In Jim Mickle’s chameleonic noir thriller Cold in July, an adaptation of the cult novel by Joe R. Lansdale, Michael C. Hall takes perhaps the most drastic departure in his career, playing Richard Dane, a timid, unremarkable picture frame store owner who accidentally shoots a burglar in his small-town Texas home in the film’s wonderfully edited, punchy opening. The gutless Richard, shaken by the consequences of his twitchy trigger finger, is soon plunged head-first into a world of old-school cowboy badasses and gunfights when Russel, (a gruff Sam Shepard) the father of the slain home invader, seeks revenge on Richard and his family. The strength of Mickle’s film is that, once you feel like you know exactly where it’s going, it takes an unexpected turn and becomes almost a new kind of film entirely. The film’s weakness is that the varied forms it inhabits feel largely derivative, not elevated enough to free themselves from the norm.

At first, Richard and his wife (Vinessa Shaw) and son are terrorized by Russel, with the creepy ex-con picking up where his son left off, invading the Dane home, more as an act of intimidation than stealing. Mickle is gifted at squeezing every bit of intensity and terror out of classic stalker scenes, and these early sequences are truly gripping. He relishes in playing with genre conventions, mining the work of Romero most notably, though less so than his Zombie thriller, Stake Land. Pulpy ’70s flicks inform Cold in July‘s style throughout, with grisly flashes of violence punctuating Mickle’s methodical approach to action. (An exception is the film’s climax, a nighttime shootout that falls apart quickly and finishes of the film with an ugly thud.)

Hall, wearing a gloriously ’80s mullet, is fantastic as Richard, a meek man forced to become a tough-guy overnight. Helping him along on his road to becoming a true badass is Don Johnson, playing a karate-kicking private eye who gives the film a welcome dose of bravado. The relationship between Richard and Russel goes to unexpected places I won’t spoil here, but I will say that Hall and Shepard have a quiet chemistry that stretches them both as actors. Shaw, however, is regrettably invisible, adding little to the emotional core of the story, despite her character’s positioning in the plot being ripe for powerful scenes of heartache and fear. Those scenes never come.

Richard’s arc is fascinating on paper; he’s faced with the responsibility of being an alpha male for the sake of protecting his family. In that gunshot flash that opens the movie, he sends himself down a path he’d never had the desire to go down, and yet, he must man up or perish. What sullies the emotional impact of his story are the later acts, whose blood-splattering violence is so arresting and dizzying you forget the subtle details of what brought our hero there in the first place. Everything devolves into midnight movie craziness, and while it doesn’t erase how involving the first two thirds of the film are, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. There’s a powerful theme of fatherly duty swimming around in the buckets of blood, but it in the end it all but drowns.

Cold in July trailer

This past Thursday we chatted with the stars of Alex of Venice, which closed out this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival at the Castro Theatre. Director Chris Messina, stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Don Johnson, and SFIFF57 Director of Programming Rachel Rosen spoke with us about Messina’s directorial debut, the festival buzz, and why Winstead will never call Don Johnson “Daddy”.

Noah Cowan has only been San Francisco Film Society Executive Director for about ten weeks, but in that short stay his presence has lit a fire under an already lively film community. Last night, at the Closing Night screening of Alex of Venice at the Castro Theatre, Cowan addressed the crowd from the same podium he did when festival began two weeks ago, thanking Programming Director Rachel Rosen and her team for putting together a fantastic lineup of films, thanking the festival staff and volunteers for their hard work, and thanking the audience for partaking in the festivities. His enthusiasm for the future of the festival and SFFS–community building, educational programs, the fall Cinema By The Bay series–was echoed by the buzzing crowd. The future looks bright for the longest running film festival in the Americas.

Rosen then took the stage to introduce the night’s guest of honor, actor Chris Messina (The Mindy Project), whose directorial debut Alex of Venice would close out the festival. Also in attendance were stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Don Johnson, and Katie Nehra (who also co-wrote the screenplay), and producer Jamie Patricof. A soul-searcher family drama, the film follows Winstead’s Alex, an environmentalist attorney so preoccupied with work that her husband (Messina), feeling neglected and trapped as a stay-at-home dad, takes a sabbatical from the family, leaving Alex to take care of her aging actor dad (Johnson) and ten-year-old son (Skylar Gaertner).

Winstead is given a lot to work with in the role of Alex, as the material requires her to explore myriad colors of emotion as a mother overwhelmed by a sense of abandonment, isolation, a scattered home life, and a hefty workload. She rises to the occasion and emerges as the film’s greatest asset. Johnson, who’s been enjoying a second wind career-wise as of late, is on the money as usual, but it would have been nice to have seen a few more layers of texture added to his character in the unpolished script, which gets hung up on family drama tropes every time it starts to build a bit of momentum. Messina shows major promise as a director, and with a couple more films under his belt could be great.

Also screening on the last night of the festival across town at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas was Kelly Reichardt’s latest, Night Moves. Jesse Eisenberg (in his second festival appearance, the first being The Double) and Dakota Fanning play Josh and Dena, a pair of environmental activists who, with the help of an ex-Marine accomplice named Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), blow up a dam in Oregon, and then wade through the dark world of paranoia, guilt, and suspicion that descends upon them following their extreme, costly actions.

Reichardt, lauded for minimalist, meditative pictures like Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, has fashioned a dark psychological thriller in Night Moves, her most accessible film to date. She still gives her actors a football field’s worth of emotional ground to cover with understated, revealing long takes and deceptively deep dialogue, but compared to how hushed her previous efforts were, this film seems to move along briskly. Some of the night time photography is bone-chillingly gorgeous, and this may be Reichardt’s most visually refined film to date, but the script slips off the edge in its third act, providing little food for thought. Still, we’re still left with the thick, atmospheric imagery and fine performances to chew on, which is more than enough to warrant a watch.

I Origins the latest effort from Another Earth director Mike Cahill, takes an excellent, heady sci-fi premise and mucks up the execution, resulting in a disappointingly half-hearted picture. We follow Dr. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), a young scientist with an obsessive  fascination with eyes and their origins. His life’s work is to end the debate between scientists and religion by proving that eyes are a product of evolutionary development, not Intelligent Design. He takes close-up photos of people’s eyes regularly, and meets the love of his life (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) at a party while using the eye-photo line as an icebreaker. She’s a spiritual soul, though, and isn’t on the same page when it comes to his work in the lab, unlike his lab assistant (Brit Marling), who with Ian unlocks a mystery that could change the world.

Far-fetched isn’t always a bad thing, especially when it comes to sci-fi; unbelievable plots can work as long as the drama is convincing and the filmmaker convinces us to invest in the characters’ plight. Cahill falls short in this regard, beating the spirituality vs. pragmatism drum too loudly stretching the one-dimensional characters so thin you begin to wonder where the story is going with all the scientific jibber-jabber and rudimentary existential debates. After the film’s predictable, overwrought, dud of an ending, it’s unclear what exactly the film is trying to say. What’s the big idea? There’s some poignant statement or metaphor buried underneath the piles of pseudoscience jargon and fleeting moments of serendipity, but Cahill fails to mine it.

The 57th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival, which runs from April 24-May 8, has announced its opening night film as The Two Faces of January, starring Oscar Isaac, Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst, which will be making it’s North American premiere at the fest. Closing out the festival will be Alex of Venice, the directorial debut of actor Chris Messina starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Don Johnson.

“We are delighted to offer these exceptional films by first-time directors who are best known for their work in other areas of the film world,” said San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Noah Cowan. “Championing talented artists who aren’t afraid of taking risks is at the heart of the Film Society’s mission and our ongoing support of filmmakers around the world. I can’t think of a better pair of films to kick off and wrap up what is going to be an amazing festival.”

The Two Faces of January (above) marks a directorial debut as well, in this caseof screenwriter Hossein Amini (Drive). Set in Greece, the thriller sees Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst play a couple who fall into a dangerous dilemma with an Athens tour guide (Oscar Isaac) following a murderous incident at their hotel.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars in Chris Messina’s Alex of Venice as a workaholic environmental lawyer whose husband (Messina) is fed up with being a stay-at-home father and decides to stay elsewhere. Winstead is left at home with her son and actor father (Don Johnson) and is forced to hold the family together all by herself.

For more festival info, visit sffs.org

Quentin Tarantino continues his new fascination of blending period pieces with grindhouse revenge films in Django Unchained, a movie that fans of Inglourious Basterds will surely enjoy. The setting this time is America several years before the civil war. Slavery is still going strong in the south, and Django (Jamie Foxx) is lucky enough to get freed by King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who needs him to identify a group of criminals he’s searching for.

Django tells Schultz his story: Him and his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) were branded and auctioned off separately after trying to escape a plantation together, and now with his freedom Django hopes to find his wife and buy her freedom as well. Schultz takes a liking to Django and offers him a deal: Train and work as a bounty hunter through the winter, and once the snow melts they’ll go rescue Broomhilda from the evil plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio) who owns her.

Tarantino surprisingly goes for a straight linear narrative here rather than breaking his story up into chapters, but the film still feels like it’s broken up into sections. The first hour or so follows Django and Schultz around as they try to collect different bounties. This section is probably the strongest part of Django Unchained, with Waltz doing his Hans Landa routine all over again. Naturally Waltz is a delight to watch, and his pairing with Foxx make the two of them a good team. There are plenty of flourishes here on Tarantino’s part, mainly a subplot involving a plantation owner (Don Johnson), but they’re so entertaining that it’s understandable why Tarantino wanted to keep them in the final cut.

Once DiCaprio finally shows up and the plot to rescue Broomhilda starts to take centre stage, the entertainment factor starts to decrease significantly. Foxx, spending most of his time staying quiet when he doesn’t have to make witty comebacks, barely registers once he’s put in the same room as Waltz or DiCaprio. When DiCaprio’s servant Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a slave whose dedication to his master makes him end up becoming the film’s big bad, enters the picture it’s hard to even remember Django’s presence in some scenes.

And as Django becomes the sole focus towards the end, the bloated 160 minute runtime starts to show. The climax, taking place after an incredibly bloody shootout that showed Tarantino firing on all cylinders, doesn’t have much power to it. Of course Tarantino is still a terrific writer/director, and Waltz, DiCaprio and Jackson are all worthy of awards for their brilliant performances, but Django Unchained doesn’t come close to matching the same level of giddy amazement as Inglourious Basterds. Fans of Tarantino won’t come away disappointed, but he can do a lot better than this.