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.

Mike Cahill’s I Origins landed on my radar from the moment the film was announced. Mainly because the last time Cahill and Brit Marling teamed up together they knocked it out of the park with Another Earth. Adding to my anticipation was the flood of positive reactions from its Sundance debut earlier in the year.

The film stirs the debate between faith and science when a molecular biologist (played by Michael Pitt) uncovers a scientific discovery that could have a major impact on both science and society. This first trailer may give too many details away, but I Origins looks to be another captivating indie sci-fi from Cahill and Marling.

I Origins will be released on July 18th.

Watch I Origins trailer

Rob the Mob opens with a robbery, but not the perilous kind the title suggests: In early 1990’s New York, Tommy and Rosie (Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda, both delivering terrific turns), a frantic, foul-mouthed young couple, botch a barely thought-out flower store stick-up, earning Tommy a ticket to jail for 18 months. Rewind to moments before the failed heist: The thieving lovebirds fall into a heated spat in the car because Rosie chose to bid her man good luck with a classic “I love you!”, last words Tommy considers a bad omen. But it’s that very love–that fevered passion that drives them wild–that defines them.

The film is based on the true story of Tommy and Rosemarie Uva, a boroughs-bred Bonnie and Clyde who were fixing to get rich quick by stealing from the only folks in the city who would never call the police: The Mafia. Director Raymond De Felitta, who’s got a proclivity to profiling life in New york (Two Family House, City Island), loosely adapts the Uva’s New York robbing spree to great success. It’s a relentlessly entertaining take on reckless love and domestic mob life, presenting tried-and-true themes and motifs in creative ways that make it all feel fresh again. Clever writing and killer performances (particularly the young leads) solidifies Felitta as a great Big Apple storyteller.

Following Tommy’s stint in the slammer, he reunites with Rosie to find that she’s straightened up, landing a secure job at a collection agency under perpetually cheery boss Mr. Lovell (Griffin Dunne). She convinces Lovell to hook Tommy up with a job as well, but Tommy’s distracted at work as he’s become enamored with the John Gotti trial, which he goes so far as to skip work to attend himself. While at the trial, he notices a testifying mobster mention that guns are forbidden at Mafia “social clubs”. Barely getting by on Mr. Lovell’s measly paychecks, he and an initially leery Rosie kick off a spree of wise-guy shakedowns that, to their surprise, actually yield some big-time dividends.

The social club stickups are wildly varied, each permeated by a sense of unpredictability. Tommy, armed with an Uzi he doesn’t know how to use (Rosie has to teach him how to load it in a funny moment), isn’t taken seriously by the mobsters at first (they get a good laugh out of the kid’s foolhardy audacity), but they’re eventually forced to comply when Tommy accidentally starts spraying bullets around the room like a broken sprinkler. Tommy’s bumbling inadequacies as a criminal (Pitt’s comedic timing is spot-on) make these scenes outrageously funny. After each robbery, he ducks into Rosie’s car and they drive home to bask in their bounty of greenbacks and gold chains. Steal and wheel.

Unbeknownst to Tommy and Rosie, the clubs were being monitored by the FBI, who leak info about the heists to seasoned tabloid reporter Cardozo (Ray Romano). Desperate for a headline, he offers to tell the couple’s story on the front page of the paper. Being the self-centered dummies that they are, they dish on all the juicy info, and Cardozo keeps his promise, spreading their story to the masses. Mob boss Big Al at first considered the social club heists as a minor annoyance, but when Tommy finds a piece of evidence that could take down Al’s entire syndicate on an aging wise-guy named Joey D (Rocky‘s Burt Young) and uses it to blackmail the salt and pepper-bearded don, he’s forced to sic his goons on the young-idiot Robin Hoods.

Scribe Jonathan Fernandez has fashioned a highly entertaining, taut script that doesn’t force De Felitta to rely on visual flair to hold our interest like a lot of modern mob flicks do. The story takes time for intimate, hushed moments of genuine emotion, but always feels brisk and on the move. De Felitta recognizes and delights in the crackling chemistry between Arianda and Pitt: They can jump from wanting to strangle each other to wanting to screw to cracking dumb jokes without a hiccup. Arianda, a Broadway star, is electric as the mouthy firecracker Rosie, and Pitt is magnetic, turning his character’s intellectual shortcomings into irresistible charm. Romano and Garcia impress as well, never going over-the-top and servicing the story perfectly. Garcia’s scenes with at home with his young grandson, teaching the youngster to make arancinis and instilling in him the importance of love and passion, are surprisingly touching moments of real emotion that add depth to an already excellent film.

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games is a shot by shot and line by line remake of his own 1997 film of the same title only with a different cast and with English dialog instead of German. Even the set of the house had the exact same proportions as the original house did. You might ask why a director would choose to remake his own film? If I had to guess it would be that many Americans skipped the original version because we shamefully tend to avoid subtitles. It is a mentally exhausting art house thriller about strangers abusing a family but after watching it you feel like you are the one being abused.

Funny Games begins with a family taking a trip to their vacation home on Long Island. As George (Tim Roth) and Ann (Naomi Watts) and their son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) approached the house they stop by the neighbors place to see if they will lend a hand to launch their boat. They noticed that the neighbors were acting a bit out of the ordinary as they hesitated to help. Also the husband and wife did not recognize the other men dressed in white that accompanied the neighbors but it was only enough to notice and not be alarmed.

The neighbor comes over as promised but brings along a gentleman named Paul (Michael Pitt) who he claims is the son of a business associate of the neighbor. George still found the behavior of the neighbor to be a little off. As Ann is preparing dinner for the family the two men dressed in white show up at the door. Paul introduces himself as well as his friend Peter (Brady Corbet) even he keeps addressing him as Tom and eventually fatty.

Although the two men are very polite you get the sense that something is very off about them. This begins to show when they ask to test out one of George’s golf clubs. Ann is very put off by them and asks them to leave. That is when the games begin but none of them are funny.

Paul and Peter being to terrorize the family with ridiculous games such as making a bet with them that they will all be dead by morning as long as the family bets they will be alive. It is during this bet that something profound happens. Paul turns to the camera and begins to talk to us to see which side of the bet we are on. It is important because it blatantly tells the audience that this film is playing games with them as well.

Without giving away any more spoilers, I will try to be vague as possible on this topic. There is a scene near the end of the film that is very controversial that will have you either cheering or booing. By the end of the film you realize that the film tries to find out the difference between reality and non-reality.

Michael Haneke was quoted saying “Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn’t need the film, and anybody who stays does.” on his original version of Funny Games. The opening credits makes it clear that what you think you are in store for is not what you will find when the classical music is abruptly interrupted by loud death metal music. After finishing the film I can understand what Haneke was trying to say, it is definitely not for everyone. Drawing some comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is easy to do based on the perverse violence that resides in both.

The performances from the whole cast were astounding. Naomi Watts is particularly good as the frantic wife whose family is being terrorized. Tim Roth compliments Watts well and lets her do most of the heavy lifting. One interesting note is that Roth said that his role abused him enough that he will never watch the film. Michael Pitt is downright creepy and unsettling as the main villain.

Funny Games is as unique as it is distributing, both which the film strived for and succeed in. I appreciated the film more than I enjoyed it. However, I am not sure if the film was even meant to be enjoyed but rather experienced instead. From the opening to closing credits the film plays games with you and eventually you realize that the actual villain is the director and you are the victim. You will not find one shred of comfort in Funny Games but that is the point.