some emotional closure by commemorating their lost child. Several other close friends have been invited, most of them somewhat out of touch with the hosts, who’ve been on retreat in Mexico. It’s an awkward get-together, and the taciturn Will increasingly suspects something is not right. This is a brooding low-budget thriller that amplifies paranoia and social anxieties into a form of horror that kept me guessing, but also relating. A hard combination to juggle. Director Karyn Kusama disliked her Hollywood experience on the thoroughly mediocre Jennifer’s Body, and returned to low-budget filmmaking in exchange for having her own way, including a lot more diversity than the genre usual accommodates.

17. Anomalisa – Charlie Kaufman’s previous film, Synecdoche New York, is one of my all-time favorites, and was bound to be a tough act to follow. Anomalisa, a story about a middle-aged motivational speaker having a one night stand while attending a customer service convention in Ohio (“Try the Chili!”), lacks his previous film’s existential ambition, but it’s still smarter, funnier and more original than 98% of cinema. Some immediate signs that this isn’t your typical midlife crisis indie movie: all the characters are puppets and all of them except two are voiced by the infuriatingly cordial-bland Tom Noonan.

16. What We Do in the Shadows – Doesn’t this sound insufferable: a reality-TV style film about four New Zealand dudes living as roommates? But Taika Waititi (Boy) adds a brilliant twist: they’re all vampires. The plot revolves around the reluctantly accepted new addition Nick, who clashes with self-centered bon vivant Deacon, 8000 year-old Petyr and a rival gang of werewolves. The screenplay explores the premise thoroughly without wearing out its welcome, and the silly but morbid skit-based comedy is sustained by performances that play off each other effortlessly.

15. The End of the Tour – Yet another biopic on my list! I must be getting old. But this highly focused, carefully modulated and relatively honest look at a brief encounter, perhaps just short of friendship, between writers David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace, highlights one of my favorite things: the sublime flow of a good conversation. Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg both inhabit their characters with grace and sincerity. Despite being framed around Wallace’s high profile suicide, the drama is wisely low key, more interested in Wallace’s fundamental humanity and need to express himself in everyday contemporary terms, than in his much touted genius. This is a quiet film, but a very full one. Its main shortcoming is that it isn’t as good as reading one of his books.

14. Wild Tales – 6 black comedic shorts from Argentina, themed around revenge in many shapes and sizes. Anthology films rarely work for me, but this one has a cohesive core without repeated itself and is ordered so that each tale overtops the previous. Lots of observations about topics as diverse as road rage, love, bureaucracy and the media. Revenge is a theme that cinema has done to death, but Wild Tales knows how to escalate things with just the right degree of cynical wit and gleeful absurdity.

13. The Last Five Years – A relatively straightforward adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s not-so-straightforward musical, The Last Five Years spans the rise and fall of a relationship between novelist Jamie (Jeremy Jordan, a bit out of his depth on the acting side) and actress Cathy (Anna Kendrick, awesome as always). Their careers go in opposite directions, with Jamie dealing with fame even more poorly than Cathy with failure. The film’s uncompromisingly literary lyrics and holistic perspective on the stages of relationships are paired well with an experimental structure: Cathy’s story is told chronologically backwards, her songs alternating with Jamie’s story as it unfolds chronologically forwards.

12. Spotlight – A team of Boston investigative journalists gradually chip away at the systemic nature of priests molesting children and high-ranking church officials covering it up. Sure, this is ensemble Oscar-bait, but it is really, really good ensemble Oscar-bait, saved from histrionics, heroics and finger-wagging by Tom McCarthy’s (The Station Agent, The Visitor) borderline obsessive desire not to sensationalize. In fact, by dialing down the dramatic, the film managed to ratchet up the emotional impact, at least for jaded viewers like me. Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton are all top notch. Liev Schreiber is the best he’s ever been.

11. Room – Ma is a 22-year-old woman who has raised her 5-year-old son, Jack, in captivity, locked in a small room somewhere in suburbia where she is kept by a kidnapper named Nick. It’s an instantly creepy, troubling, stressful set-up, anchored by a note-perfect Brie Larson (Short Term 12). The first half of the film would have been fantastic alone, but it’s the second half that shows real maturity, psychological insight and follow-through. This is really two great films, with different genres and tones fitted together seamlessly.

10. It Follows – This year’s breakout cult horror film. Spoilers ahead. Jay’s older boyfriend Hugh seems like a nice guy. Though he sometimes acts strange, they eventually hook up in his car in an empty lot behind some abandoned buildings. The romantic moment is shattered when, afterwards, he chloroforms her and ties her up. But just when you think you’ve stumbled into some awful torture porn, It Follows takes off in a really fascinating direction. Hugh isn’t a sadist; he just wants Jay to understand the gravity of the STD he’s just given her: a creature that can look like anyone will start following her. Slowly, implacably, unstoppably. If it catches her, she will die in extreme pain. And then it will return to hunting Hugh. Her only long-term survival plan is to pass it on to someone else. It Follows is a scary atmospheric thriller and a thoughtful allegory for teenage sexuality, surprisingly free from crass exploitation and cheap payoffs.

9. Tangerine –Tangerine has to be the year’s most surprising critical darling. Two take-no-prisoners trash-talking transgender sex workers, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, meet up at Donut Time on Christmas Eve, just after Sin-Dee is released from a 28 day prison sentence. Alexandra accidentally lets slip that Sin-Dee’s pimp/boyfriend Chester two-timed her with a cis-gender gal while she was in lock-up, and Sin-Dee is off on a bloodthirsty but oddly hilarious vengeance quest. A beleaguered Armenian taxi driver also gets involved. Shot on iPhones along the Sunset Strip, this is a film full of energy, guts, genuine friendship and a fresh comic voice. Much better than its po-faced East Coast indie darling counterpart, Heaven Knows What, about homeless heroin addicts.

8. Inside Out – Do I need to talk about this? It’s a Pixar film. You already saw it. Superb CG, story-telling, pacing, etc. They have a formula, but it works well, especially tucked behind such a beautiful and actually riskily original façade: personality traits controlling a teenage girl’s brain and exploring the landscapes of her mind. It’s also brave enough to dispense with both romantic subplots and villains. All “kids” movies should aspire to be this good.

7. Clouds of Sils Maria – A crafty, sophisticated, multi-layered enigma in which Juliette Binoche plays Maria, a middle-aged actress offered the role of the older woman in a play about a May-December lesbian relationship. A few decades past, she’d achieved her breakthrough to superstardom playing the younger woman, a role now being offered to hot up-and-comer and tabloid regular Jo-Ann (Chloe Grace-Moretz). Maria’s real life isn’t far from her art, as her relationship with much younger personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart, winning all kinds of awards!) is fraught with subterranean sexual tension and power struggles. Director Olivier Assayas’s career has been uneven, but never uninteresting, and this mesmerizing, ambiguous showcase of serious acting talent and subtle psychological warfare is his best work yet.

6. Embrace of the Serpent – A German botanist in 1909 and an American in 1940 both embark on similar quests for a rare legendary flower, capable of restoring dreams to the dreamless, supposedly found deep in the Amazon. They are guided by Karamakate, a shaman who doubts their ideologies and their intentions and who, by 1940, is suffering from severe memory loss. The lopsided two timeframe structure is a strange choice, but allows Colombian director Ciro Guerra to explore the unpredictable long-term ramifications of cultural clashes, both violently physical and dangerously mental. This is definitely a thinking man’s adventure film, with beguiling mystery wisps blooming out in every direction as their canoes take them deeper into a land feverishly rejecting its heart transplant. Shot in dense, evocative black-and-white.

5. Ex Machina – Caleb is a hotshot programmer who wins a chance to meet reclusive AI genius Nathan, who lives in an inaccessible high-tech glacier-side bungalow. He never quite finds his balance. Nathan immediately begins toying with him under cover of a disingenuous friendship and saddles him with an unexpected challenge: deliver a Turing test to Ava, a robot who looks, talks and possibly even thinks like a human. Caleb finds himself emotionally involved, attracted to Ava’s curiosity, intelligence and vulnerability, not to mention her sleek packaging, while trying to maneuver out from under Nathan’s thumb. Meanwhile the maestro is tortured by his visions of the coming future, a future he is compelled to create, but his condescension and narcissism have left him even more isolated than his imprisoned inventions. Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander are perfectly cast, and provide much-needed human stakes to underpin the cerebral dialog. It isn’t often I would give these two awards to the same film: best debate about technology and best dance scene.

4. Son of Saul – Does the world need another Holocaust film? There’ve been a lot, and I have to admit I go into them with a degree of skepticism. After all, what is there left to say that a film is even capable of communicating? Son of Saul has an answer, but it can’t be paraphrased. It has to be seen. This is a harrowing, soul-crushing odyssey through the inner workings of a the world’s most heinous machine, the concentration camp, seen from the perspective of a victim-employee determined to provide a proper Jewish burial for a boy who may or may not be his bastard son. The relentless over-the-shoulder long takes are technically brilliant, but even more brilliant because they force us not to do what we long to do: look away.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road – A glorious, nonstop post-apocalyptic desert car chase led by one-armed mechanic/warrior Charlize Theron and subdued, inarticulate Tom Hardy. The two, by necessity, learn to operate as a well-oiled machine as they attempt to outrun the enraged mutant tyrant whose harem they’ve just stolen. Pursued by an eccentric army of inventive vehicles of destruction, they leave a path of carnage and mayhem behind them while bonding through body language and mutual respect. Memorable action sequences and visual flourishes abound. The stripped-down script is ruthlessly efficient. Nothing else this year approached Mad Max in terms of adrenaline.

2. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem – A protracted Jewish divorce case set largely in a single nondescript white-washed room might not seem like a barrel of fun (it isn’t), but as an intersection of great writing, directing and acting (the astounding Ronit Elkabetz in all three cases, with some help from her friends), you can’t find much better. Viviane and Shimon have been married for twenty years. Viviane has been unhappy almost since day one, and longs to be free of him. Shimon claims to still love her and points out that he has never hit her or given her religious grounds for divorce, though it’s clear to everyone that he’s awful to live with. In the course of two hours, their relationship is slit open, dissected and left exposed until it starts to stink. Nobody, not the lawyers, judges, witnesses or the couple themselves, seem to be able to do anything about it. It is uncomfortable, but in the best sense: unbearably honest, human and hard to resolve.

1. Sicario – Following a raid on a suburban drug lab turned mass grave north of the US-Mexico border, FBI SWAT agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is attached to a clandestine joint operation to extradite a high ranking officer in the drug syndicate responsible. Her glib but reticent new boss (Josh Brolin) and his ununiformed partner (Benicio del Toro) immediately strike her as shady, but they reassure her that their legally murky methods are fully sanctioned from above, and they certainly prove quite effective. Kate gets embroiled deeper and deeper, fatally unwilling to accept that she is being used as a pawn in a game played above her pay grade and below the moral high-ground. Sicario is a series of linked set pieces alternating white-knuckle tension and bursts of chilling violence. It’s also a pessimistic exploration of border spaces, both national and ethical, and what it costs us to cross them. But ultimately the winning combination is three people at the top of their game: director Denis Villeneuve, cinematographer Roger Deakins and actress Emily Blunt.

I never feel like it’s been a great year until I have to bump films I really liked off my top 20. Some of the titles that were edged off towards the end include:

Blind – A sightless Swedish novelist wrestles with her sexual insecurities.

White God – A gritty Hungarian parable in which a young girl is forced to abandon her pet dog, who struggles to survive on the street before toughening up and leading a blood-soaked (but also kind of adorable) canine revolution against humanity.

The Martian - A nearly ideal adaptation of a book into a movie, with some of my qualms about the source material (character development in particular) fixed by strong acting on Matt Damon's part, playing a resourceful astronaut stranded on Mars.

Beasts of No Nation – Cary Fukunaga provides gorgeously lensed reasons why you don’t want to be a child soldier in an African civil war, in case you had some doubts.

Court – An Indian satire of the justice system, in which a street poet is arrested for inciting a sewer worker to suicide (actually a workplace accident caused by grossly inadequate safety equipment), and a deconstruction of the legal thriller, showing the mindless bureaucracy, corruption and apathy under the thin coating of law, procedure and middle-class morality.

General thoughts on film in 2015:

Although I often focus on the negative, I want to start out by saying how much I really enjoyed so many movies from 2015! It was a triumphant year for middlebrow offerings (Spotlight, The End of the Tour, Love & Mercy, Carol, Beasts of No Nation) and fantastic acting, especially from actresses in roles actually worthy of them (Sicario, Gett, Clouds of Sils Maria, Mad Max, Room, Phoenix, Inside Out, Girlhood, Heaven Knows What). There were a lot of really original and personal creative works (Anomalisa, The Duke of Burgundy, The Kindergarten Teacher) and exciting debut/breakthrough directors.

For genre fans, there was a little of everything. Some excellent sci-fi (Mad Max, Ex Machina, The Martian, Inside Out), creepy horror (It Follows, The Invitation, Goodnight Mommy) and even comedies that I actually found funny (Tangerine, What We Do in the Shadows, Mistress America, Wild Tales), though be aware that my sense of humor is highly suspect.

Meanwhile, the studio franchise factories offered us an unprecedented number of marquee sequels and reboots (Avengers, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, James Bond, Rocky, some increasingly indistinguishable superhero stuff) setting box office records, but rarely offering anything fresh or interesting. A couple exceptions were Mission Impossible, with Rebecca Ferguson redeeming Rogue Nation’s fun but otherwise formulaic entry, and Mad Max, which I’d never have predicted being my favorite summer blockbuster so far this decade. I also have a bit of a crush on The Man from UNCLE, with its appealing cast and 60s fashion sense.

On the flip side, critics raved about many an art film from established auteurs (Hou’s The Assassin, Alonso’s Jauja, German’s Hard to Be a God, Sissako’s Timbuktu) that failed to connect with me.

The Assassin, in particular, baffled me. One of Asia’s most influential directors of the 80s and 90s decides to bring his high art sensibilities to the martial arts genre and critics were quick to toast it as a masterpiece. I was truly excited to see what would result! But what a painful theater-going experience: pretty, but totally lifeless. Hou married the vacuity of navel-gazing slow-cinema to the plotless confusion of bad kung fu, eschewing action, character, historical context, thematic relevance and emotional depth in favor of static tableaux shot through diaphanous curtains (cue thunderous critical applause). After the festival screening in St. Louis, the audience poured into nearby restaurants and bars discussing the disaster.

Hard to Be a God, on the other hand, while long, slow, grim, brutal, muddy, rainy, ugly, unpleasant and monochromatic, at least had a truly distinctive vision that I found itchingly compelling though I wish more (or really, anything) had been done with its sci-fi medieval plot adapted from a Strugatsky brother novel.

Jauja is Argentine minimalist Lisandro Alonso’s most accessible film to date, but it is still utterly impenetrable. A-list star Viggo Mortensen spends the entire film looking as confused as I felt. He plays a Danish explorer lost in the Argentine dessert while searching for his child. He hallucinates an encounter with an old hermit who may be his daughter from the future. Then the film abruptly cuts to a girl waking up in a mansion and wandering a forest in the present day. I’m probably making it sound better than it is. For a superior 2015 colonial-explorer-hallucinating-in-the-Latin-American-wilderness art film, stick with Embrace of the Serpent.

Update:
A few films I watched after already publishing this post: The Revenant (Mind-blowing visuals and high-grade Leo attached to a so-so script), The Hateful Eight (Talky, gory and stetched to the breaking point; I'm a fan!), Brooklyn (Feel-good immigration tale. Solid, but I'd rather see a more challenging film about modern immigrants who are ANYTHING other than Irish or Italian).

Among the films that I missed or haven’t yet caught include 45 Years, Victoria, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Chiraq, Grangs of Wasseypur, Bridge of Spies, 99 Homes and Youth. What do you recommend?

Film Atlas (Mauritania): Timbuktu

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 15:30:00 +0000

Country: Mauritania

Title: Timbuktu (2014)

The film is set during the 8-month occupation of Timbuktu, Mali by Ansar Dine, a militant Islamic movement associated with ISIL. They impose sharia, an extremely strict set of laws that includes the banning of music, singing and sports, forcing women to completely cover their bodies, and levying heavy punishments like lashings and stonings for violations.

The local population, unassuming shepherds, fishers, farmers and shopkeepers, who’ve never needed a standing army and practice Islam as a private, inward-directed faith, are at first merely bemused and annoyed by the newly-arrived outsiders. But their policies, pitilessly, disproportionately and often hypocritically applied, soon turn the once-vibrant region into a fearful and despotic hellhole. The main character, Kidane, is a leisurely but very loving husband and father, who grazes eight cows in the grass-patched dunes outside the city. When “GPS,” the pride of his herd, is killed by an angry neighbor, Kidane gets caught up in the senseless ‘justice’ of Ansar Dine’s reign.

Veteran helmer Abderrahmane Sissako has shown a welcome inclination to tackle contemporary political topics, but what makes Timbuktu work is that it has a great deal more grace and moderation than we’re used to from political pieces and social commentaries. It functions on a much smaller and more intimate scale. The “heroes” of the story are members of a quiet unambitious family so inconsequential that the occupiers are barely aware of their existence until circumstances make them just conspicuous enough to merit a quick, callous, informal trial. The soldiers of ISIL, on the other hand, aren’t depicted here as an army or terrorist organization so much as a small-time gang; self-interested men who thrive on seeing their own will imposed on those around them, something only possible because they happen to have guns. They shroud themselves with a religion they little understand, warping it to their short-term, petty desires while disregarding the articulate common sense of the local imam.

Sissako’s style has intermittently flirted with European slow cinema and he’s developed an eye for breathtaking telephoto scenes that increasingly merit being held for a minute or more as we fully digest. Perhaps the best is a long shot of two men separating after a struggle in the middle of a shallow lake, lurching to land, their expressions far too remote to read, but in the full awareness that their lives are ending. Another hauntingly beautiful scene weaves around a soccer match taking place with an imagined ball, the real one having been confiscated as un-Islamic.

Timbuktu also has Sissako’s best script to date, balancing the slacker ennui and mute acceptance of his Waiting for Happiness and the in-your-face polemics and foregrounded debate of his last feature, Bamako, in which an African village literally puts the IMF on trial.

Major Directors:

Abderrahmane Sissako

Med Hondo

Film Atlas (Kuwait): The Cruel Sea

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 15:30:00 +0000

Country: Kuwait

Title: The Cruel Sea / Bas ya Bahar (1972)

For the men and women who eke out a living on the coast of Kuwait, the sea is both friend and enemy, generous giver and ruthless taker, and at various times a meal ticket, a home and a grave. Moussaed, your typical handsome-but-poor young man is in love with Nora, your garden variety beautiful-rich-out-of-reach woman, who reciprocates his feeling despite her father’s objections. Moussaed is more successful at vetoing his dad, determining to make his fortunes as a pearl diver even though his father’s arm was paralyzed by a shark pursuing the same career.

Once underway on a four month tour of duty, Moussaed partners with Badr, his only friend on the conspicuously solidarity-starved ship, and the two are reasonably successful at first. However, it soon becomes clear that they are playing a dangerous lottery rigged against them by both man and nature. The prolonged time spent submerged and the constant pressure changes saddle Moussaed with an excruciating earache while other illnesses plague the crew. Forced to push on anyway, his arm is caught in an underwater cleft and, after a terrifying struggle, he dies.

Late that night Badr cuts open the clams from his ex-buddy’s basket and discovers several shimmering pearls. The ship returns from the season late. In the meantime Nora has been married against her will to a wealthy merchant. Badr gives the pearls to Moussaed’s parents, but, overcome by grief, his mother throws them back to the cruel sea.

The Cruel Sea was the first feature film from Kuwait and major landmark in Arabic cinema. The production is technically rather rough, marred by injudicious zoom shots and ambitious but frequently confusing editing and lighting that confuse several scenes, but the sweaty, sickly claustrophobia of the diving boat and the misleading serenity of the underwater photography elevate the film’s latter half. Similarly, the narrative begins rather conventionally with a pair of thwarted lovers who’ve got very little spark and at one point loses momentum during Nora’s extended wedding scene, but the story has a timeless wisdom and sadness, not to mention a great deal of thematic interest, that build towards the final acts.

Family, tradition, masculinity and life at sea, while shown as essential to community life and as cornerstones of their value system, are undermined by self-interest, parochialism and unjustifiable risk. Even dreams, the thing that movies are made of, are revealed as siren songs. In an extended flashback Moussaed’s father pursues a phantom pearl to his own disaster, and later fails to avert his son, who refuses to obey him, from an even worse fate. Conversely, Nora’s father should have been disobeyed, but can’t be, and result is also tragedy. This false choice, where respecting parental authority versus paving one’s own way both lead to misfortune, echoes the movie’s more explicit theme of an ocean on which lives both depend and end.

Film Atlas (Honduras): Garifuna in Peril

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Sun, 19 Apr 2015 16:53:00 +0000

Country: Honduras

Title: Garifuna in Peril (2012)

Garifuna in Peril, despite its grassroots production, has a great deal of ambition, not only attempting to rescue an ethnic community and their fading language by telling their story of survival in both the historical past and the economically-shaky present, but also presenting a warm-hearted family saga with all the breadth and intimacy that entails. Ricardo is the foundation of an extended family that spans two countries. He lives in the US with his wife Becky, where he manages the business end of a Honduran company with his brother, Miguel, who conducts tours of their traditional Garifuna village. Together they are building an English-Spanish-Garifuna-language schoolhouse with the proceeds.

But Miguel befriends Pedro, a bus driver for a nearby luxury hotel, and falls in love with Pedro’s sister Vera, who makes him a more lucrative offer. Ricardo has to travel back to his homeland and clear up the mess. Meanwhile Ricardo’s daughter, Helena, deals with a much older boyfriend, Gabriel, who is dragging his feet about getting tested for HIV, and his oldest son Elijah, initially indifferent to his cultural heritage, stars in a play about the Garifuna people’s 17th century resistance to British colonialism and slavery on the island of St. Vincent.

One of the keys to low-budget filmmaking is to play to your strengths. Car chases and CG are expensive, but good writing, though difficult to achieve, is cheap. Garifuna understands this, and succeeds by focusing on a strong script that captures the everyday realism of a unique pocket of Honduras and never cuts corners in terms of what it wants to tackle and how. Of course, not every subplot gets an in depth treatment, but even the ones brushed over (like Helena’s relationship or everything having to do with the youngest son, Jimmy) give us a greater sense of a living, breathing family.

There are a lot of scenes that may look like soap opera, but don’t feel like it, largely because the writing is both fair and honest. For example, Miguel’s passion for Vera is understandable even as it leads him to make an obviously poor decision and I was impressed that the film resisted giving him a tearful reunion back into the family fold after realizing his mistake. Instead he gets tipsy, wrestles inarticulately with guilt and self-disgust and finally takes off never to be seen again; pretty harsh, but also pretty true to life. Another great example of naturalistic writing, painfully reminiscent of my own experiences, is a sort of town hall meeting in which miscommunication, blame apportioning, anger venting, lingering resentments and cross-cultural mistrust make it hard to get anything meaningful done, though that doesn’t stop a few optimists from trying. I was also keen on the hotel owner’s climactic “villain speech,” which is actually reasonable, persuasive and open to some compromises, an almost unheard of rarity in stories about communities squaring off against large corporations.

The acting and directing don’t quite live up to the same level as the writing. Ruban Reyes, who stars as Ricardo and co-directed, raises the level of every scene he’s in (and thankfully he’s onscreen a lot), but the rest of the cast feel like first-time actors, which isn’t surprising, because they are. Garifuna in Peril isn’t likely to generate a lot of buzz, but for those among the Garifuna diaspora or who take an interest in Central American cultures, they’ll be well satisfied by this film.

This was the first Film Atlas title submitted by a reader (and it beat out the Honduran films I was able to track down on my own). If you know of or represent a great film from a country not yet on the Film Atlas, please let know! I'd be happy to hear from you.

SLIFF 2014: Zero Motivation

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Title: Zero Motivation

Country: Israel

Rating: 8.5

Comedy is pretty hard to judge. I hardly ever see comedies in theaters because what the big US studios consider funny these days just doesn’t get a laugh out of me. I don’t think of myself as a grumpy person, though, just a picky one. That said, Zero Motivation cracked me up!

A group of young women serving their mandatory military service in the IDF, kill time in admin positions at an obscure and strategically minor dessert outpost during peacetime. They compete for ‘world records’ in MS minesweeper, intermittently shred miscellaneous documents and jealously guard their most valuable possession: twin staple guns. The film is divided into several acts following Daffi, who is so desperate to transfer to Tel Aviv that she may even endure officer’s training, Zohar, a natural rebel and unhappy virgin who manages to destroy everything in her wake without ever feeling at fault, and their commanding officer Rama, a highly-driven authoritative workaholic with plenty of conviction and almost no charisma.

This is smart, character-driven comedy with excellent timing, a brisk cycle of realism and absurdity and the boredom-born wisdom to recognize that drudgery and whimsicality are very near neighbors. It’s also a movie that genuinely cares for its characters, even the ones who it uses as the butt of jokes, while never giving them a free pass or excusing their bad behavior and poor judgment. Anyone who has every worked in an office environment, especially one cutoff from common sense by layers of calcified bureaucracy, will find moments of recognition and laughter.

SLIFF 2014: Winter Sleep

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 23:30:00 +0000

Title: Winter Sleep

Country: Turkey

Rating: 9

In the ancient and dazzlingly scenic cave city of Cappadocia, Mr. Aydin runs a hotel, writes a smalltime column called 'Voices of the Steppe,' and serves as landlord for pretty much the entire nearby population though he is so hands-off that even he admits he wouldn't necessarily recognize their faces if he passed them on the street. A former actor, he's also intermittently researching a history of Turkish theater.

But mostly he talks... and talks... and talks. He talks with his groundskeeper/chauffeur, his dissatisfied and much-younger wife, his bitter stifled sister, his few and far between guests (offseason is descending) and, when he can't self-servingly avoid them, his hard-pressed poverty-mired locals. One of these latter is Ismail, a hot-tempered heavy-drinking man who served time for a fight that got out of hand and has had trouble finding employment since. After failing to make rent, his TV and refrigerator are repossessed in front of his family, shaming him. The incident takes place offscreen before the movie opens. Our story begins when his son, Ilyas, throws a rock at Mr. Aydin's car.

Over the past decade the internet has been having some really great discussions on privilege, discourse and authority; the contemporary first-world expressions of power hierarchies and class structures which are perhaps more subtle than in the past but no less pervasive and powerful. These discussions rarely ever make it to the big screen and rarer still in forms that capture the incredible complexity and breadth of perspectives that make them meaningful. But if any of those topics are of interest to you, then Winter Sleep is a movie you will want to see. And if they aren't of interest to you, then Winter Sleep is probably a film you should see.

But I hate it when critics tell me I 'should' see a film, so instead I'll talk about why I'm glad I did see it. It woke me up a little. At times I was Mr. Aydin, or recognized him, loathed him or sympathized with him, found him impenetrable or saw right through him and through myself. Mr. Aydin is a fantastic character, and his every interaction with the people around him are mini-masterpieces of mutual, conflicting and self deceptions. It's almost worse when he hits upon truth. His erudition has brought him little personal insight and less redemption, but it has brought him eloquence and armed him to the teeth with rationalizations for his ideas and his way of life. He's not quite unaware, and certainly not blissfully unaware, of his pettiness, vanity, cowardice and mediocrity, but he has largely accepted these faults, excused them and taught himself not to dwell on them. Instead he dwells on the faults of others (when he isn't completely consumed with his incredibly niche hobbies) and seems to think that if there are things wrong with the people he is arguing with, then he himself must be right.

This film is 196-minutes and slow. But it is by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which for me has come to mean that it is worth the time and effort no questions asked. I won't even go into the cinematography except to say that it is every bit as good as the writing. I'd rank this ever so slightly below Ceylan's Three Monkeys, but it is surely his most penetrating and ambitious in a brilliant oeuvre that continues to mature and impress.

SLIFF 2014: Uzumasa Limelight

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Title: Uzumasa Limelight

Country: Japan

Rating: 4

Seiichi Kamiyama is one of those highly trained and yet borderline uncredited extras in Japanese sword-fighting films that gets bloodily dispatched, sometimes dramatically and sometimes offhandedly, by the top-billed actor. After the last great chanbara TV series is canceled, Seiichi's rather specialized skills are no longer needed, and he loses part of his pride and most of his purpose. Disliked by the company's new producer, he rarely gets roles even after the genre is revived with a younger, handsomer and trendier cast. Eventually Seiichi finds a calling teaching Satsuki, an ambitious and heartfelt young lady, how to stage-fight. She will have her day in the limelight.

The concept looks great on paper. Casting Seizo Fukumoto, a real-life oft-killed 'Thug #2' and 'Samurai guard #4' in many films from the 1970s, is also inspired. But everything else isn't. The direction is flat and over-earnest. The look is bland and overlit. The story beats are predictable to the point of mechanic, making it easy to get bored since you know where a scene is heading before it’s halfway through. The young actors are not very good, just like the young actors they are portraying. This is a film that is supposed to be feel-good, but it too often it doesn't earn it.

SLIFF 2014: The Tribe

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 23:30:00 +0000

Title: The Tribe

Country: Ukraine

Score: 8

Sergey is a new student at a boarding school that looks like it gets about as much government funding as an empty lot with a city park sign. Paint peels off the walls. Kids are packed 2-4 to a dorm room. The wood shop looks like a factory floor for exploiting child labor. And exploiting is definitely the right word, given what goes on at this place. The alpha males of this student ‘tribe’ bully whoever they please, sell drugs, mug locals and prostitute female classmates at a seedy truck stop nearby. It gradually and rather matter-of-factly becomes clear that the staff are in on, if not all of this, then at least the worst of it.

Sergey initially takes his lumps, but earns a measure of respect from the upperclassmen and is entrusted by them with various gang tasks. After one of the pimps is killed, in a scene of expertly choreographed anticipation that is excruciatingly hard to watch (although far from the hardest), Sergey is promoted. He soon falls in love – although I use this word in the broadest possible sense – with Yana, one of the girls. She doesn’t exactly reciprocate his emotional attachment, but she’s seems grateful for sex she can actually enjoy. But since this isn’t the fantasy land of most onscreen romances, the relationship just brings down trouble on everyone’s heads. Appealing to a higher authority for justice is clearly not even a thought that would cross Sergey’s mind, since corruption extends in every conceivable direction that he could take. He has no other option then to take matters into his own hands.

I’m giving you the plot first, but the plot isn’t what has the festival circuit abuzz over this film. Most reviews lead with this: all the characters are deaf. They speak exclusively in sign language. There is no dialog. There are no subtitles. There is no translation.

One possible theory as to why is that most deaf audience members have to watch movies in this state all the time: lacking complete information; trying to piece together what is happening from body language and context. You will quickly figure out how, or you better leave the theater. And if you are squeamish, you probably might want to leave the theater anyway, because this is a very grim, unpleasant movie. But it is saying a lot about marginalized vulnerable communities, about youths coming of age in neglected corners, about living in a cutthroat society and an unstable country. And even the deaf, especially the deaf, will want to hear what The Tribe is saying.

The intimidatingly hard to pronounce Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy is also a master of his craft, employing long-take mobile camerawork well-suited to his strutting, ruthless material. As I hinted at above, the locations are also spot-on: wretched cubbyholes of post-Soviet pitted concrete and tarnished metal.

This is easily the most disturbing fiction film I’ve seen this year, but the fact that I can’t get it out of my head isn’t because it bombarded me with senseless shocks and grotesquery. It has gotten into my head and under my skin in the way that provocative cinema should. This may be a film I’m able to like more as I get a little distance from it.

SLIFF 2014: Still Life

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Title: Still Life (2013)

Country: UK

Score: 7

Still Life (winner of this year’s juried SLIFF interfaith award) is about loneliness and death, two topics most films and most people try not to think too much about. Even when films go after such downbeat material, they often treat it glibly. Still Life is a counterexample. Still Life is sincere. Very, very, almost oppressively sincere.

John May’s government job is to search for living relatives, or failing that, friends, of people who are found deceased and alone. If he can find no one he arranges their funeral for them, often picking out the religious denomination of the ceremony, the music and the coffin (or urn), himself. He even writes the eulogies, based on photos and objects around their homes.

John is working on a particularly tough case, a relatively unlikable and probably abusive ex-military, ex-convict, ex-husband named Billy Stokes, when he finds out this will be his last case. His job is being made redundant. His facile boss points out that John is notoriously slow and expensive anyway, what with his ‘excessive’ respect for the dead. Mr. May decides to go the extra mile, and manages to track down clues that take him to many who knew Stokes, including coworkers, lovers, fellow soldiers, bums and even his gentle daughter, Kelly.

Both Eddie Marsan, who is sadly all-too-frequently typecast as a thug or villain, and Joanne Froggatt, who I love from Downton Abbey, give extremely sensitive and note-perfect performances. Though Still Life is a bit too monotonously respectful and gloomy for my taste, it does have occasional moments of quiet, graceful humor that worked consistently well. In fact, the film takes almost no missteps until it almost falls off a cliff at the end, with a twist that is clearly supposed to be bittersweet irony, but instead struck me as distastefully cheap. It sets up the films undeniably poignant conclusion, but my mood has been too poisoned by the tonal cost to fully appreciate it.

SLIFF 2014: Stations of the Cross

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 23:30:00 +0000

Title: Stations of the Cross

Country: Germany

Rating: 9.5

Dietrich Bruggemann’s ambitious, challenging, rigorous Stations of the Cross is 107 minutes and only 14 shots long. You do the math. Actually, I’ll do the math: that’s more than 7 and a half minutes per shot. And if you are versed in Catholic trivia, you can readily guess that each shot will be structured around one of the events that chronicles Christ’s carrying of his own cross towards his crucifixion at Calvary. Knowing this is a slow, German religious-themed film is either going to make you run away screaming or play on your curiosity.

The story is focused on a devout teenage girl named Maria (Lea van Acken giving one of the year’s best performances), who struggles with her ultra-strict mother and ultra-traditional faith. Preparing for Confirmation, her priest warns about such evils as non-ecclesiastical music, looking in mirrors and eating cookies. At home she takes care of her brother, who is mute and possibly autistic, and frequently clashes with her mother over chores, responsibility and the purity of her motives. Things get worse when she meets a boy at the library who invites her to his choir, at a church that allows ‘the devil’s rhythms,’ and Maria lies to her mother while trying to get permission to attend.

One of the many things to Bruggemann’s credit is that each shot is different and engaging, even for the conspicuous lengths of time they are held. The compositions are obviously very strong (they better be!), but his blocking and attention to expression and delivery are also exquisite.

Stations of the Cross is never patronizing, never lazy and never wastes your time. It has a fresh, intense immediacy and a deep respect for its characters, who in a lesser work would be quickly reduced to symbols. Instead, the parallels to the actual Stations of the Cross (which are displayed onscreen before each shot), range from subtle to seemingly incidental and several are largely open to interpretation. For example, ‘Jesus is stripped of his clothes’ is a hospital visit in which Maria has to take off her shirt for the doctor to examine her. Though that isn’t the main point of the scene, it hints at feelings of vulnerability, exposure, shame, defeat, secular practice railroading spiritual qualms, etc.

I actually misremembered my long-since-lapsed childhood rearing and thought the twelfth shot, the powerful climax, was the last. When the movie continued I had my doubts there was anything left to be said. I was wrong.

SLIFF 2014: Patema Inverted

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Title: Patema Inverted

Country: Japan

Rating: 7.5

Super Mario Galaxy, Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014). These days it seems like everybody is attracted to gravity. Patema Inverted has its own twist on the popular fundamental force: Patema comes from a clan that lives underground where all the people and objects are pulled upward by gravity. She meets Age, a boy from the surface where people and objects are pulled downward by gravity. The two team up to fight Age’s oppressive government and end up discovering strange new places and long buried secrets about their world’s past.

Patema continues an anime tradition of having strong young female leads exploring a fantasy/sci-fi world and overcoming an evil threat to their community, and while that specific formula isn’t new, it’s one that has survived a lot of worthwhile variations. Director Yasuhiro Yoshiura (Pale Caccoon, Time of Eve) doesn’t waste his gravity gimmick here, and the film does a fantastic job working through the ups and downs of opposing forces.

The visuals really sell some of the ideas that would otherwise be pretty hard to convey: the terrifying fear of falling into the sky, how to interact with someone or something with a different ‘gravity persuasion’ than your own, the new possibilities in terms of fighting in or navigating through an environment designed in another direction, the difficulty of capturing someone you can’t hold down.

I really loved the way that all the characters in Patema insist on using terms like top, bottom, floor, ceiling, upside-down, invert, etc., from their own perspective. There is no ‘correct’ or ‘established’ gravity. Even the camera is democratic about which way is up, a move that is smart for a lot of reasons, not least because of the delight one finds in seeing familiar objects in unfamiliar ways.

Whether intentional or not, deciding to translate a ‘person with non-locally-standard gravity’ as ‘invert’ also means the movie is open to a very welcome pro-LGBT interpretation, but I won’t belabor that point.

Patema didn’t knock my socks off, but it does characters, story and art well. I would only have suggested changing or entirely removing the villain. This one is ludicrous, lacking in sound motives and leaned on overtly as a crutch to move the story forward. In actually he only holds the movie back.

SLIFF 2014: The Overnighters

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 23:30:00 +0000

Title: The Overnighters

Country: US

Rating: 9.5

The best documentary I saw at the festival, or anywhere else this year, comes from a rather unlikely place: Williston, North Dakota. There thousands of diverse, desperate, often brave and frequently troubled men have descended from all over the world to make their fortunes, and very often risk their lives, in the booming gas and oil extraction industry. But the small rather rigidly conservative community isn’t exactly pleased with the inbound hoards, an iterant population whose legacy is environmental degradation, escalating crime rates and an insuperable housing crisis.

But local pastor Jay Reinke takes pity on these strangers, inviting them to sleep in his church, eat at his table and find consolation in his ministry. He calls them the overnighters. So many flock to his building that they have to sleep in their cars in the parking lot. His church’s regular members are, unsurprisingly, overwhelming against his Christian charity and want nothing to do with these men, who they regard as trash at best and criminals at worst. In truth, many of them do have police records, but Reinke believes in giving them a second chance and points out that sinners are those who need saving most. When he finds out that an unregistered sex offender is staying in the church he realizes that he could lose his job, and makes the tough call to move the man into his own home (after a family meeting with his wife and daughters), rather than risk the bad press rebounding on the church itself.

The film also follows several of the men. Reinke’s ex-convict right-hand man who finds new purpose in administering the overnighters program. A young guy, the first to leave his home town, who is rapidly promoted to supervisor because of his hard work and reliability. A man who leave his wife and kid in Kentucky and builds his own house from scratch in preparation for their reunion. And many of the overnighters who, after years of neglect, suspicion and rejection, find comfort and understanding.

But it all crumbles to dust. There are few happy endings in Williston. This is a heartbreaking film, where you see the incredible possibilities of providing hope but also the rarely shown pain of taking it away. Reinke, reflecting in hindsight on his personal and vocational failings, ends by dubbing his overnighters ‘broken men’ and considering himself the most broken of all. I have rarely been so devastated as I was watching his good works come undone.

I will mention that I have a fleeting connection to Williston. I few years back I lived in Rock Springs, WY, for reasons associated with the natural gas boom, and pretty much hated my life. When the vagaries of the industry took me to Williston, I remember thinking that this was a place even worse off, and that’s saying something. Watching The Overnighters made me ashamed that my reaction to the misery and exploitation (both human and environmental) that I saw was so self-interested; I just wanted to leave, to get away. A man like Jay Reinke, even with all his not-inconsiderable flaws, tried to do a whole lot more.

SLIFF 2014: The Major

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Title: The Major

Country: Russia

Rating: 5.5

Police commander Sergei Sobolev gets the call that his wife is in labor and rushes through the winter streets to the hospital weaving in and out of traffic. He spins out of control, both literally and figuratively, at a remote bus stop, killing a young boy in front of his mother. Horrified more by the legal consequences for himself than about the magnitude of the mother’s loss, he calls in his pals on the force and arranged to cover up the crime. The parents don’t take this sitting down and a fellow officer ends up dead in a tense police station standoff.

[Spoiler paragraph] Sergei repents of his crime, rather tardily, after realizing that his partner, Pavel (played by the director Yuri Bykov, who gives the film’s standout performance), plans to kill the mother before she can testify against them. He becomes her unlikely rescuer as the two try to lay low until Internal Affairs can arrive. But Pavel won’t leave them alone, and gives Sergei a terrible choice: either the woman dies, or his wife does.

The Major is a cop movie with a lot more on its mind than most. While a lot of cop movies deal with police corruption, few start with the hero being so unsympathetically corrupt himself. This makes Sergei rather fascinating, but it also makes his later conversion rather implausible, even inexplicable. The more the moral high ground shifted around, the more the story intrigued me, but the character’s psychology escaped me. A found the ending to be powerful, but strangely unconvincing.

What The Major could probably use is a lot more talking and a lot less shouting. Characters express themselves in brooding silences and sudden outbursts rather than in conversations. Cop movies have taught me that this is just the way cops are, both in the US and apparently in Russia, but I could have used something more humanizing.

I’m probably unfairly lukewarm about The Major because I saw the far more audacious ex-Soviet corruption expose drama The Tribe a few days earlier (review coming soon!), and by comparison the former is pretty tame and conventional. But still, there is some good material here and a willingness to tweak the established cop movie formulas in a meaningful way.

SLIFF 2014: Listening

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 23:30:00 +0000

Title: Listening (2014)

Country: US

Rating: 6

What if you could read people’s minds? Would you want to? What if someone could read your mind… or plant thoughts into it? What would it mean for privacy NS free will? Would you trust people more or less?

David and Ryan are graduate students working on a thought-to-text program. You attach a device to your skull and think clear, simple words and a software program matches the readings from your brain with a dictionary of recognized patterns. They are getting fairly promising results, but are broke, relying on stolen equipment and dealing with a lot of personal problems: Ryan’s dying grandmother, David’s limping marriage. Enter Jordan, a beautiful blonde with a neurochemistry degree, who turns the heads of both men in more ways than one and gives them the breakthrough they need. Realizing that no computer is powerful enough to process all the data going through a brain in realtime, they switch to the only thing that can: another brain. They will send thoughts, one-way only, from one mind to another. Technologically-assisted telepathy.

But knowing each other’s thoughts has dangers of its own, and plenty of powerful forces are interested in their work for their own ends.

In the days of Twilight Zone and Astounding magazine, sci-fi was all about good ideas. Thought experiments. Explorations into the unknown. Many of the best works took up an intriguing thread and kept us rapt while the author followed it through to its logical conclusions. Writers and readers alike didn’t worry much about style or character development. Listening kind of reminds me of that. Not that the writing, characters or filmcraft are bad, but an appreciation for low-budget constraints and a healthy suspension of disbelief will definitely help you enjoy the movie.

First time director Khalil Sullins follows in the footsteps of Aronofsky’s Pi and Carruth’s Primer in terms of showing indie inventions going wrong, and he seems to have an ear for the language and eye for the laboratory life of scientists and engineers. The acting is rough around the edges, the villain pointlessly cliché and the thriller elements don’t do the sci-fi bits justice, but my biggest complaint is also a kind of compliment: the premise is so good I wish it’d been explored in even greater depth, especially the interpersonal friction of a tightknit group uncomfortably aware of each other’s resentments, fantasies, fears and desires.

SLIFF 2014: Human Capital

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Title: Human Capital

Country: Italy

Score: 7

Like other great Italian works I could name, this one starts with two families: The Bernachis and the Ossolas. Giovanni Bernachi is an obscenely wealthy financial funds manager and his wife Carla is a former actress trying to rescue a historically important theater. Dino Ossola runs a small real estate business and is comfortably middle-class, but with upward aspirations. His wife is a school counselor. Their kids, Massimilano and Serena, are dating. Dino and Giovanni start to play tennis regularly. On the strength of their inchoate friendship, perhaps overstated, Dino asks if he can buy into Giovanni’s fund, but the move proves disastrous. Meanwhile Serena and valedictorian near-miss Massimiliano drift apart, and she finds herself more interested in one of her mother’s cases, student-artist and self-described f*ck-up Luca. Somewhere in the middle of all this is a dead cyclist, driven off the road by an SUV owned by the Bernachis. Identifying the driver is the name of the game.

The best thing about Human Capital is its Rashomon-style structure. We see the same time period through the eyes of first Dino, then Carla and finally Serena. The murder mystery element keeps the stakes high, but it is hardly necessary; the families themselves are such a tangled mess of personalities, psychoses and interactions that they hold our interest in their own right. Seeing their actions first and then learning their earlier motivations or later consequences is quite fun.

Unfortunately, the large cast of characters and the need to cover the same ground multiple times is a mixed blessing, and too many of the central players don’t have time to be fully developed. Their roles are a little too prescribed (the rich jerk husband, the bored housewife, the gauche social climber, the rebellious teen) to feel completely real.

Director Paolo Virzi ends his film on a strange note. On one hand he lets all his characters off the hook (which I have problems with) and on the other hand he gives us some white text on black background explaining what human capital means (which is way too heavy handed). I’m not sure the presumed theme, of how callous society has become when human lives and filthy lucre are weighed on the same scale, should have been the film’s marquee. This idea has been worked through in movies many times before and better. It’s especially sad because Human Capital has a much better theme going: the way we, rich or poor, get so caught up in our own problems that we remain blind to the problems of others.

SLIFF 2014: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 23:30:00 +0000

Title: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Country: Iran

Rating: 8.5

Have you ever been to the Iranian netherworld of Bad City? No? Well it’s awesome! Black and white, ultra-hip, throbbing with 80’s music and vintage cars. Of course, it is ravaged by plague, haunted by vampires and burdened by drugs, crime and male violence. But nowhere is perfect.

I could talk to you about plot. There’s a young guy who appropriates a cat. And this cat gives a great performance! And the dude’s trying to pay off his dad’s debts, the legacy of an opium addiction. He meets a rich girl and something starts to spark, but he steals her earrings instead of her heart. The girl he falls for next is a bit more bohemian, and a vampire. They meet after he leaves a party high, dressed as Dracula, and asks her for directions. Every second of the scene is witty. Oh, and they have a prostitute friend in common. But not like that sounds.

So yeah, the plot isn’t really the point. Director Ana Lily Amirpour is more interested in making individual shots and scenes work then in worrying about the big picture. That’s mostly fine with me. Especially since the shots, immaculately lit, crisply composed and tightly staged, are so incredibly good. That said, A Girl Walks Home isn’t exactly style-over-substance: the subtext here is frightfully loaded with delightfully weird feminist vibes and bristles with little daggers pointed at parental, patriarchal, political and religious authority. And even if I’m not really sure what anyone is thinking or why they do what they do, I like the mystery.

This is a horror film for people who enjoy their chills moody, modish and a bit hard to pin down. It is destined for culthood.

SLIFF 2014: Elegy to Connie

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Title: Elegy to Connie

Country: US

Score: 6.5

In February of 2008 Charles Lee Thorton walked into Kirkwood City Hall and killed six people, including council member Connie Karr. Elegy to Connie is a grassroots, experimental animated documentary about the neighborhood, the shooter and most importantly, Connie, a hardworking down-to-earth public servant who brought people together and improved the city she loved.

Elegy to Connie is up front about being an elegy, or even more accurately a tribute, which is both good and bad. It is filled with a genuine sense of love and loss for Connie (who ironically had many of Thorton’s issues at heart), a local crusader of the type that rarely gets the recognition they deserve. It also means that this is not an intimate character study or nuanced profile, but a reverential treatment of a private and public figure whose untimely death was a tragedy to friends, family and community.

I couldn’t help wanting this film to be more though. It is so formally artistically bold (more on that in a second), and yet structurally and politically shy. The information on Kirkwood’s history is a good start, but feels light. The sections on Thorton and the shooting spree didn’t tell me any more than my memories of the news coverage. At a time when St. Louis is dealing with the Michael Brown shooting and having some hard-hitting debates on race, poverty, crime, zoning, city planning and corruption, it might be time for the kid gloves to come off. And yet, this film is likely in keeping with Connie Karr’s own style: a light touch backed by sincerity and conviction; an understanding instead of inflammatory approach.

And now to the animation! This is where the film blew my mind. Director Sarah Paulsen, working with a very small team of assistants, has managed to present a sort of crash course of animation styles that writhes with creative energy and visual originality. Paper cutouts, photos, puzzle pieces, mosaics, stop-motion, traditional hand-drawn, wet paint on glass, etc., etc. This film literally brimming over with techniques, and fresh ways of seeing and yet they are blended together and united in tone such that the film never feels incoherent or disjointed. This is animation that is honestly more interesting than 90% of the multimillion dollar productions that come of big name studios and I hope Paulsen goes on to create much more of it!

SLIFF 2014: Diplomacy

noreply@blogger.com (FilmWalrus) — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 23:30:00 +0000

Title: Diplomacy

Country: France/Germany

Score: 5.5

August 24, 1944. Paris. Germany is losing the war. General Choltitz is planning to withdraw from the capitol. He has orders from Hitler to blow up the city’s great landmarks and grand bridges behind him, killing potentially a million or more in the resulting floods and leaving Paris’s cultural heritage in ruins. Raoul Nordling, the Swedish consul, overhears the plans and sneaks into Choltitz’s hotel room to talk him out of it. What results is a verbal game of cat and mouse that will run through the night and into the next day.

It a good setup, and the acting and much of the screenwriting work hard to do it justice. The art direction is strong, and the room where most of the film takes place is impeccably – one might even say too-impeccably – littered with historical artifacts. The problem is that the usually reliable director Volker Schlondorff falls into many of the pitfalls that so often plague both adaptations of history and of plays: he doesn’t have enough faith in the source material.

The verbal sparring is the heart of the film and the focal point of everything Diplomacy does right: high-stakes tension pitched softly low-key, thoughtful debate ranging from the value of posterity to the balance of duty and morality, and a character study of world-weary but far from soulless men. And yet, presumably wanting to ‘open things up’ from its one room setting, these scenes are interrupted by a B-plot in which a message must be delivered to the demolition team. They, of course, regardless of the final order, behave senselessly so that there can be a little action and violence for the denouement that is both thematically and structurally out of place.

Then too, the writing works much better as a showcase for the two central performances than as a truly deep think piece. In the first half of the film Choltitz’s appear to have only spurious unsatisfying motivations, hardly worth the defense he puts up. When he reveals in the second half that his family is being held hostage to enforce the order, it invalidates most of the previous argument (and one rather wonders why he didn’t bring it up first thing) and leads to a tedious debate about whether it is better to save your loved ones or faceless thousands. It’s a debate screenwriters love, but I do not.