On March 11, 1989, Cops premiered on American TV. The reality show—still going strong today after 33 seasons—pairs camera crews with American law enforcement, giving small-screen viewers a front row seat to the day-to-day protection provided by the men and women of countless local, state, and federal jurisdictions. Invoking memories of Cops comes Ukrainian Sheriffs, a ride-along documentary from director Roman Bondarchuk.

The doc follows the exploits of a pair of sheriffs—Victor and Volodya—in the remote Ukrainian village of Stara Zburjivka. The duo, appointed by village Mayor Viktor Marunyak, respond to any and all calls from the town’s 1,800 residents, be they issues as mundane as domestic complaints or as serious as the discovery of a dead body. With cameras ever at the ready, the film is reminiscent of that American reality crime show.

Truth be told, Ukrainian Sheriffs pales in comparison to Cops from the angle of pure onscreen gratification. Where the US television show has the luxury of cherry-picking from only the sauciest of crimes recorded, this film, despite covering a period of time that is at least a year long (based only on seasonal clues), has very little excitement in the area of criminal activity. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe, in a town of 1,800 citizens, things like broken windows and domestic squabbles are good to be the worst things these men see. But that doesn’t make it a compelling documentary. And while it’s quaint that Victor and Volodya are less enforcers of law and more voices of reason (arbitrating conflict in most cases and deferring real crime to Ukrainian police officials), it all grows tiresome.

Bondarchuk also struggles to find anything interesting in the personal lives of his two protagonists. The film attempts to humanize these individuals, but instead only succeeds in giving the viewer a look behind a very dull curtain, revealing activity that isn’t interesting beyond the base curiosity of seeing how people live in a part of the world otherwise unknown.

Where the film excels, though, is its look at the bigger political picture. The film is slow to start, but as it gets going, it delves into political areas similar to those found in other Ukraine-centric docs like Maidan and Winter on Fire, by visiting and revisiting the escalating Crimean tensions. However, Ukrainian Sheriffs does so on a local scale—namely, how the national crisis and the battle with Russia could affect local men subject to being drafted. It’s thought-provoking stuff that offers insight into the conflicting approaches to responsibility, survival, and patriotism that these men wrestle with, and that other men judge them on.

As a whole, Ukrainian Sheriffs can’t meet the challenge to make its own subject matter interesting. It might have its moments, but those moments aren’t enough to compensate for the rest. This is a film best suited for Ukrainian doc completists or people with a vested interest in the regional ongoings.

The story behind Dean Fleischer-Camp’s documentary Fraud is an interesting one. The director is said to have stumbled upon footage on YouTube—over 100 hours worth—of a American middle-class family of four living out their lives in front of a video camera, but this isn’t just any wannabe reality story. Fleischer-Camp pared that footage down to a scant 52 minutes to paint a picture of a man and woman so materialistic, they would jeopardize their own freedom and their children’s future for the chance to spend, spend, spend.

The family of four—thirty-something parents and two young children both under the age of about seven—is introduced to the viewer on 5/26/12 (according to the camera’s date stamp). Little is known about the family other than what can put together through the footage: they live in a small, cluttered house, suggesting lower-middle-class, and they are obsessed with anything related to an affluent lifestyle. As their bills mount and their resources dwindle, the family takes desperate measures to improve their cash flow so they can live what they perceive to be the good life, consequences be damned. The film ends on 10/3/12.

Less than five minutes into Fraud, I had my hand raised, calling shenanigans (please forgive the granularity of the next paragraph; it’s in support of a greater point).

At the film’s start, The Man, who does 99% of what presents itself as around-the-clock filming, records The Woman reading a pair of bank notices. The first notice is a decline letter for a new credit card. The other is in reference to a bounced payment. I understand the narcissistic obsession that comes with self-recording, but that The Man would record something as humiliating to himself and his family as that, and The Woman wouldn’t object, felt like a stretch. Still, and despite any change in tenor to The Family’s mood, I allowed that maybe reaction shots and debates had been edited out. I allowed it, that is, until the next scene where, in the interest of raising money, The Family has a yard sale. By the time the dust settles, they take their loot and head off to several retailers, including an Apple store, where everyone in The Family scores a new iPhone.

I called shenanigans again. Their declined credit card application suggests they were maxed out on their existing plastic, and the bounced payment suggests they were cash-strapped too, leaving only their yard sale earnings to fuel their shopping spree. I’ve never known a yard to generate north of $1000 in a single afternoon, and while the quick cuts of the film don’t afford a good look at the wares on sale, The Family’s living conditions suggest they didn’t have anything of high value to begin with, nor did they have a high quantity of lower-value items to unload.

This sequence is a terrific example of the film’s strength—it moves fast—but it’s also emblematic of the film’s great, great problem: it strains credulity from start to finish. Even if the action in the first five minutes of the film is factual, it raises such an eyebrow that all subsequent moments become the subject of intense scrutiny. That scrutiny then helps expose other improbable actions and events, up to and including the crime the film is named after and the subsequent cover-up; blatant timeline discrepancies between when events actually happen and the time stamp of the video; more private, humiliating moments filmed without shame or objection; the complete absence of questions from people The Family interacts with; and, perhaps most unsettling, the lack of any sense of genuine emotion between The Man and The Woman (and by extension, The Kids). These two people are more like high school buddies than a committed couple, and not once did I believe they were emotionally involved with each other or their children.

By the end of the film, so many unbelievable events and moments and decisions had happened, I called shenanigans on all 52 minutes. In a world where anyone is capable of anything, and anyone is capable of filming anything they are capable of, the four months this family spends on a money-burning binge rang as improbable as anything can.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the film after it was over…and the next day, too. Despite the superficiality of it, I couldn’t deny how mesmerizing it was. Part of this is because of the audacity of the director, but the other part of it, the larger part of it, is that while this so-called family might not have gone through those onscreen moments “in real life,” a lot of families in America have indeed suffered (or enjoyed, depending on how you look at it) some of those moments—living beyond their financial means, committing fraud, endangering children, you name it—all in the name of being able to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t normally have to spend. The nuclear (wasted) family Fleischer-Camp presents onscreen is like a composite of the unseemly denizens of an America obsessed with materialism and wealth, and it is chilling.

Therein lies the dilemma in terms of rating this film. As a documentary, it’s bad, and the title is apt. In fact, I wouldn’t even grant this specious work a “docudrama” moniker. But as a piece of visual art, effectively lean in runtime and edited with surgical precision, its statement on the skewed perceptions of the importance of money versus responsibility held by so many Americans, is like nothing I’ve seen before. That it achieves this without passing judgment makes it all the more impressive. Fraud is not a documentary about one family; it’s a reflection on a culture—a reflection that is as hard to look at as it is as hard to look away from.

Watching a documentary filmed in real-time is always fascinating to me. Unlike a traditional doc that starts with an idea and involves months of planning, research, scheduling, and execution, a real-time doc feels much more adventurous; the filmmakers are just as unaware of what will happen next as the viewers. It requires a little luck, too. Picking a compelling subject for a traditional doc is one thing, but for something compelling to happen to a subject in a real-time doc is another thing entirely. Director Christy Garland hopes to capture some of that magic in Cheer Up.

The city of Rovaniemi, Finland is located at the Arctic Circle and, as one might expect, offers a stunning and picturesque winter landscape. But in addition to all that beautiful snow and cold, the city is home to the Ice Queens, a competitive cheerleading squad led by Coach Miia. The term “competitive” is as literal as it is generous, though. The squad technically competes at the Finnish National Qualifiers, but they are dreadful, even to the amateur eye. Tired of losing and tired of coaching a lackluster team, Miia seeks inspiration where nobody does cheerleading better: Dallas, Texas, USA. At Cheer Athletics, Miia visits with the staff and squads who put on a cheering (and coaching) clinic, producing the kind of results Miia could only dream about. Dazzled by the energy of the staff and the commitment of the cheerleaders, Miia returns home energized and ready to make some changes for—and to—the squad, until developments happen in her personal life that change the course of the team’s collective future.

In her third feature documentary, Christy Garland doesn’t simply cover the sad-sack exploits of the cheerless cheer squad. She also focuses her lens on the private lives of three individuals from the team: Coach Miia and two teenage cheerleaders, Aino and Patricia. On the surface, they are all unique. Aino is the raven-haired rebel, smoking behind the school and partying at night when she isn’t trying to land a flip. Patricia is the girl-next-door, but one garnering sympathy with a life marred by the loss of her mother. And Miia is the single woman whose obsession with Marilyn Monroe ranges from decorations on her walls to bleach-blonde hair and a “Monroe piercing” above her lip.

While these differences make the young women unique, and while cheerleading connects them, what bonds them (unbeknownst to them) are their fractured relationships with men and their sometimes staggeringly-poor life choices. Aino rushes to live with her immature boyfriend, Patricia is at stubborn odds with her father, and Miia’s man trouble defies even a veiled mention here for fear of revealing too much.

This is the kind of narrative that makes real-time documentary filmmaking so great—a director chooses a general topic that is unique, finds the smaller stories within the larger tale that might lead to something special, and pursues those stories. All of these components are present in Cheer Up, and yet the magic never quite happens.

Most of where Garland struggles is with trying to keep the story compelling. The monotony of the lives of these women seeps through the screen to turn the experience into a monotonous experience. This is no indictment of the women or their lives, but rather how they are presented on film. It’s as if Garland is concerned with being melodramatic, so she reigns everything in so tightly she creates something anti-dramatic. The result is observation to a fault.

Even the most structured and well-planned of documentaries need some kind of drama, so surely a real-time doc needs it too. Cheer Up doesn’t have it.

Garland also retreats from any kind of ongoing focus on the cheerleading aspect of the story, instead occasionally returning to it as a reminder that, oh yes, this is what these girls do. There are moments in practice when Miia pushes the girls harder, and there are moments when more than one girl loses a little blood in the process, but it’s all very rote in its revisitation. The lessons learned in life never translate to lessons learned in the gym, nor vice-versa.

Cheer Up is incredibly well-intended and has some good moments, particularly Sari Aaltonen’s cinematography. But with its flat presentation and dearth of any riveting moments, the film plays more like an after-school special about the pitfalls of teen decision-making than it does a documentary about young women struggling to make something more of their lives.

Wizard Mode, from directors Nathan Drillot and Jeff Petry, is named after a term used in the pinball community. Some pinball machines have something akin to a video game’s hidden or locked bonus level achieved after executing a series of difficult tasks. Salazar attempts to make a metaphoric connection between this achievement and the achievements of Robert Gagno, a top-10 globally ranked competitive pinball player and a twentysomething young man suffering from autism, who has been trying to live his life as normally as possible.

At a high level, the metaphor works. Just as Gagno strives to win pinball tournaments, climb the world rankings, and achieve “wizard mode” in those machines that have it, he realizes over the course of the film he has to put the same kind of focus on gaining his independence. He has goals—a job, a driver’s license, living on his own, and eventually romance—but it will take a “wizard mode”-level effort to achieve this.

Presented in the film are some components one would expect about the life of an autistic pinball wizard, like old home movies flashing back to Gagno’s youth while haunting voiceovers from his parents offer memories of learning about their son’s condition. There’s also footage of some tournaments Gagno competes in (with his father playing the role of chaperone, driver, and coach), plus a who’s who of globally ranked pinball players, about each of whom Robert can point out player strengths. But with the exception of that narrated home footage, none of these parts are the least bit compelling in their presentation. Even the moments at the tournaments—regardless of how Gagno performs at them—fail to generate any sense of excitement or intensity.

Those tournament scenes also expose two fatal flaws in the film. The first is that it’s incredibly one-sided. Perspectives are offered from Gagno and his parents, but the pinball community is not tapped to speak to the type of person or player Gagno is. The second is more of a technical issue: Salazar doesn’t know how to make pinball very interesting. There is a lot of visual action in the game of pinball, from the speed of the silver sphere to how much of a nudge will earn the player a tilt. All of that visual action, combined with the glorious sound of an arcade running at full speed, should grab the viewer’s attention, but that never happens.

Despite some strengths, Wizard Mode’s inability to ever find a rhythm is too much for the film to bear. Gagno seems like a good person, and pinball sure looks fun, but in this film neither of them are sold very well.

One of the great joys for fans of true independent documentary filmmaking is having the chance to hear stories that might not otherwise be told. High-profile documentaries are great, and those stories need to be heard as well, but for every flashy doc there are countless other docs that offer unique glimpses into unknown lives, uncharted worlds, and times that have long since passed. Such is the story of Hotel Dallas from Livia Ungur, who acts as co-writer and co-director on a film about her own experiences.

As the 1980s wound down, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu recognized that the people oppressed under the boot of his Communist tyranny were growing restless and itching for freedom. In a placating move, Ceaușescu allowed the state-run television station to air reruns of America’s wildly popular drama Dallas. The prime-time soap starred Larry Hagman as evil oil tycoon J.R. Ewing and Patrick Duffy as his much kinder brother, Bobby. So popular did the show become in Ceaușescu’s corner of the Eastern Bloc, an entrepreneurial individual modeled a building after the home of the Ewings’ fictitious Southfork Ranch and turned it into a hotel, where guests could temporarily pretend they were living in 1980s Dallas.

While it’s technically accurate to call Hotel Dallas a documentary, the term both oversells and undersells the film, a juxtaposition that offers an interesting opportunity for Ungur (and her co-creator/husband Sherng-Lee Huang), but one that hampers the work as a whole.

From the oversell perspective, Hotel Dallas offers less in the way of what a viewer might expect in a documentary set in this place and time. While the filmmakers properly frame the geopolitical landscape so the importance of the TV show to oppressed Romanians is clear, there isn’t a great amount of interest from the filmmakers in exploring it too deeply. There are some fine voiceover testimonies to be heard from people who lived there and then, and it’s clear the show was a godsend to those people (and perhaps something of a backfire on Ceaușescu), but they are only soundbites offering a sketch, not narratives offering a complete picture.

This is where calling it a documentary somewhat undersells the film, as it is far more artistically experimental than the average documentary, with parts of the film delving into everything from philosophical oppression to complete fantasy.

The highlights of this avant-doc portion of moviemaking are three scenes played out by Romanian child actors dressed as Pioneers—Romania’s Communist youth organization. In one scene, the kids reenact the death of Bobby Ewing as seen on TV (something Ungur admits to being traumatized by when she was a child). In another scene, Bobby Ewing is “reborn,” a moment taken from Dallas‘ now-infamous shower episode. In the third scene, and in keeping with themes of life and death, the children replay the Christmas execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena—a chilling moment in stark monochrome, especially as performed by youngsters. There is also the chance to see an old Romanian oil company commercial starring Larry Hagman.

But the most fascinating artistic piece is the inclusion of Patrick Duffy himself throughout the entire film. He plays a character named Mr. Here (with a clever comic reason behind the name), but he channels his Bobby Ewing persona as if it were in a constant state of semi-consciousness. He is only seen onscreen once (in a recording studio scene that is slickly edited), and the rest of his “appearances” are voiceover, but from his POV. His purpose in the film is to bridge the gap between Hollywood fantasy and Romanian reality, along with bridging the time between Ungur’s modern-day existence and her Romanian youth. The pair actually travel back in time throughout the length of the film.

While some of the filmmaking is quite good when being judged on its own merits, the blending of documentary and drama becomes too cute by half. Even if every scene was good, the filmmakers don’t quite have the skills to pull off something this audacious. Using fantasy to tell the truth, or injecting the truth with fantasy to make a point, is tricky, and too often I found myself wondering what was real and what wasn’t, a question a viewer shouldn’t have when watching something that presents itself as factual. The filmmakers’ raw talent here is evident, but it’s unfocused. The facts are interesting, and the artistic choices are compelling, but the two aren’t meaty enough to work together very well.

Regardless of industry—sports, music, journalism, etc.—a Hall of Fame is the last stop for anyone who has had an impact on, or is a legend within, their field. And what usually accompanies an induction into a Hall of Fame is a retrospective of that person’s life and/or career. Burlesque is no different, and director Rama Rau uses the Burlesque Hall of Fame induction weekend as the backdrop to her new documentary League of Exotique Dancers.

The film looks at the lives and careers of golden-age burlesque dancers, as recounted by the dancers themselves. The women, with sensational names like Gina Bon Bon, Kitten Natividad, and Lovey Goldmine, are as brash, sassy, and unfiltered as one would hope retired burlesque dancers would be. These “titans of tease” are also quite eager to capture one more moment in the spotlight, and they get their chance when asked to perform in front of a live audience as part of the induction weekend. The revisiting of their professional paths and personal perils within their vocation is positioned to offer a unique and thorough perspective on the history of burlesque dancing and the lives of its dancers.

In addition to the women’s tales, there are plenty of greater stories to be told in League of Exotique Dancers, including the history of burlesque (or at least its golden age), the impact—good or bad—the burlesque trade had on women (and not just the women featured here), and in the case of the dancer Toni Elling, how being an African-American burlesque dancer affected her in a racially-charged time in our country.

By the end of the film, none of these larger themes are ever explored. The perspectives of the dancers are certainly unique, but the thoroughness of their stories is the film’s ultimate weakness. This doesn’t happen in spite of the fact Rau has the shared experiences of these dancers in front of her, it happens because of it. Rather than pluck stories from each dancer’s life and use them to build any kind of greater narrative, Rau offers a hailstorm of experiences presented in such a staccato fashion that the film leaves the impression that each of the dancers filled out the same questionnaire and filmed their answers.

A few ladies talk about bad relationships. A few ladies talk about addiction. A few ladies talk about their current professions, and so on. It’s an attempt to tell history by way of list-making, and it fails to resonate. To its benefit, League of Exotique Dancers offers a terrific collection of vintage imagery, including still photos, old reels, etc., but these become nothing more than slideshow images accompanying a collection of verbal bullet points. There’s a story to be told about the golden age of burlesque. This film isn’t that story.

“It’s a once-only chance to make the dead live again.” So states William Grimes, former book and restaurant critic, and current obituary writer, for the New York Times, in director Vanessa Gould’s marvelous documentary Obit. While the quote perfectly captures the essence of what real obituary writing is about, the film goes deeper than that, offering a lesson in history, a glimpse behind the scenes at the New York Times, a course in journalism, and a clinic in succinct writing.

It’s a tricky story to tell, as it combines a morbid subject with an activity—writing—that doesn’t necessarily make for compelling viewing. Gould understands this and rises to the challenge by approaching her subject from several angles. The backbone of the film is the linear thread: the anatomy of an obituary, from a fact-finding phone interview with a decedent’s widow first thing in the morning, to discussions on narrative approach in the afternoon, to filing the piece just under deadline in the evening.

Routinely stepping away from this so as not to get lost in function, Gould features a collection of deftly edited discussions with the NYT’s obit writing and editorial staff. Each discussion is fascinating, but none more so than those with Jeff Roth, the gloriously eccentric man in charge of “The Morgue,” where the newspaper’s history, and by extension the history of everyone who has ever been mentioned in the paper, is stored and catalogued. These discussions offer terrific anecdotal insight into the perception of obituaries and, more importantly, their history. This is where Gould’s film takes off.

A highlight reel of dazzling breadth, consisting of memories, news clips, and even video footage, spotlights one of the most interesting facets of obituaries: who gets one. Unlike your local paper, the NYT doesn’t publish everyone’s obit; someone has to have had a measurable impact to warrant one.

And it isn’t just celebrities, world leaders, or titans of industry who are considered to have had an impact. Included in this collection are the inventor of the Slinky, the pilot of the Enola Gay, an exotic dancer with ties to Jack Ruby, and the last surviving plaintiff from Brown v Board of Education, to name only a few. Every story is as amazing as the one before it and after, and if the anatomy of an obit is the backbone of the film, these highlight reels are the alluring soft parts.

With Obit, Vanessa Gould proves something I’ve said for years: pound-for-pound…or perhaps word-for-word is more apt…there is no better writing, and no better storytelling, in any national daily newspaper than there is in the obituary section. Obits are more than resumés of the deceased; obits are everyone’s last chance at life.

Many documentaries, no matter how good they might be, either follow a traditional structure or achieve the same general narrative goal along a nonlinear path. Even a doc like Listen To Me Marlon, which presents Marlon Brando’s personal audio recordings in such a fashion that the actor posthumously “builds” his life story, is essentially a clever telling of a nonlinear tale. But a new documentary from Swiss writer/director Nicolas Steiner, Above and Below, eschews traditional structures and even clever devices, embracing documentation on film in the most literal of senses.

The film examines the daily existences of five people living on what society would be generous to deem its “fringe.” Cindy and Rick are a couple living in a flood channel beneath the streets of Las Vegas; Lalo, aka The Godfather, lives in the same series of tunnels; Dave is a military veteran living alone in an abandoned bunker in the California desert; and April is a member of the crew at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, living her life simulating exploration on the red planet in the middle of nowhere. These five souls, and their four stories, have more in common than one might think, but the history of that commonality leaves much to be desired.

Above and Below opens like a crackling horror movie. Lalo acts as a tour guide of sorts, leading the viewer into a tunnel as he tells the tale of a family who once lived underground but died during flooding caused by heavy rain; he says the little girl still appears. Lalo’s theatrics, combined with Markus Nestroy’s sumptuous cinematography, is beyond compelling—it’s demanding.

Some technical wizardry continues with wide shots of stunning vastness, paired with great audio, used to frame April’s world as someone preparing to one day colonize Mars (perhaps in the event of the end of Earth). In the desert, Dave takes an acetylene torch to fire ants, crisping them on contact while explaining the pain they cause when they bite, as if he feels compelled to justify his killing. Also using a torch, although as a means to cook dinner, are Cindy and Rick, whose perpetually candlelit underground world has order alongside its chaos.

It’s all so riveting, and yet something isn’t quite right.

Still, Steiner continues to impress by finding connections between and among his subjects that forever link them. Some are superficial, like April playing ping-pong with a crew member, compared to Dave sitting alone in his bunker and bouncing a ping-pong ball off the wall to pass the time, compared to dozens of ping-pong balls flowing through drainage as if en route to Rick and Cindy (while aesthetically pleasing, this bit reeks of being contrived). Others are not so superficial: April and Dave are both military veterans with harrowing experiences, while Cindy and Dave have children and grandchildren in the “real world” they don’t see because they have lost touch with their families.

There is also contrast, not only between those who live above the surface versus those who live below it (thus the title), but also between people’s faith, the creature comforts they have access to, and the degree of solitude in which they live.

But as the film continues, that not-quite-right feeling takes shape. And I use the term “continues” specifically because there is no real progression to be found here. Despite a runtime that’s just shy of two hours, very little happens beyond the observational. It’s quite maddening, really. On one hand, and to Steiner’s credit, there is no opportunity to pass judgment on these people beyond basic moral thumbs-up/thumbs-down consideration, because there is no context available to use as a frame around current behavior. For example, Cindy goes trick-or-treating on Halloween so she and Rick have candy. She’s petite enough to pass for teen-sized, and with a full mask hiding her age and an over-exaggerated squeaky voice belying it, she scores big. Is it wrong? In spirit, sure; trick-or-treating is for kids. But how wrong is it? There’s no way to tell because there isn’t enough revealed about Cindy to make that call.

Therein lies the other hand: with no traditional backstory to these people, and only tidbits of information randomly presented, there is nothing to invest in emotionally. Yes, some sympathy is garnered for April because of her parental situation, and one can’t help but feel sorry for how Cindy or Dave are detached from their children and grandchildren, but without more context, these stories are nothing more than bits of discussions overheard at a café or in an elevator. For two hours.

This sterile, arm’s-length view is a glimpse at lives and not into them, and that is a big distinction. The viewer gets to see Steiner’s subjects, but the viewer never really gets the chance to look at them. Above and Below has artistic merit, but it begs for more from its viewer than it is willing to offer in return. Told without narration or title cards, the film is the epitome of observation, and Steiner tries hard to have it both ways. He offers subjects who might be worthy of sympathy, but never delivers on anything sympathetic, instead remaining all-observant. By the end of the film, the viewer is left wondering if there is something more compelling to look at.

In Louder Than Bombs, Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) was a world-renowned war photographer who risked her life in pursuit of an endless string of perfect shots. She didn’t always come out of the war zone unscathed, but she always came out. It’s ironic, then, that despite surviving countless dangers around the globe, she wound up the lone fatality of a single-vehicle car crash in a cozy New York suburb. Three years later, a retrospective of her work is being organized, and her widowed husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) has been tapped to display his wife’s photographs; he enlists the help of his grown son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg).

Complicating matters is a New York Times piece set to be written in advance of the showing by Isabelle’s former colleague, war reporter Richard Weissman (David Strathairn). The piece will reveal that Isabelle’s car accident was no accident at all, but rather a suicide, something Gene is fully aware of. Not only would Gene prefer to keep a more positive memory of his wife at the forefront of the celebration in her honor, he would rather his younger son, the teenaged Conrad (Devin Druid), not know the truth about his mother’s death.

Louder Than Bombs, the first English-speaking film from Norwegian director and co-writer Joachim Trier, sets itself up to be a significant melodrama. All of the pieces are there and ready to be played.

There is Gene, the widower and father of two who, thanks to the retrospective being organized in his wife’s memory, must do more than face life’s small daily reminders of a love lost—he must immerse himself in the life she lived. He must look at every photograph she took and know that he’s seeing her life, a life she spent far away from her family, through her eyes. This takes its toll on Gene, which in turn takes its toll on how he handles his relationship with Hannah (Amy Ryan), his coworker and lover.

Next is Jonah, who is a lot like the old man and not just because they’re both teachers. When Jonah is faced with an event of overwhelming emotional magnitude, he also makes poor choices. In this instance, his wife Amy (Megan Ketch) has just given birth to their first child, but when the frazzled new dad scours the hospital halls for a vending machine, he runs into an old girlfriend. Their hug lasts almost as long as the lies he tells.

Conrad, whose life is challenging enough as a teenager without a mother, has all but disconnected himself emotionally from his father, opting to live in a world of loud music and online gaming. He’s awkward and introverted and everything one would expect from a 14-year-old in his situation, but he’s also undaunted in his secret love for his classmate crush, the cheerleader Melanie (Ruby Jerins).

Even Richard, the war correspondent, brings more to the story than just the byline on the revelatory posthumous profile of the revered photographer, wife, and mother.

Again, all of the melodramatic pieces are there, but much to his credit, Trier never plays those pieces the way most would expect them to be played. Instead, the filmmaker lets his characters progress through subtle developments that require the viewer to stay keenly attuned to the little things they say and do, rather than waiting for the next bombastic outburst to occur. A lot of that character progression is negative, but it’s genuine, and it’s fueled by the fatal flaws the trio shares—a wicked combination of denial, deceit, and dreadful communication. Watching them fool themselves and others isn’t like watching people spiral out of control and perish in a fiery crash. It’s more like watching people slowly dissolve. Only Conrad, despite (or perhaps because of) his youth, offers a glimmer of hope with his unflappable crush on Melanie and his refusal to be anything but the person he is. Husbands, fathers, and sons make poor choices that carry with them the potential for irrevocable consequences, and yet just like in real life, they can’t stop making those choices; it’s in their nature.

And what about Isabelle? She appears in flashback and in dreams, but she is more mystery than matriarch. Yes, she was a loving mother and wife, as well as a successful war photographer, but beyond that (and beyond the suggestion of depression), little else is known about her. This is a terrific move by Trier, because it maintains a sense of wonder about who this woman was and why she meant what she meant to the men in her life. To explain more would have done a disservice to the character. In the role, Huppert is mesmerizing, and Trier knows how to capture the best of her, including a long, lingering, dialogue-free close-up of Huppert as she stares down the camera, leaving you wondering what she is thinking about and hoping you’ll have the chance to learn.

The rest of the cast is excellent, anchored by an amazing performance by relative newcomer Druid as Conrad Reed. Byrne and Eisenberg may have (combined) decades more experience than Druid, but they need him to be great more than he needs them to be great, and he delivers.

Louder Than Bombs is a wrenching tale about the criticality of communication and the collateral damage of deceit in the wake of significant loss. The film has barely a false note in it, hardly a moment when a character says or does something that demands to be challenged, and only the ending left me disappointed as ringing somewhat hollow. Still, despite the questionable destination of the tale, the journey is completely worth it.

A collision at the intersection of tragedy and addiction can leave countless emotional fragments strewn across life’s road. Decisions already handicapped by the perpetual specter of compulsive demons become further clouded by the blinding pain of raw emotion brought on by an unthinkable happening. Eventually, the consequences of the initial collision produce decisions that create consequences of their own, until life becomes nothing more than a spiraling series of missteps taken in an attempt to correct each previous misstep. Borealis, a comedy-sprinkled drama from writer Jonas Chernick and director Sean Garrity, looks at the victim of one such collision, a man whose years-long addiction and years-old tragedy have put him in a position to make a series of increasingly poor choices that not only threaten his safety, but the safety of his 15-year-old daughter.

That man is Jonah (screenwriter Chernick), his addiction is gambling, and the tragedy that befell him was the death of his wife and mother to their only child, Aurora (Joey King). After years of emotionally-charged bad decisions, Jonah finds himself in deep debt to Tubby (Kevin Pollak). The bad news about Tubby is he works for a loan shark. The worse news is that Tubby and Jonah go back to when they were kids, so Tubby finds a soft spot when Jonah wants to borrow money to place a bet. One cry of “all-in” later Jonah is $100,000 in the red.

Jonah’s day gets worse. Not long after playing the biggest losing hand of his life, his daughter’s eye doctor tells him that her eyesight, which has already been riddled with disease, has grown so bad that she will be completely blind in weeks. Unable to break the devastating medical news to the daughter he already has a fractured relationship with, and unable to meet the demands of Tubby and his hired muscle Brick (Clé Bennett), Jonah drags his reluctant little girl on a road trip to see the Northern Lights—partly to give her a fleeting glimpse of something he considers to be indescribably beautiful, and partly to avoid the financially painful inevitability.

For a 95-minute drama with only three primary players and three supporting players, Borealis attempts to do a lot. This is a blessing for the film. It provides a wide open space for its considerable talent to put on display a litany of emotions and memories, plus it affords opportunities for the story to avoid cliché. But the film’s “don’t just swing for the fences, swing for the parking lot” approach is inevitably its curse, as the supersaturation of backstories, plot lines, ideas, and character motivations become more than the filmmakers can handle.

The core of the story is wonderful. This father and daughter—a fractured pair as a result of mom’s passing, yet also individually broken by addiction and disease—are thrust into a unique circumstance. They are being chased as a result of one’s flaw while simultaneously chasing the clock as a result of the other’s flaw. This alone is fertile ground for emotional exploration, and adding an interesting circumstance to the mother’s death makes it even more compelling.

But that circumstance—or rather, the ripple effect from it—is never examined below surface-level. Clearly Jonah (and most likely Aurora) has been affected by this loss, and surely the loss has influenced the survivors’ behavior and contributed to the distance between them, but it is only presented to either generate pity or take a shortcut to an emotional goal; it’s never presented as a real catalyst for dysfunctional behavior.

Everything else in the film suffers from this same problem. It isn’t a case of superficiality so much as it’s a case of underdevelopment. Things like Jonah’s gambling and Aurora’s vision loss—real meaty topics—are only heavy character traits and high-level cause-and-effect cases. Other things like the childhood relationship between Tubby and Jonah, and the adult relationship between Jonah and his current flame Kyla (Emily Hampshire), are presented like early concept musings, not fully developed relationships. What remains after all of these missed chances is another road picture, a film about getting from Point A to Point Z, with stops at B through Y along the way.

It’s frustrating because these ideas are terrific as individual notions and as a creative collective. They’re also perfectly enjoyable presented as they are, but they are ultimately unsatisfying.

There are, though, some very satisfying parts of this film, led by great performances. Chernick shines as the father with all the wrong answers and the weight of the world—a world he helped create, both as a father and a gambler—on his shoulders. King is marvelous as the teen who is too angry with her father to help mend their relationship and too proud to let her deteriorating eye condition stop her from doing what she wants. And Pollak delivers the goods as the hard-ass with the soft spot.

The humor sprinkled throughout is genuinely funny, even if it doesn’t quite fit. Instead of providing a respite from the drama, the humor actually undercuts it. It’s an example of one more thing the filmmakers attempt to stuff into a picture that is already jammed with so much concept. Still, funny is funny.

There’s a lot to admire about Borealis, but the film sags under the weight of its own ambition, loading up on many solid concepts but never developing any of them thoroughly enough to do the film a greater good. Still, Borealis is very much worth seeking out, particularly for the performances by Chernick, King, and Pollak.

This review was originally published on October 7, 2015 as part of our coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

I’m hard-pressed to think of the last time something of historical significance happened and there wasn’t a camera around to record the event. I don’t mean a news camera; I mean the kind of camera anyone might have in their pocket at any given moment. The advent of video technology on mobile phones has created a culture where anything that happens can be recorded at a moment’s notice and distributed globally via social media. It’s not hard to recall the days when personal video cameras weren’t as readily available, or when they were the stuff of home movies, weddings, corporate training videos, and sex tapes. It wasn’t too long before that, though, video cameras weren’t even an option for personal use. Here Come the Videofreex, a documentary from co-directors Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin, looks at the genesis of video cameras for personal use, and how two early owners of video equipment started something of a media revolution.

The film opens with a harrowing scene: a present-day team of gloved experts pores over boxes of videotapes that have fallen victim to mold. In some cases, spooled tape is sticking to itself, creating a sense of urgency that must be restrained for the safety of the tape. This brief scene is followed by title cards that offer all the prologue the documentary needs:

In 1968, Sony introduced the CV-2400 PortaPak, the first portable video camera. For the first time, it was possible to record picture and sound and play it back right away.

The story moves to 1969, when David Cort and Parry Teasdale, strangers who both acquired video cameras, met by chance at Woodstock, where both were more interested in filming everything going on except the music. A friendship was forged, a partnership began, and a name was coined. Before long, the duo would recruit eight others, land a gig with CBS, lose that gig with CBS, and go on to record seminal moments and legendary figures in US history.

Here Come the Videofreex, presented chronologically for the most part, is really a tale of two histories. The first history is that of the group itself. In addition to Cort and Teasdale, members included Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, Bart Friedman, Davidson Gigliotti, Chuck Kennedy, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, Carol Vontobel, and Ann Woodward. Each person had their own specialty, from editing to accounting, and each was treated as an equal member (that said, like any team, this one had its all-stars and its role-players, and those designations are implied here).

The second history is what the group recorded. Moments of modern US history where the Videofreex were present include discussions with Abbie Hoffman during the Trial of the Chicago Eight, an interview with soon-to-be-slain Black Panther Fred Hampton, a Women’s Strike for Equality, Anti-War Protests, and the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. This treasure-trove of footage is not just history in the making, it’s history in the raw. In today’s media, between our cameras-are-everywhere existence and the slick packaging we are used to being fed from news outlets and websites, it’s easy to forget what it feels like to organically witness history because we’re so busy consuming what we’re being fed. This film is a great reminder of that feeling. The footage, presented in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, is slick in its native, almost sterile, black-and-white images. It’s also very effective that the present-day interviews with the talking-head surviving members of the Videofreex, while in color, are also in presented in 4:3.

But what the film is flush with in terms of footage, it lacks in engaging narrative. While there is plenty of history to be had, it all has a museum piece feel to it, as if the film isn’t really teaching anything, but rather putting everything on display to be admired. It’s history being shown, not history being shared. The filmmakers also seem to be so enamored by the footage they have, they think any footage is good footage. Nealon and Raskin use many clips that are nothing more than the Videofreex recording themselves and/or each other. It’s cute at first, but soon that footage takes on the feel of any other home videos found in most households in the 1980s.

As their tale winds to a close, the Videofreex again find themselves ahead of the new media curve. Fed up with New York and their inability to distribute their content, they move to a large farmhouse in the Catskills. It’s there that they curry favor with the suspicious locals by creating what will eventually be known as Cable Access Television. They even fancy themselves pirates of the airwaves, and while technically they are, it’s not as sexy as it sounds. The locals eat it up, but to watch the locals create and record cable access programming tests the patience more than actually watching cable access programming.

Here Come the Videofreex succeeds in telling a tale of how a two-person partnership became a ten-person collective, and how their efforts simultaneously made history and made them historians. The film also shows how anyone rolling video today, whether by camera or cameraphone, stands on the shoulders of that collective. It’s an important documentary about an important point in the timeline of American media and technology, even though its presentation struggles to connect with the viewer.

Here Come the Videofreex opens April 6th at The Royal Cinema in Toronto, Ontario.

In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, filmmaker and film historian Peter Bogdanovich recounted a conversation he once had with Golden Age Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart. In the conversation, Stewart, while speaking about making movies, said, “… then what you’re doing is, you’re giving people little … tiny … pieces, of time … that they never forget.” It’s a great quote that has stuck with me since I first read it, and I was reminded of it while watching the excellent new documentary Cameraperson.

The film comes from director Kirsten Johnson, who has been a cinematographer on more than 40 documentaries since 2001. The pieces of time she presents are truly pieces of time from her life: dozens and dozens of cinematic moments she has shot over the years. But these are not solely excerpts from the films she’s worked on; these are clips of when she rolled film to test lighting, scout locations, discuss shots with her directors, experiment with camera angles, and even just footage of her own family she shot at home, too. Assembled in no chronological order, there are no mentions of the original films the clips are associated with. It’s an effective tactic, as it takes the focus away from “Look where this scene is from,” and moves it to, “Look at this scene.” Johnson presents the clips only with title cards to indicate the geography of the moment, and what geography it covers, globetrotting from Bosnia to Brooklyn, Gitmo to Nodaway County, MO, and everywhere around and between.

At first, the presentation seems so random. There’s an early scene of a boxer in his Brooklyn locker room, preparing for a big fight. In the next scene, a midwife aids in the delivery of twins in Nigeria. These two worlds could not be further apart geographically or thematically, and yet they aren’t necessarily ripe for direct contrast, either. Johnson leaves those scenes where they are and moves onto others, and then patterns start to emerge.

Men in Herat, Afghanistan are connected to a troupe of young ballerinas in Colorado Springs, CO, who are both connected to Johnson’s own family in Beaux Arts, WA, all by a theme of religion. This segues into the theme of how death is approached by connecting another documentarian, a spokesperson for the Syrian Film Collective, and the prosecutors of a murder trial in Jasper, TX. Many other patterns take shape in this manner as the film progresses.

The scope of it all is what’s so amazing about Cameraperson: how themes of life, death, faith, crime, childhood, parenthood, government, joy, and sorrow intersect, overlap, and intertwine across time and around the globe.

This film isn’t the work of a director who has an idea for a documentary and decides to gather new footage or mine soundbites to make what they want. This isn’t someone, for example, who wants to showcase the looming specter of governmental distrust, and in doing so shoots scenes at Guantanamo Bay, adds a Washington, DC interview between a documentarian and a Marine willing to go to jail to avoid a second tour of duty in the Middle East, and caps it off with a shot of a mysterious thumb drive being entombed in fresh cement at an undisclosed location. This is a filmmaker who shot scenes at Gitmo in 2010 for one story (Laura Poitras’ The Oath), in DC in 2004 for another (Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11), and at an undisclosed location in 2014 for a third (Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour).  Johnson then combines her pinpoint eye for filmmaking with her broad eye for history to illustrate how the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s breathtaking in both ambition and execution.

Edited with great skill by Nels Bangerter (whose work on Jason Osder’s Let the Fire Burn is must-see), Cameraperson has such a great variety of entries that everyone will surely have a favorite subject, even when that subject is taken on its own merits and not looked at as part of the greater whole. My favorite? Two, actually: the boxer and the midwife from the start of the picture. How Johnson concludes their individual stories is supercharged with raw, genuine emotion. How she connects the two tales is visionary.

Cameraperson is a dazzling example of storytelling in its purest form—being observed, not told—and every little piece of time she gives us is time well spent.

Cameraperson screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

Almost as long as there has been teen angst, there have been films about teen angst. From Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause  to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, and including many in between and since, the teen angst film has been a moviemaking staple for six decades, offering insight into what teens go through during each film’s point in time. In most cases only the details change, as higher level themes of disaffection, identity crisis, and peer pressure have been common teen problems for generations. But those details are important, and can drive just how good a film is.

Kill Me Please is set in an affluent section of present-day Rio de Janeiro, where a clique of bored teenage girls finds titillation in a series of murders—murders that happen to be of other teenage girls. Facts are at a minimum but that doesn’t stop the rumor mill from grinding out plenty to quench their morbid fascination. As the body count rises, 15-year-old Bia’s (Valentina Herszage) obsession with the crimes and their victims grows too. Teens are still teens, though, and there is plenty else for them to cope with as they go about their daily high school lives.

The opening scene of Kill Me Please is terrific, showcasing the harrowing demise of a teenage girl whose only crime was walking home alone at night. Panic leads to pursuit, which leads to the girl’s final, fearful gaze into the camera and her piercing, dying screams. Neither the killer nor the girl’s blood is ever shown. The sequence is all atmosphere and adrenaline, recalling the openings of slasher flicks from the 1980s, and it’s an opening that will grab viewers from frame one.

With the opening gambit established, the film settles in, introduces its players—Bia, her girlfriends, her slacker brother João (Bernardo Marinho), her boyfriend Pedro (Vitor Mayer), a few other students—and delves into the daily drama of the young, rich, and beautiful, with diversions into the darker side of life with every new victim.

There are several films that come to mind when considering Kill Me Please. Its horror strains invoke thoughts of Brian de Palma’s Carrie; its beautiful and privileged teens having their lives jolted by death, and how reactions to death vary from teen to teen, harkens to Michael Lehmann’s Heathers; and João Atala’s lush and colorful cinematography calls to mind Benoît Debie’s lens work in Spring Breakers. Unfortunately, this film is nowhere near the level of any of those.

The problems begin early on, when the film doesn’t know when to stop settling in and eventually becomes stuck in a rut. Writer/director da Silveira parts ways with the slasher film motif (and all its promise) to handle things like character development and plot, of which there is very little. The teens’ lives include the expected, like sexual awakening, competitiveness in the athletic arena (handball), petty jealousy, passive/aggressive body shaming, religion, and rival cliques. These are all part of creating, wrestling with, and solving teen angst. The problem is how lifeless the characters are. Kids meant to be regarded as soulful or introspective instead come across as apathetic bores. Even Bia’s growing obsession with the murders never takes on any kind of intensity; it’s only an increased interest.

Because the director never returns to the intensity of his opening sequence, subsequent victims are shown after their demise, not during, or they’re simply talked about (save for a montage of their faces late in the film, only proving the dead were just as beautiful as the living). Some might consider this to be a less is more approach, but that sense is never conveyed. The murders are cold, distant events that lose all gravitas because they are talking points about murders, not the actual murders. The fact that there are adult characters in the film is an interesting and gutsy choice, but it strains credulity as the body count grows since no police ever show up.

Kill Me Please is a gorgeous-looking film that ultimately falls victim to its own narcissism, relying on its aesthetic so heavily that the function of its story is mostly an afterthought. After squandering an excellent beginning, it never recovers to offer a satisfying finished product.

Kill Me Please screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

I love a good ghost story, so when I read the synopsis of first-time writer/director Zhang Hanyi’s Life After Life—a description that included the spirit of a deceased mother possessing her son—I was all in. While I didn’t quite get what I bargained for, what I got wasn’t bad. It’s a ghost story for sure, but one unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Mingchung (Zhang Minjun) and his son Leilei (Zhang Li) are walking through the forest gathering fallen sticks to use as kindling in the fireplace that warms their home. After a brief spat between the two, Leilei sees a hare race by and gives chase. He’s gone for several minutes and when he returns, he is Leilei only in body; his spirit has been replaced by that of his late mother, Xiuying. Using her own voice, Xiuying asks her widowed husband to return to their previous home, dig up the tree she planted in the front yard (a gift from her father), and replant it somewhere safe from the industrialization that is growing and will eventually lay waste to that old land. Mingchung dutifully obliges, at first attempting to recruit help but eventually doing it himself, with Leilei/Xiuying’s help.

The setting, which Hanyi and cinematographer Chang Mang magnificently capture in wide static shots with sharp details and an achingly muted palate, reflects a barebones Chinese countryside forever skirting the edges of industrial sprawl. The land is mostly dead, but the sense is that the death is not some hibernation demanded by the wintery season; instead, it’s the earth’s terminal state of complete surrender to the assault it is under.

The film’s characters are not much different. Repressed by dreadful socioeconomic conditions, Mingchung and those whom he attempts to recruit to relocate the tree are distant, unemotional, and devoid of personality or excitability. If no one is phased by the notion that Xiuying has returned in the form of her own son’s possessed body, then it comes as no surprise that no one is phased at the site of a man suffocating a goat. That’s a level of repression that borders on abused. It might also explain why Mingchung can’t get the help he wants since nobody cares.

And yet buried deep within these doldrums are sparks of hope. Xiuying, at least in spirit, is back with her husband, and she gets the opportunity to see her parents one last time. This offers hope for an afterlife and a way back for those so inclined. And at one point, Xiuying alerts Mingchung that his deceased parents have since been reincarnated—one as a dog and one as a bird. It’s absurd to the point of being funny, although the constant hum of misery stifles any laughter.

Then there is, of course, the love story. It isn’t overt or sappy, nor is it traditional, but it’s there in the form of Mingchung taking on this massive task rather than not rejoicing in his late wife’s temporary return. He didn’t have much of a life, but the life he had was put on old to make her happy one last time. He seals the deal with a devastating monologue late in the film, where the reason for her demise is revealed and his regret surrounding the circumstances and the aftermath come to light. It’s never elaborated on, but their meet-cute must have been something special.

Life After Life, with its foreign arthouse sensibilities, its glacial pace, and its chasms of silence between sparse lines of dialogue, is a film that dares you to dislike it. And yet I didn’t. In fact, I found it quite hypnotic. I also found it rather sentimental, given the task at hand for its protagonist and who’s responsible for sending them on their journey. It isn’t a perfect film, and it won’t be for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a shot.

Life After Life screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

Before my grandmother passed away, she taught my wife how to make homemade pierogi from scratch. There were no cookbooks nor smartphone apps to be found in the kitchen that day. All that filled the room were the intoxicating smells of our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, a pile of ingredients that dwindled as the day grew long, and two people standing side-by-side, one passing tradition along to the other in a culinary masterclass of ethnic cuisine. I was reminded of that day while watching Sweet Bean, the latest film from writer/director Naomi Kawase.

“Making bean paste is all about heart, sonny.” So says 76-year-old Tokue (Kirin Kiki) as she all but begs for a part-time job from baker Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase). Despite her enthusiasm and her willingness to take less pay than he is offering, Sentaro is reluctant to employ Tokue because of her age, the frailty that accompanies it, and her gnarled hands. He isn’t dismissive, but he certainly isn’t open-minded. The next morning, Tokue returns with a container of her own homemade An (sweet red bean paste), along with a little trash talk about how Sentaro’s An isn’t very good. She argues that the paste he uses doesn’t taste good, and that the delicious pancakes he makes for his dorayakis are betrayed by such poorly mass-produced filling.

It isn’t until after he tries Tokue’s paste that Sentaro finds religion in the recipe. He hires Tokue, and in the process gets much more than a loyal and hardworking employee (and lines of new customers who have heard about this otherworldly confection). On his journey with the septuagenarian, one he shares with Wakana (Kyara Uchida), a teenage girl who frequents his shop, the baker learns much more than Tokue’s secret recipe.

While there is considerable depth to Sweet Bean, no other consideration can be given to the film without first addressing its culinary aspect. It’s marvelous. Some cooking scenes are brief but impactful, like several where Sentaro makes batter from scratch, pours the golden gooey goodness on the skillet, and flips the palm-sized pancakes at just the right golden-brown moment. Other scenes are a little more special, particularly the dazzling 10-minute sequence where Tokue and Sentaro work side-by-side so the elder can show the baker just how that paste is made. It’s all so dazzling in its meticulousness. Kawase’s observations on cooking are quite intimate, with many close-ups that give the viewer a sense of the food’s texture, combined with Shigeki Akiyama’s rich cinematography that strikes the perfect balance of soft and warm to create something of a visual tasting menu.

Deeper, though, the cooking sequences before the introduction of Tokue offer more than just gastric titillation. Nagase, who is excellent as Sentaro, uses the baker’s solo cooking scenes to convey a sense of heaviness in his soul. Cooking is driven by all five senses, making it a very passionate form of art. But through the listless repetition of his daily routine, Sentaro postures himself as one who has lost that passion years ago, with no desire to find it again. Even when a small group of giggling and chatty schoolgirls show up for their daily treat, he is unmoved by them. This is the result of something from his past that continues to haunt his present and affect his future, a secret that’s revealed later on in the film.

Also revealed later in the film is the part of Tokue’s life that at one time may have haunted her, but is now something that she has learned to live with and live through. Her approach to cooking has its roots in nature. She speaks of things like listening to the stories that the beans tell as she goes through her cooking ritual. One can’t help but wonder, at least at first, if these are simply the musings of a woman who has lived alone for too long. But the character is one keenly in tune with nature, particularly the cycle of the cherry blossoms, and who is mostly intoxicated by that connection, creating a giddiness that belies her age. Kiki, who is delightful in this role, presents Tokue as both the crazy aunt and caring grandmother everyone loves in equal measure yet for entirely different reasons.

Wakana is a little less developed as a character, thus a little more enigmatic, but no less important. Like Sentaro and Tokue, she is somewhat alone. She lives with her mother, but her mother seems more concerned about having spilled her beer than worrying about what the spill might have ruined. This less specific character sketch, coupled with the fact Wakana plays a critical role late in the film, suggests the girl is a step or two removed from being nothing more than a character of convenience. But her daily patronage of Sentaro’s shop, and how he treats her compared to the giggling schoolgirls who also come in every day, suggest Wakana has a certain gravitas that will eventually reveal itself. It does, but mostly in the sense that she will become the next generation needed to take up this art of cuisine and use what she has learned from those before her. She shares a brief but memorable moment over tempura with Sentaro, where the two of them meet by chance at a local restaurant one evening (before Tokue’s hiring) and decide to dine together. Sentaro speaks to Wakana like an adult, confiding in her something that surely took guts for him to admit, let alone share.

The film’s ending is predictable (and early), and that ending veers towards mawkish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying.

Based on a novel by Durian Sukegawa, Sweet Bean (known also as An and Sweet Red Bean Paste) is a delicate, enchanting, layered Japanese drama about so much more than food. It’s about isolation, regret, and the sense of helplessness that comes with losing control of your own destiny. These three people are forever bonded as both equals and (unrelated) generations of a greater spiritual family. With excellent performances and a fine directing touch, Sweet Bean is a film worth finding and savoring.

In addition to faith, scandal, and fundraising, the Catholic church also knows its way around paperwork. To its credit, at least from my own experience, the church keeps excellent documentation in the area of who received what sacraments, where, and when. To its detriment, though, and again from my own experience, it can mire itself in so many forms and processes, it becomes an institution less about spirituality and more about bureaucracy. The frustrations of searching for baptismal records and being subject to the slog of pro forma processes are only the beginning for the protagonist in Federico Veiroj’s latest, The Apostate.

Gonzalo Tamayo (Álvaro Ogalla) is that protagonist. He is a philosophy major who decides he wants nothing to do with the Catholicism he was raised on (thus the term “apostate,” meaning one who renounces religious beliefs). Furthermore, because gave no consent to his baptism due to being a baby at the time, he wants his baptismal certificate—the key document that connects him to the Catholic church—expunged entirely. The church doesn’t necessarily see his side of things.

Between Gonzalo’s existential crisis and the arcane machinations of the church, The Apostate has a foundation ripe for comedy, and the film shows flashes of it where one might expect. There is some fairly direct humor when Gonzalo visits his church, learns about the ridiculousness of what it takes to apostatize, receives blowback from his family as a result of his decision, etc. There’s even the broader humorous notion that Gonzalo’s grand efforts to detach himself from the Church are nothing more than efforts to update paperwork. The reality is if Gonzalo wants nothing more to do with faith or religion, he only needs to stop participating.

But rather than explore and enrich these themes, maximize their deeper impact (either comedically or dramatically), and let Gonzalo’s decisions set other events into motion, The Apostate treats his desire to free himself from the Church as little more than the core situation in an underdeveloped comedic anthology. Throughout the film, Gonzalo moves among a collection of situations that, while mostly connectable in some way, offer no greater sense of cohesion or flow. This is particularly frustrating, as these situations each have enough of a base to build something upon, but they only get in the way of each other’s development.

The first facet of this concerns Gonzalo’s studies. He is one class away from earning his degree and yet he fails that class. The fact that his philosophical slant drives his apostasy and yet he can’t close that deal gives an opportunity to delve into some rich irony, but it’s treated as little more than one more thing Gonzalo’s overbearing mother can complain about (Her cliché reaches its zenith when she ultimately learns of his desire to leave the church).

On the amorous front, Gonzalo has eyes for his comely cousin Pilar (Marta Larralde). He has been attracted to her since childhood, and when she shows up at his place looking for a place to crash because her marriage is failing, he sees an opportunity to score. The tenor of this is difficult to reconcile. Yes, there is the triple-threat of incest, infidelity, and adultery (not to mention the fact Gonzalo’s first attempt to bed Pilar occurs while she is sleeping), but there is never the sense of taboo to the degree one would expect. Like his desire to be rid of the church, his desire to be with Pilar seems superficially situational. Gonzalo also engages in sex with an older stranger on a bus and has an attraction to his neighbor Maite (Barbara Lennie), and while these relationships’ perceived sinfulness might suggest Gonzalo is acting in defiance of the church, there is nothing earned to be defiant over; his position is philosophical, not spiteful nor vengeful. It isn’t as if he has been wronged by the church in any way, he simply wants to disassociate himself from it.

This is not to say that the film doesn’t have its moments of humor. Some moments in The Apostate are laugh-out-loud funny (including an ending that deserves a better film preceding it), but it’s all so slapdash. Perhaps this scattered offering of moments and ideas is a result of the collaborative screenwriting effort among four scribes: director Veiroj, star Ogalla, Gonzalo Delgado, and Nicolás Saad. It certainly feels like a lot of ideas were pitched and those that were considered good on their own merits weren’t considered for how they would fit within a collective.

In addition to those funny moments, Ogalla, in his first role, is quite enjoyable and something of an onscreen natural. It’s no surprise that the film’s core and hook—an apostasy—is something Ogalla experienced in real life; that sense of experience comes through. Still, these few virtues cannot compensate for the greater sins the film commits, and while it isn’t the worst way to pass 80 minutes, it isn’t the best cinematic option out there.

The Apostate screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

There’s a part of being the victim of infidelity that isn’t often discussed: the suspicion of infidelity. Unlike the flare of rage that comes with the surprise of catching a cheat, suspicion envelops the mind slowly like quicksand, pulling an already fragile psyche deeper and deeper into the abyss until there’s nothing left but suspicion itself. Innocuous happenings become something more, something ominous, but they never quite manifest into damning evidence. All they do is fuel more suspicion, because if that last thing was almost proof, the next thing surely will be proof. Suspicion creates a lot of smoke, but usually without ever producing the gun. In Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday, the suspicion of infidelity wreaks havoc on the psyche of a woman in Tehran.

Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti) is a beautiful young bride-to-be whose wedding won’t pay for itself, so she takes a temp role as a cleaning woman for a family of three. On her first day on the job, Rouhi finds herself dealing with more than messy rooms and dirty windows. The husband and wife who have hired her—Morteza (Hamid Farokhnezhad) and Mozhde (Hediyeh Tehrani)—appear to be on the last legs of their marriage as they ferociously argue in front of their new hire about how Morteza broke his promise to have a serious talk with Mozhde about their future so he could go to work on his day off. Mozhde sees this not only as a slight but as a sign that her husband is having an affair. Mozhde recruits Rouhi to spy on Morteza, but even that grows into something more than she signed up for.

Other than the glow from the soon-to-be-wed Rouhi, the first thing that becomes a constant presence in Fireworks Wednesday is the perpetual hum of chaos. The film takes place on Persian New Year when fireworks go off in the streets all day and night (seemingly by everyone in town). The constant bursts of noise sound like a military skirmish, creating a low-level hum of aural unease. This sets the film’s tone, acting as a celebration and a backbeat for the unfolding drama.

The highlight of the film is Farhadi’s construct of, and Tehrani’s portrayal of, Mozhde. The chaos in the streets outside and in the apartment inside are nothing compared to the chaos in Mozhde’s psyche. She starts out as angry, a woman defending her marriage and not feeling the same level of commitment from her husband to save it. But that anger is ultimately powered by suspicion, and when her husband is at work, that suspicion tears her down as it builds itself up. Every number on caller ID, every conversation overheard through the apartment’s ventilation system, every other randomly discovered factoid that doesn’t feel quite right becomes more smoke without a gun. Like a person with a terminal illness begging for a mercy-killing, Mozhde simply wants relief from her pain. Without saying it, she knows that relief will only come with discovering the worst because there’s no way of disproving her suspicion. In an effort to expedite that relief, she enlists Rouhi’s help.

Poor Rouhi. The young girl only knows love and happiness with her man, not whatever it is Morteza and Mozhde have. But over the course of only one day, Rouhi shifts from bystander to witness to full-on participant in a very messy domestic game, and in the process learns about the frailty of marriage, the criticality of communication, the trickery of deceit, and the importance of honesty. It’s a wedding gift no one intended to give her, and one she shouldn’t try to return.

Put it all together and the director of A Separation and The Past has done it again, crafting an excellent exercise in weathering sustained chaos. There are early moments when the film doesn’t have the steam it should, but once it gets going it plays almost like a psychological thriller, although one stripped of that genre’s tropes. Tension mounts, characters evolve, and secrets are revealed. Yet even with all that, and with the ominous sense of discovery forever looming overhead, nothing is ever overwrought or overplayed. Fireworks Wednesday was first released in Iran in 2006. After a decade-long wait, the film is finally receiving a release in the US.

I find myself drawn to films with ambitious timelines—those that span not weeks or months or even years, but decades—and over the past few years, there have been some terrific Asian films that have been so ambitious; Kongkiat Khomsiri’s The Gangster, taking place in the 1950s and 1960s; Jing Wong’s The Last Tycoon, spanning from the 1910s to the 1940s; and, to a lesser extent, Choi Dong-hoon’s Assassination, which ranges from the early 1910s to the late 1940s. This year, another decades-spanning entry arrives from Asia: Mountains May Depart, an ambitious Chinese drama from legendary filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke.

And Mountains May Depart isn’t just ambitious in terms of the timeline it travels and the arcs its characters take; it’s ambitious in how it’s presented by writer/director Jia. Rather than offer a traditional three-act, 131-minute film that spans 25+ years, Jia divides the film into three independent yet critically interconnected parts.

The first part opens in 1999 and covers about a 7-year period (other than the title card revealing the year, no other date information is available, so guessing needs to be done based on other clues). Tao (Zhao Tao), Zhang (Zhang Yi), and Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong) are the three players in the film’s love triangle that begins here, as China and the rest of the world are on the brink of a new millennium. Zhang’s businessman-on-the-verge-of-wealth and Liangzi’s miner-on-the-verge-of-unemployment represent the growing economic divide in the country, with Tao torn between the traditions of the old (Liangzi) and the excitement of the new (Zhang). Even the hostility the men have for one another seem to reflect a have vs. have-not mentality. Jia’s lingering, observational directorial style flourishes here.

Tao remains reluctant about which man she prefers, but coal mine worker Liangzi is no match for rich businessman Zhang, and eventually the man with the money gets the girl (and goes so far as to buy the coal mine and fire Liangzi). Tao and Zhang eventually marry and have a son, but all is not sunshine and roses. The second part opens in 2014. Tao and Zhang are divorced with the latter having won custody of their son Dollar.

The second part opens in 2014.  Tao and Zhang are divorced with the latter having won custody of their son, Dollar. Liangzi, now married and with a child of his own, suffers from cancer, the byproduct of a lifetime of breathing coal dust. When a family emergency arises, Zhang flies Dollar to be with his mother, but the young boy has no real maternal connection to her. It’s during this part that the film begins to unravel a little. The 1999 section was drenched in rich, meaningful drama. In the 2014 chapter, the tenor shifts to something more melodramatic with the presentation of Tao’s seemingly endless trouble with men. One former love has divorced her, another former love is dying, her son is a stranger to her, and then there is that family emergency. Tack on Zhang’s plan to westernize his and his son’s names and move to Australia to make even more money (a plan overheard by Tao while Dollar is Skyping with his stepmom) and it starts to become too much. Tao’s moments with Liangzi are divine, and her struggle to connect with her son is real, but the periphery begins to intrude.

The final section, which takes place in 2025, finds Dollar as an English-speaking college student with a fractured relationship with his father, almost no memory of his mother, and a blossoming romance with someone his mother’s age (Sylvia Chang). This section struggles throughout its duration, partly because of how Dollar’s relationship with his father strains credulity. It isn’t that the conflict between upstart sons and failed fathers isn’t possible, it’s that despite living together for Dollar’s entire life, the son has picked up no Chinese and the father knows no English (and nothing is suggested to indicate a refusal to speak the languages on either part). That Zhang has a gun fetish to the tune of handguns and ammunition just lying around the house feels inserted for shock value, and Dollar’s attraction to a mother-figure is terribly cliché. It’s the shortest segment of the three, but it’s the last one, and it doesn’t close the film well at all.

Jia also takes an artistic chance with this film. The 1999 segment is shot in an aspect ratio of 1.37:1, the 2014 segment widens to 1.85:1, and the 2025 piece opens even wider with 2.35:1.  It feels like it’s trying to be some kind of visual commentary on past/present/future, but aspect ratios alone simply can’t do that, especially when the period of time presented is only 26 modern years. The aesthetic of Nelson Lik-wai Yu’s cinematography from section to section is terrific—a muted past, a rich present, a shallow future—but the presentation itself does nothing for the film.

The core cast, however, is solid. Zhang plays the budding entrepreneur with the right amount of swagger, and Liang is excellent as the blue-collar hero with hope for romance. But this film belongs to Zhao Tao, and it’s a better film for having her in it. Her range and nuance are really something, whether it’s playing the love-torn ingenue, the regretful divorcee faced with the mortality of a past love, or the mother who is ultimately childless in everything but name. It’s impossible not to look at her and feel everything she’s feeling.

By establishing a love triangle and injecting conflict via the socio-economic divide between its two male protagonists, and then using that to represent the growing chasm between the old China settled in the east and the new China running towards the west, Jia Zhang-Ke opens his story with great strength. But the inflamed melodrama that dominates the tale as time marches towards the future only weakens the film, creating a desire to return to the better past.

There are more worries that come with parenting than there’s space here to list, but one worth mentioning involves babysitters. A child is precious, so the care for that child must be handed to someone whose trust is irrefutable. A trustworthy sitter is a valuable commodity and can mean a stress-free (and well-deserved) night out for parents. A new sitter, though, is a different story. A new sitter invites questions, worries, and doubts until they can prove their worth. These are the sorts of doubts are at the center of Emelie, an effective thriller that taps into the fears of parents and children about strange sitters.

Dan and Joyce Thompson (Chris Beetem and Susan Pourfar) plan a night out without their three kids to celebrate their wedding anniversary. When their usual sitter can’t make it, they hire her friend, Anna. At first, Anna is everything the kids could want in a sitter because she lets them do whatever they please. But as the night progresses, Anna’s behavior grows darker. 11-year-old Jacob (Joshua Rush) learns this mysterious new sitter’s name isn’t actually Anna, but rather Emelie (Sarah Bolger). Once Emelie’s identity is compromised, her behavior grows even darker.

After a harrowing opening (the film’s one true, and earned, jump scare moment) that allows Emelie to assume the role of Anna, first-time feature writer/director Michael Thelin settles into an unsurprising, if not mostly predictable, first-act groove. He presents the serenity of suburbia to establish the juxtaposed backdrop of the impending terror. He portrays the chaos found in a house where parents scramble to get ready so they don’t miss their reservation while trying to wrangle their three young ones. While driving to the restaurant, natural parental worrying settles in but ultimately passes. As for that sitter, she curries favor with kids immediately by allowing them total freedom. This is where it gets interesting.

For the two younger kids it’s all about junk food and playtime, but for Jacob, Emelie is both attractive and a temporary mother-figure he wants to please. Emelie senses both of these things and exploits the former when, in a stunning scene, she asks Jacob to fetch her a tampon…while she’s on the toilet and he’s in the bathroom with her. This is the first in a collection of lapel-grabbing scenes that move the story away from that familiar groove while avoiding expected psycho-sitter moments.

Thelin draws Emelie as wickedly subversive and passive-aggressive in her cruelty to the children. Rather than overtly frighten them or physically abuse them, Emelie instead exposes them to things that are varying degrees of traumatic, including putting one child’s pet hamster into the tank of another child’s pet snake. Emelie is rich with other similar moments, which aren’t so much scary as they are discomforting.

Hampering the film, however, is the inclusion of a mysterious man spying on the parents while Emelie is watching the children, which stops the film in its tracks every time Thelin focuses on this subplot. Seeing the parents enjoying themselves while their children are going through this traumatic night is unnecessary; the addition of the spy tries to force some greater sense of doom on the evening and it never quite works.

The other big detriment to Emelie is its lack of momentum. While it fits the traditional three-act structure, Emelie never turns up the intensity. The film is essentially a collection of moments that never build up to something greater, but it’s a solid B-movie that Thelin doesn’t try to oversell. He makes some interesting creative choices that mostly work, like his creation of the title character and (especially) the decision to avoid turning the story into a straight cat-and-mouser. This is a taut thriller that finds its greatest effectiveness in its discomforting moments.

Last year saw the release of Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, a film about The Boston Globe’s investigation of the systematic cover-up of pedophilic priests by the Catholic Church. It’s a challenging watch given the subject matter, and McCarthy finds a balance in his film that never sugar-coats or cheapens the crimes it profiles for dramatic points. But Spotlight is not nearly as challenging as The Club, a drama that looks at child abuse by the Catholic clergy from the perspective of the accused.

The latest offering from Chilean director Pablo Larraín focuses specifically on four accused priests living out a Church-mandated exile in a quiet Chilean beach town, run by a former nun with baggage of her own. Although sequestered and living within rules that prohibit most contact with outsiders, the Fallen Five make the most of their circumstance by training a greyhound to become a champion racer. Going into the film, viewers know, at least at a high level, the heinousness of the subject matter (the priests’ past actions are eventually revealed in greater detail), and yet Larraín manipulates right out of the gate. The setting is a beautifully cozy hamlet and its denizens are as non-predatory as they can get. They are four charming old men living out their golden years breeding a race dog on the beaches of Chile, all the while being mothered by a charming older woman and living in relative harmony in a delightful yellow house. It’s serene.

Then BANG—Larraín reminds you of the seriousness of the situation with a scene so uncomfortable (and seemingly endless in the most unsettling of ways), followed by a moment so shocking yet so utterly genuine, that I audibly gasped.

The situation upends the four priests’ lives when The Vatican intervenes in the form of Father Garcia (Marcelo Alonso), whose goal is to investigate the incident, investigate the people living in the house, and ultimately shut the place down. As circumstances unfold, however, Father Garcia’s task might not be as easy as he thinks.

Larraín’s film takes on a procedural tone, creating an interesting (and compelling) dynamic. It sets up a good guy/bad guy construct with the clergy as the bad guys and Garcia as good. But the bad guys here are otherwise so likable, and Garcia, with his interrogations, stricter living conditions, and goal of shutting down the house, is just off-putting enough to be unlikable. Eventually, the rooting interests become blurred, and then Larraín’s skills truly shine as he slowly builds two very specific cases.

The first is the case against the Fallen Five. Despite their dark collective past, they continue to make questionable choices in the lives they lead after living in service to the Lord. There are hints of this poor behavior early on. They lie to the police about the event that kicks the story off, but the lies are told to protect themselves; they snoop through Garcia’s personal things, but they do it to understand his intentions so they can better shield their interests. They also drink and smoke and gamble, and while these things aren’t illegal, they too fit into a certain pattern of behavior: sin. Minor, at least at first, but sin nonetheless. The viewer might miss it though because Larraín, like a magician, distracts with the obvious transgressions—including the child abuse—and when no one is looking, he carefully layers these other, smaller things into the characters’ routine actions. They might be subtle, they might be acts committed for self-preservation, but they are still acts of varying degrees of wrong. It’s on this foundation of the flawed nature of humanity that Larraín makes a more difficult case, one that’s less pro-Church and more anti-anti-Church.

Because these five people have engaged in a lifetime of recidivist behavior and, as the film progresses, the sinful acts they commit increase in both selfishness and severity, the Fallen Five show that they have learned nothing while in exile. Larraín makes it clear that the problem is with the person, not the Collar, nor the Habit, nor the higher institution they once served and represented. The presence of Garcia reinforces this case, who represents the good amidst this sin. Not only is he tenacious in his investigation of the quintet, he tries early to break them of their more pedestrian transgressions. It appears as punishment but it’s actually an effort to redeem. By the film’s end—an end that highlights his monumental compassion—Garcia’s actions, and in particular the goodness of them, stand in stark contrast to those from the collective he has been sent to investigate. It isn’t about his Collar, it’s about his Christianity.

But have no illusions: this film is no mea culpa on behalf of the Catholic Church. And while it takes place in exile on the beaches of Chile, that doesn’t make the core subject matter any different than that of the story told by Spotlight in the parishes around Beantown. Despite that similarity and the familiar procedural strains, what Larraín does with The Club is more daring and direct than McCarthy’s film. It’s also more thought-provoking, as it goes beyond the expected (and warranted) knee-jerk reaction to the crimes committed, adding a facet to the subject that is worthy of consideration and onscreen treatment.

It feels like sibling filmmakers are becoming more of a thing lately. In the last two years, movies of all varieties have been made by the Coens (the musically-themed Inside Llewyn Davis), the Wachowskis (big-budget sci-fi Jupiter Ascending), the Farrellys (franchise comedy Dumb and Dumber To), and the Russos (superhero tentpole Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Even a foreign drama is represented by siblings, as evidenced by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.

This year, another pair of filmmaking siblings are introduced to the scene: Ben and Chris Blaine, with their first feature film Nina Forever.

Holly (Abigail Hardingham) has a romantic interest in Rob (Cian Barry), her coworker at a local grocery store. Her friends try to warn her away from him, though—he’s been suicidal since the accidental death of his girlfriend more than a year ago. Fate steps in when Rob is injured at work and Holly, who is studying to be a paramedic, offers to examine his wound. There’s a spark between them, and on their first date, that spark becomes a flame when they find their way to Rob’s bedroom. Their heat is quickly cooled, however, by the sudden appearance (in bed next to them, no less) of Rob’s ex-girlfriend—the very dead, very chatty Nina (Fiona O’Shaughnessy).

Nina, whose corpse is still bloodied and broken from the car accident that took her life, becomes a greater presence—and a greater nuisance—in the new couple’s life. As Rob struggles to figure out how to stop Nina’s appearances, Holly considers the opposite approach by embracing the decedent’s presence.

Who are these Blaine Brothers and where have they been hiding? Nina Forever is a sensational film, and while the presence of a talking corpse might tempt some to hang a horror tag on it, don’t take the bait. This is a deliciously dark comedy/psychological drama hybrid, using the horror device of Nina’s corpse as a symbol for guilt and loss, then doubling-down and using her unwillingness to leave Rob and Holly alone as a metaphor for the couple’s inability to properly deal with the loss (It also uses her wit for the funny bits—and there are plenty of those).

The film, co-written by the Blaines, has a strong foundation in the construct of its three lead characters. Rob is so burdened by loss and guilt (he was driving the car in the accident that killed Nina) that he has become mostly non-functioning. Holly is a wannabe paramedic—a healer, a rescuer, a fixer of things—and he is something she can fix. And Nina—poor, dead Nina—might be a symbol for something deeper, but on the surface she’s still the girlfriend who has been jilted, at least by circumstance (her insistence that Rob not refer to her as his “ex-girlfriend” because they never technically broke up is hysterically played).

O’Shaughnessy, Hardingham, and Barry all turn in solid performances, as do David Troughton and Elizabeth Elvin in key supporting turns as Nina’s parents.

As the story progresses, the characters evolve in a way that so many other writers struggle to make happen on the page. There is an organic fluidity to how the trio act, react, and interact throughout the length of the film. Also, Nina’s first reveal could have been treated as some type of singular moment that the rest of the film winds up tethered to until the end. Not so in the Blaines’ hands. That first reveal of Nina truly is the jumping-off point for a longer game with a wickedly smart ending I did not see coming. Sparkling dialogue that any actor would want to deliver tops off a script any director would want to helm.

There is a strong confidence to the Blaines’ direction, too. They are clearly not afraid to take creative chances, and this confidence results in that sweet spot between storytelling and artistry. This is an engaging story that is also great to look at. (Oh, and the fellas know how to film a scorching sex scene, too.) While they get key help from Oliver Russell’s gorgeous cinematography, their secret weapon is their editing. The Blaines join the growing list of filmmakers who edit their own work (a practice I’ve grown to appreciate). There are present-day moments in the film, such as Rob and Holly’s first date, that integrate glimpses from the past and teases from the future to offer a complete picture before the picture has even developed. Not only does that take confidence to attempt, it’s difficult to execute, but the directors make it work.

Nina Forever is the film to follow, and with it, the Blaine Brothers have brought serious game to the screen. It’s clear the film world’s latest sibling tag-team has come to play.

A version of this review was originally published on March 15th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the SXSW film festival.

In addition to screening two feature films, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series ‘Friends With Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers’ includes a baker’s dozen of short films divided into four Short Programs. To find out more about the series visit the ‘Friends With Benefits’ website.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has made filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes its focus for the shorts programs in the ‘Friend With Benefits’ series. Of the 13 films on the slate, divided across four programs, Abrantes directs or co-directs all but one (he also wrote all of them and appears in most), and the collection represents nearly his entire body of work. Seeing them as a collective over a short period of time makes two things abundantly clear about the auteur.

His fearlessness and his unwillingness to be contained by any specific set of creative guidelines are undeniable. His topics include Shakespearean works and the war in Iraq; the themes he tackles include incest, race relations, and global warming; and the storytelling styles he employs range from an ancient Greek comedy set in present-day Haiti to the exploration of a young man’s psyche by way of reality TV. Each of his films is as unique as those before it and after.

However, the fearlessness on the one side of the Abrantes coin shares an arrogance on the other. The filmmaker’s quest to display his intellectual superiority and prove his work is capital-A art comes with a cost: most of his films are difficult to consume and at times can be patience-testing. His topics, while intellectual, are dense, and his filmmaking style, rather than compensating for his dry material, instead complements it (at best) or compounds it (at worst). This is most evident in his scripts and how he directs his actors to deliver their lines. His dialogue is often vague or veiled, with long pauses between and throughout, and lines are routinely delivered in bored, listless monotones devoid of emotion.

Abrante’s performers—himself included—don’t act their parts so much as they deliver his message, and he has them do so in a way that their delivery of that message won’t upstage the message itself. This requires—almost demands—the viewer to have existing knowledge of the subjects he tackles so as to best understand the message he’s sending.

Program 1: Dreams, Drones, and Dactyls

This program contains three of Abrantes’s most recent works.  They are the most humorous of his films and, collectively, the most accessible to a wider audience.

Taprobana

Portugal’s greatest poet, Luís Vaz de Camões is the subject of this 16th-century comedy. The poet lives a life on the lam from Portuguese authorities with his lover, Dinamene. The two engage in extreme drug-fueled hedonism (coprophilia alert) until he is captured. At the end of his life, he finds himself somewhere between heaven and hell, with the choice available of where he would like to finally reside. The hallucination of Petrarch is the highlight here.

Freud and Friends

About as close to mainstream comedy as the filmmaker gets, Abrantes stars as a man who is the test subject of a scientific breakthrough that allows people’s dreams to be seen on TV. When his scientist girlfriend sees that he dreams of her sister and that he envisions his own mother emanating from a fart, paradise finds trouble. Abrantes fully commits to his reality TV approach to the film, keeping it at 30 minutes and including two very funny commercials.

Ennui Ennui

This near-screwball comedy focuses on a representative from France attempting to negotiate disarmament with an Afghani warlord. Through a well-structured series of events, the rep’s daughter, who is along for the trip, is mistaken for the warlord’s daughter and captured. Also, President Obama carries on father/daughter-like conversations with a drone flying over Afghanistan.

Program 2: Slow Learners

Five of Abrantes’s earliest works, mostly with collaborators, are collected here. It’s interesting to see how his production values have improved as he has achieved greater critical success, and yet his creative weaknesses have not.

Olympia I & II

Both co-written with and co-starring Katie Widloski, Abrantes’s first two films (presented here as one film in two parts) draw inspiration from and breathes life into Manet’s painting “Olympia.” In the first part, Widloski is the supple courtesan who is the object of her offscreen brother’s desire. The second part bends genders and challenges race as it makes Abrantes the subject and Widloski as the maid, albeit in overt blackface. These two films set the stage for what will be recurring themes and appearances of incest, race, and nudity throughout Abrantes’s oeuvre.

Visionary Iraq

This early entry was co-written with, co-directed by, and co-stars Fort Buchanan‘s Benjamin Crotty, who plays one-half of a pair of siblings readying to depart for the Iraq war. Playing his adopted Angolan sister is Abrantes, in heavy brown face. The siblings (yes, who are sleeping with each other) learn shortly before they deploy that their father is profiting from the war. While in Iraq, the siblings are faced with a moral dilemma.

Too Many Daddies, Mommies, and Babies

After failing to save the Amazon from ultimate ruin, a pair scientists in a same-sex relationship decide to return home and start a family using the egg of one of the scientist’s sisters and the uterus of a surrogate mother. This is an interesting look at the effects of man on nature, and how nature still has all of the power.

Liberdade

Opening with a young man stealing Viagra at gunpoint in an Angolan pharmacy, this sweeping story of love, crime, and racial tension, ultimately told in flashback from co-writers/directors Abrantes and Crotty, is one of the most “Hollywood” things the auteur has done, and it showcases his broader creative potential. The filmmakers also make great use of a slowed-down version of Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” (featuring Ladysmith Black Mambazo), as well as Frank Sinatra’s “Very Good Year.” This is a must-see.

Baby Back Costa Rica

More music video than short film, this 5-minute effort, which would have played better alongside Palaces of Pity (in Program 3), features three teen girls on a ride home to their awaiting swimming pool. During the ride, they discuss, among other things, pizza and Judaism.

Program 3: Friends for Eternity

Only two films are part of this Program, but they make up over 80 minutes of runtime and spotlight the first two collaborations between Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt (The Unity of All Things).

Palaces of Pity (Palacios de Pena)

This coming-of-age story focuses on two present-day teen girls—cousins who are being played against each other by their wealthy, dying grandmother. The matriarch will give her fortune to only one of the girls. When she passes away, legalities create a situation where one of the girls must voluntarily renounce her claim to the fortune…or involuntarily do so (at the hands of the other, of course). At 58 minutes, it has all the trappings of a full-length feature but is encumbered by the filmmakers’ indulgence to inject a 13-minute dream sequence set in medieval times.

A History of Mutual Respect

Abrantes and Schmidt costar as friends on a rainforest journey. Schmidt is in pursuit of clean, pure sex, while Abrantes is waiting for the right person. When the object of both their desires appears, their friendship is (eventually) forever changed. This film opens with lingering shots of a waterfall accompanied by the recorded wisdom of Nina Simone.

Program 4: Three Adaptations

This collection of shorts have ties to long-ago days.

The Island is Enchanted with You (La Isla está Encantada con Ustedes)

This opening short of the final program, and the only one that doesn’t feature work by Abrantes, comes from Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt, the filmmaking duo behind The Unity of All Things. Instead of science, though, this film delves into history; specifically, it looks at the history of Puerto Rico. Flirting with timelines ranging from present day to pre-Colonial days, and employing a variety of filmmaking elements (the island pulses with light when it talks, years on the timeline are represented by miniature headless CGI people, there’s a full music video at one point), this is a clever and captivating short where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ornithes (Zwazo)

Returning to Abrantes, this short transplants Aristophanes’ 414BC play The Birds into modern-day Haiti. With dialogue spoken in Haitian Creole and Attic Greek, the film features colorful costuming and the wonderful line, as uttered by a local driving a car following a bird riding a horse (while the backing track to the remix of L’il Wayne’s 6 Foot 7 Foot beats in the background), “My problem is that the director thinks we can still have a Dionysian collective trance induced by polyphonic hexameters or comic dactyls in Attic Greek. It’s plain foolish.”

Fratelli

The final short of the final program, co-written and co-directed by Abrantes and Alexandre Melo, is a retelling of the prologue of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. This isn’t the only connection to classic literature found here, though. Using some original costumes used in the 1972 film The Canterbury Tales, the filmmakers give an artistic nod to both Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, once said in an interview about the show’s humor that the right people will get the joke.  His message was that while not everyone will understand everything, there will always be someone who will understand something. Such is the case of the works of Gabriel Abrantes—not every film will be for everyone, but each film will be for someone.

The Unity of All Things will screen in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series ‘Friends With Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers.’ To find out more about the series visit the ‘Friends With Benefits’ website.

The lines separating mainstream, independent, and arthouse films are often blurred (especially around awards season). But to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I might not be able to definitively summarize each category, but I know what I’m watching when I see it. This is particularly true when it comes to arthouse films. As far from the mainstream as possible and certainly well-removed from the indie scene, an arthouse film can do more than challenge a viewer; it can defy basic understanding. Such is the case with The Unity of All Things, a film as arthouse as they come, from the writing/directing team of Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt.

There’s very little plot to speak of, but the film is no less dense. It begins on a scientific level, as its physicist protagonist/matriarch faces the inevitable shuttering of her particle accelerator and the quest to build another. Still keeping physics heavy in the forefront, but with philosophical musings injected (“Knowledge of the universe does not change reality. The pursuit of that knowledge does.”), the film then plays on relationships between and among the protagonist, two other female scientists who work for her, and her twin sons (the sons, meant to be portrayed as beautiful boys, are played by girls). Those sons begin an exploration of their own sexuality as they engage in an incestuous relationship with each other. Beautiful visuals (the film was shot on Super 8 and Super 16) get mixed with monotonous scenes (meant to be viewed as art rather than consumed as film, I suppose), and the title card appears halfway into picture.

The Unity of All Things not only refuses to be pigeonholed into a traditional genre, it defies even being called a film. Less a motion picture than a piece of moving art, Carver and Schmidt’s feature debut epitomizes the notion of something being an acquired taste.

Fort Buchanan will screen in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series ‘Friends With Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers.’  To find out more about the series visit the ‘Friends With Benefits’ website.

While I’ve never served in the military (and thus have never been deployed), my family’s history has loads of this experience. While I often think about the grandparents and uncles and in-laws who have served, I rarely consider that while they were gone, they were forced to leave people behind—people who had to tackle childrearing as de facto single parents, as well as managing their own loneliness. In Fort Buchanan, writer/director Benjamin Crotty focuses on a group of military spouses and how they cope with childrearing and loneliness. However, the first-time filmmaker does so in the most peculiar of ways.

When his husband is deployed to Djibouti, Roger Sherwood (Andy Gillet) finds himself left alone to raise their 18-year-old adopted daughter Roxy (Iliana Zabeth). The two live on-base at Fort Buchanan, where they befriend a collection of other military wives whose husbands have also been deployed. As time passes, Roger finds himself increasingly distraught by loneliness, frustrated by his own weakness, and vexed by his blossoming daughter’s growing rebelliousness. That Roxy has become the object of desire of the lonely wives who are helping to raise her escapes Roger entirely, and efforts to address the emotional distance that comes with the geographic separation between Roger and his husband only make matters worse.

There’s something quite hypnotic about Fort Buchanan, a lean 65-minute feature that’s an expansion of Crotty’s 13-minute short film Fort Buchanan: Hiver. The film’s titular military base setting is quite perfect for the story, allowing for spouses to be believably absent while creating a space where Roger’s pangs of loneliness can coexist with the raging libido of a collective of horny housewives. That said, it’s really a base in name only; nothing about the setting says “military base” apart from the sign out front, and the setting feels more like a secluded resort deep in the Pocono woods, complete with something of a strapping and handsome farmhand/groundskeeper. It’s at this base/resort where the denizens spend their days lounging about without worry, discussing, among other things, the nicknames they have for their private parts.

This conversation actually happens, and it’s an emblem of the open sexuality that flows throughout the film. These wives, apart from their husbands for an unknown length of time, are allowed to go on “playdates” while their husbands are away. Once they clearly define their meaning of the word for Roger (he hears “playdate” and thinks back to when Roxy was a little girl), the playdates are revealed to be (mostly) of the sapphic variety. It’s here where a subplot begins about a friendly competition among the women to see who can bed the nubile, barely-legal Roxy first. This openness of sexuality, combined with cinematographer Michaël Capron’s lush 16mm lens and Ragnar Árni Ágústsson’s era-reminiscent score, gives this slice of the film’s narrative a very ’70s European cinema feel, invoking memories of films about sexual awakening like Just Jaekin’s Emmanuelle (1974).

All of this goes on right in front of Roger, whose physical and emotional detachment from his husband, coupled with his frustration at Roxy’s age-appropriate defiance, makes him mostly oblivious to it. In the film’s second act, Roger is determined to make some kind of connection with his husband, Frank (David Baiot), so he travels, unannounced, to Djibouti. Everyone else (Roxy and the wives) goes with him, as if on a vacation away from their vacation. They lounge in the heat of the African Republic’s climes (lending again to the idea that the military aspect of the film is for narrative convenience only) while Roger changes his appearance in an effort to mend his fractured marriage. While there, Roxy makes a heterosexual connection.

Not to be limited to tales of heartache and carnal pleasures, Crotty infuses a humor in Fort Buchanan that is something akin to slapstick. Moments of physical comedy occur when least expected, at times happening in the background while a more serious moment happens in the foreground. These tonal shifts might not do their specific scenes any particular favors, but they are genuinely funny, and make considering the film as a greater whole a slightly different exercise.

The third act falters with the introduction of a new character who appears to have been added so Crotty can take the film down a darker path. I like the idea in general, and the ending fits with the film’s subtle theme of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but with only a 65-minute runtime, the character would have been better served being introduced and developed earlier. Still, the third act is a stunner on its own.

Fort Buchanan is a terrific first feature and with it, Crotty proves he is fearless in the face of defying conventional filmmaking. The film, while not perfect, is in that sweet spot of being both enjoyable on its own and an indicator of the kind of talent Crotty has. Given time to hone his skills and focus his creative efforts, Benjamin Crotty could be around for a long time.

One of the great trademarks of Oscar-nominated shorts (in any category) is the diversity of the nominees. That diversity reflects not only in the countries represented but also the languages and themes of each film. The 2016 Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts are no different.

Ave Maria (directed by Basil Kalil)

Five nuns based on the West Bank of Palestine have their dinner—and their vow of silence—disrupted when an Israeli man crashes his car into their statue of the Virgin Mary. Khalil’s delightfully funny short is rich with juxtaposition, not only of faith but also of family.

Day One (directed by Henry Hughes)

The title of Hughes’ effective war-based drama refers to the first day on the job for Feda (Layla Alizada), a US Army interpreter stationed with a unit in Afghanistan. When that unit arrests a bomb maker at his home, their routine mission becomes anything but when the bomb maker’s wife goes into labor. Religious rule forbids a male doctor from touching the mother, so Feda must deliver the baby. Alizada shines in the role.

Everything Will Be Okay (directed by Patrick Vollrath)

In this family drama, a divorced father picks up his 8-year-old daughter for what appears to be a routine weekend. But as the day unfolds the day becomes anything but routine, and the young child knows it. The fist half of Vollrath’s film unfolds with great tension but loses a little steam once it makes its big reveal.

Shok (directed by Jamie Donoughue)

Based on true events, Donoughue’s film begins in the present day when a man finds an old, beat-up bicycle on the road. This triggers memories of two Albanian boys, best friends Petrit (Lum Veseli) and Oki (Andi Bajgora), living in Serbia during the Kosovo War. Petrit makes some bad decisions and brings Oki down with him. The drama lacks tension in the early stages but it closes strong with a stunning ending.

Stutterer (directed by Benjamin Cleary)

Matthew Needham plays Greenwood, a typographer with a stutter so crippling, he has taken to learn sign language to communicate. He has carried on a six-month online romance with Ellie (Chloe Pirrie), and when she suggests they finally meet in person, Greenwood goes into a panic. Cleary’s drama, while the least intense of the nominees, is the most intimate and accessible. Credit must also be given to the film’s sound editor, Gustaf Jackson. Greenwood’s thoughts are audible to the viewer and spoken perfectly in his head, creating a need for Jackson to overlay a lot of competing (and panicked) dialogue; it’s surgical-like editing.

If I had an Academy vote, I would place mine for Day One. I really liked Ave Maria, and it’s the most entertaining of the five films, but the sustained intensity of the on-the-job war drama, coupled with Alizada’s performance, makes it the winner for me.

With characters ranging from a bear to a young Hindu boy, themes ranging from familial loss to the Soviet space program, and animation styles ranging from CGI to pencil-and-paper, the field of nominees for the 2016 Best Animated Short Oscar offers something for every taste. And regardless of your preference, there’s something for everyone in this year’s shorts.

Bear Story (directed by Gabriel Osorio Varga)

The most touching of all five nominees, Bear Story shows a bear telling his story about the fate of his family. The CGI animation of the bear is perfectly fine, but it’s magnificent when the bear presents his tale via something akin to a mechanical nickelodeon. There’s also an overt animal rights message here too.

Prologue (directed by Richard Williams)

Animation veteran Williams, a three-time Oscar winner, returns with a tale of a battle between Spartans and Athenians. There is not plot, per se; it’s simply about a battle of opposing forces. The animation—old-school pencil-on-paper work—is gorgeous.

Sanjay’s Super Team (directed by Sanjay Patel)

This animated short was inspired by director Patel’s own youth. Sanjay, a young Hindu boy, is made to pray with his father but he yearns to return to the superhero cartoon he was just watching. His meditation turns into a daydream, where the Hindu gods he worships are actually superheroes. Pixar is back with another wonderful short rich in theme and intended much more for adults than for children (despite it being screened before The Good Dinosaur in 2015).

We Can’t Live Without Cosmos (directed by Konstantin Bronzit)

Titled ы не можем жить без космоса in its native Russian, this film tells the tale of best friends and aspiring cosmonauts facing the rigors of space training. Bronzit wonderfully blends the joy of youthful dreams, the desire to bring those dreams to life, and the psychological effects when those dreams don’t go quite as planned (This film is also part of the 17th Annual Animation Show of Shows. Our review of that can be found here).

World of Tomorrow (directed by Don Hertzfeldt)

This hysterical film, illustrated crudely and presented with unbridled vision, is about a little girl who is visited by a future version of herself. That future version offers lessons in history (past and future), life, love, birth, and death. And quantum physics (This film is also part of the 17th Annual Animation Show of Shows. Our review of that can be found here).

If I had an Academy vote, it would be a tough choice, but I would have to go with We Can’t Live Without Cosmos.  Sanjay’s Super Team is wonderful for its diversity and a welcome return to form for Pixar (remember Lava?). As for World of Tomorrow, it pulls off quite the stunt of being both dense and hilarious.  But as entire packages go, from story to execution, We Can’t Live Without Cosmos delivers better than its fellow nominees.

With respect to all short filmmakers, documentary short films are the most challenging to execute. Sure, animated shorts may require the added dimension of art, and both animated and live action shorts may require the adoption of a traditional three-act structure in a greatly condensed form. But neither animation nor live action shorts bear any burden of proof. There aren’t facts to present, histories to tell, or cases to make. Documentary shorts have those facets. Documentary shorts also come with mandatory moments that must be made to fit within the condensed narrative, and they do not enjoy the luxury of creative fictional exits. These are challenges greater than any of those faced by other types of short films. This year’s slate of Oscar nominees is no exception to those challenges.

Body Team 12 (directed by David Darg)

For many, if not most, the Ebola virus is something far away, something we only read about in the news. In his impactful and efficient documentary, Darg brings viewers through the screen, drops them into Liberia, and puts them on a harrowing ride-along with the members of Body Team 12. This team, part of the Liberian Red Cross, has the difficult task of removing the bodies of those who have succumbed to the virus. The film pays particular attention to the sole female member of the team, Garmai Sumo. This may be the shortest short of the bunch, but it uses every second of that time to solid effect.

Chau, Beyond the Lines (directed by Courtney Marsh)

The subject of this documentary is Chau, a teenager living at the Lang Hao Binh Agent Orange Camp in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The camp is special in that it caters only to those children who have been born with physical handicaps as a result of Agent Orange used during the Vietnam War. Unlike the other members of the camp, Chau has aspirations to become a professional artist and clothing designer. This means he has to leave the confines of the camp and make it on his own. The ravaging effects of Agent Orange on the collection of children make this film difficult to watch at times, and oddly, once Chau is on his own, the film slows.

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah (directed by Adam Benzine)

Shoah is generally regarded as the greatest film about the Holocaust ever committed to celluloid. Clocking in at more than 9 hours, Shoah took 12 years to produce, five of which were spent editing the 200+ hours of footage. Benzine’s documentary, a reflective one on the masterpiece, is part history lesson, part film studies course, part behind-the-scenes feature, and part biography of Shoah‘s creator, Claude Lanzmann. While loaded with interesting information, the biggest challenge this Oscar-nominated short faces is doing justice to its subject. To capture anything of substance about or related to a 9-hour epic, and to do so in only 40 minutes, is a tall order. Benzine touches only a little on as many points as possible.

A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy)

The subject of this unbelievable documentary is a young Pakistani woman who survived an attempted honor killing. This practice is, at least anecdotally according to Obaid-Chinoy’s film, a growing trend in Pakistan and one that Pakistani courts are actually tolerating. The survivor of an attempt and the focal point of this film, Saba Maqsood, made a decision her family took issue with, so her father and uncle took matters into their own hands. Saba survived, creating a dynamic of guilt and forgiveness that doesn’t accompany most instances like these. This documentary is spellbinding from the first frame, capturing Saba’s personal struggles, her family’s defiance, and the complexity’s of a culture that allows such awful behavior.

Last Day of Freedom (directed by Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman)

While each of the nominated docs are personal in their own ways, this film feels more personal that the others, thanks largely in part to how it is presented. Bill is the narrator of the story about his brother, Manny, and the lifelong struggles Manny faced including illiteracy, several tours in Vietnam, PTSD, and finally a date with the executioner for a murder he committed. The fact that Bill narrates gives the film emotional heft, but it’s the animated presentation accompanying the story that serves as a double-edged sword. It offers an engaging visual style, and as effective as it may be, ultimately it’s one artist’s interpretations of another person’s words. Stick around for the closing title cards—they’re chilling.

If I had an Academy vote, I would cast it for A Girl in the River without hesitation. It combines excellent technical execution, a riveting tale, a protagonist to root for, and the most shocking of subject matters, particularly in the 21st century. It also bears the distinction of being the only doc of the five I want to re-watch, which is a good barometer for me.

It’s hard not be drawn to a film whose hook focuses on a day in the life of a pair of closeted gay Muslim teens living in New York. The combination has serious potential as it sets up for things like the awkwardness of a blossoming teen love, the fear of being discovered by family and friends who might not understand, the conflict of being an active member in a religious community whose tenets negatively view homosexuality, and the constant hum of suspicion that comes with being part of the Muslim community in post-9/11 New York. All of this potential exists in writer/director Jay Dockendorf’s debut feature, Naz & Maalik.

Maalik (Curtiss Cook Jr.) and Naz (Kerwin Johnson Jr.) are two teens who make money by purchasing lottery tickets, prayer cards, oils, and other small items, and then sell them at a markup to passersby on the sidewalks of Brooklyn. They are also best friends who have recently discovered deeper emotions for each other. Throughout the course of the day, the young men roam the streets selling their trinkets, make time for prayer, and discuss greater social and spiritual issues as well as wrestle with the spiritual and familial ramifications of their relationship. All the while, they are under surveillance by an FBI agent (Annie Grier) who thinks the Muslim boys could be a greater threat.

Yes, all of the potential is there in Naz & Maalik, but it’s potential that is never fully realized. Rather than use weighty issues as something the leads can wrestle with, Dockendorf relies on the leads’ charm to carry the film while peppering the story with only weighty suggestions. The young men spend a fair amount of time walking and talking about heavy topics, but their conversations never delve deep enough to elicit considerable thought from the viewer. It’s as if their conflicts and musings exist solely as some philosophical or intellectual exercise, not discussions that will result in decisions that will have real consequences.

Once the pattern is established that their conversations exist only on a surface level, each subsequent walk and talk become that much more tedious. Dockendorf also spends far too much time showing the boys shopping for their items and then selling them on the street. An 86-minute film has no time to waste on such frivolity, but the endless presentation of meaningless moments suggests the writer/director didn’t know how to properly flesh-out his ideas, leading to stretched out scenes that pad the film.

This shallowness extends to other areas. The boys’ families, the most significant people in their lives (with the exception of each other) and those with a vested interest in what happens, are almost nonexistent. As for the boys’ onscreen spiritual involvement, it’s relegated to one visit to a mosque, a reading from the Quran, and some handwringing about the conflict between sexuality and their faith. I’m not one who needs everything explained, but I do need some ideas to be developed if they are to be believed.

The film also struggles with the entire FBI angle. I understand persons of interest, and I’m willing to go so far as to accept that the FBI agent caught the scent of the two boys based on a mostly bogus (and very racist) tip by a cop early in the film. What rings unbelievable is the subsequent (slow-speed) pursuit of the boys by the agent. She’s more private eye than Fed, and a bad one at that. Again, Dockendorf doggie-paddles on the creative surface instead of deep-diving, this time asking viewers to fill in the FBI blanks based on what Hollywood has taught them about law enforcement, rather than exploring issues like profiling and being profiled.

By the third act, there is trouble in paradise, both between the boys and with the film. For the former, distrust and suspicion begin to fester over the oddest of things. For the latter, the film winds down with a bizarre circumstance involving a live chicken. By the credits, the film has worn out its welcome.

It’s a shame. Jay Dockendorf has a refreshing premise and his stars have charm for days. But all of that quickly fades when nothing of substance develops from the premise, and nothing of consequence leverages that charm. Naz & Maalik is the kind of idea the indie scene wants, but it’s not the kind of film the indie scene needs.

Naz & Maalik opens Friday, January 22nd in New York City. It will be released on DVD & VOD on Tuesday, January 26th.

My earliest recollection of watching a road movie dates back to my youth when a local TV station aired the series of Bob Hope/Bing Crosby/Dorothy Lamour Road to… comedy pictures. Since then, I’ve amassed a lot of cinematic road miles with everything from It Happened One Night to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and from Thelma & Louise to Nebraska. The latest offering of what is most definitely a road movie is set not in 20th century America, but rather 19th century Romania. It’s unlike any road movie I’ve seen before but in the most positive of ways.

Radu Jude’s Aferim!, set in Wallachia (Romania) in 1835, tells the tale of Costandin (Teodor Corban), a law enforcement official who, with his son Ionita (Mihai Comanoiu), embarks on a manhunt. The man they are hunting is Carfin (Toma Cuzin), a gypsy who was caught having an affair with the wife of Iordache (Alexandru Dabija), a boyar (high-ranking aristocrat) now fixed on revenge. Costandin and Ionita trek on horseback across various terrains, searching from village to village to find their man.

If that sounds like a Golden Age Hollywood western, believe me when I say it feels like one, too. This is just one of the great joys of Aferim!—how Jude, who co-wrote the screenplay with Florin Lazarescu, structures the film in a way that harkens back to a film like Howard Hawks’ great western Red River. In that film, John Wayne and Montgomery Clift play a father/(adopted) son leading a cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail, but it isn’t getting from Point A to Point B that’s important; it’s what happens during the drive that is key. The same approach is taken here. The pursuit of Carfin is little more than an excuse to allow circumstances to unfold with and between the father/son duo during the trip. In both cases, the journey is more important than the destination.

More homage paid to the American western—or rather, more specifically, paid to director John Ford, a master of the genre—is Jude’s use of B&W film and his compilation of stunning long shots of the Romanian countryside. Helping Jude achieve his vision is cinematographer Marius Panduru, who dulls the contrast between the darks and lights to achieve something more visually fitting to humanity’s geo-centric bleakness of the time period.

Aferim! does not hesitate to depict the cruel history of slavery, racism, misogyny, and lawless corruption that existed in that region and at that time. The abuse of gypsy slaves, both verbal and physical, ranges from unsettling to harrowing (particularly in one instance of justice meted vigilante-style). Women are, by law, inferior to men, and the attitude towards other ethnicities, especially in one chunk of dialogue spewed by a clergyman (!), is shocking. Given the abundance of gypsy slaves in that part of the world during that era, the reminders of how cruel a people they were is constant. Being juxtaposed against such a beautifully lensed backdrop makes it that much more unforgettable.

Jude adds one additional dimension to his film that doesn’t soften the blow of dealing with Romania’s dark history head-on, but it sure does provide the occasional respite: humor. And not just any humor, but bawdy, raucous humor that uses foul language so liberally it’s like the script was seasoned by a salt shaker full of hand grenades. The frankness of language is initially disarming given the visual aesthetic, the need for subtitles, and the blunt delivery, but it quickly becomes a natural part of the film’s dialogue, mostly delivered by Costandin as if he were a character created by Judd Apatow.

As for Costandin, he’s a bullish, boorish old man whose verbal arsenal is never short on hilarious stories, couplets, quotes, or homespun wisdom, all of which he imparts on his son. (My favorite line: “Even a fallen tree rests.” Whatever that means.) Teodor Corban, who is in nearly every scene and has more than the most dialogue of any player, performs marvelously in this role. He’s a natural, delivering his lines with great bombast but never to the point of caricature.

Rounding out this excellent production are Dana Paparuz’s costumes and Trei Parale’s Romanian folk-infused score. Both add a high degree of authenticity to the film that helps transport the viewer to that point in time.

The triple-threat of imagery, history, and comedy, salted with language and made even better by a terrific lead performance, all combine to make Aferim! a road picture like no other. This is my first Radu Jude film, and it’s one that has me eager to find his previous two.

I was doing some research on plot twists in movies and the majority of the lists feature movies that have plot twists that occur at the end. I won’t list them all, but films like The Sixth Sense, Psycho, and Sleepaway Camp are a few examples of films where the surprise comes so late, it makes the viewer reconsider everything that happened before it (and maybe even inspire a re-watch of the film to look for missed clues). In director Adam Schindler‘s new thriller, Intruders, the twist doesn’t want a re-watch, it wants the viewer’s attention as soon as possible, occurring early in the film.

Beth Riesgraf plays Anna, a 20-something young woman living with, and caring for, her sick brother, Conrad (Timothy T. McKinney). Anna is trapped in her own home by acute agoraphobia. But one of the few other people she has contact with is the young man (Rory Culkin) who delivers daily prepared meals to the parentless siblings. When her brother dies, Anna inherits a considerable sum of money, left to her entirely in cash. A trio of thugs (Jack Kesy, Joshua Mikel, and Martin Starr) catch wind of this windfall and attempt to break into the home. But they didn’t account for her agoraphobia keeping her home. While the thieves turn the house upside-down looking for the cash, Anna turns the tables on them and the terrorizers become the terrified.

Early on, Intruders looks as if it’s going to be just another home invasion thriller. After the set-up leaves the protagonist physically trapped (by agoraphobia) and emotionally vulnerable (sad because of her brother’s death), she spends the better part of the rest of the film trying to outwit her attackers while overcoming her own personal issues. It’s pretty comparable to Panic Room in that way.

To get to the twist, one must first tolerate the clichéd first act (although, to be fair, that cliché helps make the twist all the more twisted). It starts out well, but once the dimensionally bereft bad guys appear (the Alpha Male, his weaker brother, and the sadist), Schindler’s direction becomes more of a stale paint-by-numbers. Still, the early going has its bright spots, led by veteran Riesgraf, who gives a terrific performance as the grieving sister and trapped agoraphobe. Another veteran—from the other side of the camera—is set decorator John Gathright, whose eye for detail allows Anna’s house to say a lot about her fragile psyche.

Then the twist happens.

I’ll issue the Spoiler Alert now, since the twist is its selling point. Without it, the film is just another home invasion thriller. In fact, not only does the twist happen early in Intruders, it’s sold about halfway through the trailer as the reason to see the film in the first place. You have now been warned.

The twist is that the basement of Anna’s house is something of an underground prison and torture chamber. It’s complete with retracting stairs to trap people in the basement, an assortment of instruments designed to deliver pain, and a few other unsettling things best not mentioned here. Anna knows her way around all these things, giving her something of a Jekyll/Hyde persona, only softly sinister. It’s a delicious twist, offering the viewer everything from the refreshing sight of a power struggle shifting to the woman’s favor (instead of the man’s), to the relief that the film is not just another home invasion thriller. Riesgraf revs up her performance here, turning out her character’s lifetime of psychological oppression into a measured burn.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is once the twist happens and the viewer’s excitement is ignited about the endless possibilities these turned tables offer. Intruders quickly disintegrates and exposes itself as having no real possibilities. The drop-off is jarring. Once the trio of intruders (and that delivery boy, too) are in the basement, what more is there to do other than have the woman terrorize the men? Once that trick is played the first time, the film can only manage to limp along as home invasion thriller-turned-torture horror. The only maintaining interest is wanting to know why this frightful basement exists. It’s explained, and quite satisfactorily. But that explanation should be the reward; instead, it’s the consolation prize.

Hollywood is a town full of bad ideas. So when a great one comes along but is poorly executed, it’s more than an opportunity missed, it’s an opportunity wasted. With Intruders (previously titled Shut In), director Schindler and screenwriters T.J. Cimfel and David White prove to be another in a long line of filmmakers guilty of being so enamored by the originality of their twist, they simply let that twist try to carry them instead of building a strong showcase around it.

The introduction of this collection of shorts makes it clear that the calibre of animation forthcoming is formidable. Of the 3,000+ entries submitted for consideration, only 11 were selected to be included. Calling this international collection “elite” is an understatement. But something else makes these short films, whose creators employ animation techniques ranging from hand drawings to stop-motion and from paint on glass to CGI, even more special than that. This is the first Animation Show of Shows collection to be screened publicly. Ron Diamond, founder of Acme Filmworks and curator of the Animation Show of Shows for all 16 years of its history, decided to take the 17th annual event on something of a global tour.

Previously, the presentation had been confined to animation studios, festivals, and other exclusive venues. Now, lovers of animation, short films, and movies in general, will have the chance to experience these gems on the big screen. In addition to the short films, four of the artists are spotlighted in “documentary portraits.” The 11 shorts and 4 portraits run as one 97-minute program.

For more info on the films and screening details check out www.animationshowofshows.com.

The Story of Percival Pilts

Leading off the program is Australia’s 8-minute stop-motion film from Janette Goodey & John Lewis. A young boy named Percival uses pair of stilts and vows never to touch the ground again. The narration cadence invoke memories of Seuss, and what looks like something that might be only light fun offers an interesting perspective on tolerance. This is a delightful film to start with.

Tant de Forets

From Geoffrey Godet and Burcu Sankur of France comes a 3-minute film bursting with color and smoothly animated with sharp lines and crisp, distinctive shapes. The tale is based on the poetry of Jacques Prévert and points to the irony of how newspapers report the warnings of deforestation while simultaneously plundering forests to make paper.

Snowfall

Ireland’s Conor Whelan packs an emotional punch in his 4-minute motion graphics entry. A lonely man makes a decision to go to a friend’s party and while there, falls for someone. That someone doesn’t fall for him. It’s both beautiful and heartbreaking. Following the short, Whelan is the focus of the first documentary portrait.

The Ballad of Holland Island House

Created by Lynn Tomlinson from the United States, this short is the most visually striking and uniquely presented of the collection. The style Tomlinson employs is clay painting animation, and the texture of the imagery is so rich you can almost feel it. As for the story, it’s the history of an old house on a sinking island in the Chesapeake, presented as a five-minute folk ballad sung by the house itself.

Behind the Trees

The short with perhaps the most clever origins comes from the United States and Amanda Palmer and Avi Ofer. Palmer, who got into the habit of making notes about what her husband, writer Neil Gaiman, said in his sleep, was paperless one night so she dictated her exchange with her sleeping spouse. The result was a funny narrative, so she decided to set it to animation. It works wonderfully (and in less than three minutes).

We Can’t Live Without Cosmos

Russian animator Konstantin Bronzit, who was nominated for a Best Animated Short Film Oscar at the 2009 Academy Awards for Lavatory Lovestory, returns with a story about best friends who are aspiring cosmonauts facing the rigors of training for space travel. Their story unexpectedly changes from lighthearted fun to poignant reflection and does so to great effect, never wasting a second of its 16-minute runtime. Bronzit is the subject of the second documentary portrait.

Messages Dans L’Air

France and Switzerland combine to present Csabel Favez’s six-minute short, which is set in a world made of paper. The film balances a few unique relationships: a woman and her cat, her cat and the neighbor’s goldfish, the goldfish and its owner (a boxer), and the boxer and the woman. A message-offering bird adds a unique dimension to this already multifaceted tale.

Stripy

Babak Nekooei & Behnoud Nekooei create a unique entry for Iran. Set to Brahms’s “Hungarian Dances No. 5” and taking place in a dull grey factory, this film does an excellent job illustrating how art cannot be tamed and will not be monetized by commerce. The Nekooeis are the subjects of the third documentary portrait that follows their four-minute film.

Ascension

A terrific team of students from France—Thomas Bourdis, Colin Laubry, Martin de Coudenhove, Caroline Domergue, and Florian Vecchione—collaborate on this CGI film about a pair of mountain climbers who attempting to place a statue of the Virgin Mary atop the highest mountain they can find. The attempt and the results are not as planned for the climbers, but very funny for the viewers. The graphics work here is top-notch.

Love in the Time of March Madness

Another pair of countries—this time the United States and Australia—team-up to present Melissa Johnson and Robertino Zambrano’s terrific nine-minute B&W entry. The film is autobiographical for Johnson. It deals with how she managed her uncommon build at such a young age (she was six-foot-four and 127 pounds … in the 8th grade). She went on to make basketball her life until she years for something more. While not the laugh-out-loud funniest entry in the program, it certainly has the most wicked sense of humor. The fourth and final documentary portrait features Johnson.

World of Tomorrow

The program closer—and a film deserving of the closing spot—hails from the United States. It’s Don Hertzfeld’s hysterical 17-minute film about a little girl who is visited by … well, she’s visited by what can correctly be described a future version of herself. That future version offers lessons (lessons that the child can’t understand anyway) in history, life, love, birth, death, and quantum physics. The film has already snatched over two dozen awards and is presently on the Oscar nominee shortlist for Best Animated Short Film.

The 17th Annual Animation Show of Shows is a triumph and worth seeking out. Screening details and information about the films can be found at www.animationshowofshows.com.

One of the more awkward topics in the early points of a romantic relationship involves the discussion of past loves. The reality is most people are not their current love’s first love, and yet some struggle to admit there was someone before them. This topic can be most sensitive in the early months of a relationship, especially if there is a concern that feelings for an ex might still exist. Fear about this isn’t exclusive to new relationships, however. In Andrew Haigh’s sublime 45 Years, a couple who has been together for nearly half a century finds their relationship suddenly tested by a voice from the past.

That couple is the Mercers: Kate (Charlotte Rampling), a retired teacher, and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), a retired plant worker. They live a quiet life in the British countryside where they go about their business the ways most retired couples do: walking the dog, puttering about the house, running errands in town, etc. Those halcyon days of their golden years take a sharp turn just a week before their 45th wedding anniversary, when Geoff receives a letter that the body of a long-deceased former love has been found. “My Katya,” as Geoff refers to her when he breaks the news to his wife, was the love he knew before Kate. The discovery of Katya, whose body was frozen solid and lost for half a century in the mountains of Switzerland, changes Geoff. That change, along with the subsequent discovery of other information, changes Kate.

There’s a high degree of difficulty in properly presenting 45 Years without it devolving into some mawkish soap about old age and young love and regret and whatnot. Fortunately, it’s a challenge Andrew Haigh (who adapted the screenplay from David Constantine‘s short story In Another Country) more than rises to. The filmmaker has a keen awareness that a 45-year marriage is simultaneously strong and vulnerable, and he has a clear understanding that the frailty of the human ego is something that doesn’t fade with age.

The strength of the Mercers’ relationship is the most obvious aspect of the film. A couple doesn’t get to its 45th wedding anniversary on cruise control. Marriages take work to get that far, and the Mercers have put in that work, but their success is measured by more than just a number. It’s also measured by their contentment and ease with each other. It’s a subtle but important thing. This is an elderly couple not portrayed as bitter or cantankerous or even slyly dismissive of each other; they love each other and have for a long time. The fact that they are planning a 45th-anniversary party is a great example of that. They had planned a party for their 40th—a more logical milestone—but illness got in the way. They didn’t reschedule it for as soon as possible, nor did they clamor to try again at 41. They shrugged their shoulders, knew in their hearts they’d be together no matter what the year, and rounded to the next 5-year marker to throw a replacement party.

The part that’s less obvious, the part that’s more important, is the vulnerability of a relationship that has lasted so long. It isn’t a vulnerability that comes with boredom or complacency because these aren’t people looking for something new. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. These are people who are comfortable with, perhaps subconsciously cling to, the familiarities and rituals they have built up over 45 years. The film is rich with little suggestions of this. So when something like the unexpected reemergence of the corpse of a past love enters this familiar space, it might not crumble the house, but it chips the paint, and chipped paint is the kind of thing that gnaws at someone because they know it’s there and they can’t leave it alone.

And therein lies the never-aging frailty of the human ego that Haigh gets so right. With the reemergence of Katya’s body, Geoff is whisked back to the past and once again reminded of a love realized and yet left incomplete by tragedy. If he were a 40-something who had run into a high school flame at a reunion, he might buy a flashy car. He’s not that guy. Instead, he starts smoking again. He tries reading Kierkegaard again. He moves a little closer to being that irritable old man who wonders if he did it right. He worries that his old love’s frozen body has not aged a day while his has aged thousands. These little changes, these little comments, this renewed interest in a time he long filed away keeps the paint chipping and threatens to crack a wall.

Kate is in tune with it all. Acutely.

At first, it’s not that big a deal. Sure, it’s an old love, but it’s a dead love. However, as Geoff’s interest in Kierkegaard and finding old mementos increases, and as those moments when the couple would share quiet small talk turn into a discussion about Katya (again), Kate wears down. She asks questions—little ones—that illustrate the stoic and supportive face she wears on the outside hides an unraveling self-confidence on the inside. Learning something new and unexpected only exacerbates the problem because now it feels like Geoff is hiding something. When she starts poking around in the attic, her disbelief is crippling. The stakes are immeasurable because it’s not as if she might lose her husband to some fling the way a 40-year-old might; she might lose her husband to a ghost, and there’s no fighting that.

Rampling plays her incredibly deep and complex role to perfection. There is no scenery to chew, no impassioned speech to make, no confrontation to be had with “the other woman,” so in the absence of that, Rampling wields subtlety like a surgeon with a scalpel: precise, efficient, effective. It’s an amazing performance, and one made greater by the fact that Haigh keeps her the focus of almost every scene. But Courtenay is no slouch either, and it takes a real actor to be convincing in his late-life change and give Rampling everything she needs to shine.

Love does not have a finish line. There is no point along the timeline of a relationship where someone can say, “We made it this far; nothing can come between us now.” A relationship is like any other living thing: it needs constant care and attention, and it is always susceptible to damage, whether it’s a budding flower of romance or a mighty oak of marriage. With 45 Years, Andrew Haigh and his pair of stars prove this to be true, and they do so in the most well-measured yet mesmerizing of ways.

I know what it’s like to be laid off; it’s happened to me twice. Finding myself out of work not only forced me to face financial uncertainty, I had the added worry of wondering what the future would hold for my family. It can be harrowing. Such is the fate that faces the small family in Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas’ Hard Labor. But rather than buckle down, the couple instead doubles down, with unexpected results.

Helena (Helena Albergaria) is about to take a big step in her life; she’s ready to rent a storefront and open her own market. When she gets home from closing the deal, she finds her husband Otávio (Marat Descartes) home early from his office job. He isn’t just home early, though—he’s home for good, having been let go by his company. This doesn’t dissuade him from supporting his wife’s endeavor, however. With his help (in between humiliating job interviews), and with their new live-in maid Paula (Naloana Lima) caring for their young daughter, Helena works hard to get her business launched. Like any other small-business owner, she faces challenges that include things like inventory worries, small repairs, and staff management; unlike any other small-business owner, she finds herself facing another challenge—one more supernatural in nature—making the harrowing a little more horrifying.

Hard Labor presents itself as having a blend of drama and horror. While the latter might be a cause for concern for the characters in the film, it certainly isn’t for the viewer. That the film has elements of horror is true only on the most technical of levels. Imagine having the ingredients for an omelet and putting those ingredients on the counter next to the stove, but not making an actual omelet. This is the horror portion of the film; items are present but never properly presented. There is never a sense of foreboding, no moments of anticipation, never a worry something bad will happen when least expected. There are ingredients—a vicious dog, mysterious scratches on a wall, unexplained broken glass, etc.—but they aren’t made into anything worth consuming. The horror is secondary, rendering it as nothing more than a dull distraction.

The film’s primary tale is, at least on the surface, a study of the effect of financial disparity within two unique socioeconomic circles, with Helena as the common ground. One circle is Helena’s house. In one day, roles reverse. Suddenly Helena, despite being a small business owner whose business has yet to open, becomes the breadwinner. This puts something of a strain on her marriage, although the film never takes the bait of relying on gimmicky tropes that trade on traditionally held gender-driven responsibilities. That’s not to say, though, that Otávio isn’t at least a little wounded. He is, but it isn’t played for melodrama.

Also in Helena’s house is Paula. Her employment status is considered “unregistered,” which is about the U.S. equivalent of working under the table. That might play okay for some workers here in the States, but in Brazil, being a registered employee is as much the goal as being employed is. (There’s even a line late in the film that equates being registered with existing as a person.) So, in Helena’s house is the troubled white collar of Otávio, the troubled blue collar (no collar?) of Paula, and the hard-working gray collar of the self-employed matriarch.

The other circle Helena exists in is her business. All the collars there are the same, but there is a clear hierarchy as well as a clear economic divide (as evidenced by an event that should not be spoiled). There’s even a reminder of society’s greater economic concern, as represented by a brief exchange between Helena and a customer when that customer complains about the price of a given item.

These differences—both between and within Helena’s circles—are all exercises in posturing for the deeper story of entitlement Hard Labor tries to tell. There are actions taken by every character, from Helena to the store clerk, that suggest each character thinks of themselves as being entitled to something. The most obvious example is Helena continuing with her business launch (with Otávio’s support) despite the absence of any other steady household income, but other smaller examples fill the story too. And because everyone operates at different economic levels (in both circles), that “something” that everyone thinks they’re entitled to exists on different levels as well.

It’s all very weighty, and while it takes place in another part of the world, the themes are such that they can resonate with any North American of employment age. It’s a shame it’s all presented in the dullest of terms. Like the horror portions of the film, the dramatic portions (read: the rest of the film) are not only devoid of melodrama, they’re devoid of any drama whatsoever, and presented mostly without emotion. It’s Brazilian neorealism at its least interesting, and watching it is akin to watching complete strangers trudge on with the tedium of their lives.

This makes the dullness of the horror aspects that much more frustrating, because at least a few good scares would have injected some energy into the film. With so much to say but lacking an interesting voice with which to say it, Hard Labor is more than just the film’s title; it’s also the film’s viewing experience.

Hard Labor will stream on Fandor and come out in select theaters on Friday, October 30.

On my list of Saturday Night Live‘s greatest alum, Kristen Wiig is quickly climbing the charts. Of course her terrific work on the show is a key part of that, but it’s what Wiig has done outside of the show, especially since leaving, that puts her in a special place. Like other SNLers who traded TV for movies (Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy), Wiig has found great success in her comedy comfort zone. She starred in the hugely successful Bridesmaids, a film that not only ranks as the highest-grossing SNL alum debut, it also earned Wiig a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination (with co-writer Annie Mumolo). But rather than wallow in a familiar well until it runs dry (like those aforementioned alum), Wiig has taken a much quirkier career path. A quick glimpse at her resume shows strong work in indie darlings like The Skeleton Twins and Diary of a Teenage Girl, as well as riskier choices in more offbeat offerings like Hateship Loveship and Welcome to Me. Her latest film falls into that risky, offbeat category.

In writer/director Sebastián Silva‘s Nasty Baby, Wiig stars as Polly, a woman trying to have a baby with her gay best friend, multi-media artist Freddy (Silva, also starring). After months of failure, testing shows Freddy’s sperm count to be low. With some persuading, Freddy’s boyfriend, Mo (Tunde Adebimpe), agrees to donate his sperm to the cause. Meanwhile, tension mounts in the trio’s New York City neighborhood as the behavior of an unhinged neighbor, a man who calls himself The Bishop (Reg E. Cathey), grows more and more confrontational, even becoming dangerous. His behavior escalates from annoying early-morning leaf-blowing sessions to vicious homophobic verbal assaults lobbed at Freddy. This ever-growing rift comes to threaten Freddy’s world.

Early on, Nasty Baby is a charming film about three characters who defy conventionality. Two minorities, in a same-sex relationship, are attempting surrogate pregnancy with a woman who, by all accounts, will be a part of the child’s life. That would be one baby with three parents, none of whom fit what society has come to expect as the traditional parental mold. And yet filmmaker Silva, along with his cast, make this arrangement feel incredibly natural, even familiar. There’s never a doubt this arrangement is insincere, nor is there any notion it might fail, post-baby. The charisma and chemistry among the leads solves that and is the film’s great strength.

Beneath the surface of this pleasantly offbeat story, the film wants to be a meditation on the universal balance of creation and destruction. Mo is a horticulturist by hobby but a woodworker by trade. Creation/destruction. When Mo is donating his sperm at the medical clinic where Polly is a nurse, she suddenly can’t chat with him because a battered woman comes in (one Polly knows from previous abusive incidents) and requires immediate attention. Creation/destruction. When Freddy and Polly travel to meet Mo’s family, tension is created by a few of Mo’s narrow-minded family members. Mo, Freddy and Polly are trying to do something borne of love while others judge them based on intolerance. Creation/destruction.

Then the third act comes in and irreparably damages the film. Don’t worry, no spoilers ahead.

Three key events that occur in succession in the third act are designed and presented in such a way as to be collectively considered inconceivable. The first event, involving Freddy’s art, is believable, but only to a point; beyond that, the eyebrow cocks. The second event, involving circumstances related to Polly’s attempted pregnancy, betrays the very character she has been to that point; something about the film now seems amiss. As for the third and final event, it is so far removed from anything remotely rational, the viewer is left wondering if what is being presented is a reel from an entirely different film, or maybe some form of catharsis for Silva. Either way, what should have been the “final conflict and resolution” is instead so tonally foreign, it renders the first two acts mostly irrelevant.

Two things make this disappointing and frustrating. First is that the core of that third event—not its final design or execution, but the basic conflict and the general path to it—makes sense. (In fact, it’s almost predictable.) The execution, though, is stupefying. Related to that (and other than seeing a terrific effort taken out back and set on fire) is that the trio of events, despite the devil in the details, still work within the thematic construct of creation/destruction. Somehow Silva managed to hang onto his core theme even though he realized he couldn’t close, opting instead to jam the pedal to the floor and hope for the best.

The net is the worst possible result: not a bad effort made nor a great effort flawed, but a good effort wasted.

Thankfully Kristin Wiig’s cinematic selections aren’t wasted though. It might be a mixed bag from a qualitative perspective, but her choices have ranged from confident to bold, and Nasty Baby is no exception. Her next few films bring her back to her comedic comfort zone, but I’m already looking beyond those to see what unique and daring choices she’ll make in the future.

I have a rule to make no concerted effort to familiarize myself with the source material of a film before watching it. While there can be value in comparing a film to its source material, in the end, a film should be judged based on its own merits, not as a derivative of something else. Other than watching previous installments of a film franchise before settling into the current chapter (because sequels, at times, can require their predecessors be considered for things like familiarity of greater story/character arcs), I rarely make an exception to this rule. But for Stephen Winter’s Jason and Shirley, a bio-docu-drama fabricating stories from behind the scenes of a famous interview, I made such an exception.

The first two title cards combine to establish the past:

“On December 3, 1966, Oscar-winning filmmaker Shirley Clarke invited Jason Holliday, a black, middle-aged man to her Chelsea Hotel penthouse in New York City. She filmed him telling colorful stories from his turbulent life for 12 hours. This footage became ‘Portrait of Jason’ (1967), a groundbreaking documentary hailed worldwide for its unflinching look at race, sexuality, and the nature of truth.”

What follows for the next 79 minutes is a wholly fictionalized story of what went on behind the scenes during that 12-hour marathon filming session.

While those title cards are accurate, particularly the “unflinching look” statement, they don’t begin to capture the might of Jason’s 105-minute on-camera performance. And it is a performance, at least at first, until it becomes something heavier, something deeper and more impactful, something that brings Jason to tears. That’s when it becomes real. From behind the camera, Shirley directs the hell out of Jason, with a combination of alcohol and marijuana mixed with verbal interaction that ranges from coaxing to goading, even when Jason is obviously exhausted and (at times) ready to leave. Also goading him from offscreen is Carl Lee, a theater actor, frequent collaborator with Shirley, and friend of Jason. It is riveting filmmaking, something simultaneously mesmerizing and almost completely unbelievable, yet something that surely requires multiple viewings to truly take it all in.

And now I’ve spent a paragraph in a review of one film to explain another film, which simply shouldn’t be necessary. This is the first problem with Jason and Shirley—it requires existing knowledge of its subject to be understood, even on a basic level. Watching this film without having seen the source material turns this film into a pointless presentation.

Assuming you have seen the original, in Jason and Shirley, Jason is played by co-screenwriter Jack Waters mostly as an impersonation of the real Jason Holliday, who was quite the character, and Waters is fine. (Had I not seen the original, though, I doubt I would have believed such a “character” could exist in real life. Had YouTube existed in the 1960s, he would have been a star.) He’s presented here as clamoring for fame and fortune, a vibe I got watching the original. Shirley is played by fellow co-screenwriter Sarah Schulman, and her acting task a little more challenging than Waters’.

As written, Shirley is a heartless manipulator, constantly searching for ways to get Jason to turn off the Jason Character and speak to her camera as the Jason Person. She’s something of a Dr. Frankenstein in this sense, using the promise of notoriety to lure Jason in front of her camera, which creates a (showbiz) monster she later struggles to control. And she tries hard to control him, using the substances she already has in her arsenal, calling down the thunder for stronger stuff, and using sensitive points from Jason’s past to get a reaction from him (his relationship with his father, his incarceration, the time he was raped). Shirley even goes so far as to tell Carl (Orran Farmer, the real acting standout of the film) that she wants to “break” Jason. She might be a director, but she is written and portrayed here as an enemy interrogator using life-threatening manipulation to get what she wants out of her subject.

It’s no wonder the estate of Shirley Clarke neither authorized nor endorsed this film—a fact stated in a title card buried deep in the closing credits, a long time after many viewers will have stopped paying attention.

This is the second, more serious problem with the film: it’s fictional status means the filmmakers could have done anything they wanted to, and this is what they chose to film—a fabricated and unflattering characterization of a real person disguised as a documentary about the making of her film. The fact that the filmmakers could have put in the time and effort to assemble an actual documentary but instead chose to create this from scratch puts a taint on the film that can’t be ignored. Yes, they protect themselves with that late title card about the Clarke estate, along with another buried card that states, “This film is a work of fiction and is not intended to be a true or exact account of actual people or events,” but that doesn’t mean they were responsible, only cautious.

The filming style is practically an afterthought at this point, although it is still worth mentioning. It’s shot in 4:3 on what looks like VHS, complete with random discoloration and tracking issues, all of which makes for interesting stylistic choices considering the film takes place in 1966. It’s also filmed from multiple cameras and angles and never are the characters aware of their presence. Despite this odd, time-fractured feel, the presentation style is fun, harkening back to the days when tech prices dropped so amateur “filmmakers” could tell their own stories and circulate the tapes.

Jason and Shirley is a poorly-conceived, poorly-executed drama posing as a documentary. It’s a work of fiction that flaunts itself in front of the truth on which it’s based, a truth it never seeks to honor or expand upon, only pivot from for its own gain. With its found-footage feel and VHS veneer, Jason and Shirley is, at best, incomprehensible without first knowing Portrait of Jason, and at worst it’s a tabloid drama. Overall, it is not a film to be judged on its own merits, but rather a frivolous companion piece better relegated to the extras section of a DVD release.

Olga Kurylenko is no stranger to action movies. The Ukrainian-born actress has appeared in several testosterone-fueled flicks, including 2007’s Hitman, 2014’s The November Man, 2012’s Erased, and, perhaps most famously, 2008’s James Bond entry, Quantum of Solace. But in all those films, she was a supporting player behind male stars (respectively) Timothy Olyphant, Pierce Brosnan, Aaron Eckhart, and Daniel Craig. That changes in her latest action entry, Momentum, which puts the actress’ name above the title and her character at the center of the film.

Kurylenko plays Alex Farraday, a thief called out of retirement for one last score. Though this high-tech heist nets Alex and her fellow thieves more than they bargain for. In addition to a cache of diamonds, they swipe a flash drive containing treasonous evidence against a mysterious US Senator (Morgan Freeman). Unfortunately, Alex’s identity is compromised during the heist and the Senator sends a “cleaning crew,” led by Mr. Washington (James Purefoy), to Capetown, South Africa, to kill the thieves and retrieve the drive. But Alex has other intentions.

If the biggest genre sin in film is a horror movie that isn’t scary, a close second has to be an action film that is utterly boring. This is the case with Momentum, brought to the screen by veteran camera operator-turned-rookie director Stephen S. Campanelli. To say it’s boring is not to say Campanelli doesn’t try; he does. It’s just that the screenplay (from Adam Marcus and Debra Sullivan) is a threadbare patchwork of undeveloped characters, underdeveloped ideas, and tired action tropes.

It starts with Alex and that opening gambit. While I’m all for a film fading into the heart of a tense scene already in progress, that scene needs either quick context or a hint of something more cerebral that will payoff later. The intellectualism (such as it is) of Momentum is nowhere near the latter, but the former is abandoned entirely. By the end of the heist, all we know is Alex’s crew stole diamonds (but we don’t know why); we know there is infighting between certain members of the crew (but we don’t know the history); we know Alex’s big “reveal” must be devastating since it’s suggested everyone in the bank be murdered because they saw her face (with no explanation as to why such extreme measures are necessary); and we know Alex came out of retirement for the score (but we don’t know what drove her to retire and come back). None of this is context, it’s convenience—the shortest of shortcuts.

By the end of the heist, the film feels like it’s in the second act of a sequel, like there are things that ought to already be known. They aren’t, and it cripples the film.

Those notes on Alex, by the way, are about as deep as deep as she gets (although there is one other facet that is only hinted at—again for convenience—and another that is revealed too late in the film to actually care), but she’s not alone. Of the other two key characters in this film, Mr. Washington is more caricature than character (although ultimately a pretty good baddie, thanks to Purefoy having some fun with the role), and the Senator is far too much a mystery to be believable (and a waste of Freeman’s talents).

The main plot is no better developed than the heist: Alex has a flash drive, the Senator wants the flash drive, Mr. Washington pursues Alex to retrieve the flash drive. People die in the process. There’s the movie. All that’s left is the action which, because there is nothing cohesive to attach it to, plays as an anthology of violent set-pieces connected by common characters instead of a series of high-octane conflict/resolution moments that advance a story.

That action is decent and it includes everything this type of movie should: guns and explosives, a car chase, fight scenes, etc. And while he doesn’t break any ground, Campanelli has a couple notable moments, but really nothing more than that. In fact, the best scene of the film includes one particularly effective torture scene, with the irony being the torture is only heard; yes, the best scene in the film takes place offscreen.

Put it all together and it’s not an action movie, it’s an arcade game that gives the viewer just enough character background and story information before getting out of the way of the endless cycle of moves.

As for Kurylenko, it’s hard to tell if she can rise to the challenge of carrying an action picture on her own. It’s clear she has the physicality for it, and given she is a woman playing in a genre thats dominated by men, it’s hard not to measure her against the likes of Linda Hamilton (the Terminator films), Sigourney Weaver (the Alien franchise), Charlize Theron as Furiosa from Mad Max Fury Road, and several others. It’s also unfair to do that to her, because the material those women had to work with was far superior to what Kurylenko has had to make due with here.

Momentum might have its moments, but those moments are no match for the onslaught of “meh” the rest of the picture delivers.

In my SXSW review of the dark comedy Nina Forever (from the Blaine Brothers), I take note of the increasing number of sibling filmmakers and the variety of genres into which they have delved. It’s time to add horror to that genre list, and with it add to the list of filmmaking siblings Michael and Shaun Rasmussen, writers and directors of the haunted house indie horror film, The Inhabitants.

Jessica and Dan (Elise Couture and Michael Reed) are a married couple starting a new chapter in their lives: entrepreneurship. A bed and breakfast in the oldest house in New England has become too much for its elderly, widowed owner (Judith Chaffee) to manage, and the couple buy the place with the hopes of restoring it to its past greatness. Something in the house isn’t quite right though. Dan takes a business trip for his day job, leaving Jessica alone to unpack boxes and explore the house and town. And that’s when spirits from the past—dating back to the Salem witch trials—possess the vulnerable wife. When Dan returns, he’s not sure what to make of this woman who used to be his wife. He’s also not sure about a less-than-spiritual secret he uncovers.

“Not sure” is an apt two-word summary for The Inhabitants. It’s a film that’s not sure what it wants to be, with characters who are not sure of who they are, made by filmmakers who not sure about what they are doing.

To say the characters are not sure of who they are is still something of an overstatement; Jessica and Dan have no dimension to them at all. Once they move in, they become the stereotypical new homeowners; she mostly unpacks boxes while he fixes things. At the end of the the day, he wants sex and she’s too tired. By the end of the film, the only other thing we know about them is that he has a day job and she may have had a miscarriage at some point (in one quick scene, she looks longingly at an ultrasound picture she finds in a box). The absence of any backstory turns the characters into nothing more than paper dolls—flat, lifeless beings. The only other character of consequence is the elderly former owner, and while she brings a certain old-lady creepiness to her, even that is presented in the least interesting of ways, with thousand-mile stares and nonsensical muttering.

This can all be forgiven, though, if the story is good or the tension is high or the scares are effective. But none of it is.

The story does have potential. The house dates back to the era of the Salem witch trials, and its original resident was a midwife who was hung for suspicion of being a witch. After her death, children began mysteriously disappearing, creating more suspicion that the house was haunted. Despite the dull presentation of its history (onscreen book/newspaper text, someone reading of said text aloud, or both), this house has 400 years worth of stories to tell to get to the present, and yet it fails to tell any. Instead, it hits the fewest bullet points possible and requires the viewer to fill in the rest of the blanks. But the blanks are too many and too large and what’s presented is a parchment-thin history with no real connection to the present. (This approach also leaves gaping, illogical chasms too numerous to mention here.)

With no characters to care for and no real story to tell, all that remains are the tension and scares, which are also non-existent for the most part. Moments presented to create a mood or set-up a fright range from boring to arduous. Part of that has to do with lumbering direction that confuses “dull” and “suspenseful,” and the other part has to do with the fact there isn’t a single scary moment in the picture. There are moments that attempt to scare, but even the old reliable “jump scare” (which we’d rarely advocate) is nowhere to be found.

What rests at the heart of these accumulated problems is the Rasmussen Brothers simply don’t know what they want this film to be. I counted close to a dozen horror tropes employed here—from the haunted house and the creepy old lady to pseudo-found footage and a random trio of delinquent teens with ill intentions of their own. Several tropes are fine; but when this many are shown they are more noticeable and start getting in the way of themselves. All that remains are a bunch of undeveloped ideas.

There are a few bright spots, including Couture, who is good in the first half (although undermined by her directors in the second half by being given little to do but “wander slowly” and “act possessed”), a few interesting visual moments, and the inclusion of that great antique birthing equipment. I would also be remiss if I didn’t give credit to co-editors Sean Hester and Michael Rasmussen for their work. A lot of low-budget indie films fail to properly edit even the most routine of scenes (think two-person, one-location conversations), let alone the trickier stuff. These guys have strong editing fundamentals which will go a long way.

At its core, The Inhabitants wants to ride the recent trend of throwback horror pictures where mood and atmosphere are the key component to the overall viewing experience, not simply a prerequisite means to a gory end. But too many other horror tropes either distract the Rasmussen Brothers from achieving their true intention, or attempt to distract the viewer from realizing the siblings are not yet skilled enough to create a complete story, populate it with multi-dimensional characters, and commit it all to film.

I’m always quick to mention how great it was being a film buff while growing up in the ’80s—that Golden Age when both cable and home video exploded to offer all the classics one could consume (with or without cheese). But it has also been great living in the Information Age, where the portal to all data and the lifeline for all communication can now fit into a back pocket. It wasn’t always that easy, of course, and just as it’s quaint to stumble across a VHS tape with a “Be Kind, Rewind” sticker on it, so too is it nostalgic to be reminded of that time when we didn’t realize just how cumbersome “high tech” was. Parallax, a dramedy set in the Decade of Decadence, not only highlights how cumbersome technology was back then, but unfortunately does so in a cumbersome way.

In the film’s prologue, the year is 1983 and Abbott (Michael Kelberg) is a married college professor in pursuit of something greater: the creation of “Zeteo Vision,” a revolutionary communication tool. (Zeteo Vision, aka Z-TV, is a device best described as the fictional precursor to YouTube.) Coming out of the prologue and into present-day 1987, Abbott is still in pursuit of that vision, only his obsession has since cost him his job and his marriage. As he slowly moves closer to realizing his dream, he encounters obstacles expected (technical and financial) and unexpected (the addictive nature of his creation).

Making his feature debut with Parallax, writer/director Graham Nolte attempts to execute something rather interesting. He tries to tell a cautionary tale about obsession with social-based technology and the pitfalls that accompany that obsession—pitfalls that are as relevant today as they ever have been—but he does so by setting the story in technology’s early years, a time when many might not consider this problem to be as pervasive as it is today.

The obsession can be found in different forms and in most of the main characters. Abbott is obsessed with the creation of the tech to the expense of his marriage and career. Abbott’s former student, Mannix (Robb Stech), already burnt out on tech, loses himself in the ability to upload commercials to Z-TV. Villini (Jim Ludovici), from whom Abbott acquires server space, decides time-shifting (my phrase, not the film’s) his soap operas would be a better experience than watching them live as he had before Z-TV. And even the one “positive” use of the tech is still obsession-fueled: Abbott’s friend, Finbar (Phillipe Simon), finds a love interest as a result of using Z-TV.

It’s an interesting conceit, placing this modern issue in perhaps the most appropriate period setting, and doing so avoids any sense of preaching by instead creating something of a “the more things change, the more they stay the same” message. The problem is the execution is so terribly dull.

The core of the story concentrates on Abbott’s efforts and obstacles to make Z-TV a reality. This requires endless conversations about things like network access, technical capabilities, practical applications, impractical applications, government grants, etc., none of which are the least bit interesting. The lines feel as if they’ve been lifted from a Z-TV training video, and they are delivered by the cast with about the same level of enthusiasm. It’s hard to fault the cast though, given what they have to work with. As a singular presentation, the scenes don’t flow so much as they coexist.

Compounding this problem is Nolte’s apparent awareness that the conflict his plot presents is dry, but rather than work to make it more interesting holistically, he instead injects fleeting, unfunny moments into scenes. On one Z-TV delivery, a dog pees on the device; in another scene, during Abbott’s pitch for grant money, his device is struck by a vehicle and destroyed. Moments like these are incredibly contrived and only serve to highlight the script’s deficiencies.

Also missing is any real notion of consequence. Abbott has already lost his job and his wife, and his present path is strewn with obstacles, but there is no the sense of what will happen if he fails to launch Z-TV. Because the story is about being successful, there needs to be a result of failure lurking over Abbott’s shoulder to get the viewer invested, and it simply isn’t there. Also missing is any development of what is hinted at as the chance for reconciliation between Abbott and his ex, Lucia (Mary Sarah Agliotta). That she is now engaged to the man who holds Abbott’s grant fate in his hands only seems creatively opportunistic, not the result of an idea fully vetted.

The film is not without its bright spots. Sprinkled throughout are the commercials Mannix is addicted to, as well as scenes from the soaps Villini loves. Most of these moments are genuinely funny. The soap scenes are intentionally overwrought for laughs, and the faux commercials are reminiscent of actual ads shown in the ’80s (think Wacky Packages). From a technical perspective, there are several scenes where the POV actually comes from within a television screen, simultaneously framing the individual watching it while offering an opaque projection of what is on the screen. It’s deft technical presentation that lifts every scene that employs it. From the cast, Simon is the standout.

With Parallax, Graham Nolte goes back to the past to offer a reflection on the present. Technology is wildly more advanced today than it was 30 years ago, but the problems it presents are no different from back then. Had Nolte focused more on the intricacies of the dilemmas technology presents instead of the granularity of the technology itself, the finished product may have been more compelling. Instead, it’s more of a corporate video than a tech drama.

I recently had the great privilege to program a small film festival at my local theater. The theme I chose was “Directed By Women,” in an effort to celebrate and spotlight women directors. I tried to make the offering of films as varied as possible, presenting everything from Oscar-winning fare to indie documentaries—and films both foreign and domestic. The directors whose films I chose ranged from Ida Lupino (The Hitch-Hiker) to Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker). If only I had seen Our Loved Ones before then, I would have begged to include Anne Émond’s film on the roster.

The story begins with the death of a family’s patriarch. Of the decedent’s five children, two are sons. The elder son, André (Mickaël Gouin), who discovers his father’s body, lies to his younger, more sensitive brother David (Maxim Gaudette), as well as other family members who were not present, about the circumstances surrounding their father’s death. There is no malfeasance behind the false explanation, only a desire to shield the younger son and others from the painful truth.

As years and decades pass, David grows up, grows older, and comes into his own. He has both professional and artistic success as a maker of marionettes, he is able to employ André (at their mother’s behest—but still), and he has two beautiful children of his own. That said, and setting aside these successes, David still lives with the specter of his father’s passing, and his relationship with his teen daughter Laurence (Karelle Tremblay) presents challenges he doesn’t expect.

Our Loved Ones (Les êtres chers) is only the second feature from writer/director Anne Émond, but what she puts onscreen shows such tremendous confidence—the film feels like it has come from someone with 10 times her experience.

It starts with the film’s narrative (or the lack thereof). Our Loved Ones doesn’t tell a story so much as it observes one man’s life; that man is David. It hits the two key points in his life it needs to hit (and early) to get the observation going: his father’s death and his introduction to the woman in his life, Marie (Valérie Cadieux). From there, Émond takes something of a highlight reel-approach to her film, skipping huge chunks of David’s life and presenting moments along his timeline. These moments, however, are not typical highlight reel fare. They aren’t the kind of “this is your life” moments many have come to expect from films. They are, however, meaningful later in the film.

This is the real magic of the screenplay. The film has a definitive beginning and, more importantly, a definitive end. But the middle, despite being critical to the conclusion, isn’t driving the film to the end. Émond selects moments that are key to the life she wants us to observe, not the life’s moments we think we should see.

More of that confidence shines in the way Émond presents David’s life, as it demands a lot from the viewer in terms of intelligence and faith. This 102-minute tale spans decades (which is so ambitious for most veteran filmmakers, let a lone a sophomore). As such, Émond must make great leaps forward in time, but when she does, those leaps aren’t announced. There is no subtitle or title card presenting the year in which the new action is taking place; it simply happens. For example, there is a scene early where David and Marie have just met, and they are carefully walking on a frozen lake at night. Cut to the next scene, and not only is it warm and sunny, David and Marie are living together. Cut to the scene after that, and they are at his mother’s house with their baby.

It’s jarring at first because it’s an approach that belies the usual spoon-feeding most movies offer viewers and instead requires the viewer to pay close attention for things in the film that indicate where it is along David’s timeline. This jumping—sometimes far, sometimes not—to points in David’s life that aren’t the usual key moments in a person’s life also requires faith from the viewer that Émond has planned on the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It is.

Despite this praise (which is wholly earned), Émond’s confidence is a little higher than her storytelling skill. There is an event early in the film that aches to be addressed and never is. There is a shocking moment late in the film that comes as some considerable surprise—a moment that is key to the film’s end—but it feels contrived, like Émond wasn’t sure which points to insert into David’s timeline to support this particular moment and instead decided the viewer would simply make some necessary connections to earlier, tangentially related moments. In a film that demands a lot, this is asking for a little too much. Kudos to Émond for not wavering on her approach, but that kind of resolve comes with a price.

Still, this film is mesmerizing in the story it tells and the way it tells it, with a wonderfully soulful performance from acting veteran Gaudette as David, as well as a captivating turn from relative newcomer Tremblay as Laurence. There is great father/daughter chemistry between the two, which is also key to the film’s success. With Our Loved Ones, Anne Émond boldly makes the movie she wants to make, not the movie she thinks the audience is expecting.

Ask a random sampling of movie buffs to name a famous costume designer and the first response will most likely be Edith Head, and rightfully so. With 35 Oscar nominations to her name (eight of which went on to win), Head is synonymous with high-calibre movie fashion. Ask for additional names, and the hardcore film fans will reveal themselves, offering names like Irene Sharaff, Charles LeMaire, and Milena Canonero. Another designer they might mention is Orry-Kelly, son of Australia, winner of Academy Awards, and a man whose story is as fascinating as they come. That story is told to remarkable effect by filmmaker Gillian Armstrong in her documentary, Women He’s Undressed.

The linear bio starts with the boyhood days of Orry George Kelly, the son of a tailor from Kiama, New South Wales, Australia. Those early days reveal two key things that will forever shape Kelly’s career and life: his natural and immense artistic flare, and his homosexuality. Living in a land during a time when the latter was not tolerated, Kelly abandons the banking career he had begun and departs Australia in 1922 to set sail for America. In his early years in New York City, Kelly makes his bones as an artist and costumer for Broadway productions. It’s also during this time he begins a romantic relationship with Archie Leach, a struggling (but unspeakably handsome) actor who eventually goes on to change his name to Cary Grant.

The two make it to Hollywood together, but where their individual careers began to thrive, their relationship died. Cary Grant goes on to be, well, Cary Grant, while Orry-Kelly goes on to costume some of Hollywood’s greatest stars (Bette Davis-calibre) in over 280 films (including a little picture called Casablanca), winning three Oscars in the process.

There is some deft storytelling from Gillian Armstrong in Women He’s Undressed. This isn’t just another biopic about a kid from the middle of nowhere making it big in showbiz, nor is it just some revelation about another unsung Hollywood behind-the-scenes great, nor is it just a name-dropping clip reel of Hollywood history. It’s actually all of these things and more. And it’s dazzling.

Women He’s Undressed might struggle to get out of the gate of his childhood, but during those early minutes of the film, his homosexuality is established. This is key not only because it makes him who he is, but because the position and evolution of the entertainment industry (somewhat Broadway, mostly Hollywood) as it relates to same-sex relationships has considerable consequences. The greater narrative then radiates from Orry-Kelly: he’s gay, others in Hollywood are gay, here is how Hollywood handled gay. (The approach towards his sexual orientation, by the way, is never disrespectful, nor does it ever pander.)

Bringing Archie Leach/Cary Grant into the story might sound scandalous (and it is), but it is also critical to the designer’s tale in that: (a) Leach/Grant is a major love of Orry-Kelly’s life, and (b) the actor is responsible for Orry-Kelly making it to Hollywood. This isn’t just a kiss-and-tell; Leach/Grant has real purpose to who Orry-Kelly is as a person and as a costume designer.

Once the story moves inside Hollywood’s gates, Armstrong really shows what she’s made of as a documentarian.

The Orry-Kelly thread about his homosexuality turns into the fabric of a Hollywood history lesson. Like the same-sex narrative, the Hollywood history narrative radiates from Orry-Kelly, puts context around the time and the business, then returns to put Orry-Kelly into history’s context and vice versa.

The history radiates to the groundbreaking work that Busby Berkley did and then brings it back to Orry-Kelly’s equally impressive costumes for the filmmaker’s pictures. The history radiates to the tawdriness of pre-code films and crosses over to the more subdued post-code films, using Orry-Kelly as a bridge between the two eras and focusing on what he did as a costumer during both eras (including what he got away with, post-code). Then to some of the titans of the times: Bette Davis, Jack Warner, William Randolph Hearst, Marilyn Monroe—and his relationships with all of them. And of course, the story then proceeds to Cary Grant. The documentary even finds its way back to Australia from time to time.

By the time the story is over, Orry-Kelly is not just another Hollywood luminary—he’s forever one with that town and its history.

Yet for all its narrative might, some of the storytelling devices employed fall terribly flat. Armstrong opts to cast people to play Orry-Kelly and his mother, and then work them into the story for narration, commentary, even humor. It’s all so silly, especially in the earliest days, which at times are downright cartoonish. I think I get what Armstrong is trying do—inject elements of stage and film into these portions as representations of the two branches of entertainment where Orry-Kelly was at his best. It just feels so gimmicky, and never more so than when the intricate pattern Armstrong weaves suddenly gets disrupted. Also feeling manufactured are quotes from celebrities as voiced by other actors. It’s intrusive and too cute by half, and it’s all to the detriment of the overall product.

It wouldn’t be a documentary without some talking heads, and it’s refreshing to see some living legends who worked with Orry-Kelly offer their thoughts. The most recognizable are critic/historian Leonard Maltin, actress Angela Lansbury, and actress Jane Fonda. (Hearing Fonda confess to what she would have liked to have done to a certain part of Marilyn Monroe’s anatomy is worth the price of admission.) These celebs, and other contributors, are used in excellent measure. Oddly enough, Orry-Kelly himself is only ever seen (via photos) at the end of the film.

Orry-Kelly’s formidable combination of history, skill, attitude, and pizzaz creates a mighty base for Armstrong to build upon, and build she does, using numerous storytelling devices and a whip-smart narrative. Women He’s Undressed isn’t always perfect, but it’s riveting from start to finish.

According to the National Down Syndrome Society, one in every 691 children born in the US has Down syndrome. That calculates to a collective of over 400,000 people nationally. Hollywood has been paying attention. In addition to casting actors with Down syndrome in key parts in recent hit TV shows like American Horror Story (Jamie Brewer) and Glee (Lauren Potter), 2015’s Where Hope Grows made history as the first major US theatrical release to star an actor with Down syndrome in a leading role (David DeSanctis). The indie film community has taken notice as well, casting Dylan Harman in the title role of the new indie drama The Rainbow Kid.

Eugene (Harman) is a 19-year-old living in an apartment with his mother in Toronto. His passion is rainbows. When tragedy strikes, the Down syndrome sufferer loads his backpack with sandwiches and saved money, hops on his bicycle (training wheels and all), and embarks on a road trip along the back roads of Canada to find the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow he sees outside. On his journey, Eugene meets a collection of individuals, not all of whom share his good nature or his good will.

Writer/director Kire Paputts, making his debut feature with The Rainbow Kid, begins his film with the promise of a hero. Eugene is faced with a life-changing moment that he is not equipped to manage. Still, he remains undaunted. He thinks he knows what is best to do in his situation and he does it—not necessarily without fear, but certainly without hesitation. This is what makes him a hero in the film’s first 10 minutes, and he retains that title throughout the film because, despite considerable adversity, he keeps moving forward, looking for that pot of gold.

This heroism the film’s lone bright spot. Once Eugene hits the road, Paputts abandons all narrative and opts to string together a succession of situations Eugene finds himself getting into and getting out of. While his motivation is strong, his story isn’t a story at all, but rather a series of hurdles he must clear in order to reach his goal.

Eugene’s first major encounter is with a man who “teaches” him to use a bent hanger as a dousing rod to find treasure. That man might be nefarious and Eugene needs to leave. The second major encounter is with an aging rock star who teaches Eugene to dance. That man might be nefarious and Eugene needs to leave. The third major encounter is with a man whose daughter also has Down Syndrome and who will do anything to get into Eugene’s good graces. That man might be nefarious and Eugene needs to leave. And so on, until it isn’t necessarily the people who are a threat to Eugene, but the situations he finds himself in.

With a combination of a lack of narrative, the hero’s drive towards a singular goal, and a steady string of impediments, the entire film feels like an old-school video game, with Eugene as the protagonist. He moves forward, he dodges, he moves forward, there’s a setback, he moves forward, there’s a damsel in distress, he moves forward, he’s injured, etc. Like an old-school video game, the challenges escalate in difficulty as he encounters them. Also like an old-school video game, the challenges become more outlandish as the forward movement progresses. If this were an 8-bit world, it might be fun. However, in a film about a teen with Down syndrome who has suffered a tragedy and is searching for something that doesn’t exist, the circumstances rapidly devolve from quirky to creepy to preposterous.

Like an old-school video game, the repetition becomes monotonous.

There is a sense that one of the purposes of The Rainbow Kid is to demonstrate that a character with a disability can go through a film and struggle with that film’s conflicts no differently than a character without a disability, and amen for that. Life is full of people, some of them disabled, and the movies need to show more of this. But conflicts don’t care about disabilities. Conflicts are conflicts, and if they aren’t believable, it doesn’t matter who is in the lead; those moments simply won’t ring true.

The Rainbow Kid isn’t so much a story of Eugene’s journey as it is a collection of situations Eugene is thrust into, each as unbelievable as the one before it. The lack of narrative would have the film rolling in an endless string of these things, so Paputts must resort to a shocking third-act moment to hurl the story towards resolution instead of leading it to a natural end. That these situations are so outlandish and feature a lead character with Down syndrome, there are times the film feels like it is generating extremes to show that someone with a disability can deal with extremes. That’s not telling a story, that’s forcing a situation, and when the subject of that situation has a disability, it feels like the circumstance has been manufactured to garner additional sympathy. Once that happens, and it happens early here, the film is lost.

Living in front of cameras that never stop rolling and existing in the presence of an often vicious social media congregation, Caitlyn Jenner, who for four decades had best been known as US Olympic hero Bruce Jenner, announced she was transgender. It’s a new thing for most people, this transgenderism, but Jenner has brought it to the forefront of the world’s mind. And while there are a lot of questions the world might have about those identifying as transgender, the one that keeps coming to my mind is this: how much pain have transgenders suffered while spending lifetimes pretending to be something they are not?

Director Alexandra-Therese Keining’s drama, Girls Lost, looks at the genesis of that kind of pain when a teen wonders if she is actually a boy trapped in a girl’s body.

Kim, Momo, and Bella (respectively Tuva Jagell, Louise Nyvall, and Wilma Holmén) are the closest of friends and they need to be. Outcasts at school, the teen trio are physically and verbally bullied on a regular basis—at times brutally so—by classmates who are enraged only by the hateful notion the girls might be lesbians. Nothing more. Their teachers allow the bullying to happen.

One day, while seeking solace in the greenhouse in Bella’s back yard, the girls find a mysterious-looking seed among the usual horticultural fare. They plant it, and by morning a flower is fully grown. Burning with curiosity (but understandably a little scared), the girls drink nectar from the flower. Soon after, they magically transform into boys, albeit temporarily, giving them a chance to experience life the way the opposite sex experiences it, both inside and out. This opportunity, however, brings with it consequences the girls might not be ready for.

Girls Lost is one of those films where to explain a little more wouldn’t make much sense. At a high level, this film deals with themes including love, friendship, bullying, sexual identity, absentee parents, and even addiction. A lot happens in 106 minutes, and while all the goings-on are worthy of inclusion in a story like this, to attempt to tackle them en masse prevents sufficient exploration of themes beyond their labels. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach also demands shortcuts to be taken.

Some of those shortcuts undermine the development of characters. While the gaggle of mean teens can remain at surface level, a pair of main characters is woefully two-dimensional and ought not be. Their actions, then, ring a little hollow because they seem to be doing things for the sake of having something to do. Therein lies another short-cut problem: most of the conflict in this film is not conflict at all, but rather a series of obstacles meant to impede the progress of a character or give them something to solve to get to the next point. There is never a sense that a deeper solution is being explored.

The struggle with sexual identity, and during during puberty no less (the most difficult time in an adolescent’s life), is the main theme here. But it’s hampered by the very construct that makes the film so unique. One of the girls wonders aloud (in painfully overt dialogue) if she is a boy. When the magic flower turns her into a boy, her struggle is over; she knows she should be a boy. Because the “Who am I?” question is answered so early, when she reverts back to being a girl her pursuits are no longer about finding herself—they become about getting more nectar (there’s the addiction part) to become a boy again, so she can pursue a love interest while she is in male form.

Keining then doubles-down, creating a love triangle among the girl, her romantic interest, and a third (established) character. Because the girl frequently changes gender via the magic nectar, the love triangle twists the gender-bend. It’s all so mad, really, and what once tried to be a film about deep things quickly devolves in the third act to become another pouty, “Why don’t you love me?” teen melodrama. Although one with a set-up I’ve never seen before.

But there’s some positives to Girls Lost too. The trio of actresses are terrific, especially Tuva Jagell as Kim. And the boys who play the girls as boys—Emrik Öhlander as Kim, Alexander Gustavsson (as Momo) and Vilgot Ostwald Vesterlund (as Bella)—do well to capture the wonder one might experience in such a unique situation. The film also has some fine lighter moments, especially when the girls look at themselves in the mirror after transforming.

Speaking of that transformation, the VFX used to show it onscreen are top-notch. It would have been easy for Keining to use clever blocking and heavy editing to make the point, but instead she shows the girls transforming. It helps immensely that the boys bear great resemblances to the girls (a fine bit of casting), but the transformation is subtle to the point of requiring a double-take.

To pivot off that, Keining is incredibly strong with her overall visual presentation (aided by gorgeous lensing from Ragna Jorming). There isn’t a scene nor setting Keining can’t handle. This includes several hours of day and night, as well as some sublime underwater shots. The director also knows when camera movement is most effective. Her handling of the film’s tenderest moments—mostly involving the trio of girls early in the picture—is deeply moving.

Girls Lost is an incredibly ambitious undertaking, and if anything can be said about Keining, who adapted the screenplay from a popular Swedish YA novel, it’s that she is undaunted in the face of both delicate and intricate material. It might not always work, but her combination of strengths and her bold attempt at storytelling make this film—and Keining’s future—is well worth the time to pay attention to.

The definitive teen film of my generation is John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985). I saw it in the theater on its initial release, I’ve watched it countless times on cable and home video, I’ve introduced it to my kids, I’ve seen it in the theater again on re-release, and I’ve even hosted screenings of it in my local cinema (as recently as May, 2015). There is a quote in that endlessly quotable film that I kept coming back to as I watched Bienvenue à F.L., Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ first feature film. Carl the Janitor (John Kapelos) says to the lamenting Assistant Principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), “C’mon Vern, the kids haven’t changed. You have.” If there is anything this documentary proves, it’s that quote.

In an effort to do something different and positive, Gabrielle Chaput enlists the students of a Quebec high school to participate in the “Inside Out Project.” The task put forth to the school’s 1,162 students is simple: pair with a randomly assigned student, get to know them (even if just a little bit), and photograph them in front of a background of white with a black-dotted pattern. The resulting photos will then be plastered on the school’s drab exterior, creating a collage of the present day’s student body meant to celebrate them and offer an interesting alternative to the drab grey walls that remind many of the kids of a prison. Documentarian Dulude-De Celles is there to capture the event, and much more.

This is really a tale of three films. The first film—the best film—is populated with teenagers in fairly extreme close-ups discussing directly to the camera, and in what seems to be considerable candor, myriad issues that face them as high schoolers. They discuss cliques and acceptance into groups (or the sad lack thereof). They discuss the pressures teens face—pressures from school and parents and friends and cliques and jobs and romantic interests and the various combinations thereof and so on. They discuss the socioeconomic realities of their lives, mostly defined by their wardrobes. Some students confess, passively, to modifying their behavior so as to be accepted by the masses. Others boast, also passively, to clinging to their individualism, masses be damned.

In this best film, every student’s take is as powerful and riveting as the next because of how honest each is. And it’s not as if these statements and sentiments are necessarily negative; they’re simply statements of fact that, when delivered by today’s teens, ring heavy with truth. They are also devoid of the drama one might expect from a documentary about teens of today. There is no talk of drugs. There is no talk of sex. There is no talk of violence. While it might be easy to criticize a film about teens that lacks these issues, I prefer to view it as a positive that a documentary with teens as its subject can still find compelling matter without resorting to the salacious.

The second film is where the good ends, sadly. In between these video confessionals are examples of what some teens do when they are not in school. One plays guitar and he is shown playing a song. Another is into parkour, and he is shown with his friends scaling gutters and somersaulting on rooftops. Another pair of teens are amateur filmmakers and shoot a film in one of their basements. All of this is fine, and it all illustrates what makes these teens happier than what school can provide. It just grinds the film to a near halt is all, because it’s not interesting in the least. Bienvenue à F.L. is already lean at 74 minutes, but much of it is padded with this kind of filler (honestly, do we need to see all the makeup a prom attendee applies)? There is enough of this filler to make one consider that there wasn’t enough “there” there to keep the interesting parts of the doc the dominating thread.

The third film is pure frustration. A main theme of the ongoing story is the Inside Out Project. It is introduced early, and it treats the viewer to a scene of kids taking pictures of each other for the project. But nothing is ever developed in terms of how these random pairs of kids interact. I’m not one to usually say when a film should have something in it that it doesn’t, but in this case, much was made early about randomizing the pairs—as if two kids from wildly different cliques, kids who might not ever interact, are suddenly forced to collaborate, with the results to be revealed in the film. This never happens, and it’s terribly disappointing.

I cited the quote from The Breakfast Club because as I listened to the kids speak to the camera, I found myself harkening back to my high school days. Despite being part of a graduating class of less than 100 kids, and being part of a high school with less than 400 total students, my triumphs and tragedies and fears and realities were no different than those of these subjects. The same can be said for my teenage daughters. So what Carl the Janitor said holds true: kids don’t change; we do. We grow up and move on, putting high school behind us, and leaving for the coming generations the same general fears and frustrations. The details might differ (my youth was more about Pac-Man than parkour), but the sentiment and the themes remain the same.

Bienvenue à F.L. is one of those films that will mean different things to different generations of people, and yet still mean the same thing to everyone. In the end, though, the collage of experiences, like the collage of pictures taken for the Inside Out Project, is better suited as a living yearbook for the students showcased than it is as a true documentary.

I first saw Byung-Hun Lee in 2013’s Red 2, but I didn’t really take notice of the South Korean superstar until I caught the sublime I Saw the Devil while binge-watching SoKo thrillers on Netflix. While I haven’t been eager to seek his work in the two G.I. Joe films, I am a huge fan of Masquerade, a 2013 South Korean period drama in which Lee plays two roles (in a plot device similar to Ivan Reitman’s Dave, although far more serious). After this year’s disappointing Terminator: Genisys, in which he also appears, it seems Lee’s talents are better suited away from Hollywood, and probably more appreciated as well. In his latest film, Memories of the Sword, he returns to period drama in an entry in the genre that includes action, romance, and pathos.

In medieval South Korea, teenager Seol-Hee (Go-eun Kim) is being raised by her surrogate mother, teahouse owner Seol-Rang (Do-Yeon Jeon). However, Seol-Rang knows more than just making tea. She was once a great sword master but has since gone blind. Still, she has the skills to train the child in her care to be a sword master for a new generation, but one with a clear and singular purpose: when Seol-Hee turns 20, she will kill the people who killed her natural parents. What Seol-Hee doesn’t know is that Seol-Rang is one of those people. The other person is Deok-Gi (Byung-Hun Lee), a high-ranking general in the Goryeo Dynasty. But this isn’t a mere tale of revenge, and there is more to each of these characters than initially shown.

Actually, there is much, much more than meets the eye, and all of it is sensational, thanks in large part to the film’s screenplay, co-written by Ah-reum Choi and director Heung-Sik Park. This duo has written a richly crafted tale that balances concurrent themes of history and destiny. Weaving into that fabric a collection of carefully considered origin stories, paths to glory, roads to hell, romance, tragedy, and even a political coup. It has all the trappings of something gloriously Shakespearean, but the ambitious filmmakers also double-down with numerous action sequences. That the film is only a minute over two hours is nothing short of remarkable, as there is enough content here for a TV miniseries three times that long. Yet, with the exception of a pair of integral characters who could have been better developed, the story never feels like it’s rushing to get anywhere. This speaks to both the density of the material and to Park’s skill as a director.

Park doesn’t only carry a heavy load, he balances it, too. Moods in the film run the gamut. There is the joy a teenage girl feels when her skills move to another level (symbolic of puberty, really, adding a coming-of-age element to an already full slate of themes). There is the tender romance between two people fated to be together, yet fated to be apart. There are calculating political maneuvers made and passionate battles fought. There is fear. There is regret. There is a sense of tragic inevitability that ultimately casts a pall over the latter portions of the film.

In what is probably the best scene of the film, Park’s balancing act is on full display. In a heavy rain, a band of assassins attacks the home of Deok-Gi. As his men fight off the attackers in a space of land in front of the house, Deok-Gi makes a pot of tea and “hears” (via voiceover) Seol-Rang explain how to prepare perfect tea. Amidst chaos and violence, Park manages to deftly integrate a breathless education in boiling water. It’s hypnotic.

The action in that scene—and most of the action in the other scenes—does not disappoint. Park uses every hand-to-hand combat direction resource at his disposal: from blocking and choreography to razor-sharp editing and just enough wire-fu to dazzle viewers without defying belief. He also masterfully utilizes changing frame rates to slow or accelerate the action, leaving the viewer breathless from the pulsating tempo of the action. The best action scene of the bunch occurs in silhouette, when Seol-Hee infiltrates Deok-Gi’s compound and dispenses of several of his men.

Memories of the Sword is not without flaws, but I cannot remember the last time a film had me so eager to see what the next scene would bring the way this film did. I have been a fan of South Korean period dramas for some time now, and this film has earned its place in my collection of favorites.

Recently, the staff here at Way Too Indie put together a list of independent films we thought Alfred Hitchcock might have made if The Master of Suspense had come up in the Kickstarter Era. There were some great choices, including Mulholland Dr. and Stoker, while my pick was The Usual Suspects. It’s too bad that assignment came before I had the chance to screen Queen of Earth. The psychological drama not only invokes Hitch, it screams Hitch.

Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) is a young woman on the ropes, having recently lost her father and been dumped by her boyfriend. Reeling from these impactful events, she looks to get away from it all by spending a week with Ginny (Katherine Waterston), an old and dear friend whose parents have a gorgeous and secluded lakeside vacation home. The retreat, however, proves less than helpful. Memories of happier times at the vacation home—times when Catherine’s (now-ex) boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley) was also a guest—surface to wrack Catherine’s conscience. Agitating things further are Ginny’s passive/aggressive behavior towards Catherine and the perpetual presence of Ginny’s neighbor/plaything Rich (Patrick Fugit), who takes a peculiar antagonistic approach when dealing with Catherine. Difficult memories and constant defensiveness take a grinding toll on Catherine’s already frail psyche, driving her deeper into despair and paranoia.

Queen of Earth is far more than just an exercise in observing one woman’s psyche slowly unravel, although it’s certainly that. The film opens at Catherine’s emotional Ground Zero; dismissed by a cheating boyfriend while reeling from the loss of her father. Writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s extreme close-ups on Moss are startling, revealing bloodshot eyes and a reddened nose and makeup ruined beyond repair, all from a recent (and clearly heavy) crying jag.

From here, Perry avoids the worn path of a woman making bad decisions while in an emotional fog. He also avoids presenting a woman who attempts to find herself after a lifetime of being defined by men. Instead, the filmmaker skillfully presents Catherine’s gradual decline within the framework of a larger, but quite intricate, story about friendship and the wages of the sin of pride. The relationship between Catherine and Ginny is strong and certainly has positive roots, but there is something more going on between them.

In addition to a terrific story, the film has many technical strengths, beginning with pop-up flashbacks that vanish almost as quickly as they appear. These brief scenes are critical to establishing the story’s foundation, even as it builds upon itself. It isn’t necessarily parallel storytelling, more a form of context to the present-day action. With masterful editing by Robert Greene and Peter Levinto, these flashbacks take the story between present day and about a year prior. It’s an unsettling technique, but it’s through these glimpses into the past—moments seen through both Catherine and Ginny’s eyes—that we’re allowed a comparison and contrast of how the two friends have changed in a year, and how their core attitudes have not.

Gloriously filmed in 16mm by cinematographer Sean Price Williams and set to a bare, haunting score by Keegan DeWitt, Queen of Earth channels the psychological dramas of the ’60s and ’70s, right down to spot-on title cards in soft pink cursive that mark each day that passes in the week-long story.

The presentation and aesthetics of the film fire on all cylinders, and at the heart of the film is a pair of performances simultaneously different yet complementary. Both are so very good.

As Catherine, Moss is turned loose, her confidence as an actress affording her the luxury of fearlessness. She manages the varying aspects of Catherine expertly, playing a woman freshly scorned and wearing every emotion on her tear-drenched sleeve; playing coy but paranoid conducting mysterious phone calls at random times during the day; and at other times a socially awkward introvert disarmed by an unexpected party. Moss delivers in amazing ways. Conversely, Waterston, as Ginny, is incredibly restrained. Her calm hostess to Moss’s unhinged basket case is at all times cool, almost aloof, with something of a sinister passive/aggressive treatment of Catherine that is captivating.

The tale ends with a devilish ending. To say more would be criminal, but I will add that a second watch of the film—with a full understanding of the ending—is highly recommended, providing a chance to catch the little clues that may be missed during a first watch.

What makes Queen of Earth so Hitchcockian isn’t Catherine’s plummet into madness, but rather how her spiral starts and how it accelerates. Setting it within the company of friends and against a placid backdrop reminds me of something Hitch would do as well, as comfortable surroundings only make the discomfort of psychological drama that much more uncomfortable. As for the roots of Catherine’s madness, I won’t say they are MacGuffins, but the loss of her father and end of a romance are clearly little more than starting points for something much more subtle and far more interesting.

Anecdotally, I would venture to guess that one of the top three settings for horror movies is the woods. (Haunted houses and school settings would be the other two.) Some of the great films of the genre are set in the woods, including early slasher flick Friday the 13th, indie juggernaut The Blair Witch Project, Whedon wonder The Cabin in the Woods, and personal fave Sleepaway Camp. High school horror might be a metaphor for youth, and a haunted house might represent the violation of a home’s security, but the woods, despite their earthly serenity, are full of actual living critters, so no one can ever know which creature might be up to no good. That’s scary.  The latest horror film to explore the wooded unknown is the Belgian movie Cub, from director/co-writer Jonas Govaerts.

Cub tells the tale of a pack of cub scouts who, led by adults Peter (Stef Aerts) and Kris (Titus De Voogdt), embark on a weekend camping trip in a local forest. As adult scout leaders en route to a campout with young scouts are wont to do, these adults tell the scouts a scary story; this one is the story of Kai, a werewolf who allegedly lives in the woods near where they are camping and has a penchant for killing campers.

One scout who takes the Kai story to heart is Sam (Maurice Luijten), a somewhat troubled 12-year-old whose belief in Kai invites derision from others (especially the adults). This becomes a problem, however, when Sam finds a secret tree house. He also comes face to face with that tree house’s resident, a young, masked feral boy (Gill Eeckelaert) Sam believes to be Kai; no one believes Sam when he recounts his tale, and it’s only when the feral boy’s (supposed) parental guardian starts racking up a body count that things are taken a little more seriously.

It’s time to add another title to the “What Could Have Been” pile. Cub, despite its good intentions and a solid premise, fails to do the one thing a horror film should do: generate terror.

It starts well, with an opening that finds a girl being chased through the woods. Not only is the scene exciting, efficient, and very well shot (by cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis), it fully reveals the feral boy—who looks like a dirty kid in an angry Groot mask—in the first few seconds. It also reveals the diabolical nature of the traps the boy has set throughout the woods. It’s a great way to hook viewers in from the get-go.

This opening gambit is followed by a classic set-up: a group of people (kids, in this case) go carting off into the woods and once they get there, things go wrong. It’s here director Govaerts allows the discovery of evil to gradually unfold, which is reminiscent of early slasher films, where atmosphere and mood (and just enough plot) are allowed to breathe before things accelerate.

Govaerts, however, doesn’t really know how to accelerate the film into that high horror gear. What should be an enthralling sequence of events that alternate from suspenseful to terrifying and back again are instead a scattershot collection of moments separated by rhythmless downtime. And those moments are not frightening; they’re shocking at best and at worst, they’re sadistic incidents played out for nothing more than sadism’s sake.

Be shocked! as an adult brutally abuses a child in a grossly disproportionate response to an event. Be shocked! as a collection of children fall victim to a random act of violence. Be shocked! when a dog is specifically targeted to be the victim of egregious violence, not only in another grossly disproportionate act, but in an act that does nothing to advance the plot or develop a character.

None of this is to say shock is bad; it isn’t. Shock can be fun.  But shock is a horror film’s empty calories—the cheese puffs that might taste good in the moment but offer nothing in the way sustenance; being force-fed too many leaves little more than a tacky residue on the fingers.

The film is not without its positives, including the aforementioned open, some other bright spots including a clever title, considerable creativity in the those diabolical traps set in the woods, and Maurice Luijten as Sam, who calls to mind, at least in appearance, a young River Phoenix.

Unfortunately these things aren’t enough.  Flat characters, gaping plotholes, and inexplicable creative choices combine to be too much for Cub to pull itself out of the death spiral it takes once it peaks as it moves into the second act.

Cub is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

I’ve come to be spoiled on period dramas from Asia. Excellent films like The Last Tycoon (1910-1940 China), Masquerade (16th century Korea), War of the Arrows (17th century Korea), and The Gangster (1950s-1960s Bangkok) are great examples of movies made by filmmakers who understand the critical need to properly manage drama and action within the broader scope of history to produce a robust and high-quality film. Assassination looks to join those ranks, and it has two great things going for it out of the gate: director Choi Dong-hoon, whose previous outing was the slick and entertaining heist flick The Thieves, and star Gianna Jun, a high-profile Korean actress also of The Thieves as well as Blood: The Last Vampire.

Assassination is set in 1930s China, and during this time in history Korea is under Japanese rule; the Korean resistance hides from Japanese authorities in China’s northeast region, known as Manchuria. In an effort to thwart the Japanese, the provisional Korean government hatches a plan to assassinate two key Japanese authority figures. The government appoints Yem Sek-jin (Lee Jung-jae) to recruit three military prisoners—experts the Japanese government knows nothing about—to do the job: military school graduate Big Gun (Cho Jin-woong), explosives expert Duk-sam (Choi Deok-moon), and sniper Ahn Okyun (Gianna Jun).

Despite the players’ degree of expertise, the plan does not go smoothly. There is a traitor in the midst of the provisional government who tips off the Japanese leadership. They, in turn, hire freelance killer Hawaiian Pistol (Ha Jung-woo) and his partner (Oh Dal-soo) to eliminate the freedom-fighting trio and quash the resistance.

Based on that description alone, Assassination sounds reminiscent of many American films, particularly from the 1980s, where experts are assembled to carry out some critical mission (everything from Vietnam drama Uncommon Valor to sci-fi/actioner Predator springs to mind), and not everyone makes it back alive, and those that do are forever changed. This happens in Assassination, but where those other films might include some backstory or a little personal drama to add depth to the film, this one adds an inordinate amount of backstory, subplot, and supporting characters. This scope, with an expansive and critical period in history as the backdrop, is the film’s fatal problem.

Trouble begins in the opening scenes, both in structure and in theme. Structurally, the film opens in 1911 with something of a vague prologue, shifts to 1949 and the investigation of anti-national crimes, and then settles into its primary calendar point of 1933. This past/future/present construct sets a rocky tone for the film, making it difficult to know what, if any, time-shifts will occur again, and whether or not the film will play out in three different eras. Those issues (sort of) get resolved as time goes on, but to reveal more would require an explanation of actions and events so lengthy it would spoil a lot and undermine the purpose of actually watching the film.

Thematically, that vague prologue comes into greater focus as the film progresses, ultimately maturing into a predictable set-up for a plot twist that disintegrates into contrived melodrama—unrelated to the assassination plot—that sets up third-act (and even epilogue) events that attempt to be Shakespearean. And that’s only with one main character; this film has five other main characters, plus many smaller ones, and this, too, greatly hampers the film. Its players and their stories are sprawling to the point of being unwieldy, with a constant sense of urgency to wrap the current scene featuring some characters so as to get to the next scene featuring other characters. Choi, as screenwriter, sets himself up for directorial failure with a story that wants to say and do far too much, even within its lengthy 140-minute run time. All of this rushing makes for lackluster direction.

Such as it is, the film becomes an exercise in tolerating the story until it drives to the next action set-piece, which is where Choi’s directorial flair is put to better use. It also puts Jun to better use, whose considerable talent—both as an actress and as an action star—is mostly wasted here. She does well with her dramatic scenes and her action scenes are electrifying (including a great rooftop-to-ground descent that is NOT performed by a stunt double), but her scenes are too brief and too far between. The technical execution, particularly in the areas of costume design and set decoration, is the film’s other bright spot.  Interiors and exteriors are rich with era-appropriate detail, and the costumes adorning characters from all walks of life help set the right mood.

Assassination is ambitious, and it wants desperately to be one of those epics that becomes synonymous with the period in history it tries to portray. It has its moments, but not enough to give it that kind of gravitas. Unlike other Asian period dramas before it, this film neither focuses on a succinct enough subject within the broader context of history, nor does it rise to the challenge of the scope before it.

One lazy afternoon when I was a kid, I came across Ranald MacDougall’s 1959 film The World, the Flesh and the Devil on UHF; I’ve been a fan of post-apocalyptic films ever since. I can’t speak to whatever deep-rooted psychological reasons fuel this in me, but what I find most interesting about the sub-genre is each filmmaker’s vision of what the future will look like after a global catastrophe, whether that disaster is natural or man-made. The latest glance at what a filmmaker thinks of the world’s bleak future can be found in Orion, from writer/director Asiel Norton.

David Arquette plays the Hunter, a man wandering alone in a desolate world known as The Rust. The shell of a large parking garage where he scavenges suggests civilization once thrived not that long ago (about a century, according to opening title cards), but the rat he is forced to trap and eat is the mascot for just how far that civilization has fallen. Meanwhile, Magus (Goran Kostic), a magician, helps deliver the baby of the Virgin (Lily Cole), but Magus disposes of the child in accordance with a ritual as documented in a large tome he possesses. The Virgin is then held captive by Magus. As the Hunter wanders, he comes across the home where Magus and the Virgin live, and the magician invites the Hunter in for a meal. While there, the Virgin desperately but discreetly asks the Hunter to help her escape. One thing Magus, the Virgin, and the Hunter all know is that there is something greater at work in the universe—a destiny for the Hunter they all will help fulfill.

Orion might take place in a post-apocalyptic world, but it isn’t a post-apocalyptic film; other than some hollowed-out buildings and some props, there is no real connection to life before the catastrophe. The story (such as it is) could have just as easily taken place in ancient Europe, and one gets the sense that the century-removed, post-apocalyptic backstory/setting was a creative decision driven by the sets available for filming. An approach of using what is available might embody the spirit of independent filmmaking, and the dilapidated buildings and other “civilization used to be here” settings all look terrific, but none of that matters if the storytelling doesn’t work.

Orion‘s storytelling doesn’t work; in fact, it’s threadbare. The construct is interesting enough: a man must fulfill his destiny, and part of that destiny is rescuing the damsel in distress whom he falls in love with. There’s a bad guy that is both the obstacle to saving the girl and yet part of the greater destiny, and there is a smaller character (the Fool, played by Maren Lord), who helps the hero. It has the potential for depth and density, but instead it is a shell of a story, like an outline sketched as a placeholder for something greater.

Norton is far more interested in reveling in his own directorial style than he is in creating anything substantive. He establishes his story, dolls it up with some mysticism, some title cards with Olde Tyme font, some nudity, and some Tarot-like storytelling device, then clings to an endless series of shaky, hand-held close-ups (close-ups that ultimately undermine any action taking place during the Hunter/Magnus battles) and long scenes of the Hunter pondering his destiny. These ponderous scenes, which include clips of what the Hunter is thinking (foretelling?) are replete with pseudo-mysterious dialogue (“He’s coming. He’s me.”) delivered via voiceover and incessantly repeated at various volume levels. It feels like watching a medieval perfume commercial.

Throw in some Christian symbolism to give the tale a little spiritual heft, and Norton wants you to think he’s made something deep. He hasn’t. He’s committed a live-action RPG to film and acted as its middling game master.

The cast is fine although mostly unchallenged by the material, with the exception of Kostic as Magus. The character, while not deep, has some scenery-chewing moments and Kostic delivers. When Norton allows the camera to occasionally open up, Lyn Moncrief’s cinematography is quite nice. It also bears repeating that that the sets are very good, along with the costumes.

Another facet of post-apocalyptic films that draws me to them is the opportunity to ponder if I could survive in that creator’s imagined realm. I like to think that in most cases I would, but if ever I were faced with the choice of dying during the apocalypse or living in Asiel Norton’s future, well, tell my family I love them.

Orion made its World Premiere on August 1st at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. To find out more about the festival, visit www.fantasiafestival.com

Watch enough independent films and it becomes hard to avoid looking for “the next one”—the film that, on the surface, might look like any another genre entry in a long list of low-budget genre entries, but manages to rocket above the rest with something else, something special. Some titles have already done it in 2015, like Appropriate Behavior (romantic comedy), Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (drama), and Spring (horror). It’s time to add a thriller to the top shelf of indie standouts: Alex R. Johnson‘s transfixing slow-burner, Two Step.

James (Skyy Moore) is a kid with a rough life behind him and nothing all that promising ahead. Already orphaned (his parents died) and recently kicked out of college, the young man pays a visit to his grandmother, only to meet more tragedy: she is in mid-stroke when he arrives, after which she soon passes. Even with his late grandma’s house and a pretty decent inheritance to his name, James is young man with nothing to lose. The only person in his life is his grandma’s middle-aged neighbor, Dot (Beth Broderick).

Webb (James Landry Hébert) is a felon doing time when, via some little phone-scamming techniques from inside, he tricks an old man into believing he is his grandson and needs to send money to bail him out. Once out, Webb shows up at his girlfriend Amy’s (Ashley Spillers) house. He wants to see her, but he also wants his half of the take from a previous job. Amy wants no part of Webb and flees her own home the first chance she gets.

Desperate for his money, a lot of which he owes to shady liquor store owner Duane (Jason Douglas), Webb decides to scam a previous mark: James’ grandma. When she doesn’t answer or return his calls, he shows up at her house only to find James there. Surprise quickly turns violent and in minutes, James finds himself Webb’s captive. The situation only grows more desperate and more violent from there.

Two Step is not only “the next one,” it’s something else entirely. Writer/director Johnson is an incredibly disciplined storyteller and filmmaker. As the latter, he deconstructs the thriller genre and rebuilds it with a rich genuineness of events, surrounded by intricate layers of character and relationship development that a viewer usually doesn’t find in a home invasion film.

That genuineness is found mostly in what Johnson doesn’t do. He shows great restraint with events, actions, and characters (and their relationships), constantly avoiding what is so often the expected path in films like this, while at the same time maintaining every ounce of believability in every action, reaction, outcome, and ripple effect. The challenge for me is that to offer an example of any of these decisions would be giving a micro-spoiler—not of the entire film, of course, but of these special moments that consistently and refreshingly surprise.

Johnson also constructs clever parallels between the pair of trios led by James and Webb. Over the course of their respective lives, James has been a victim and Webb a victimizer (most especially in the moment their lives converge). The women in their lives are opposites as well. Webb’s Amy is young and troubled and wants nothing to do with him. James’ Dot is mature, wise, and—no matter the newness of their friendship—only wants to help James. Finally, James and Webb each have something of a patriarch in their lives. For Webb, it’s Duane, shady and full of nothing but cynicism. For James that duty falls on his grandma’s attorney Ray (Brady Coleman), an upholder, not a breaker, of the law. There are even peripheral masculine figures in the opposite camps—hired muscle (Johnny Snyder) for Duane and a cop with a crush on Dot (Barry Tubb).

These supporting characters may travel along this parallel road with James and Webb, but it’s them doing the traveling along a road  potholed with desperation. For James, it’s born out of stupidity—his criminal actions, his violent ways, his poor decisions. For James, it’s born out of helplessness—his parents dead, his grandma dead, himself a captive in his own home.

Ultimately, Johnson’s brilliance comes from writing a smart story within the framework of his chosen genre, not letting the genre—and the tired entries that came before—dictate how his story should proceed or how his characters should develop.

As a director, Johnson is just as good as he is a storyteller, if not better. Despite the story’s start (the first act is more slow than deliberate), there is real technical excellence in Johnson’s direction. It’s an incredibly crafted film. Every shot is effective, efficient, impactful, and captivating. Every shot is also a visual joy thanks to cinematographer Andrew Lillen, whose lensing is gorgeous, particularly what he does with natural sunlight. Rounding out this technical excellence is the acting, and almost everyone in this cast of character actors, newcomers, and unknowns delivers big, led by Hébert, who dazzles as he wields his reckless power over the helpless Moore.

A lot of movies can grab you by the lapels and give you a good shake to get your attention. Two Step isn’t that obvious. Instead, after staring you down, the film slowly glides around you, grips you tightly by the back of your neck, and demands your attention.

In late 2012 saw Love, Marilyn, a documentary about the life of Marilyn Monroe. While so much had already been written about the iconic actress, what made that doc unique was how the narrative was presented. Rather than follow a traditional documentary structure, the actress’ life was instead presented in a series of her own personal writings—and the writings of those who knew her—as read by a parade of modern Hollywood stars.

After successful debuts at both Sundance and New Directors/New Films festival, this week sees the limited release of Listen to Me Marlon, a documentary about another iconic celebrity, Marlon Brando. Like Marilyn’s doc, the story is told in a unique way, but instead of using the voices of others to tell Marlon’s tale, director Stevan Riley uses Brando’s own voice as the narrator.

As lifetime highlight reels go, Listen to Me Marlon does a very good job. Riley covers the actor’s childhood, his relationship with his parents, his studies at The New School under the legendary Stella Adler, his film career (with plenty of clips), his children, his activism, the decline of his career, the rebirth of his career, and the tumult and tragedy that filled so much of his later life. Riley also pivots deftly from subject to subject, routinely veering away from a linear telling but never losing the viewer in the process. He hits key moments in Brando’s past not according to a calendar but when they need to be hit to make the right point about the actor’s life or career. As a bonus, the director is not afraid to return to people from Brando’s past, like his parents or Adler, as the narrative warrants it.

Given the breadth of Brando’s career, his devastating charisma, and his real-life drama, this highlight reel (with its endless trove of remarkable still photographs, movie clips, news footage, and other source audio/video) and the way it is structured would have made for a compelling—or at least entertaining—biography. It’s Riley’s narrative approach that puts the doc on another level, and the opening title card says it all:

“Throughout his lifetime Marlon Brando made hundreds of hours of private audio recordings none of which have been heard by the public until now.”

“Until now.” This is what makes Listen to Me Marlon such a hypnotic film: every narrated word is in Brando’s own voice, culled from tapes and assembled in an incredible marriage of image and voice. But even “narrated word” is misleading because Brando doesn’t truly narrate the film. The late actor reflects and ruminates and espouses and regrets and mourns and more, all through a collection of stream-of-consciousness moments that are paired with perfect visual accompaniment. This is Brando opening up, not reading a script.

Or is it?

Of course he’s not literally reading a script, but there is something to raise an eyebrow about here. Riley, in an effort to present “Brando on Brando” with all of this terrific source material, doesn’t consider that a two-time Oscar winner (Best Actor for both 1954’s On the Waterfront and 1972’s The Godfather) and one of the greatest actors Hollywood has ever produced might just be acting on tape for an audience of one: himself.

He is enamored by his own profession, his place in its history, and his persona. He even takes time to name-check a few actors from 1930s/1940s Hollywood and compare them to breakfast cereal in the sense that the audience knows what it’s going to get with every role (like a box of cereal each morning, the same thing over and over).

Since Brando is not without ego, there’s something to be said for his collection of hours of himself on tape (a collection that includes recordings of self-hypnosis sessions). To what end did he do it? Is part of it a symptom of OCD? Maybe. But he must have considered the tapes would one day be heard, so surely it’s not impossible that Brando might have embellished or dramatized some of his free-form stories. This is never explored, so we are left to take Brando at his word that what he is saying is not just for the sake of putting on a show.

(And even if it is, it’s a damn good show.)

As I am not well-versed in the history of Marlon Brando, I cannot say what, if any, of this documentary offers anything in terms of substance beyond what has already been published or produced. Regardless, Listen to Me Marlon is a spellbinding watch, a great exercise in alternative story presentation, and a terrific collection of clips and pics of a Hollywood legend.

A version of this review was first published as part of our ND/NF 2015 coverage. The film releases in NYC July 29 and LA July 31, 2015.