Based on the life of Stanley Milgram, Experimenter pokes and prods at the mind as the late social psychologist did in his controversial obedience experiments conducted at Yale in the 1960s. The reality-bending film stars the charismatic Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram, who intermittently addresses the camera directly, commenting on his unlikely life story as we watch it unfold. Milgram’s obedience experiments—which involved a subject administering electric shocks to a second volunteer—changed the landscape of social psychology, though Milgram’s career would suffer due to many of his colleagues disagreeing with the ethicality of the experiment. Odd, mesmerizing and wildly inventive, Experimenter is one of the most unique things you’ll see this fall.

We spoke to director Michael Almereyda about the film, which also stars Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning, John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, and Winona Ryder (as Milgram’s wife, Sasha).

Experimenter is out in theaters and VOD now.

How were you introduced to Milgram’s work?
It’s called Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It has transcripts from the experiments and a detailed account of its genesis and execution. It was very compelling to me and I thought it would make a good movie. The more I read and researched, I began to recognize there was a bigger scope than those experiments. His mind was reaching past those experiments, but they kept creeping up on him from the shadows.

How long ago was this?
2008. I’d heard of [the experiment] before, but not with attention or definition. I didn’t know how clever, rich and exhaustive it was. I didn’t know he worked on it for two years. I also didn’t realize the controversy and repercussions.

I like the way the movie slips between different planes of reality.
I’m grateful that you say that, but in some ways it’s a pretty straightforward movie. It’s pretty chronological, there’s one flashback, and otherwise it’s really broken into three sections. It’s more flexible than most movies because there’s a playful recognition that it is a movie and he can talk to the camera. That idea was part of the original thought I had for the movie, before House of Cards happened, but not before Ferris Bueller. Talking to the camera has been with us for a long time, but it felt appropriate that someone as self-conscious and self-confident as Milgram would do it. In fact, Milgram made a series of films in which he talked to the camera. Milgram was aware that reality shifts and we have different ways of interpreting things.

Talk about your use of rear-projection.
It was meant to reflect the way that a lot of situations in life are staged, that we’re constantly acting. There’s a level of reality that feels distanced from our more immediate experience. Going to see an old mentor with your new wife can be a play, almost. You’re dressing up and trying to be somebody bigger than you are. Throughout the movie, there are these elements of staged reality where I wanted to be candid about it and allow the audience to see that there’s an element of play and performance.

Peter is very likable in the movie, and I think that’s critical.
I hoped he’d be charming and compelling. I’d known him for a while, and the key to casting this role was that he had to be agile with language. You had to believe he could write a book. Peter’s a really good writer on his own, and I think he’ll be directing movies soon. The last shot of the movie was his idea, and it wasn’t in the script and it wasn’t meant to be the last shot. When we were shooting, he said, “It could be interesting if I tried to wave to Sasha but she doesn’t see me.” I was grateful for that and it ended up being a very poignant way to end the movie.

How did you decide which aspects of Milgram’s life outside of the experiments to show?
Almost nothing in the movie is made up. The biggest liberty I took was that he never visited the set of the made-for-TV movie. I simply took what I thought was compelling. I thought it was pretty organic and cohesive that one experiment led to another and they reflect back on each other and his own experience being a human in a city. We often have these barriers that are unspoken, and he tried to make us more aware of them.

You said you wanted to make the kind of movie Milgram would make himself.
I was trying not to make a plodding, literal-minded biopic. He was a talented filmmaker. He made two films that I think are truly wonderful films. One is called Obedience, which was shot during the last two days of the experiment. It’s very compelling and Roger Ebert called it one of the ten most important documentaries ever made. The other is The City and the Self, where he was roaming around New York with a camera, staging experiments. It’s a city portrait from the ’70s, a very lyrical documentary. In 1974, he was approached by a BBC crew to talk about the experiment and he was apparently so authoritative and compelling that they let him write his own movie [instead of being the subject]. It’s called We Do As We Are Told.

Talk about casting known actors in the roles of the subjects as opposed to more obscure names.
To me, they weren’t that well known. I wanted interesting people who were compelling. I wanted each role to have an impact. Part of the luxury of making a low-budget film is that I asked the best people I know if they had anything better to do, and they said yes. There’s another version of the movie where everyone is more anonymous, but I didn’t think it served the story any better.

I thought Jim Gaffigan was great.
He was an early choice. I didn’t know about him. I’d thought about Philip Seymour Hoffman, who I’d asked to be in about seven of my movies and who kept not being in my movies. He was actually signed, but he got a better offer. He looked like the real guy. Gaffigan was recommended and I started watching these Youtube clips and I was completely captivated by him.

Sasha Milgram is in the film. What did she think of it?
I think she liked it. She’s frail and she’s so supportive. I showed it to her at her house on DVD. What was touching was, at a certain point, when her character comes up she turns to me and says, “That’s Winona Ryder!” She was very excited. She’s great.

What do you think Stanley’s greatest fear was?
I think the real Stanley was probably more prideful than he is in my movie. But at the same time he’s smart and aware of his own foibles. There’s one quote of his I didn’t put in the movie that had something to do with that, to be a good social scientist, you have to have courage. I think, whatever fears he had, he was pretty good at mastering them.

Reed Morano, a successful cinematographer, takes her first shot at directing with Meadowland. And it may be because she’s so cinematically inclined, or perhaps she has a dark side the public is getting a taste of here, but she’s chosen some truly heavy material from Chris Rossi (also his first) to kickstart her directorial career. Granted, drama makes for plenty of opportunity to play with the camera, and she certainly does, providing dreamy, close-up, mood all over the place. And it may be because she usually only has control of the camerawork of a film that she felt so inclined to rev up the other sensory experiences of the film to maximum intensity.

The film is about Sarah and Phil (Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson) who, at the film’s outset, are struck the heavy blow of having their only son kidnapped. Flash forward a year and Phil is back at work as a cop, dealing with his grief with the occasional support group meeting and lunches with a friend who lost his daughter (John Leguizamo). Sarah, on the other hand, stays fairly numb with the help of lithium, barely passing for a teacher at the grade school she teaches at. Clearly these two have chosen the grieve alone path, Sarah often wandering around Times Square late at night, not necessarily searching so much as distracting herself, and Phil parking outside the gas station where their son disappeared as though he may wander back in the dead of night.

The detective on their case presents some new evidence that suggests what neither, though Sarah especially, want to hear. In her own misguided attempt to avoid reality she goes to cringe-worthy extremes leading to a belligerent and uncomfortable end. Grief manifests differently for everyone, especially in the circumstance of a cold case where the absence of concrete evidence doesn’t allow for proper grief, but Sarah’s self-destruction is especially difficult to watch. Morano also makes it quite hard to listen to. The music and sound design of the film are pumped up so high at parts it hurts. What’s meant to be a distraction tactic for the characters is just plain wearisome for the viewer.

Calling the film a bummer is an understatement. Wilde is convincingly inconsolable—and a bit crazy—in what is clearly meant to be a showcase of her talent, but in the hands of Morano, we’re rather hit in the head with it repeatedly. Wilson is of course the easier to sympathize with, those trademark Wilson puppy dog eyes playing to his advantage, but Rossi could have written Phil with more backbone to counter Sarah’s intensity better. As is, the two don’t have much in the way of chemistry, or even a believable animosity befitting their situation. They are more like two characters sharing the same story by chance.

Rossi wrote a script exploring the most gruesome depths of repressed grief, Morano certainly pulled it out of the actors and added further intensity with her blurry focus and pore-revealing intimacy in almost every scene, throw in the ear-assault and too-serious actions of the characters and it stops being insightful and starts being a bit scary. The film does a full stop at the very end, attempting to bring the mood back up with a slipshod scene that feels so much like a therapy session it’s laughable. Sorry Morano, you can’t assail viewers for 90 minutes and not expect them to be numb by the end to any ploy at pulling at heartstrings. Like Rossi’s characters, we can’t help but follow their lead and remain neatly anesthetized.

Originally published as part of our 2015 Tribeca Film Festival coverage.

To watch Experimenter is to subject yourself to a form of filmic mind manipulation, in which the movie’s central character, Stanley Milgram (played by a coolly cerebral Peter Sarsgaard), looks directly into the camera, at us, and seems to measure our reactions to his unlikely life story. It’s a strange, unsettling, but almost playful experience watching Sarsgaard watch us. It’s this mischievousness that makes the film, directed by Michael Almereyda, one of the more unique, oddly entertaining things you’ll find at the cinema this fall.

Milgram is  a real-life figure, a late, influential social psychologist whose most notable (notorious) work was a Yale experiment in which subjects would administer increasingly violent electric shocks. A volunteer is told that a fellow lab rat (Jim Gaffigan) is sitting on the other side of a wall, his fingers hooked up to the electric shock machine that’s under their command. The second volunteer plays a memory game, and for every wrong answer he receives a shock by their counterpart on the other side of the wall. In reality, the second “volunteer” is actually an actor and isn’t hooked up to anything (Gaffigan feigns wails of pain with each fake zap). Milgram’s interest is the subject’s behavior: How much punishment are the subjects be willing to inflict on another, innocent human being?

The results of this “obedience” test are alarming—65% continued administering shocks despite the man beyond the wall pleading with them to stop. The film shows a variety of test subjects, each played by famous character actors. Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Taryn Manning each play subjects and while their screen time is fleeting, they get their mini chamber stories across. Watching the inner turmoil bubble up in their facial expressions is mesmerizing and unsettling.

The intermittent moments when Milgram turns to us to comment on what we’re seeing are unforgettable not just because it’s visually, but because Sarsgaard is magnificent. As Milgram he’s calmly deceptive, as if the words coming out of his mouth are a cover-up for the ominous thoughts he’s processing behind his steely eyes. It’s easy to fall into a state of hypnosis as he slips his heady ideas underneath your eyelids and into the back of your mind.

Milgram’s ethicality comes into question when we learn that he rarely interacts with his subjects despite arguably putting them through a form of emotional torture. Surely he owes them the baseline courtesy of a personal interaction, or even a thank you. But no. He’d rather leech behavioral data from the volunteers and promptly kick them back to wherever they came from. His proclivity for emotional detachment starts to affect his personal life when his supportive wife, Sasha (Winona Ryder), starts to feel as shunned as his lab subjects. Milgram’s personal life is covered in a cursory way that wastes Ryder’s talents and makes his home life feel not just secondary, but disposable to the larger story. This bit of narrative negligence may be a fair reflection of Milgram’s state of mind at the time, but if this part of his life was so unimportant, why include it in the movie to this extent? At the very least, Ryder and Sarsgaard work very well together, and it definitely doesn’t hurt that they look good as a couple.

The movie’s disappointing final act is concerned with the fallout of the experiment and the devastating impact it had on Milgram’s reputation and career. Both Almereyda and Sarsgaard seem half as emphatic in depicting Milgram’s downfall as they are the movie’s strong front-end. Experimenter is gripping in that it allows us to spend time with this brilliantly realized character, an outcast who’s so out of touch with others that he only opens up completely to us, his imaginary friends. That’s when the movie works best, when we’re falling down the rabbit hole of Stanley’s mind. The movie’s imagery turns surreal, with literal elephants in the room trailing Stanley as he spouts his babble at us and rear-projected images that reflect the academic artifice that defines his personality. His behavior is more shocking than his poor subjects’. And yet, we want to be near him.

The name Stanley Milgram might not ring a bell for a lot of people, but his work as a social psychologist might. Milgram had a hand in creating some of the most fascinating social experiments in the 20th century (one of his experiments helped introduce the concept of “six degrees of separation), with his most famous study being the obedience experiments he conducted at Yale in the 1960s. His obedience experiments revealed a disturbing truth about society and people’s willingness to obey authority figures even if they don’t want to. Milgram helped expose a fundamental flaw in humanity’s own construction of itself, and even today some people turn a blind eye towards Milgram’s findings. Taking a cue from Milgram’s work, writer/director Michael Almereyda has crafted a brilliant biopic of Milgram with Experimenter, one that’s playful, enlightening and subversive from beginning to end.

Taking advantage of the fact that his subject spent a living experimenting with confronting societal norms, Almereyda continually messes around with the norms and structures of biopics and filmmaking in general. Milgram narrates and addresses the camera directly, frequently breaking the fourth wall and discussing his life with an omniscient tone, while the film frequently embraces artifice in its form: rear projection, theatrical sets, blending in documentary footage, asides detailing other social experiments from Milgram’s colleagues, and at one point making the term “elephant in the room” more literal than metaphorical. Almereyda’s direction is nothing short of brilliant here in the way it channels the spirit of Milgram into its own conception.

Peter Sarsgaard plays Milgram, and even he seems aware that this is his best role in years, relishing in his character’s charm and playfulness. Winona Ryder also does a great job playing Milgram’s wife Sasha, turning what could have easily been a thankless role into one that carries the film’s emotional weight. Both actors are part of a strong, eclectic ensemble (including John Leguizamo, Jim Gaffigan, Taryn Manning and Anton Yelchin), but this is really Almereyda and Sarsgaard’s show. It will be hard to imagine any other biopic topping Experimenter this year.

Between viewing options like Godzilla and X-Men: Days of Future Past, which make up the usual beginning-of-Summer box-office listings, is the smaller scaled and incredibly satisfying Chef. Jon Favreau takes a break from action movies and mainstream projects to get back to his indie comedy origins.

In Chef, Favreau (who wrote and directed) plays LA chef Carl Casper, a tattooed foodie who starts the film preparing for a big deal food critic who will be dining that evening at the posh restaurant where he works. He creates a creative new menu to showcase his culinary talents, aided in the kitchen by Martin (John Leguizamo) and Tony (Bobby Cannavale), his friends and associates. When the restaurant’s owner Riva (Dustin Hoffman) puts the pressure on Casper to play “his greatest hits” and stick to their usual menu, he gives in and predictably receives a horrible review by critic Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt) who calls him out on having given up on the inspired dishes of his youth to cater to the boring palettes of the social élite.

Shaken by the review, Casper ruminates on the accusations, and when introduced to Twitter by his ten-year old son, Percy, he finds an outlet in which to retaliate, which he does without realizing the very public nature of Twitter. The Internet turns the online dual into an even bigger deal and Casper challenges Michel to another tasting, but when Riva puts his foot down once again Casper reaches his breaking point, quitting his job and erupting on Michel in a very public outburst that only perpetuates the scandal as its shared online. When his good friend Molly (Scarlet Johansson) points out that he hasn’t been truly happy in some time, Casper can’t help but face the music about his life and ambition.

Dejected and out of options Casper takes his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara) up on an offer to go to Miami to spend more time with his son and in a way get back to his own roots in food making. In a hilarious cameo by Robert Downey Jr. playing Inez’s other ex-husband, Casper is offered a food truck and he decides to finally go into business for himself making the food he does best: cuban sandwiches. Joined by his best friend Martin and his son, the three make the trek from Miami to LA and Casper doesn’t just learn how to be the chef he should be, but also the father he should be as well.

With a touch of shmaltz and a whole lot of butter, this film should not be seen on an empty stomach. Favreau takes his time, allowing his characters to develop with the same precision and delicacy each meal on-screen is made with. Emjay Anthony plays Percy, Casper’s son, and his big brown eyes perfectly convey the sort of constant watching a young boy does of his father; looking for cues, lessons, and love. Like other foodie films, Chef doesn’t dance around the metaphors of recipes for food as recipes for love, but uses it to great effect. And the film is truly hilarious, using Casper’s lack of social media understanding for quite a few jokes that keep the film from feeling too indie.

Favreau uses all his famous friends (Downey Jr. and Johannson are both from Iron Man) but doesn’t abuse them, letting Leguizamo do the sort of cheeky comedy he’s so good at. The film’s ending is a bit Hollywood perfect and I wouldn’t advise anyone consider this an accurate career representation. Also, Casper’s naïve reaction to his food’s criticism doesn’t serve much as a lesson in thick skin by any means, and any allegory to Favreau’s own opinions on criticism of his work isn’t especially effective. But what Favreau maybe unintentionally proves is that when a creator gets to the core of what they do best, their work will almost always be applauded, and Chef is the kind of filmmaking Favreau excels at.

Chef is a fun summer film that leaves viewers happy and heart warmed, albeit hungry. No explosions or caped crusaders necessary.

Chef trailer

As someone who has played some variation of baseball since the age of 6, and as someone who has compiled a single home run in their 20 year long career, I feel uniquely qualified to handle a review of Ballplayer: Pelotero; the independently produced documentary about the Major League Baseball’s farm system in the island nation of the Dominican Republic. Director/producer trio Ross Finkel, Trevor Martin, and Jonathan Paley met some resistance from the MLB due to some unsavory portrayals of MLB affiliated scouts and organizations in the Dominican Republic. A documentary that has the MLB’s knickers in a twist? Count me in.

It’s not a great wonder why the MLB paused at this movie. The version of the game the MLB tries to sell everyone is the “Good ole’ boys of summer.” We go bananas over stat crunching in baseball so much so, it has spawned professions like “Sabermetricians” who break down players according to easy to understand stats like Value Over Replacement Player, Ultimate Zone Rating, and Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. We love it so much, we tend to glaze over the fact that a lot of our international players get dehumanized in the process. This documentary shows the shady underside of baseball’s international involvement through the eyes of two young Dominican prospects; Miguel Angel Sanó who was arguably the best prospect of that year by a considerable amount, and Jean Carlos Batista, a upper-middle of the pack player who tends to overestimate his ability. Pelotero shows the MLB engaged in a harsh cutthroat game of Dominican Roulette where players are treated as commodities and nobody even bothers to stay hush-hush about it. Multiple times from multiple levels during Pelotero, the interviewee tells the camera straight out that these players are nothing more than dollar signs. All at the ages of 15 and 16! When tough questions are posed, trainers, scouts and facility directors unabashedly tell the interviewer that these players are regarded, and treated like capital. It really sets the mood for the unethical behavior on display from some of the scouts and directors.

Because Pelotero is a documentary, it has a different set of criteria upon which to judge it by. A good documentary should tell a story, keep interest, and leave the viewer with a sense of emotional involvement. Pelotero does all three of those things and more. For one, the story of Miguel Sanó was national headlines in the baseball world a few years back. This movie shows you the inner workings of the drama that unfolded due to Miguel Sanó’s age dispute. It really sheds a bad light on the MLB in this regard and the scouts and directors handling the situation come off as corrupt.

Some documentaries have to fabricate or edit the story to make someone a bad guy but Pelotero does a good job of showing the entire situation in a believable way and doesn’t fall prey to sensationalism, albeit, only through the eyes of Miguel Sanó’s family and agent. Jean Batista’s story also lends itself to some tense moments although I was a bit less emotionally invested in his story. Pelotero plays out like a movie in that it has a concise beginning, middle, and end. There is a sense of resolve that the documentary supplies that leaves the viewer satisfied instead of saying, “Wait, tell me more!” Comparisons to Bully come to mind in that regard.

Music also plays a big part in this documentary. The Dominican Republic has a culture of music that is lively and fast and Pelotero smoothly uses these music bits to add a great depth to simple scenes like 16 year olds shagging pop flies. Pelotero also has great cinematography and directing. There are some beautiful shots through withered wrought iron gates and dramatic close ups of the stars’ faces which could only happen if the director was adept at his job. Anytime a camera is around a self aware 15 year old, it’s a bit more difficult to film intense questions like, “What happens if you fail?” The emotion comes through strong.

Pelotero‘s directors, writers and cameramen allow the viewer to receive a slice of the Dominican Republic in only a way experienced filmmakers could do. John Leguizamo’s narration also provides an excellent voice over to scenes that aren’t just white on black text. Overall, Pelotero left me with a better understanding and appreciation for where these Dominican and other international players come from and entertained me in the process.