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.

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.

Love & Mercy

Brian Wilson wrote some of the most beautifully complex pieces of music in history throughout his decades-long career with the Beach Boys and beyond. But as a person, he’s more beautifully complex than anything anyone could ever write. Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy explores Wilson’s psyche from two angles, focusing on the biggest artistic and personal turning points in his life. Paul Dano plays a Wilson as a young man in the Beach Boys’ heyday, in the midst of writing what would become one of the greatest albums of all time, Pet Sounds. Making up the other half of the movie is a more recent, frightening period in Wilson’s life (he’s played here by John Cusack), when he was under the (highly medicated) spell of unethical therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), his only protection from whom being his beach blonde soul mate, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks).

Alternating between the two Brians is a welcome break from the typical biopic schematic. Dano’s resemblance is scary uncanny, and while Cusack’s isn’t so spot-on (I didn’t see it, to be honest), their commitment as actors is about level. Beach Boys fans will suffer uncontrollable geek-outs during the Pet Sounds studio session reenactments, but the real value of the film lies in the respectfully unkempt and fraught depiction of Wilson’s legacy as both a musician and a man.

Experimenter

Slipping between several planes of reality with the nimbleness of a jazz ensemble, Michael Almereyda‘s Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard as late social psychologist Stanley Milgram, is more of a delectable treat than the dark subject matter might lead you to believe. It centers on Milgram’s famed contributions to the world of social experimentation, most notably his controversial experiment on obedience conducted in the ’60s. We see the Holocaust-inspired experiment—involving test subjects led to believe they’re remotely causing harm to a man in an adjacent room (played by Jim Gaffigan)—reenacted by a litany of strong players, including Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Anthony Edwards, and others.

The film sees Sarsgaard’s Milgram periodically address us, the audience, in cleverly worded monologues that highlight the actor’s natural wit and intellect. It’s fun to see Sarsgaard given so much breathing room; he has a lot of fun with the role, and so we do as well. Almereyda lets loose too, with neat touches like utilizing rear-projection backdrops and employing a real-life elephant to stalk behind Sarsgaard down a hall as a fun metaphor. Winona Ryder stars as Milgram’s wife, Sasha, and gives the film an emotional oomph whose importance is clearest by film’s end.

7 Chinese Brothers

Jason Schwartzman is ridiculously funny in Bob Byington‘s 7 Chinese Brothers, a film created in the Wild West indie landscape that panders to no one (mainstream audiences will likely balk at the quaint, offbeat humor), but will please crackpot-comedy weirdos (like yours truly) to no end. Larry (Schwartzman) is a small-town schlub who drinks his way into and out of menial jobs he can’t stand. He’s got his romantically savvy friend, Major Norwood (TVOTR’s Tunde Adebimpe), his silvery grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), and his impossibly drowsy dog (Schwartzman’s real dog, Arrow) to keep him company most days. When he finds himself gravitated to his new boss, Lupe (Eleanore Pienta), he’s shocked to discover that, for once, he actually looks forward to going to work.

A lot of the funniest stuff in 7 Chinese Brothers involves Schwartzman almost having a contest with himself, trying to come up with the most bizarre behaviors he can think of and making them as out-there as possible. It’s the little, absurdist stuff that makes you laugh, like Schwartzman throwing garbage into a garbage can, and then throwing said garbage can into a dumpster. Byington’s written a great script, too, each line of dialogue going in a different direction than you expected. Keep this one in mind.

In a press conference yesterday the San Francisco Film Society announced the complete lineup for the 58th annual San Francisco International Film Festival, running from April 23rd – May 7th. Festival Executive Director Noah Cowan led the presentation, emphasizing SFFS’s mission to champion films and filmmakers from around the globe.

“I think this festival doesn’t get as much credit as it’s due as being among the most significant champions of emerging filmmakers from around the globe,” said Cowan at the press conference. “There’s a lot of focus right now in the festival world on American independent cinema. There’s lots of great stuff going on here, but sometimes it happens to neglect the quite extraordinary artists coming from other parts of the globe.”

Emblematic of the festival’s initiative to spotlight films on a global scale is its “Global Visions” section, which boasts an array of narrative and documentary films from Japan (Wonderful World End), Brazil (The Second Mother), Germany (Stations of the Cross), China (Red Amnesia), the United Kingdom (Luna), South Korea (A Hard Day), France (Fidelio: Alice’s Odyssey), New Zealand (The Dark Horse), and many more countries with exciting, emerging filmmakers and films worthy of our undivided attention. Also celebrating global storytelling are the Golden Gate Award Competitions, in which will award films from around the world nearly $40,000 across 14 awards categories.

The festival’s “Marquee Presentations” section takes a look at some buzzy titles from the festival circuit. Highlights include Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve’s French DJ drama starring Greta Gerwig and Brady Corbet; Best of Enemies, Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s doc about Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.’s legendary 1968 televised debates; Results, Andrew Bujalski’s awkward comedy starring Cobie Smulders and Guy Pearce as personal trainers; Francois Ozon‘s latest drama, The New Girlfriend; and What Happened, Miss Simone?, Liz Garbus’ piercing doc about legendary vocalist Nina Simone.

The festival will open with lauded documentarian Alex Gibney‘s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, which should be a perfect kick-off for the Bay Area audience. The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt’s follow-up to The Spectacular Now, is the fest’s Centerpiece presentation, while Michael Almereyda’s biopic Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard as scientist Stanley Milgram, will be the Closing Night Film.

Late additions to the festival lineup are still rolling in, but three additions confirmed are Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Sundance darling Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Patrick Brice’s uncomfortable comedy The Overnight, and Helen Hunt’s Ride.

Special awards will be handed out to two of the industry’s most enduring luminaries. Guillermo del Toro will be in attendance to receive the Irving M. Levin Directing Award, and Richard Gere will be on-hand to receive the Peter J. Owens Award. Also receiving awards are documentarian Kim Longinotto and film translator Lenny Borger.

For the complete lineup, visit www.sffs.org

A well iced cake can look quite pretty, but if it’s undercooked it won’t taste very good. Naomi Foner’s directorial debut Very Good Girls has some delicious icing, including excellent performances from Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen, and plenty of trimming in the way of Demi Moore, Richard Dreyfus, Peter Sarsgaard, Clark Gregg, and Boyd Holbrook, but its under-developed plot and overly sentimental premise leave it ooey and gooey in the middle with not even a sugar rush to make up for its failings.

First premiering last year at Sundance, Very Good Girls is marketing itself as a virginity pact movie, but that’s not quite accurate. Other than a brief conversation held between best friends Gerry (Elizabeth Olsen) and Lilly (Dakota Fanning) at the beginning of the movie, where they discuss first Lilly catching her father cheating on her mother and then the strange notion of parents having sex in general before moving on to their own unappreciated virginity, there is no real plot to become de-virginized. The film is a friendship story, focusing on the strange purgatory that is the summer between high school and college. As if dealing with their various family issues, creepy bosses, and annoying siblings aren’t enough to keep them occupied the girls’ friendship is tested most when they meet David (Boyd Holbrook), a sexy ice-cream vendor at the beach who likes taking pictures. They both take an interest in him, but Gerry, being the more vocal of the two, marks her territory by constantly discussing her interest in him and by pseudo-stalking where he works. Of course, as these things are apt to go, David was much more interested in the darker, quieter, Lilly and seeks her out.

The unfortunate part of love-triangle stories is ensuring that each thread of the entangled relationships is given enough depth. Very Good Girls has an obvious loose thread. David’s pursuit of Lilly and the ease in which she slips into a secret relationship with him is mostly non-sensical. Considering at her day job she has a boss (Peter Sarsgaard) who is consistently hitting on her, you’d think she’d execute a bit more caution when another almost-stranger exhibits what so obviously seem to be shallow motivations for pursuing her. But the film doesn’t claim to be the great love story of the century, so it’s slightly excusable. Tensions build as expected as the repercussions of forbidden romance ensue.

Elizabeth Olsen makes the most of her artistic-minded, self-centered character, but seems a bit too much like an archetype: girls who can attract men, but not obtain them. Equally archetypical is Dakota Fanning’s Lilly, who does her best to get away with wide-eyed staring equaling out to implied depth and understanding, when really she’s just a shy, white-collared girl with some pent-up daddy issues. And winning Most Abused Stereotype is artist David with his sullen ways, who speaks of some day visiting Paris and even reads Sylvia Plath to Lilly before first kissing her.

The film wastes talent in abundance. Even the film’s music, done by Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, seems to be trying too hard as we hear her familiar voice in almost every scene. There are some questionable wardrobe choices as well, as though the costumer didn’t think we’d understand the essence of the characters with simple words and actions, they needed to be outlandish in their outfits. If they’d been thrown into a film set in the 60s, maybe the completely illogical actions of the characters would make more sense. Unlikely and ill-advised romance, childish secrets and silly pining away for a boy without much to offer — it’s all just so incredibly un-modern.

The locations and lighting of the film do give off a definite summery vibe, and younger female audiences are likely to be drawn to the film’s stars and suggested plot, but like I said, no matter how you cut it, this cake ain’t cooked.

The film is now available on VOD on iTunes and Google Play.

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.

My previous day at TIFF was originally going to comprise of four films as well, but unfortunately I had to bail out of one film due to pure tiredness (I’ll keep the film’s title unnamed here, but if it wasn’t for my physical limitations I would have stayed since it was good from what I saw). Luckily, I was able to chug through my second four-film day without a hitch, but I’ve learned now that it’s not something I should try more than once.

Night Moves

I decided to start my big day with Night Moves, which turned out to be the worst possible film to choose as a starting point. I’ve been a fan of Kelly Reichardt’s work from what I’ve seen, and was excited to see her approach being used on a genre film. Three activists from different walks of life get together to pull off a dangerous act of ‘eco-terror’: They buy a boat and rig it with explosives, hoping to blow up a dam. Theoretically what Reichardt is attempting here is interesting in its own right. Her stripped down style getting applied to a thriller makes for some neat moments, and the way things unravel so the three characters become corrupted by the same selfish behavior they abhor is a nice development.

The only problem is that Reichardt’s approach is bone dry, sucking out all of the tension and forward momentum. Paradoxically, while the main group (played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard who all do their best at understating as much as possible) feel well-defined and realistic as characters, the tone of the film is so distant it’s impossible to feel anything about them. The last time Reichardt took a crack at a genre film it was the western with Meek’s Cutoff, which worked wonderfully. This time I think she simply picked the wrong area to work with. Hopefully next time she’ll be successful again with whatever she chooses.

RATING: 5.9

Gravity

Next up was the film that I had been waiting for since it was announced back in July: Gravity. Alfonso Cuaron spent seven years developing his follow-up to the brilliant Children of Men, and it’s apparent from the start just how much effort went into this film. The special effects are incredible, and it will be impossible to watch this without wondering exactly how they pulled off some moments. So Gravity does deliver in the spectacle department, but that’s mostly it. Granted it’s really good at it, and it’s an easy recommendation, but this is far from the new classic that people have been going on about.

Gravity is merely a well-done thriller that never lets up pacing-wise. Starting right in space with Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a new astronaut, and a veteran on his last mission (George Clooney), it takes all but 10 minutes before debris from a satellite crash has Bullock and Clooney flying in opposite directions with nothing to hold on to. That’s merely the start of the many, many problems Bullock encounters while she frantically tries to make it back to Earth alive, and by the end the amount of near-death experiences become absurd (and it drew some laughter from the audience as well).

There really won’t be anything better this year on a technical level, but Gravity is far too basic to enjoy beyond the surface. Bullock and Clooney are terrific in their roles, making the most of the little material they’re given. Bullock is given some backstory to work with, but the film’s suffocating and repetitive pace drown out any emotional impact. I know that what I’m saying sounds very negative about the film, but it’s mostly because I came away disappointed that Gravity did not live up to my high expectations. There are some truly incredible sequences in here, and for a studio tentpole it’s quite original, but don’t expect a masterpiece.

RATING: 7

October November

Continuing my strange tonal shifts in films throughout the day, I went to check out October November. Gotz Spielmann’s last film Revanche blew me away when I saw it years ago, and at the beginning I was expecting more of the same riveting drama when an actress (Nora von Waldstätten) is confronted by the wife of a man she’s having an affair with. That scene turns out to be the only moment where fireworks go off, as the focus shifts to the actress’ sister (Ursula Strauss) who runs a small hotel in the countryside owned by her father.

The two sisters reunite when their father takes a heart attack, and the tensions between them form the basis for October November. Strauss is jealous of her sister leaving to be successful while she was forced to stay at home, and Waldstätten feels like she has no idea who she really is. It’s another existential European drama, and Spielmann really doesn’t seem to know how to get these issues across. The majority of October November is a no-stakes drama until the final act sees the two daughters waiting for their father to finally pass away. Despite being superbly shot and acted, there really is very little to get interested in. There’s no doubt that Spielmann is still a mature and terrific writer/director, but he seems to have invested in subject matter that returns very little.

RATING: 6

Under the Skin

I ended my day with Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and what a way to close off my long weekend at TIFF. I’m not over the moon like some people who have seen this, but I can’t blame them for being so ecstatic. Glazer is a master of style, and his 9 year absence seems to have made his images even more striking. The film’s first half, which simply follows Scarlett Johansson’s alien character around as she seduces men to a horrific fate, works as an excellent mood piece. Glazer has created some shots that will probably stick with me more than any other film I’ve seen here, and Micah Levi’s score is one of the best of the year by leaps and bounds.

It pained me a lot when Under the Skin didn’t coalesce into something wholly terrific for me. The second half of the film, in which Johansson gains human qualities and gets hunted down by her alien superiors, is a step down from the beautifully expressive and original first half. Glazer seems to have a hard time getting across what he wants to say at some points (his goal, to show Earth through an outsider’s perspective, wasn’t exactly successful in my eyes), and while Johansson is great her role is too enigmatic to make any of the final acts resonate. At times horrifying, beautiful and strange, Under the Skin is a classic case of a film not adding up to the sum of its parts.

RATING: 6.9

Next up:

Ben Wheatley’s hallucinogenic trip through A Field in England, and the best film I’ve seen at TIFF.

Co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman bring the story of Linda Lovelace, a celebrity in the adult entertainment industry, to the very screen that brought her fame into mainstream culture from her seductive role in Deep Throat. Lovelace was made for half of the amount that Deep Throat was made for back in 1972 (not including adjustment for inflation) with seemingly a quarter of the amount of inspiration. The film attempts to produce laughs, chills, and entertainment, but fails to deliver any of those qualities.

One of the first things you are likely to notice about Lovelace are the aesthetics of the film; a high contrasting warm color palette shot on grainy film stock against a rocking soundtrack helps recreate the time period. Beginning in 1970, Linda Lovelace is (Amanda Seyfried) tanning and talking about her sex life (or more accurately the lack thereof) with her best friend Patsy (Juno Temple) in the backyard of her parents’ house. The Virgin Mary statue in the front yard serves as a symbol of her conservative upbringing and a nice contrast to what is about to unfold.

Linda is swept off her feet by an older man named Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard)—a topless bar owner who views Linda not only as girlfriend but a potential worker. The film skips ahead, something that happens quite frequently, to the two living together in New York, where Traynor’s abusive and manipulative side begins to show. One of the best scenes of the film is when Traynor decides to exploit her oral sex skills in an upcoming production of a pornography film aptly titled Deep Throat (which ends up being a massive box office hit). Linda’s naïve personality is put on display when a makeup artist discovers bruises on her legs that Linda passes off as just being clumsy—an obvious lie that fools nobody.

The closing credits inform us that Linda spent twenty years speaking out against domestic violence and the pornography industry—the film only captures the former while practically skipping the latter. Even though Lovelace does not glorify the porn industry, it does not exactly condemn it either. With all the attention on the domestic violence Linda endures, the adult-film industry is portrayed much tamer than one would think.

Inconsistency plagues the film more than anything else. While most of the scenes play out with so much exaggerated drama that it feels like it was made for the Lifetime Channel, others are chock-full of campy sex jokes that lighten the mood too much. This combination not only made the tone of the film unclear, but also much less effective when it attempts to have an emotional impact on the audience later on.

Despite setbacks in other areas of the film, the acting performances found in Lovelace are top notch; aside from the surprisingly unconvincing James Franco as Hugh Hefner. Amanda Seyfried takes on the daring role as wide-eyed innocent girl turned porn star in perfect stride. Peter Sarsgaard handles the duality required of the role flawlessly; going from charming in one scene to terrifying in the next. Even the smaller roles from Sharon Stone, Robert Patrick, and Bobby Cannavale are equally as good.

Lovelace is a story that is practically served on a silver platter considering it is a real-life story of an ordinary woman turned overnight adult-film star, who eventually speaks out against a brutal and abusive relationship with her manager and pornography industry, yet somehow this biopic manages to be both unexciting and unemotional. On top of that, Lovelace never ventures below the surface of the story that most people are vaguely familiar with already. Credit the cast for going well beyond the material they were given, without their performances the film would be a complete catastrophe.

Lovelace trailer:

Robot & Frank is a sentimental buddy-movie between two unlikely people; well, technically just one as the other is a robot as the title suggests. It is a simple story that aims to entertain and satisfy the audience rather than explore some of the serious issues it introduces. In the end, the film felt like it set its aspirations bit too low, but if you are willing to do the same, it can be a tolerable light spirited film.

Set in Cold Spring, New York in the near future, an older man named Frank (Frank Langella) is slowly showing signs of dementia. Frank is an ex-jewel thief who still stores most of his valuables in a secret safe behind a picture on the wall of his house where he resides alone. Because he absolutely refuses to go to a “brain center” or any kind of retirement home, Frank’s son Hunter (James Marsden) decides to get his father a robot to help him out around the house, like a butler.

To say that Frank is very put-off by his new robot would be a gross understatement. At first, he does not believe the robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) will benefit him at all and figures it might just murder him in his sleep. Beyond just the fact that Frank is an elder who is resisting to rely on new technologies, a common thing among older people, but embracing this new butler also means that Frank would indirectly admit that he has a problem and needs help, which he does not believe he has. On his side for political reasons, is his daughter Madison (Liv Tyler) who plays a hippie that is opposed of robot slavery. But his view changes when Frank looks at the robot as an accomplice rather than a caretaker.

Because Frank has no choice but to accept the robot, he does so by putting it to work for him, just not in the way Hunter envisioned. Frank begins to teach the robot on how to assist him on his future heists by showing the robot how to pick locks and how to bypass traditional security measures. Just as they start to form a bond together, an opportunity arises where the pair can put their teamwork to use. A librarian that Frank has had his eye on for a while named Jennifer (Susan Sarandon) is distraught when the new library owner decides all of the books will be replaced with digital additions. Some view the plan to recycle all of the traditional books as throwing them away, thus Frank has his robot go to work to “save” one that means a lot to Jennifer.

The frustrating part about Robot & Frank is how the film chose to stay within the lines and playing out exactly how you think it will. It is essentially a classic tale of a stubborn man who wants nothing to do with his new robot but eventually befriends it and defends it when threatened to be taking away. The problem is there was more potential in Christopher Ford’s script that was severely underused. Dependency on technology, political views on robot slaves, and the demise of text-book literacy were all hinted at, but unfortunately, not fully explored.

Frank Langella appears in every scene, and handles the task well for the most part. Some of his lines feel a little off at times, like when he says the robot is “cramping his style”. The rest of the cast is too clichéd to be memorable. Jeremy Strong who plays the villain of the new snobby library owner, comes off as a laughable character who probably was not intended to be. Strong is almost always over-the-top with his delivery and is more distracting than anything else.

Because the film holds your hand the entire way through – something that it could have deviated from at times – Robot & Frank ends up largely being a film that was too carefully setup and executed to be anything beyond a safe crowd pleaser. But since being a crowd pleasing film was the intention of the film, it cannot be faulted for carrying out its design. The aim to leave the audience satisfied is evident throughout but especially in the end where a plot twist could have been worked as a bone-chilling yet emotional impacting moment that the film instead opts to keep low-key and lighthearted. Changing the direction that the film should have gone would be labeled as a personal preference; and one that I would have preferred.

There is no denying that the indie Sundance Film Festival winner Robot and Frank looks intriguing. While it still looks like it is a heartwarming tale of robot companionship, it appears to put a little bit of a spin on the over-used formula. The film stars Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), who appears to have a fairly stand out performance, alongside James Marsden (X-Men) and Liv Tyler (Lord of the Rings, The Strangers).

An ex-jewel thief named Frank receives a robotic caretaker from his children in lieu of moving into a retirement home. Frank is reluctant towards the butler robot at first but eventually begins to bond with the machine. He especially grows close to him once he finds out that he can teach it how to pick a lock and become a partner in crime.

Robot and Frank has a limited theatrical release on August 24th, 2012.

Watch the official trailer for Robot and Frank:

An Education is a simple and sophisticated foreign indie film directed by Lone Scherfig. It was nominated for 3 Oscars including Best Picture and won Best Foreign Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. Not sure if I myself would nominate it as Best Picture, while it was a good overall film, it was not spectacular.

It is a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Jenny (Carey Mulligan) whose father is very determined that she goes to Oxford. Right from the very beginning she meets an older man named David (Peter Sarsgaard) who is witty, suave and wealthy. Naturally her father is a bit skeptical of this name but like her, he is caught off guard of his charm.

They go on a few date with some of his friends and seemed to hit things off quickly as they share similar tastes in music and art. David is almost too good to be true, you just cannot help but assume that there must be a catch. He was a bit vague with his answer when Jenny asked what he did for a living, certainly not going into any details about it. Then one evening he shows up and is sharing drinks with her parents trying to persuade them to let he take her to Oxford for the weekend. David tells them he is an alumni from there, only he told her he never went to college.

After the successfully convincing Jenny’s parents to allow her to go to Oxford, it is brought to David’s attention that Jenny is a virgin and intends to be so until she turns seventeen. David seems content with that. The next morning David and his friend/business partner are go into a house for business reasons. Jenny wants to join but is promptly denied thus further making what he does more suspicious.

Eventually David asks Jenny to marry him. She does not respond right away and has to think about it. She brings this up to her parents, asking them their thoughts on getting married instead of going to Oxford, presuming her father would say absolutely not. Instead, he is perfectly fine with it due to his fondness of David.

It is Jenny’s current school teacher who tells her that getting married would ruin her life and that not going to college would be tragedy. Advising her without a degree you will not be able to get a job. Jenny’s argument is that the education is hard and boring and once you get a job it will be hard and boring. She goes on to say that if she gets married she will live a wonderfully fun life by going to nice restaurants and listening to good music with the man of her dreams. A decision must be made.

First hour of An Education goes by so fast and it really does a good job of developing characters, something that I very much appreciate. Both Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard put on a showcase of great acting. If Carey Mulligan continues with performances as she did with this one, she will be a future star for sure. As the film progressed you slowly find out more and more about David and some of the mysteries that surround him. I felt that some of the initial charm of his was slowly fading and but you cannot discredit his good intentions completely.

What it excelled in character development it lacked in plot substance. I felt there could have been more done with it. The climax was faint and unsubstantial. An Education was not completely forgettable and I would recommend it as a watch once indie film.