Serge Gainsbourg captivated France for three decades. He spent his formative years as a frustrated artist before finding success as a singer/songwriter. In the mid-’60s, collaborations with teen ‘yé-yé’ star France Gall brought Gainsbourg a level of wealth, fame and notoriety that lasted the rest of his life. Troublemaker, provocateur and controversialist, by the time he died from a heart attack in 1991, Gainsbourg had earned the comparisons to Baudelaire that accompanied his funeral.

With so much ground to cover in 130 minutes Sfar needs to exercise a judicious eye for vignette. Instead, he’s attempted to cram as much on screen as possible. And so a linear path is set, winding its way through Gainsbourg’s childhood as a cocky Jewish kid in Occupied France, taking piano lessons from a doting father, but taking more interest in the comic creations of his sketchbook. It’s here that the seeds of a subversive nature are sown, as little Lucien Ginsburg proudly displays his yellow star, draws dirty pictures for his schoolmasters, and seduces women twice his age.

These are the film’s freshest scenes, in which young actor Kacey Mottet Klein evinces an extraordinary charm. It’s also where Sfar introduces us to a make-or-break stylistic quirk. Despite his playboy reputation, as an adult Gainsbourg was always haunted by the implications of his Jewishness, both in the outsider status it conferred on him, and in the physical manifestation that was his ‘mug’ – that uniquely misshapen beauty, both cruelly arrogant and irresistible. This internal dichotomy is represented by a giant, comical Jewish face that appears at key emotional moments, and later by a lizard-limbed ‘ghoul’ chattering temptation in his ear.

This is a bold piece of metaphorical dramatisation, but elsewhere Sfar’s comic-book sensibility does Gainsbourg no favours. His grip on the film’s narrative trajectory is unsteady, and with little or no time for contextualisation, anybody who isn’t already conversant with the singer’s biography will soon feel lost in a role call of songs and scenes that prove bewildering. It’s as if Sfar, alongside editor Maryline Monthieux, has constructed the film as a series of comic-book panels. But the gaps between film scenes can’t be filled by the viewer’s own intuitive leaps.

The adult Gainsbourg is convincingly inhabited by Eric Elmosnino, all cigarette sneer and crocodile eyes. As Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin respectively, both Laetitia Casta and Lucy Gordon (who tragically committed suicide shortly after the film was completed) provide the sensual fireworks required of them. But the film itself goes off with a whimper.

If Jared Hess’ 2004 indie hit is one of the obvious influences holding Babak Jalali’s debut up, then Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums forms the other pillar. Like Anderson, Jalali is interested in the balance of hope and futility in human ambition. His modest characters (chicken farmers, travelling musicians, shop assistants) have modest ambitions (to move from outside Gorgan, into it). He frames them in tableaux – tiny against the wide, bleak countryside of northern Iran – and these setups help his audience to maintain the same ironic, wry detachment that Anderson and Hess shoot for. The effect is depressing – a clever reflection of the mood of the community perhaps, but one that totters on the lofty legacy of kooky American cinema uneasily.

And yet Jalali seems to recognise his limitations. A key story strand of Frontier Blues sees an elderly Turkman being tailed by a photographer determined to catch ‘the real Turkman lifestyle’. The photographer’s idea of a real Turkman is set before he arrives. He refuses (to the frustration of his subject) to capture any version of the place and the people other than the one he already has in his head. Jalali has compared himself to this character and, faced with a film weighed down by scenes included because they look odd, rather than help the story, it’s easy to agree with him.

Not much happens. Hassan takes a menial job in a chicken farm. Kazem orders a batch of clothes too large for any of his customers. Alam – a local boy learning English in order to take his beloved away from this listless life – fails to impress her traditional parents with his high-shooting but weightless plans. The disappointments are measured. The triumphs are slight. It’s arch and wry and sharp. It’s also rather bitter.

Bill (Robert Hill), Maggie (Julia Deakin) and their 34-year-old son Karl (Robert’s real son Robin Hill, who also co-wrote and edited) may seem like an ordinary family, but that is only because, as Bill puts it, they ‘can’t be too conspicuous.’ Bill, you see, heads the local chapter of a crime syndicate. But someone’s been talking to the police, so Bill, with his wife as chief advisor and occasional enforcer, sets about identifying and eliminating the informant in their ranks. Meanwhile, Karl – engaged to Valda (Kerry Peacock) and soon to be a father himself – wants out, but the blood in this family runs very thick, and as Karl unearths some well-hidden home truths, he looks set to continue the very legacy that he longs to sever.

From The Godfather to The Sopranos, crime and family have long made compelling bedfellows, but in his low-budget feature debut, Ben Wheatley brings a very English working-class brand of domestic banality to his evil, doing for the gangster flick what Steven Sheil’s Mum & Dad did for survival horror. It is a tragedy, but also very funny, shocking and also utterly mundane –though the seething tensions are always palpable even if the violence is largely kept out of the frame. Isn’t that how it is with most close-knit clans?

A British crime film that is refreshingly free not just of cliché but (broadly) of action itself, Down Terrace offers an ensemble of believably contradictory characters divided between their commitments to work and family, and then observes from its darkly comic distance as they all try to kill one another – in the family way.

But as middle-age beckons, it’s time for Rhys to figure out what to do with the second half of his life before rock ‘n’ roll chews him up and spits him out. Enter the Film Agency for Wales. Reportedly five years in the making and the recipient of multiple re-edits, Separado! treats the world to a retracing of Rhys’ family tree – “or family forest, as my auntie Beryl called it.”

Of particular interest is Rene Griffiths, a distant relative and Patagonian émigré who fused Latin American rhythms with traditional Celtic ballads. Rhys sets out to track him down, providing a part-road movie, part-magical mystery tour across the barren scrublands of Argentina, playing with various local musicians along the way.

Rhys has tried to instil the resulting film with the same whimsy as his music, but despite the low-fi aesthetics, the trippy skits, the Peckinpah subtitles and spaghetti western stylings, it is still shackled by the habitual failings of celebrity-centric TV.

For all its conceptual departures, Separado! is narrated by a man who spent his twenties doing interviews with NME, and it shows in the movie’s intellectual depth. Louche ennui might work when you’re accepting a Brit Award, but for an 80-minute feature doc, it’s a soporific approach. As Rhys shuffles around in his aviators, long curls and bobble hats, strumming on his guitar and mumbling away in his thick Welsh vowels, the company of Anne Robinson seems suddenly more appealing.

The Furries best tune was ‘The Man Don’t Give a Fuck’. Separado!, unwittingly, has provided that anthem with an extra layer of significance.

Like his mate Michael Moore, Stone is a lopsided attitudinal liberal polemicist who evidently thinks ‘nuance’ is something you eat with chips. If this documentary were a Brit, it’d probably be digging an organic latrine in Parliament Square, smoking PG Tips and mooning the Met.

Filmed in strangely self-aware guerilla doc style – as if the sound guy has been told to repeatedly drop the boom in shot – Stone assumes a shotgun approach to his perceived targets. The right wing press, the left wing press, the International Monetary Fund, the Bush administration, free-marketeering and neo-con foreign policy in general are deconstructed with all the precision of a grumpy bull. “America has friends whose leaders do what we tell them to do, and enemies whose leaders occasionally disagree with us,” Stone posits in his whispery, whistley voiceover. Wow, that sounds easy. Someone should have told Condoleezza Rice.

In Stone’s tonic for right-wing excess, Chávez is depicted as a benign, socially democratic champion of wealth distribution. It’s likely Amnesty would have something to say about that, as would any of Venezuela’s multiple political prisoners, but they are never given a podium, or even acknowledged.

Not to say the film isn’t frequently hilarious, largely due to Chávez‘s uninhibited brand of statesmanship. He looks like he’s having an absolute ball. Addressing the United Nations, his accusation that George Bush is the devil is knocked off with a comic’s swagger – “I can still smell the sulphur in the room.” Showing Stone around a Venezuelan corn factory, he quips: “This is where we are making the Iranian bomb.”

It’s all very entertaining but deriding Fox News and the Bush administration is about as difficult as drowning a blind puppy. So what’s the cause? Is there a cause? You can sit their schmoozing and back-slapping with Raúl Castro while he talks of another 50 years of the revolution, but Bush still had congress, and the anchors on Fox News, like Stone himself, are still allowed to criticise the government. Cubans, on the other hand, can be incarcerated for using the internet.

Rabble-rousing, zingy and infused with a pseudo-inspirational sense of liberal celebration, this is a genuine film devoid of genuine research. The wider, compelling narrative we are promised is only hinted at, meaning we are left with little more than a PR stunt for ambiguous Third World governments. For someone who was sent to Vietnam in the name of liberalism, Stone should know that, when the chips are down, ideology is lost. Power corrupts, as someone said, and no government should be given a free pass.

Crossing platforms and breaking boundaries is par for the course for AND, which has quickly established itself as one of the UK’s most progressive young art and film festivals. If this year’s programme is anything to go by so far, AND looks well placed to lead the way for years to come.

Opening on October 1 at the Cornerhouse in Manchester – the hub of 2010’s second AND helping – early programme highlights promise an energetic exploration of identity, behaviour and systems, examining who we are and how we function within society.

First up is a unique film project by British artist Phil Collins, curiously titled Marxism Today. Revisiting the Marxist syllabus that was abandoned in German schools following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film exhibition looks at what became of the teachers that were tasked with passing this dying ideology on to future generations.

With the aid of some of these ex-teachers, Collins will reintroduce Marxism into Secondary schools across Manchester, inviting audiences to reassess how our political geography has shifted over time.

If that sounds a little dry for your taste, you might be more readily seduced by Peaches Christ and Midnight Mass. Peaches (aka filmmaker Joshua Grannell, who’ll also be bringing his latest film, All About Evil, along for its international premiere) is a San Francisco drag queen phenomenon who’ll be taking over Manchester’s Dancehouse on October 2 for a night of sex, gore and debauchery.

Championing ‘bad’ moviemaking, Midnight Mass is a trashy underground sensation that’s earned a reputation for live participation and onstage audience makeovers. An open mind and liberal disposition are a requirement. Stilettos optional.

Elsewhere, avant-garde provocateur Lawrence Malstaf will be presenting his serene installation, Shrink, in which members of the public will be vacuum packed and displayed as part of a gallery exhibition. Billed as an evocative metaphor for protection and the threat to survival, Malstaf’s award-winning project is certainly one of the more intriguing programme highlights.

AND is also proud to welcome Turner Prize winning artist Gillian Wearing, who will be presenting her debut feature, Self Made, to the Cornerhouse on Saturday, October 2. The film leads on from a newspaper ad placed by Wearing which asked members of the public: ‘If you were to play a part in a film, would you be yourself or a fictional character?’ Considering the roles we play in our daily lives, Self Made is an intimate assessment of how reality and fiction are fast becoming interchangeable commodities.

LWLies will be joining Collins, Christ, Malstaf and Wearing in Manchester at AND 2010, so look out for our online coverage and exclusive interviews come October.

For more information about AND 2010, including special event announcements from September 1, venue details and to book tickets, visit andfestival.org.uk

Shank, his directorial feature debut, wasn’t exactly embraced by critics on its release in March this year. Set in 2015, it provides an uncompromising vision of anarchic youth in the ghettos of East London. Wearing its heart on it sleeve, Shank is an endorsement of the street culture that Ali grew up in, and is heavily educated by the music video aesthetic that has become his bread and butter.

In a whitewashed PR firm in Chelsea, he told LWLies how a first-generation immigrant from London’s poorest district becomes a feature-film director, and what he intends to with that power.

LWLies: Shank is set in 2015. How much do you see Shank as a comment on London today?

Ali: It’s definitely about the here and now. One of the reasons why I wanted to use this concept was to highlight how things could turn out with the government that’s in charge now and the government that was in charge last year. There is this generation that is being forgotten about in some senses. It’s the YouTube generation, and every ounce of the money is going to the Olympics, and they’re not really focusing on the community. It’s a global thing, and the community coming up now is forgotten about. And I think the film, because it’s set in the future, could somehow make the audience understand how their life could turn out over the next 10 years.

There’s a real juxtaposition between the vibrancy of the street culture and just how disenfranchised it is, just how left alone it is…

Yeah that kind of idea came from my own background. I grew up in shanty towns and I saw it, and it’s happening now. A lot of developing countries have that way of life, and it’s just about getting that concept and putting it into a Westernised country, and London is the pinnacle of global Westernisation. If you set it in London, it makes a great point, because young audiences can realise a) how lucky they are and b) how other people live. It could easily happen here, and the film is a small, subliminal message saying ‘This could happen to you.’ But it’s also about escapism. As a young kid, I didn’t like films that were hard-hitting and had a massive message. I loved enjoying Spielberg and Kubrick, and their films had messages that were very much underground. So I wanted Shank to be dystopian but also escapist. I wanted it to be eye-opening and edge-of-your-seat.

Your own background sounds like it’s really educated the film?

Yeah definitely. I grew up on the streets where we made our own way. I was a little shepherd for a while as well, and it made me realise how lucky I am now. It’s taken me a long time to get here and to create film, it’s a very privileged thing and I’m lucky, but I’ve worked hard to achieve it. But it woke me up about my social group; our way of life, how it affects other people, because we were living to day to day, and when it made me become very aware of what’s going on around me a lot quicker. I didn’t have a lot of franchises blocking my way of thinking.

So you genuinely think there are communities in East London and other parts of Britain that can go that way?

Yeah man. This morning I went to visit my family in Upton Park and the whole place is unrecognizable, but there are these little elements of Shank in there; these little street markets, with meats hanging out. It completely reminded me of the market scene in Shank without the whole futuristic look. To me, I think, this is not Britain. The way you’ve got national groups in East Ham, Newham, Wood Green, it breeds these gangs. And it’s a subject that we tried to talk about in Shank. They grow up and their gangs stick to them, because they don’t know anything else. If you’re in a group with your community members, you stick together, you fight for each other, because you have no body else. You become almost programmed to think ‘Right, this is my bit, this is my turf.’ They’re forgotten children. But a lot of gangs are in essence family.

It’s an usual film visually, particularly in the way it doesn’t involve any establishing shots before a scene.

I didn’t think we needed it. It’s trying to create this closed-off thing. Everything about the film was almost cage like, engulfing buildings that look down on you and metal and wire; this idea of being closed in, like a concrete jungle.

Film sets are mad environments. They also seem to be right on the edge of chaos. You’re a young guy, this was a big project. Did you ever have any difficulties in handling it?

Do you know what? No. It was hard for the first week to adjust. The main job for the director is to make the visual original. My heroes are Kubrick and Spielberg, they’re my father figures and I felt I had to please them. It’s a daunting idea to make a 93-minute long film for a director that’s only worked on five-minute long projects, so the key thing was to break it up. I storyboarded every shot, I had a shot list of about eight pages. I made sure I planned everything to a tee, visually, before I shot.

You always felt in control?

Yeah. Well, it’s not about control, it’s about group understanding. Dictation is never good on a set. It just makes people understanding what needs to be done, and what we’re trying to achieve.

You’ve mentioned Kubrick and Spielberg. At what stage did you think to yourself, ‘I don’t just have to be a fan of these people. I can start making movies professionally.’

When I was 14. Weirdly enough, I used to live in Beckton, which is where Stanley Kubrick shot Full Metal Jacket. I didn’t go to school much, and I used to hang out with my friends and smoke and drink, and we used to hang out there and this director one day came roaring up in this 4×4, ripping in. He came up beside us and said ‘Listen, I’m looking for locations. Do you know any?’ and I showed him a couple. He was impressed by them and he said ‘Look, I’m shooting in a couple of months. Do you want to come and be a runner?’ I didn’t have a clue what that what was but I was like ‘Yeah alrite, I guess so.’ I totally forgot about it but he gave my Mum a call and he said ‘Look, I promised your son…’ and she was like ‘Great, it’ll get him out of my house.’ So I went down with a bunch of my mates to see how it all worked. They had fake guns and sound and just to see this whole world of film. Before I’d seen a lot of films but I didn’t know how they’d made it. It just seemed to make sense. So the next day I turned up without my mates and I ended up spending the rest of summer as a runner. And I’ve gone from there.

Shank is out on DVD now.

An opening burst of sub-Chris Brown R ‘n’ B in the mawkish opening will see twentysomethings bracing themselves for an exaggerated tarnishing of a childhood favourite, but for the most part, Harold Zwart’s reboot is surprisingly watchable, if entirely pointless all the same.

Jaden Smith plays sullen pre-teen Dre Parker, reluctantly uprooted from his Detroit home after his mother (Taraji P Henson) is transferred to Beijing, where he soon finds himself at the mercy of a gang of local bullies. But just as Pat Morita saved Ralph Macchio’s Daniel-san in the original, Jackie Chan’s sombre handyman Mr Han is on hand to help Dre learn to defend himself.

And from there, it’s largely as you were, with the plot building towards a tournament climax and the young student learning life lessons as well as a martial art from his unorthodox teacher. Like all successful sports films, the formulaic plot is a necessary, enjoyable evil and Smith’s likeability – aided by a swagger clearly inherited from his father Will – means Dre is a winning hero.

Zwart also shoots the action more fluidly than you might expect from the director of The Pink Panther 2, and it wouldn’t be hard to see the film mimicking its source and inspiring a generation – the film’s US success proves audiences can’t get enough of underdog stories.

Somehow Mr Han’s ‘put jacket on, take jacket off’ won’t have the resonance of Mr Miyagi’s sage teachings, however, and many of the new version’s problems stem from its new location. The action has been transported from California to China and the native kung fu is used rather than Japanese karate (causing the film to be titled The Kung Fu Kid in China and the brilliantly literal Best Kid in Japan). The Chinese tourist board must be ecstatic at the clean and modern portrayal of Beijing and the picture-postcard shots of the Forbidden City, Wudang Mountains and Great Wall, but these interludes mean the film’s running time is 20 minutes longer than necessary.

The geographical change also takes the film down a curious route for a ‘fish-out-of-water’ story, with a racial undercurrent bubbling beneath Dre’s struggle to fit into Chinese society. One sequence sees head bully Cheng telling Dre to “stay away from all of us”, after the young American attempts to chat up aspiring violinist Mei Ying (Han Wenwen), and audiences may be taken aback by the apparent xenophobia of the ruffian’s tone, a world away from the well-drawn class divisions of the original.

Central casting means The Karate Kid is a roundhouse kick short of a knockout, with Smith impressive for his age but still too young for the plot. His intended love story with Mei Ying feels creepy and ill-judged while the bullying that felt humiliating and brutal to the teenage Daniel in the original feels more akin to child abuse for a 12-year-old. Chan, in a role calmer than his typically hammy turns, does his best to forge a believable father-son arc with Smith, but their chemistry seems more collegial than familial and never matches the clear affection between Morita and Macchio.

Yet it would be harsh and facile to expect the new version to be as unexpectedly moving or climactically intense as the original. Ignore the location change and the hero’s reduced age and what remains is a solid and slick and entertaining family film.

Well, you guessed it: just about everything. It’s not that Carnahan’s A-Team is a disaster; indeed, a total failure might at least have been glorious. It’s more the sense of inevitable disappointment, of weary mediocrity that runs through the entire enterprise. From a script that never had a chance of surviving the competing passes of multiple writers, to action scenes nullified by poor CGI, to a cast who can’t recreate the TV series’ all important chemistry, The A-Team betrays its B-team credentials at every turn.

For what it’s worth, the plot sees US Ranger John ‘Hannibal’ Smith drummed out of the Army after an operation to smash a major counterfeiting operation goes haywire in the dog days of the Iraq war. Joining him in prison are right-hand man Templeton ‘Face’ Peck (Bradley Cooper), BA Baracus (Quinton Jackson) and ‘Howling Mad’ Murdock (Sharlto Copley). But as ever, Smith has a plan to break them out, go after the people who set them up (including a Blackwater-esque rogue agent) and clear the names of himself and his men.

This plot is largely communicated through a series of explosive set pieces and hard-to-decipher verbal exchanges, usually screamed over the whining engine of one or other high-speed vehicles. In the film’s worst sequence (and there are several very bad ones), these two narrative elements are combined as the team yell expository tidbits at each other over the engine drone of a tank that they are trying to crash land in a river. At least this scene provides the film its legacy: “They’re trying to fly that tank!” deserves to go down in history as the worst piece of movie dialogue ever.

Maddeningly, the filmmakers have approached their movie as a comic-book rather than a piece of cinema. The limits of credulity are soon passed as helicopters are flipped through 360 degrees, container ships are destroyed and articulated trucks are jacked. It’s not that Carnahan can’t shoot these scenes with style and energy, it’s that they’re so poorly conceived, so deafening and characterless that there’s simply no point investing the emotional currency in their outcome.

A better A-Team film might have been shot for $40 million, with tight set pieces, a dramatic plot and real-world stunts. Access to cash has made Carnahan lazy or at least over-reliant on a series of splashy FX bail-outs.

The cast coast. A curiously wrinkle-free Liam Neeson looks like he’s been PhotoShopped in real-time. Quinton Jackson has the proper physicality for BA but can barely speak English. Bradley Cooper needs to wise up and realise he’s not a proper movie star yet so can’t get by on Tom Cruise’s flashy smile. Jessica Biel is token totty. But at least District 9’s Sharlto Copley makes an impression. His Murdock is the only reason to watch this bloated and laboured blockbuster.

Fans flock from all over, happily handing over $600 for the full three weeks to catch the likes of Mutant Girls Squad from Japan as much as Disney nemesis Don Bluth, who was in town for The Land Before Time. Rumour has it that demand for the screening of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is predicated to be so high that a tout snapped up 500 tickets like it’s a Lady Gaga show. And that’s without an appearance from director Edgar Wright who, by the way, would devour this festival.

Fantasia is an annual feast of genre films made by underdogs who rule the underground. Take the blood-stained premiere of I Spit On Your Grave (which will be at FrightFest in London next month). Steven Monroe’s remake of ‘the most notorious revenge thriller of all time’ caused controversy when an audience member fainted during its screening. But when a here-unnamed journo tried to snap the guy’s blood on the cinema walls, the festival organisers nearly kicked him out. They like exploitation, but only if it’s in the movies…

Neverlost was praised by Fantasia’s general manager and co-director of international programming Mitch Davis as a ‘no-budget miracle that showed up and knocked my socks off.’ However, the film, which enjoyed its world premiere at Fantasia last week, was a disappointment. Keen to evoke his heroes, Canadian writer-director Chad Archibald has instead created an amalgamation of Mulholland Drive and Requiem for a Dream. The inconstant, sentimental script offers one-dimensional characters plagued by weak dialogue with the production values of a soap.

The plot pivots around the double life of failed scriptwriter Josh Higgins (Ryan Barrett). Awake, he is married to a brunette bitch whose constant nagging turns him onto sleeping pills. As he dreams, he is reunited with his blonde ex Kate (Emily Alatalo), who, in his waking life, was burned alive by her own dad. But, while Josh dreams, Kate’s arsonist father reappears to ruin this life too. The film flickers between each of his lives which get progressively worse until his only recourse is suicide. Then Kate – who only has two emotions – weeps and the credits roll.

In everyone’s defence, the film had apparently been re-cut at the eleventh hour for inclusion in the festival. But that’s the luck of a draw, you never know what you’re going to get with programming as diverse as this. Perhaps with more time and more money, Archibald will emerge with a genuine miracle at a future festival.

Far better was Hungarian mind-melter, 1. Based on a story by Solaris writer  Stanislaw Lem, it centres on a rare bookshop whose entire library has been replaced by multiple copies of a hardbound tome called 1. The book contains nothing but numbers. The mind-boggling data is revealed to signify man’s achievement, from the amount of deaths by human hand per minute to the percentage of successful conceptions in relation to copulation. The data proves deadly to society. As soon as people read the streams of figures, their minds unravel at the meaninglessness of life. A grizzled detective sets out to unearth the book’s mystery authors in order to keep society together, but in the end, is helpless to its power.

Pater Sparrow’s film looks gorgeous. Boasting a metaphysical plot, surreal imagery (floating dolphins, shelves of identical white books) and dreamlike, sepia tones it is like Caro and Jeunet taking on Jorges Luis Borges and every bit as complicated as that sounds. Catch it if you can.

Despite the significant industry buzz surrounding Simon Rumley’s follow-up to The Living and the Dead, the Canadian premiere of Red White & Blue was not a sell out. More fool Montrealers, as it was by far the best of the festival. If you like the laissez-faire losers who lurk in Richard Linklater’s films – and aren’t adverse to a decent throat-slitting scene – then this new-wave horror is for you.

Taking a three-act structure more literally than most, it’s a ‘slacker revenge thriller’ that keeps you guessing to the gory end. More akin to a teleplay than a straight up genre film, it’s a craftily-edited slow burner set among the dive bars of Austin, Texas.

Skinny hipsters work part-time jobs, play in garage bands, drink, fuck and sleep ’til noon. Unhappy Erica (Amanda Fuller) has made casual sex an obsession, barebacking a new guy nightly. Pock-marked and clad in denim cut-offs and dirty white cowboy boots, she seduces Franki (Marc Senter) over some beers. Franki is a sensitive guy with a terminally-ill mother with whom he lives. He and his bandmates The Exits devour Erica, feasting on her flesh as they fuck in a (consensual) foursome. Afterwards, she showers vigorously, expecting never to see them again.

Then she meets Nate. A former military man who escaped Iraq with honourable discharge, Nate longs to be close with Erica. She spurns his advances claiming she doesn’t ‘want a boyfriend.’ But that’s not the whole story. Erica has a secret.

Raped at four by her mother’s boyfriend, Erica inherited HIV along with a life-changing distrust of heterosexual relations. Subverting the female-as-victim role, she wreaks revenge on the world by utilising her body as a lethal weapon – spreading her disease to any guy who’ll have her. But, as her disease impacts the men who encircle her, Erica finds herself at the mercy of casual lays turned psycho-killers all too ready to avenge their ‘sins’ in the bloodiest fashion.

Though it offers a gory crescendo that won’t disappoint Fantasia fans, much of this film’s violence actually takes place off screen. Diegetic deathnotes and gaffer-taped screams accent the audience’s own fears as the camera pans away from the action. Bar a visceral throat-slit and a nasty yank of a spinal cord up and out through the hairline, Red White & Blue is actually pretty art-house.

Initially we track Erica’s cruddy, emotionless life. Wide shots shrink her already-tiny frame as she walks to and from work, parks and bars leaving you cold and uncomfortable. Her face is bland, her lifestyle inexplicably punishing. But Rumley veers on the right side of art and didacticism, feeding in non-linear plot lines that keep you guessing as to her actions.

Plus, there’s a hip, freshness about it all, partially due to a hot cast and a maintained low, natural light but more thanks to location. Though a Brit, Rumley captures Austin’s vibe with gusto. Shots of Fantastic Fest and the Alamo Drafthouse cinema make their way into the frame, neatly name-checking co-producer Tim League while capturing the aspects that make Austin so cool. Linklater would be proud.

At World’s End is a Danish black-comedy set in the Sumatran forest by director Tomas Villum Jensen. Prudish psychologist Adrian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is flown to the jungle in order to determine whether a fellow Dane, who has just murdered a group of nature documentary-makers, is mentally fit for trial. He claims to be  129-year-old explorer Severin Geertsen who stays young by eating the leaves of a unique Sumatran flower. But as his doctor, Adrian becomes a target in his own right as evil gangs probe him for the plant’s whereabouts. Bespectacled Adrian turns unlikely action hero in order to keep his patient-doctor confidentially and save his own skin.

As he shoots his way out of jail, inadvertently freeing Severin, the unlikely duo are joined by Adrian’s excitable secretary who completes the silly Danish trio. Decked out in a form-fitting red dress and military boots, she is willing eye-candy, (think Willie in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone) but Adrian is a virgin and not interested. Their will-they-won’t-they relationship is a running gag, exemplified by an ending which does not surrender to saccharine stereotypes.

This ’80s-hommage offers silly action-adventure  with some pretty jaw-dropping scenery and a constant stream of bleakly comic lines. Extra points for a seriously funny finale.

LWLies would like to thank the festival organisers and Tourism Montreal for hooking us up with flights, hotel and fun non-film activities like surfing and jet boating in the St Lawrence river!