New York Film Festival 2013

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/ey7f.jpg

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/isaac.jpg
OSCAR ISAAC IN THE COEN BROTHERS' INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

New York Film Festival 2013
September 27 - October 13, 2013

Welcome to Filmleaf's Festival Coverage thread for the 50th New York Film Festival, Sept. 27 - Oct. 13, 2013. The Nyff is a presentation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York. Filmleaf's General Film Forum discussion thread for the NYFF begins here.

Links to reviews:

12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen 2013)
About Time (Richard Curtis 2013)
Abuse of Weakness (Catherine Breillat 2013)
Alan Partridge [Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa] (Declan Lowney 2013)
All Is Lost (J.C. Chandor 2013)
American Promise (Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson 2013)
At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman 2013)
Bastards (Claire Denis 2013)
Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d'Adèle; Abdelatif Kéchiche 2013)
Burning Bush (Agnieszka Holland 2013)
Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass 2013)
Child of God (James Franco 2013)
Club Sandwich (Fernando Eimcke 2013)
Gloria (Sebastián Lelioa 2013)
Her (Spike Jonze 2013)
Immigrant, The (James Gray 2013)
Inside Llewyn Davis (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen 2013)
Invisible Woman, The (Ralph Fiennes 2013)
Jealousy (Philippe Garrel 2013)
Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (Arndau Desplechin 2013)
Last of the Unjust, The (Claude Lanzmann 2013)
Like Father, Like Son (Hirakazu Koreeda 2013)
Missing Picture, The (Rithy Panh 2013)
My Name Is Hmmm... (agnès b. 2013)
Nebraska (Alexander Payne 2013)
Nobody's Daughter (Hong Sang-soo 2013)
North, the End of History (Lav Diaz 2013)
Omar (Hany Abu-Assad 2013)
Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch 2013)
Real (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2013)
Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The (Ben Stiller 2013)
Square, The (Jehane Noujaim 2013)
Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie 2013)
Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang 2013)
Touch of Sin, A (Jia Zhang-ke 2013)
Week-End, Le (Roger Mitchell 2013)
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Corneliu Porumboiu 2013)
Wind Rises, The (Hayao Miyazaki 2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpicture...%20signage.jpg
NYFF51 SIGNAGE FRONTING RENOVATED ALICE TULLY HALL (photo by CK)

These reviews also appear on the website Flickfeast.co.uk here.

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/2489/l0z6.jpg

Main Slate.
Main Slate lineup for the 51st New York Film Festival (with short blurbs provided by the FSLC):

ABOUT TIME (2013) 123min
Director: Richard Curtiss
Country: UK
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Richard Curtis adds a touch of time-travel to this hilarious romantic comedy, a perfect vehicle for the comic talents of Bill Nighy, Rachel McAdams, Lindsay Duncan, and emerging star Domhnall Gleeson. A Universal Pictures release.

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS (Abus de Faiblesse) (2013) 105mi
Director: Catherine Breillat
Country: France
U.S. PREMIERE
Catherine Breillat’s haunting film about her 2004 stroke and subsequent self-destructive relationship with star swindler Christophe Rocancourt, starring Isabelle Huppert.

ALAN PARTRIDGE (2013) 90min
Director: Declan Lowney
Country: UK
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
In the long-awaited big-screen debut of Steve Coogan’s singular comic creation, the vain and obliviously tactless Alan Partridge must serve as an intermediary when North Norfolk Digital is seized at gunpoint by a down-sized DJ.

ALL IS LOST (2013) 107min
Director: J.C. Chandor
Country: USA
Robert Redford as you’ve never seen him before, gives a near-wordless all-action performance as a lone sailor trying to keep his yacht afloat after a collision with a discarded shipping container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. A Roadside Attractions release.

AMERICAN PROMISE (2013) 135min
Directors: Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson
Country: USA
Two Brooklyn filmmakers follow their son Idris and his friend Suen from their enrollment in the Dalton School as children through their high school graduations in this devastating, years-in-the-making documentary that takes a hard look at race and class in America.

AT BERKELEY (2013) 244min
Director: Frederick Wiseman
Country: USA
U.S. PREMEIRE
Another masterfully constructed documentary from Frederick Wiseman, examining the University of California, Berkeley from multiple angles - the administrators, the students, the surrounding community - to arrive at a portrait that is as rich in detail as it is epic in scope.

BASTARDS (Les Salauds) (2013) 100min
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France
Claire Denis’s jagged, daringly fragmented and deeply unsettling film inspired by recent French sex ring scandals is the rarest of cinematic narratives—a contemporary film noir, perfect in substance as well as style.

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (La Vie d’Adèle) (2013) 179min
Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Country: France
The sensation of this year’s Cannes Film Festival is an intimate - and sexually explicit - epic of emotional transformation, featuring two astonishing performances from Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. An Sundance Selects release.
Please be advised that this film has scenes of a sexually explicit nature.

BURNING BUSH (Hořicí Keř) (2013) 234min
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Country: Czech Republic
A passionately brilliant Czech mini-series from Agnieska Holland about the events that followed student Jan Palach’s public self-immolation in protest against the Soviet invasion after Prague Spring.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (2013) 134min
Director: Paul Greengrass
Country: USA
OPENING NIGHT GALA SELECTION, WORLD PREMIERE
Paul Greengrass has crafted an edge-of-your-seat thriller based on the true story of the seizure of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship in 2009 by four Somali pirates, with remarkable performances from Tom Hanks and four first-time actors, Barkhad Abdi, Faysal Ahmed, Barkhad Abdirahman and Mahet M. Ali. A Sony Pictures release.

CHILD OF GOD (2013) 104min
Director: James Franco
Country: USA, 2013
U.S. PREMIERE
James Franco’s uncompromising excursion into American Gothic, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel, about an unstable sociopath in early 60s rural Tennessee who descends into an animal-like state - not for the faint-hearted.

GLORIA (2013) 110min
Director: Sebastián Lelio
Countries: Chile/Spain
A wise, funny, liberating movie from Chile, about a middle-aged woman who finds romance but whose new partner finds it painfully difficult to abandon his old habits.

HER (2013)
Director: Spike Jonze
Country: USA
CLOSING NIGHT GALA SELECTION, WORLD PREMIERE
In Spike Jonze’s magical, melancholy comedy of the near future, lonely Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his new all-purpose operating system (the voice of Scarlett Johansson), leading to romantic and existential complications. A Warner Bros. Pictures release.

THE IMMIGRANT (2013) 120min
Director: James Gray
Country: USA
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
In James Gray’s richly detailed period tragedy, set in a dusty, sepia-toned 1920s Manhattan, a young Polish immigrant (Marion Cotillard) is caught in a dangerous battle of wills with a shady burlesque manager (Joaquin Phoenix). A Radius release.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013) 105min
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Country: USA
Joel and Ethan Coen’s picaresque, panoramic and wryly funny story of a singer/songwriter is set in the New York folk scene of the early 60s and features a terrific array of larger-than-life characters and a glorious score of folk standards. A CBS Films release.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (2013) 111min
Director: Ralph Fiennes
Country: UK
Ralph Fiennes directs and stars as Charles Dickens in this adaptation of Claire Tomalin’s revelatory 1992 biography, which brought the upright Victorian author’s secret 13-year affair with a young actress to light. A Sony Pictures Classics Release.

JEALOUSY (La Jalousie) (2013) 77min
Director: Philippe Garrel
Country: France
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
Another intimate, handcrafted work of poetic autobiographical cinema from French director Philippe Garrel, in which his son Louis and Anna Mouglalis star as actors and lovers trying to reconcile their professional and personal lives.

JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN (2013) 114min
Director: Arnaud Desplechin
Country: France
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
In Arnaud Desplechin’s intelligent and moving depiction of a successful “Talking Cure,” the encounters between patient (Benicio del Toro) and therapist (Mathieu Amalric) are electric with discovery.

THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (Le Dernier des injustes) (2013) 218min
Director: Claude Lanzmann
Countries: France/Austria
U.S. PREMEIRE
This moral and cinematic tour de force from the creator of SHOAH will cause you to reconsider your understanding of Adolph Eichmann and of Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of Theresienstadt and the film’s central figure.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (Soshite Chichi ni Naru) (2013) 120min
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Country: Japan
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sensitive drama takes a close look at two families’ radically different approaches to the horribly painful realization that the sons they have raised as their own were switched at birth. A Sundance Selects release.

THE MISSING PICTURE (L’image manquante) (2013) 92min
Director: Rithy Panh
Country: Cambodia
Filmmaker Rithy Panh’s brave new film revisits his memories of four years spent under the Khmer Rouge and the destruction of his family and his culture; without a single memento left behind, he creates his “missing images” with narration and painstakingly executed dioramas. A Strand release.

MY NAME IS HMMM… (Je m’appelle Hmmm…) (2013) 121min
Director: agnès b
Country: France
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
In this deeply personal, incandescent first feature from designer agnès B, a young girl holding her family together and bearing the weight of sexual abuse runs away from home and enjoys a carefree idyll with a kindly Scottish trucker.

NEBRASKA (2013) 115min
Director: Alexander Payne
Country: USA
This masterful film from Alexander Payne, about a quiet old man (Bruce Dern) whose mild-mannered son (Will Forte) agrees to drive him from Montana to Nebraska to claim a non-existent prize, shades from the comic to multiple hues of melancholy and regret. A Paramount Pictures release.

NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (Nugu-ui ttal-do anin Haewon) (2013) 90min
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Country: South Korea
A young student at loose ends after her mother moves to America tries to define herself one encounter and experience at a time, in reality and in dreams, in another deceptively simple chamber-piece from South Korean master Hong Sang-soo.

NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan) (2013) 250min
Director: Lav Diaz
Country: Philippines
U.S. PREMIERE
Filipino director Lav Diaz’s twelfth feature - at four-plus hours, one of his shortest - is a careful rethinking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, with a tortured anti-hero who is a haunting embodiment of the dead ends of ideology.

OMAR (2013) 96min
Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Country: Palestinian Territories
U.S. PREMIERE
A tense, gripping, ticking clock thriller about betrayal, suspected and real, in the Occupied Territories, from Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now).

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013) 123min
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Country: USA
U.S. PREMIERE
Jim Jarmusch’s wry, tender and moving take on the vampire genre features Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston as a centuries-old couple who watch time go by from separate continents as they reflect on the ever-changing world around them.A Sony Pictures Classics release.

REAL (2013) [late addition to Main Slate]
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Country: Japan
U.S. PREMIERE
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's first feature since the 2008 TOKYO SONATA, his most romantic movie yet, is an exquisitely crafted sci-fi fable about young love, marriage, and the merging of two psyches in the face of death.

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (2013)
Director: Ben Stiller
Country: USA
CENTERPIECE SELECTION, WORLD PREMIERE
Ben Stiller stars in and directs this sweet, globe-trotting (but New York-based) comic fable about an up-to-the-minute everyman, co-starring Kristen Wiig as the woman of his dreams, Sean Penn as a legendary photographer and Shirley MacLaine as Walter’s mother. A Twentieth Century Fox release.

THE SQUARE (2013)
Director: Jehane Noujaim
Country: USA/Egypt
U.S. PREMIERE
Jehane Noujaim’s tense, vivid verité portrait of events as they unfolded in Tahrir Square through Arab Spring and beyond, in a newly revised, up-to-the-minute version.

STRANGER BY THE LAKE (L’Inconnu du lac) (2013) 97min
Director: Alain Guiraudie
Country: France
U.S. PREMIERE
Alain Guiraudie’s lethally precise, sexually explicit film, which unfolds entirely in the vicinity of a gay cruising ground, is both a no-holds-barred depiction of a hedonistic subculture and a perverse and unnerving tale of amour fou. A Strand release.
Please be advised that this film has scenes of a sexually explicit nature.

STRAY DOGS (Jiao You) (2013) 138min
Director: Tsai Ming-liang
Country: Taiwan
U.S. PREMIERE
Tsai Ming-liang’s fable of a homeless family living the cruelest of existences on the ragged edges of the modern world is bracingly pure in its anger and its compassion, and as visually powerful as it is emotionally overwhelming.

A TOUCH OF SIN (Tian Zhu Ding) (2013) 133min
Director: Jia Zhangke
Country: China
U.S. PREMIERE
Jia Zhangke’s bloody, bitter new film builds a portrait of modern-day China in the midst of rapid and convulsive change through four overlapping stories of marginalized and oppressed citizens pushed to murderous rage. A Kino Lorber release.

LE WEEK-END (2013) 93min
Director: Roger Michell
Country: UK
U.S. PREMIERE
A magically buoyant, bittersweet comedy drama about a middle-aged and middle class English couple who go to Paris for a weekend holiday, starring two of Britain’s national treasures, Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan. A Music Box Films release.

WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM (2013) 89min
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Countries: Romania/France
U.S. PREMIERE
A rigorously structured and fascinatingly oblique new film from Corneliu Porumboiu that examines the life of a film director during the moments on a shoot when the camera isn’t rolling.

THE WIND RISES (Kaze Tachinu) (2013) 126min
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Country: Japan
U.S. PREMIERE
The great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s new film is based on the life of Jiro Hirokoshi, the man who designed the Zero fighter. An elliptical historical narrative, THE WIND RISES is also a visionary cinematic poem about the fragility of humanity.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/kj.jpg
Richard Peña has retired and Kent Jones is the new NYFF
Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair
photo: *Godlis

The press & industry screening schedule

All screenings and press conferences will take place in the Walter Reade Theater, (165 West 65th Street) unless otherwise noted. (Main slate films in bold.)

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 16
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM AT BERKELEY (244m)
*Press conference to follow via SKYPE
3PM LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON 120m)

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 17
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM CHILD OF GOD (104m)
*Press conference to follow via SKYPE
11:45AM A TOUCH OF SIN (TIAN ZHU DING) (125min)
2:15PM NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (90m)
4:15PM MANAKAMANA (118m)
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: MOTION PORTRAITS

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 18
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM AFTERNOON OF A FAUN: TANAQUIL LE CLERCQ (93m)
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: MOTION PORTRAITS
11AM LE WEEK-END (93m)
1PM THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (218m)
5PM THE WIND RISES (KAZE TACHINU) (126m)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (250m)
*Press conference to follow with director Lav Diaz.
2PM STRANGER BY THE LAKE (97m)
4PM Views from the Avant-Garde
FALLING NOTES UNLEAVING (12m)
SONG (18.5m)
SPRING (23m)
* PLEASE NOTE LOCATION: ELINOR BUNIN MUNROE FILM CENTER, 144 West 65th Street

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 20
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM Views from the Avant-Garde
DIVE: APPROACH AND EXIT (12m)
SIGNS OF STILLNESS OUT OF MEANINGLESS THINGS (28m)
MERCURIO (MERCURY) (18m)
ARQUIVO (ARCHIVE) (19m)
10:45AM WHAT NOW? REMIND ME (E AGORA? LEMBRA-ME) (164m)
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: MOTION PORTRAITS
2PM THE MISSING PICTURE (92m)
*Press conference to follow with director Rithy Panh via SKYPE.
4:30PM ABOUT TIME (123m)

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM CLUB SANDWICH (82m)
EMERGING ARTISTS
* PLEASE NOTE LOCATION: ELINOR BUNIN MUNROE FILM CENTER, 144 West 65th Street
10:45AM THE DOG (101m)
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: MOTION PORTRAITS
* PLEASE NOTE LOCATION: ELINOR BUNIN MUNROE FILM CENTER, 144 West 65th Street
1PM JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN (114m)
*Press conference to follow with director Arnaud Desplechin via SKYPE.
4:00PM WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM (89m)

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM EXHIBITION (105m)
EMERGING ARTISTS
11:15AM JEALOUSY (77m)
1PM THE SQUARE (104m)
*Press conference to follow with director Jehane Noujaim
3:45PM STRAY DOGS (138m)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM BURNING BUSH (234m)
*1 intermission will be held for 15m after Part 2.
*Press conference to follow with director Agnieszka Holland via SKYP
2:15PM ABUSE OF WEAKNESS (105m)
*Press conference to follow with director Catherine Breillat via SKYPE.
5PM TIM’S VERMEER (80m)
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: APPLIED SCIENCE

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (105m)
*Press Conference to follow with directors Joel and Ethan Coen, T-Bone Burnett and Oscar Isaac.
12:45PM AMERICAN PROMISE (135m)
*Press conference to follow
4PM SHORTS PROGRAM #1 (102m)

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 27
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (132 min)
*Press Conference to follow
1:15PM ALAN PARTRIDGE (90m)
*Press Conference to follow
3:45PM Views from the Avant-Garde
LOIS PATIÑO: COSTA DA MORTE (83m)
* PLEASE NOTE LOCATION: ELINOR BUNIN MUNROE FILM CENTER, 144 West 65th Street

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 30
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM REAL (127m) CANCELLED
12:30PM MY NAME IS HMM… (121m)
*Press conference to follow with director agnès b via SKYPE.
3:30PM SHORTS PROGRAM #2 (97m)

TUESDAY OCTOBER 1
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM OMAR (96m)
*Press conference to follow with director Hany Abu-Assad via SKYPE.
12:30PM SAM IN THE SNOW (93m)
SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: HOW DEMOCRACY WORKS NOW
2:30PM SHORTS PROGRAM #3 (61m)

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 2
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM HAIL MARY, screening with THE BOOK OF MARY and NOTES ON HAIL MARY (107m)
RETROSPECTIVE: JEAN-LUC GODARD – THE SPIRIT OF THE FORMS
12:15PM THE CHASE (86m), preceded by IT’S THE CAT/SOME OTHER CAT (7m)
REVIVALS
2:15PM PROVIDENCE (110m)
REVIVALS

THURSDAY OCTOBER 3
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM SHORTS PROGRAM #4 (89m)
12:30PM. REAL [RESCHEDULED FROM SEPT. 30]

FRIDAY OCTOBER 4
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM

FRIDAY OCTOBER 4
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 8AM – 5PM
9AM THE IMMIGRANT (117m)
*Press conference to follow with director James Gray.
12PM BASTARDS (100m)
*Press conference to follow with director Claire Denis.
2:45PM GLORIA (110m)
*Press Conference to follow with director Sebastián Lelio and Paulina Garcia.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
1:00PM THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY
*Press Conference to follow AMC LINCOLN SQUARE

MONDAY OCTOBER 7
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM 12 YEARS A SLAVE (134m)
*Press conference to follow

TUESDAY OCTOBER 8
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM ALL IS LOST (107m)
*Press Conference to follow with director J.C. Chandor and Robert Redford.
1PM NEBRASKA (115m)
*Press conference to follow

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 9
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (111m)
*Press conference to follow with director and star, Ralph Fiennes, and Joanna Scanlan.

THURSDAY OCTOBER 10
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 9AM – 5PM
10AM PENDING: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (123m)
*Press conference to follow

FRIDAY OCTOBER 11
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 12PM – 5PM
1PM – 4PM BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (LA VIE D’ADÈLE) (179m)
*Press conference to follow

SATURDAY OCTOBER 12
P&I OFFICE OPEN FROM 12PM – 5PM
10AM HER
*Press conference to follow

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/ny51.jpg

FREDERICK WISEMAN: AT BERKELEY (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/@uc.jpg
From At Berkeley

Wiseman provides a reassuring picture of today's UC Berkeley

The seemingly indefatigable American independent documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, still productive at 83, has made a four-hour study of the University of California at Berkeley, so famous for its Free Speech Movement and its role in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the Sixties and early Seventies, as it is today. The theme that emerges is of a struggle, apparently so far successful, to remain a world-class place of learning in the face of post Great Recession budgetary restraints, cutting corners while trying to maintain the quality of teaching and research. There's no big news here. But Wiseman, editing down over 128 hours of digital footage, provides one of his best recent portraits of an institution, shifting around from classroom teaching to meetings of various administrators, in which the Canadian-born Robert J. Birgeneau, 2004-2013 chancellor and a renowned MIT physicist, features prominently.

Nothing is happening. And then something quietly is. A student protest, mainly calling for a return to free tuition, begins with resounding speeches on the Sproul Hall steps that invoke Mario Savio of the FSM and moves on to an occupation of the Dow Library reading room. This is an event that earlier we see being in general terms planned for at a discussion of campus cops and administrators. In the event, it disperses quietly, only to be quietly mocked later by Birgerneau at yet another administrative meeting for its lack of a forceful, specific goal -- the usual criticism of the Occupy movement.

Tellingly, perhaps (and one can always argue that Wiseman's "fly on the wall" coolness is undercut by his pointed, sometimes metaphorical, editing) there's a class in which the lively Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich talks to a mini-arena about the difficulty administrators or leaders have in "self-evaluation" since they can't get constructive criticism from their staffs even when they want it. Threaded through are sequences in classrooms. In one students discuss the growing economic squeeze on the middle class and its effect on students at UC Berkeley. At another meeting, not a class, scholarship students feeling the pinch are counseled to suck it up. There are also professors analyzing Walden and a poem by Donne, or talking about neuro-science, physics, or paleontology. In between are cool wide-angle shots of the university's buildings, in a bland style that seems to combine Spanish mission with Stalinist. An occasional shot shows a chorus of busty sorority girls singing out of doors, a skateboard or two zipping by, students studying on the lawn or crowding through the plaza.

Wiseman seems to have had remarkable access, to all academic meetings except those on tenure, and to a variety of classes. We don't see anything lively, exciting, or brilliant happening in a classroom. Nor do we enter a dorm or see students working out at the gym, sitting in a dining hall, hanging out, or drinking beer. A decision was made to exclude footage of the city of Berkeley. The filmmaker gives us some kind of Platonic ideal of a serious, academically superior American university (Berkeley being traditionally the most elite of the many UC campuses for undergraduates, the most richly supplied with Nobel Prize winners). The result is reassuring but also a little numbing.

Happily, perhaps, this is all in sharp contrast to the lengthy 1994 PBS Frontline documentary "School Colors," which depicted the volatile mix of violence, racial conflict, idealism and talent then prevailing at Berkeley High School. That documentary, based on a year of shooting, showed the ideal of school integration failing. In contrast black students at UC Berkeley in Wiseman's film, gathered with Asian and white students to discuss issues of race and education, express satisfaction that at the university they're no longer stared at when they speak in class or stereotyped as unintelligent as they were in high school. In a way the lack of drama at Wiseman's Berkeley is reassuring. But the financial crunch remains a threat to the school's excellence. How long can a great public university keep raising student fees and still call itself public?

At Berkeley, 244 mins., debuted at Venice, was shown at Toronto, and was screened for this review as part of the 2013 New York Film Festival. It reportedly will later have a theatrical run in NYC at IFC Center and Lincoln Center. It airs on PBS starting Monday, January 13, 2014.

HIRAKAZU KOREEDA: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/k1r2.jpg

An old theme deliberately muddled?

Koreeda, who has dealt with children being separated from parents before, turns this time to the old theme of babies switched at birth. And he does not avoid the cliché of contrasting social levels. This isn't exactly a prince and a pauper, but two of the parents are ambitious and moneyed, and the others are humble. Along with that comes the obvious association of the wealthy with coldness and distance and the poor with more humanity. Perhaps Koreeda's greatest strength here is a weakness: he takes forever to resolve things. Neither the emotional decision about how to resolve the discovered child switch nor the question of nature vs. nurture is ever satisfactorily concluded, and this uncertainty makes for an emotionally complex and thought-provoking, if still somehow somewhat weak film. Certainly this is also a take on the theme that's both contemporary and Japanese. And to add a touch of class, Koreeda's low-keyed treatment has its main sequences delicately linked with the opening passage from the Goldberg Variations.

Though the poor family is somewhat romanticized, the wealthy one gets more attention. Right off the focus is on the ambitious corporate architect Ryota Nonomiya (Masaharu Fukuyama) and his wife Midori (Machiko Ono), who live in a posh glass and steel apartment and are pushing their six-year-old son Keita (Keita Nonomiya) into a fancy school. Well, they think he's their son. Poor Keita is like a little doll, and his handsome father is distant and withholding toward him (and also somewhat toward his wife), forcing the boy to take piano lessons, though he isn't very good, obsessed with money and success. The main focus remains on this family. Later when the hospital contacts them about the discovered switched babies, we meet mom Yukai Saiki (Yoko Maki) and dad Yudai Saiki (Lily Franky). He has an appliance repair shop in a not-very-attractive neighborhood. Their son is Ryusei ( Hwang Sho-gen) -- or so they thought. They also have a couple of other kids.

Because Koreeda's solution is to tease and twist his theme rather than resolve it, the film forces the viewer to linger over how wrenching and confusing it would be both for adult and child to learn parents have been raising and loving the wrong kid. But either the discomfort is most felt by the architect Ryota and his wife, or we just don't get to see how the Saikis experience it. Despite Ryota's disdain for the other parents and their lifestyle, he arranges for the two families to start meeting and socializing, and having Keita and Ryusei switch places on a temporary basis, which Ryota tells Keita is a "mission" (using the English word), to "toughen" him.

Keita is won over by Yuda's ability to fix anything, including mechanical robot-monsters, and by his general playfulness; the boy also seems to like the togetherness of bathing with the poor family in their tiny bathtub. On the other hand, Ryusei enjoys the luxury of the architect's house. However, for the Nonomiyas, all is inner turmoil. She misses Keita terribly; he knows that his withholding nature isn't going to win Ryosei's affection. Meanwhile there is much discussion of a damage suit against the hospital, and an irrelevant subplot about a nurse who makes a confession. Meanwhile Ryota tries at first to pay off the Saikis and gain the right to raise both Keita and Ryusei, thus resolving any abandonment guilt and still gaining control of his blood offspring. But this is immediately rejected, and Ryuta simply starts believing his father's advice that the genetic link will come through in the end.

At times it seems that nothing is really happening. In contrast to traditional rags-to-riches or prince-and-pauper tales, Koreeda's provides no dramatic incidents. He works with a series of small, delicate ones designed to bring out social and cultural differences and spotlight little emotional shifts. He also shows how quickly the boys, like most children, can adjust to changed circumstances. Meanwhile complexities in Ryota's background are added on top of his initial impression of mere chilly ambition, and the way is paved for a moral transformation that might be corny if it were not undercut by a deliberately ambiguous finale. Thus Koreeda underlines the point that to the question of who is the true parent, the blood one or the one who has raised the child, there is really no final answer.

There are three Koreeda films about children now, the 2004 Nobody Knows, the 2011 I Wish (FCS 2012) and now this. While I Wish had charm, magic, and much more intimate focus on children, Like Father, Like Son is more troubling and complex. But neither can begin to compare with the devastating true tale Koreeda tells about the children abandoned by their irresponsible mother in Nobody Knows, which takes us into the heartbreaking, yet resilient world of children left by themselves and, afraid of being put into foster care, desperately pretending to the outside world that everything is fine. There is nothing like having a truly meaty theme to deal with. The other two films feel contrived in comparison. While it may be that as Derek Elley says Koreeda's films tend to be half an hour too long due to his insisting on doing his own editing, in the case of Nobody Knows that extra time contributes to our sense of the length of the children's ordeal; in the other two, it just seems like meandering.

Like Father, Like Son, 120 mins., debuted at Cannes and was shown at over a dozen other international festivals before being screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival. NYFF public screenings: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 6:00 pm, Alice Tully Hall; WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 6:00 pm, Francesca Beale Theater.

JAMES FRANCO: CHILD OF GOD (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/52ex.jpg
Scott Haze in Child of God

James Franco does Cormac McCarthy, literally, with feeling

The prolific James Franco may have arrived as a feature film director when his adaptation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying became an Official Selection at the 2013 Cannes festival and got US theatrical release for this September 27th. He also has an adaptation with Vince Jolivette of Cormac McCarthy's Child of God. This (which may also be said of Faulkner's novel) is a book whose prose is unique, and to turn it into moving pictures is to rob it of what makes it a work of art. You can say this about any novel-into-film, but it's more true of some than others. Child of God is one of McCarthy's early, deep-South books and it concerns a disturbing and repugnant character (not that McCarthy's books are not rife with malignant and horrific people and acts). The Tennessee novels' effect is disturbing however you approach them but they are meant to come drenched in the authorial voice and its special way of evoking a period and milieu that at the same time is really McCarthy's world, and no place else; his sensibility, and no one else's. Franco's version is a well-made film, dominated by a once-in-a-lifetime, balls-out performance by Scott Haze as Lester Ballard, the crazed outcast, the titular, protagonist "child of God" (testing the range of that concept) who in the course of the story becomes a cave-dweller, murderer, and necrophiliac. This version is also too literal, following the narrative structure and four parts of the novel closely rather than re-imagining it. Franco needs to take on more filmable books, or to film a story of his own devising.

You have to credit Haze, Franco, and the other cast and crew members, who shot in West Virginia rather than the novel's Tennessee, for recreating very vividly a challenging series of events. Some of the encounters with a mean southern cracker sheriff, ably played by Tim Blake Nelson, even some of Lester's earlier running around and rough encounters with locals, are familiar stuff. But we've never seen a wild man find a young couple suicided in the back of a shiny Forties Pontiac and then copulate with the girl, and then lug her body to his cottage for further use. I won't forget Lester's struggle to carry the girl's body up a ladder to the loft of the cottage, or the cottage all in flames later when he accidentally sets fire to it on a cold night; or how he fills with bullets the heads of the giant stuffed pooh-bear and tiger he won at a carnival shooting gallery (a sequence Franco added); or his flight through a cave escaping from a lynch mob. These are good acting, good staging, and good storytelling. But a few voices reading narration and a few artificial large paragraphs from the book flashed on the screen do not make up for the absence of Cormac McCarthy's style, among the most unique and sonorous in contemporary American fiction.

Lester Ballard is an extreme character and Scott Haze delivers in kind. Franco's regular collaborator Christina Voros provides handsome muted cinematography, in which the protagonist's crazed mind and adrenalin-drenched experience are evoked through shaky camera and rapid, rough-edged editing. The banjo-dominated bluegrass-style arranged by Aaron Embry is a little conventional, but it neatly links the surreal and comic aspects of the story. This film is not for everyone, to put it mildly. But for those whom it may suit it is absorbing and watchable. Only you should go and read the book, and all Cormac McCarthy's books. He is one of the great ones (see Harold Bloom). . . and this is only a glorified Cliff Notes "Child of God" (which I find is how Variety describes Franco's As I Lay Dying). James Franco is an A+ student, who uses his power, cachet, and name to good effect and doesn't waste them on soft or easy projects. We look forward to seeing what he does when he graduates.

This is added to the list of Cormac McCarthy film adaptations, along with All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. It's probably no coincidence that the one that works best, the Coens' No Country for Old Men, is based on the least brilliant and McCarthyian of the adapted novels. The Coens had never done a literary adaptation before, and they are the best writers in the group. Nabokov tried to do his own screen adaptation of his masterpiece, Lolita. It was not a success..

James Franco's Child of God, 104 mins., debuted at Venice, was shown at Toronto, and was screened for this review as part of the 51st New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

JIA ZHANG-KE: A TOUCH OF SIN (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/JxW.jpg
Jiang We in A Touch of Sin

Jia takes a new genre tack, with mixed results

Jia Zhang-ke, China's most important unconventional "sixth-generation" movie director, has hitherto restricted himself to complex, generally low-keyed portraits of his country in the throes of development. But this time in A Touch of Sin he turns to a four-chapter study of violence that is both more overtly moralistic and more "genre" than anything he's done before. Obviously Jia has been jolted by what he's learned about the drastic ill effects and inequalities of rampant capitalism in the ROC. The panorama is rich, but the results are mixed and the collection lacks coherence. If his point is that bad behavior is rife, the point's well taken. But the kinds of "sin" are so various here that the effect is scattershot, the specific relevance to contemporary events unclear. However, the individual segments are still wonderful, at least intermittently, and the evocation of the contemporary Chinese milieu in various regions is often vivid. And some will argue this film is in harmony with Jia's other work: he has just added weapons and murder to make "a martial arts film for contemporary China," as film critic Marie-Pierre Duhamel quotes Jia as putting it. In fact, except for a highway sequence and a sauna killing sequence, this claim to having made a wuxia film is far-fetched indeed.

To begin with, there's an imbalance in the chapters. First comes a man who takes revenge on several political and social wrongdoers. Next is a guy who simply goes on a wild killing spree. Third is a woman who wrecks horrible vengeance on a man who mistreats her in a sauna-massage parlor. Finally we follow a youth whose aimless, impoverished life as a factory and sex worker and failed lover leads him to suicide. These can't be seen as at all the same kind of things, though all clearly do happen, though in different parts of the country, with similar backgrounds of rampant exploitation, graft, and inequality.

In the first episode Dahai (Jiang Wu) comes back to Black Gold Mountain, Shanxi province to blame the village boss in person for his personally profiting from selling off the state-owned local mine and not hsaring the proceeds with the workers as he'd promissed. Dahai writes a letter of protest about this to the Discipline Commission in Beijing but can't seem to get it sent. A new fat-cat mine boss Jiao Shengli arrives by newly acquired private plane from Hong Kong and at the ceremonial arrival Dahai confronts him and Jia Shengli has him brutally beaten with a shovel, which they joke is "playing golf." After visiting his elder sister, Dahai decides to take matters into his own hands and simply kills some of the wrongdoers. Dahai is an almost comically simple and brutal character, but his moral outrage is clear.

In part two, which is completely pointless and amoral, Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), a migrant worker who loves guns, has already shot and killed three highway bandits from his motorcycle in the opening pre-title sequence in Shanxi (the director's home province). Zhou then visits his wife and young son in Chongqing, where his elder brother splits up the leftover money from their mother's 70th birthday celebrations. But he declines to take his share. Instead he goes on a trip that turns into a killing and robbery spree.

Part three. Further down the Yangtze River, in Yichang, Hubei province, Zheng Xiaoyu (Jia's chief actress and muse Zhao Tao) sees off her married lover, Zhang Youliang (Zhang Jiayi), on a train to Guangzhou, where he will manage a factory. He gives her six months to decide whether to join him or not. When she returns to work, she is later cursed and physically attacked her lover's angry wife. After visiting her mother out of town, Xiaoyu returns to the sauna where she uses a fruit knife she took from her lover when the train security people wouldn't allow it on a bullying customer who wants her to perform services that have nothing to do with her job as the cashier.

Next, in the fourth and last segment, In Guangdong province, at the factory managed by Zhang, Xiaoyu's lover, a young employee called Xiaohui (Luo Lanshan) is ordered to turn over his salary while a coworker is off work with an injury that happened while they were chatting. He instead runs off to Dongguan, where he gets a job in a luxury hotel that caters to rich sex tourists from Hong Kong and Taiwan. He bonds with a cute female coworker, Lianrong (Li Meng), who's from his home province of Hunan. The naive, pretty young man falls for Lianrong, but she tells him he knows nothing bout her: she has a 3-year-old child. When he sees her "working" at the hotel, his disenchantment causes him to flee again and go to work at another factory, where he soon commits suicide.

All this is interesting and illustrates Jia's penchant for rapid, disjointed incident and rambling storyline at a high level of energy, but it is also too much to take in. Derek Elley is doubtless right in his review of A Touch of Sin when he comments that Zhao Tao (but not the subtle Zhang Jiayi as her lover) is, as usual, a comely blank; hence I would say her murder, though revenge for criminal and odious behavior, seems cold and amoral. But as Elley says the young man's psychology in the last section is more fully developed. Though it's not made at all clear how he could suddenly have become desperate enough to kill himself, his naivety and disillusionment of his existence and his typical lack of anything but the grimmest prospects (much like the young men much earlier in Jia's Unknown Pleasures) come through clearly and movingly, even though they are subtle. For me, Still Life remains the most magical of Jia Zhang-ke's recent films, with unity and haunting delicacy.

There is much good stuff -- too much -- in A Touch of Sin. While the fourth, Xiaohui, episode is like a more touching segment of Jia's The World, one wishes that Jia had found a way either to expand the opening Dahai segment into a whole feature, or to have multiplied other segments in the same vein, perhaps focusing on other industries. While it's probably true as Elley says that "Most of Jia's films have been essentially episodic, with little grasp of long dramatic lines," in some of them that works more than in others. Platform, for instance, is held together by the adventures of the theater company, and becomes a rich chronicle of a decade. This time each episode is very strong in its way, but the whole suffers from the clear sense that they don't quite belong together. What is great in A Touch of Sin and makes it a delight to watch is the cinematography by d.p. Yu Lik-wai.

A Touch of Sin, 125 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2013, where it got the best screenplay award, and has shown since at half a dozen other festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and is slated for a US theatrical release by Kino Lorber 4 October. My other Jia Zhang-ke reviews are linked here.

HONG SANG-SOO: NOBODY'S DAUGHTER HAEWON (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/HS-s.jpg
Lee Seong-jun and Jeong Eun-chae in Nobody's Daughter Haewon

An auteurist Korean Woody Allen?

The blurb term "deceptively simple" indeed applies to this Hong Sang-soo iteration, in that very little seems to be going on -- but the end apparently is a dream, and that fooled me. And it also fooled my friend, who was delighted with the film, though unable (perhaps blissfully?) to remember any of the various other Hong films we've both seen before at Lincoln Center, which has presented six or seven of the Korean auteur's works at iterations of the New York Film Festival. I have enjoyed most of the others more, and therefore must side -- cautiously -- with those who consider this one a "tired retread" (Derek Elley), even though there are moments -- for some of us, anyway, such as my friend. I also agree with Mike D'Angelo in wondering if "the professor/director's (yes, again) obsession with that hideous techno rendition of Beethoven's 7th [is] meant to be funny, or weirdly poignant." What's clear is that it's hideous (he plays it on a cell phone). And why do some aspects of Hong's films, the camerawork, and the external shots, for instance, so often seem colorless and merely routine? The main characters are usually played by attractive people, with interesting or pretty faces and nice voices. The "professor/director" speaks in deep resonant tones.

This one has a twist: it has a girl at the center of it, and a very pretty one, who's "abandoned" by her mother, who goes to Canada to be with her brother. There's also a chance meeting with Jane Birkin, which brings out that the girl, Haewon (Jeong Eun-chae) speaks good English, and also wants to become a successful movie actress. Birkin says Haewon resembles her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg (she does; she's meant to) -- which delights Haewon. After a farewell (tea) drinking session with her mother, Haewon walks past the Jongho public library and sees the Famous Hotel, which has memories of her brief affair with Lee Seong-jun (Lee Seon-gyun), the director and also her current teacher. She calls him because she's lonely and they meet up and drink, joining other students and pretending that they met by chance. The theme of hiding, but not hiding, an affair is repeated with them and another couple.

A week later Haewon and Lee Seong-jun go to Namhan Fortress, in the hills south of Seoul, where they have a big argument over their affair. Lee is furious that Haewon has slept with a younger guy she's dating, and calls her a bitch. The re-connection leads Lee Seong-jun to messing up his life. He gets drunk and fights with his wife and moves out. He keeps playing the hideous techno version of Beethoven's 7th and breaking into tears, reminded of Haewon and how he pines for her.

Another week passes and Haewon falls asleep in the college library and dreams of a boy asking if she's dating another boy. (This is seen/shot as if it were happening.) Still later Haewon is back in Seoul and runs into Jeong-won (Kim Ui-seong), and they go to a bar and chat. He is a professor in San Diego just divorced who says he is looking for a new wife just like her. This pleases and flatters her. But does she want him, or Lee Seong-jun, or one of the boys her own age, or just flattery and success?

Hong's way of working is double-edged. On the one hand his constant reworking of themes and situations in every successive film makes for a kind of inbred pleasure, and tricky repetitions and overlappings of real and imaginary as in the recent Night and Day can be fun. On the other hand one begins to think back nostalgically to the first few Hong films one saw, when it all seemed fresh and new and original, sort of Nouvelle Vague in Korean, and they had not all begun to blur together. The question arises: is the burnout his, mine, or both? Of course Hong is far from being an auteurist Korean Woody Allen; Woody changes milieus and themes more often. But both directors make a lot of distinctively personal movies of which some work and some don't. Or all work, more or less. But afterwards some of them you don't care about.

On the other hand, with a filmmaker whose work is all so closely interrelated and flat-out repetitions as Hong Sang-soo's, the interrelations between the films are a big part of the interest and pleasure, and so it may be that in viewing his entire œuvre, or a large slice of it, in connection with Nobody's Daughter Hawwon, this latest film may come to life.

Actually more than Woody Allen Hong Sang-soo obviously resembles Eric Rohmer. He, like Rohmer, focuses on people who always want to be with the wrong person, or like Melvil Poupaud in Rohmer's 1996 Tale of Summer, just can't decide among several. Haewon certainly has several, but she doesn't even seem to want to decide; she's just killing time, or trying to forget that she misses her mother.

Nobody's Daughter Haewon , 90 mins., the director's 14th feature, debuted at Berlin (February) and has shown at four or five other festivals, and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival in September 2013.

ROGER MITCHELL: LE WEEK-END (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/LeW.jpg
Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan in Le Week-End

An aging English couple's wry anniversary in Paris

Le Week-End is a rather bitter, yet safe, little comedy about sixty-somethings that will please the mature art-house audience. Mitchell, whose Hyde Park on Hudson last year (NYFF 2012), about Roosevelt's meeting with England's king and queen, was on the crude side, delivers something this time with both more tone and more bite thanks to a Paris background, discreet chamber jazz, performances by Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan and Jeff Goldblum, and above all a script by Hanif Kureishi, who has collaborated with Mitchell before (with The Mother and Venus) and likes to blend laughs and home truths. His richest triumph as a screenwriter still remains My Beautiful Laundrette, done with Stephen Frears, one of the best English movies of the Eighties. Kureishi's focus seems to have narrowed and his viewpoint soured since then; a very bitter divorce and midlife crisis or crises of his own are not impossible writing influences.

These actors are so distinguished and reliable, so able at mimicking the familiarity of a long marriage, they might put one to sleep, were it not for all the thorny issues that arise between Meg Burrows (Duncan) and fellow teacher Jack (Broadbent). The theme is late (sixty-something) midlife crisis hitting a seasoned marriage whose anniversary they are celebrating with a weekend in the Ville Lumière, where they spent their honeymoon three decades hence. They seem to delight in overspending, in ways that may strain credibility: to begin with Meg summarily rejects the modest but decent little "beige" hotel they're chosen (their original one?), and ordains a costly tour ride in an open-roofed taxi to compensate and take them to a very expensive hotel where after a wait they're given the one space available, a VIP suite whose balcony overlooks the Eiffel Tower and whose bar is well-stocked with champagne, which they drink. We also see them savor several nice restaurant meals, the second in a place so upscale they are forced to "do a runner" to avoid payment. Something like this happens at the very posh hotel, except that at that point they're really in trouble.

Meanwhile there are the demands and complaints. Jack wants to revive their sex life; Meg says his touch is like being put under arrest. He persists, but she threatens divorce, or at least going off with the first Frenchman she meets at a party given by Morgan (Goldblum), an old and admiring Cambridge classmate of Jack's they run into who's won all the success that has eluded Jack. The climax is the party's dinner celebrating Morgan's new book -- his speech manages to be modest and boastful and all his behavior is a satire on American egocentrism -- where Jack replies to a toast to himself with a speech that becomes an aria of ironic self-pity about how he's in fact been a failure at everything. This includes, as we've already learned, that rude words to a student have led to his being forced into early retirement; a failure of a grown son they're only just gotten rid of who wants to come back with them; and being flat broke (if so, why this trip?). Goldblum has several little arias of his own, delivered with the panache that shows what a terrific stage actor he also is; I still remember his wonderful performance on Broadway in Pillow Man and on screen in Igby Goes Down. In a brief turn as Morgan's visiting son from a half-forgotten earlier American marriage Olly Alexander is excellent, and unique. He was quite unforgettable when I first encountered him, romantically involved with Greta Gerwig in a little 2011 movie by Alison Bagnall, The Dish & the Spoon (SFIFF 2011)

In his review of Le Week-End Dennis Harvey of Variety nicely pinpoints some of its contradictions. Morgan's quality is a "generous yet completely self-absorbed joie de vivre"; and Meg and Jack are characters who are "as familiar as they are complicated." I would add that the bickering in the first half is annoying and vaguely uninteresting despite being subtle and specific. Things pick up when Jeff Goldblum, his character too both complex and a cliché, enters the scene providing a venue for the film's climax, a sort of self-abnegating encounter session so complete and brilliant (Morgan's son, come from his whiskey and marijuana in his bedroom -- briefly shared by Jack, to sit at the dinner table, calls Jack's speech "awesome") -- that it brings Meg and Jack back together again, and Morgan comes to save them from their dilemma with the posh hotel's possible legal action and the "maxing out" of Jack's one credit card. Ultimately Kureishi's "humor" has become too realistic and bitter to be very funny, and the use of Paris interiors and exteriors has been too glitzy and conventional. But this shows that Mitchell and Kureishi can still surprise us, and they know how to find impeccable actors. Olly Alexander is the icing on the cake. Some talk about love vs. sex is as profound as the dialogue gets. Ultimately this is a film with very few false steps and a number of good moments, and yet it tends to cancel itself out and end by being a fine diversion but not terribly memorable.

Le Week-End, 93 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 2013, and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. It opens in the UK 11 Oct. and the US 1 Nov. In France it opens on Christmas Day.

CLAUDE LANZMANN: THE LAST OF THE UNJUST (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/ijbj.jpg
Claude Lanzmann in The Last of the Unjust

The last Jewish elder interviewed in the Seventies, with current additions

Lanzmann provides a coda to his monumental Holocaust documentary, Shoah, with this shorter but still very long study of the Viennese rabbi and Jewish scholar Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Jewish elder of Theresienstadt, whom he interviewed in Rome in the Seventies, when he was 70, a film that he has now reedited with the punctuation of judiciously added contemporary image and narration. Murmelstein in the Seventies interview film (which does not look dated at all) is still vigorous, feisty, and possessed of a remarkable memory. Lanzmann introduces the interview by saying Murmelstein "did not lie." But one eventually may question that familiar idea Murmelstein expresses that nobody he knew at the time or at Theresienstadt knew what was going on in the death camps, despite the fact, which he acknowledges, that Jews were being executed and cremated right there at the "model ghetto" of Theresienstadt that he helped run.

The newsworthy item is that Murmelstein had direct knowledge of Adolph Eichmann, whom he had dealings with before Eichman's deep involvement in the "Final Solution." Murmelstein debunks Hannah Arendt's description of Eichman as exemplifying "the banality of evil." Nothing banal about Eichman's evil, in Murmelstein's view. He says Eichman, even in his personal encounters with Murmelstein, was a "devil"; that he was also guilty of graft and exploitation of Jewish exportation to other countries for his own personal profit. Furthermore while in the Jerusalem trial there was no proof offered that Eichman took part in Kristalnacht, Murmelstein recounts directly observing him doing so, participating in the destruction of the holy objects of the largest synagogue of Vienna.

Murmelstein was viewed as a collaborator and a criminal, though he was tried and acquitted (no detail about this), and hence his book about Eichman and other testimony submitted to Israel at the time of the Eichman trial was not taken seriously by the Israelis. Murmelstein never went to Israel. The film does not explain what happened to Murmelstein's own family. He seems to have lived his life after the war in limbo, never able to go to England or America, where he says he might have had a career as a teacher and writer.

And what are we to think of Murmelstein? First of all, Lanzmann, who addresses the camera in French but interviewed Murmelstein in German, describes in detail the twisted origins and purposes of Theresienstadt, the "model ghetto" designed to function as a showplace cover or facade for the concentration camps. It was presented as a safe haven for elderly Jews, but when they arrived there they were greeted with humiliation, as they were by the Nazis elsewhere. Murmelstein was the third Jewish elder who "ran" Theresienstadt under the Kommandant, after the first two were sent away and executed. How did Murmelstein survive? Is the fact that he survived heroic -- or despicable? It seems that in any case he survived because he was brave, forceful and tough, both to the Nazis and in administering the "ghetto."

Murmelstein says that his aim was the survival of Theresienstadt through cooperating with the authorities in its "embellishment," the beautifying and physical improving of the facilities, and insisting that the inhabitants work 70-hour weeks. He explains how he protected their health, getting rid of typhus and lice, and asserts that his cooperation in the 1944 propaganda film about the place was an essential step, because once it had been made known as a model place, the Nazis could not eradicate it. He admits that he was of course also saving his own skin and feeding his own ego in being a strong and effective leader -- under the Nazis.

Lanzmann's lengthy, solemn, ceremonial over-and-overing documentary process seems necessary as we eventually hang on Murmelstein's and his every word -- Murmelstsin himself a forceful, vociferous speaker who makes the viewer focus intensely on him and on the day-to-day matters of his administration and his earlier interactions with Eichman that he describes. Lanzmann's magisterial filmmaking technique today involves continual breaks showing landscapes and cityscapes of Theresienstadt and other places touched on by this document. In some of them Lanzmann stands and speaks, or reads from Murmelstein's book on Eichman, originally published in Italian, translated here into French. Unlike Shoah, which consists exclusively of talking heads, this time Lanzmann sometimes shows contemporary images from the Thirties and Forties, including a passage from the Theresienstadt propaganda film and a photo of Murmelstein in an office with Eichmann before he became the Elder at Theresienstadt.

But just Lanzmann standing and speaking at a now clean and beautiful outdoor space around the buildings at Theresienstadt can be impressive. Particularly memorable is Lanzmann in a space, become through his art both beautiful and horrible, where dozens of young Jewish men were hanged to frighten the others, an event Lanzmann describes in detail. In his late eighties, Lanzmann today still seems forceful and monumental himself, with a sadness and moral weight the feisty, energetic, logical Murmelstein does not quite muster.

This is the ultimate portrait of moral ambiguity. Note, however, that Murmelstein had the chance earlier of emigrating to England or America, and instead chose to remain in Austria and help other Jews to emigrate, before his final wartime job at Theresienstadt. This does not keep Murmelstein from having entered into very dubious situations, to put it mildly, in becoming the last Jewish elder of Theresienstadt. This is a role in which a man will be either compromised or dead.

The Last of the Unjust/Le dernier des injustes, 218 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2013, and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2013.

HAYAO MIYAZAKI: THE WIND RISES (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/kfvi.jpg

An romantic animated biopic of a Japanese warplane inventor

The great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s new film, his swan song, is based on the life of Jiro Hirokoshi, the man who designed the Zero fighter. This is a biopic, and one that may have an odd ring to it in part for American viewers who recall that the fighter planes built by Mitsubishi were used to fight against the Allied forces World War II, against Pearl Harbor and in kamikaze operations. Hence this film seems unlikely to win a US audience as did films like Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl's Moving Castle (2004) -- at least if anyone remembers as far back as the Second World War.

The story begins with a little boy -- Jiro Hirokoshi -- who dreams of flying planes, and as a young man heroically saves a young woman who breaks her leg after an earthquake that derails a train and causes cities to catch fire -- this is the 1923 earthquake followed by a firestorm and typhoon that devastated Tokyo and Yokohama. The girl Jiro meets is Nahoko, the girl who is to become his love. This is a story for boys, with a romantic hook for girls to catch onto. Jiro grows up to become a talented aeronautical engineer focused on making planes lighter and stronger. When he entered the field, the Germans had metal planes; the Japanese ones were of wood and fell apart at high speeds or in high winds.

Miyazaki and his team are as good as ever at gracefully imagining whatever they want, as we see in the striking yet understated recreation of the earthquake destroying trains and houses early on, and what Scott Foundas in his hype-worthy Variety review calls "flights of incredible visual fancy, harrowing images of poverty and destruction, and touches of swooning romance." Foundas is not only Variety's current chief critic but on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, which has chosen to include this between-two-wars aviation story as part of its Main Slate. Given that this is by Miyazaki and is reportedly his last work, this is an understandable ceremonial choice for a film festival. And I loved the beauty and lightness of the images here. However, there's no getting away from how conventional a story this is, and how mediocre, even, it would be likely to seem if the same material were all filmed as an ordinary feature with live actors and real settings. But, of course, the medium is the message. It is a pleasure to see relatively old fashioned animated images with a hint of a drawn linear quality rather than the stuffed plastic doll effects of 3D Pixar films and all the horrid American imitations that unceasingly follow in their wake.

The film is best at capturing a sense of childish imagination, and it makes sense that it delivers several of Jiro's flying dreams early on. After those, the aerial travel sequences read at least in part like dreams -- a quality it would be hard to convey in a regular feature film. On the other hand, for even a boy interested in the aeronautical engineering part of the story, this account lacks detail. The engineering drawings in Jiro's shop look like animator's sketches, not the real thing. The early Japanese planes, which would have been no doubt impossible to recreate, as would the elaborate creations of Jiro's early inspiration the Italian aviation pioneer Giovanni Caproni, also have a dreamlike quality that is appealing, if also perhaps a bit trivializing of the actual historical events. In Miyazai's reimagining of events, Caprioni and Hirokoshi actually share aviation dreams.

Hirokoshi e is one of the Japanese engineers who go to see the Germans, whose superior plane they want to buy and bring back to copy (this may sound vaguely familiar). The actual war is not shown. Instead there is simply an image of vapor trains futilely foundering above dark cloud masses with a kind of cemetery below them of falled fragments of planes. And Jiro simply declares, "Not a single plane came back. That's what it means to lose a war." Perhaps this straightforward declaration will keep the film from being offensive to audiences from Japan's former opponents in the war. Or it may make the film ultimately feel vaguely irrelevant.

The film loses its momentum and its aviation focus in the second half when Jiro meets Nahoko again, now a victim of the TB epidemic, at a mountain resort that Miyazaki links to Thomas Mann's "Magic Mounntain." A structural problem? The title comes from a famous line from the French poet Paul Valéry that Jiro and Nahoo inexplicably if charmingly exchange when the first meet on that ill-starred train, "Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre," "The wind is rising, one must try to live." The drawing, especially of the young man Jiro, sometimes evokes the style of Fifties French children's books. It's been pointed out that Miyazaki dealt with early aviation in his 1992 film Porco Rosso.

The Wind Rises, 126 mins., debuted at Venice and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Sept. 2013. US Oscar-qualifying release in Nov., and again in wider (limited) release Feb. 21 2014.

LAV DIAZ: NORTE: THE END OF HISTORY (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/yyp0.jpg

A meandering Filippino 'Crime and Punishment'

Filippino director Lav Diaz is of the "slow cinema" school of art filmmaking, whose icon is said to be Theo Angeloopulos and progenitors Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and Michelangelo Antonioni. But judging by this ill-judged four-plus-hour meander "based on" Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, however reportedly more polished than previous efforts and however much festival devotees regard it as a masterpiece, Diaz is far from worthy of comparison with any of the aforementioned artists. His new film is overlong, inept, amateurish, and inexplicable. Moreover rather than emphasizing "long takes, and . . .often minimalist, observational, and with little or no narrative," as slow cinema is descried on Wikipedia as being, Norte: The End of History has a story, in two main threads, but one that is simply thin in actual incident, superficial in character development and slow and repetitive in the telling.

There are occasional nice images, moments of pastel light, or delicate panoramas; but Diaz's self-editing is random and clumsy -- even though by reports this is a "comparatively streamlined piece of storytelling" (Jonathan Romney, "Screen Daily) -- and hence four hours long instead of eight. Rather than a meditative and atmospheric film, this reads like a conventional story, however poorly told, only with a lot of empty filler in between the weepy women, suffering men, and acts of random violence.

The protagonist is the self-centered Fabian (the chunky, undistinguished-looking Sid Lucero), a law school dropout from a well off family in the Ilocos Norte region where Ferdinand Marcos was born (the director has said Fabian is a stand-in for Marcos). Fabian is also Diaz's Raskalnikov. His pretenses as an revolutionary anarchist, or maybe an existentialist, and the setup for his future acts of violence are established in a static opening scene where he is sitting at a cafe drinking with a few colleagues. They throw clichés at each other, most in English, in a remarkably incoherent and sophomoric discussion of politics and the country's future. Fabian wants to demolish everything, ditch basic concepts like family and nation, and simply kill all people who are "bad."

Romney suggests, rather over-kindly, that this film most resembles "Hou Hsaio-Hsien or perhaps Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, although in the final stretch, an apocalyptic turn suggests echoes of Bruno Dumont or Carlos Reygadas." Mike D'Angelo tweet-reviewed it at Cannes "Longest. Dumont movie. Ever. (If Dumont owned up to being a self-loathing intellectual." Rather than sidestepping action (as Hou and Yang to some extent do, while filling in a rich milieu, Diaz resorts to a final flurry of violent action, together when a cruel Deus ex Machina event. Fabian becomes as brutish as some of Dumont's more animalistic protagonists, though Dumont's coherent mood and style are missing.

The secondary plot involves a poor family whose male head, Joaqin (the even more undistinguished-looking Archie Alemania), has plunged his wife and kids into worse poverty by being out of work due to a broken leg. This gets both Joaqin and his simpering wife Eliza (Angeli Bayan) into constant trouble with Magda (the unsubtle Mae Paner), a mean, fat moneylender. Tedious scenes follow in which Eliza, and then Joaqin, plead in vain for leniency from Magda. Fabian also is a client of Magda, and an hour into the movie he goes to her house and stabs her to death with a knife, also (off camera) murdering her young daughter because she's a witness. Joaqin has assaulted Magda over a pawned ring and she has reported this to the police, and so he is collected as the prime suspect and sent to jail for life for the murders.

Fabian now fades from the picture while the film meanders back and forth between Joaqin's prison life and Eliza's efforts to take care of their two kids by selling vegetables and doing laundry. Joaquin gets into trouble for being too "good": in a Reygadas-like scene he levitates surrounded by light as if transformed into a saint.

Fabian returns briefly to be helped by a well-meaning Christian group; this is when he begins weeping and wailing, which later becomes shouting and grunting. He comes into play more lengthily on a visit to his family's estate where he is appallingly cold to his well-meaning sister, after which he wrecks further mayhem, and Eliza is removed from the action by an accident.

All this could be cut down to ninety minutes or so and in that form might make a clumsy but relatively watchable movie. More is indeed less here. But of course then Diaz would cease to be a slow cinema niche filmmaker and his one raison-d'être would vanish. In any case, avoid.

Norte, the End of History/orte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan, 250 mins., debuted in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2013 and continued at Locarno and Toronto and other festivals, including the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review.

ALAIN GUIRAUDIE: STRANGER BY THE LAKE (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/3gwd.jpg
Paou, Deladonchamps, lake

Tightly constructed French thriller set at a gay nude beach, with explicit sex

L'Inconnu du lac, a movie entirely set in a nude gay cruising area by a forest lake in the south of France, first was shown safely in the separate Un Certain Regard section at Cannes May 2013, where its overt sexual content didn't have to submit to the conventional "competition" scrutiny or the mainstream press, and it won a lot of positive buzz by viewers surprised at discovering it. Upon its French release it won critical raves. This is understandable. Stranger by the Lake (the English title has a classic Forties Hollywood sound, as noted by Jérôme Momcilovic of Cronic'art.com ) is a thriller set in a milieu straight audiences (and some gay ones) are unfamiliar with. This is a little bit as if John Retchy's bold 1967 novel of gay sexual desperation Numbers had been filmed as a murder mystery; there is a similar formal, repetitious structure. But it's a Whodunit where we know who did it. The dark, hunky, mustachioed Michel (Christophe Paou) did it. The question is what the young blond Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who witnesses it but then falls for Michel, is going to do, and what Michel will do to Franck if he knows he knows. Stranger by the Lake is notable for its observation of the unities, its tense excitement and its tight, economical structure. Cahiers du Cinéma says it's the best of Guiraudie's seven films, which they've seen (I haven't). It is a well-constructed thriller but it also has a mythical, fantastic dimension. As Stéphane Leblanc of 20 Minutes says, it's a fairy tale with a pretty (male) innocent ("joli Poucet") and a wicked wolf who pops out when night falls. And if it's Hitchcock, it's also Eric Rohmer's Summer's Tale, says Leblanc.

First let's talk about the sex, and then Hitchcock. The sex is explicit. The pebbly beach is a nude beach, and the men lie on it stripped. Cruising doesn't mean dating or pickups. It means anonymous sex, there and then or back in the woods. (When it's repeated it's no longer anonymous.) There is even a shot of a man masturbating with another man and an erect penis amply ejaculating, and fellatio, and repeated fucking. There is just enough of this to show and acknowledge that it's the main thing going on. The film isn't porn, though the conservative or uninitiated may say it is. These overt moments (and only moments) are not there to turn you on (or off) but to establish what goes on in the setting. And how it goes on. In his no-nonsense treatment of sex Guiraudie may succeed in "outing" himself in a way he hasn't before. He may also desensitivize straight audiences to gay sex in a new way. The French already had the hippest most world-weary gay filmmaker, the prolific actor-auteur Jacques Nolot. They also had the most artistic of gay porn (or any porn?) filmmakers, the immortal Jean-Daniel Cadinot. So that a French filmmaker got overt gay sex into a thriller for the first time? Not so surprising.

And yes, Hitchcock. Guiraudie has definitely created a Hitchcockian mood, which various critics have commented on. He has that Hitchcockian character, a voyeur who inadvertently witnesses a murder -- Franck watching Michel, whom he desires, and seeing him drown his partner in the lake, and who is later himself by association guilty, perhaps titillated. And there are odd onlookers, notably Henri (Patrick d'Assumçao). Henri befriends Franck and the relationship continues as they both come to the lake every day. Henri isn't thin, muscular, or cool looking. He's decidedly paunchy and bad cruising material. He also says he's straight, and is only coming here because he's broken up with his girlfriend, is on vacation, is lonely, and knows he can talk to people here without being thought weird. Henri's ambiguous presence is slightly comical and one of several light notes, the others brought chiefly by a discreet but ever-present cop, Inspector Demroder (Jérôme Chappatte), who becomes part of the scene after the body is found. Demroder's questions are insistent, sometimes telling, sometimes droll. Most Hitchcockian of all, the movie becomes progressively more and more suspenseful, almost excruciatingly so in the final moments -- then leaving us hanging. The director appears in the movie too.

The nudity and cruising still go on, and Demroder critiques this. What kind of community, he asks Franck, says nothing when one of them disappears, his clothes and shoes and towel sitting on the grass for days unclaimed, and, after a possible murder is found, the cruising and sex continue? No community at all. Thus Guiraudie, who also scripted, himself points to the cold, anonymous aspect of his own world. Not all gay men, of course, like anonymous sex, even when they're young; I didn't. But it is a fact of gay life, even post-AiDS.

Franck's relationship with Michel is amoral. Michel's murder adds to its excitement for him. The relationship is so obviously risky and dangerous that when they fuck, they agree to do so unprotected. Why does Franck fall in love with a murderer? Michel, who won't allow them to meet away from the lake, exemplifies a cold, pure-sex side of gay life that the movie frames as murderous. But Franck's passion is also amour fou, a kind of destructive love that is universal, not strictly homo or hetero.

The neat, formal, repetitious construction takes the form of a succession of days at the lake. Michel disappears at first, and reappears. The friendship between Franck and the straight guy Henri, who does not cruise, does not strip and does not swim, continues. It becomes warmer too. Henri becomes a sympathetic ear for Franck. Henri has bad days too and grows to need Franck. Michel is as hot for Franck as vice versa. But when the corpse is found and the inspector arrives on the scene things change. The parking lot and the individual cars are part of the accelerating rhythm. The days end there. But Michel won't allow Franck to follow him. Franck stays on till dark. And then the parking lot comes to seem dangerous as well as a symbol of separation.

Stranger by the Lake/L'Inconnu du lac, 97 mins., was screened for the press as part of the New York Film Festival after the third four-hour film in the first week, Lav Diaz's interminable and molasses-slow North, the End of History, and when the urbane John Wildman, communications officer of the FSLC, announced the run-time, there was applause. But there's more that's good about it than compact length. A warning. As an IMDb "user" commented, it's "extremely explicit," and "not for the squeamish or conservative." In his Cannes Tweet review Mike D'Angelo telegraphed the warning, "Might be too straight for this, as it's pretty close to being gay porn w/an unusually hefty plot." There is a Cannes Queer Palm Award and this won it. Introduced at Cannes in Un Certain Regard where it won that series' Best Director prize. The Films du Losange release will be distributed in the US by Strand Releasing. US theatrical release (limited) 24 January 2014.

RITHY PANH: THE MISSING PICTURE (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/11pl.jpg
Still from The Missing Picture

Carved figurines recreate a world of horror and attrition

The filmmaker Rithy Panh, born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1964, was eleven when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot took over the country. He and his family were taken to "rehabilitation" camps for slave labor and starvation, and, as we learn in The MIssing Picture, his mother, father, and sister died and he daily buried the exterminated or dead of starvation. In 1979 at fifteen he escaped to Thailand and a year later made it to Paris, where he makes his home. After studying at the French National Cinema School he went on to produce an award winning filmography largely devoted to studying and recreating the Pol Pot period and the tough life in Cambodia since. The Missing Picture is his most personal film -- but still detached. The story he tells in a French text coauthored with Christophe Bataille and read by Randal Douc) (dubbed in English in this version) is illustrated using little carved clay figures fabricated by Sarith Mangs and shot in vignettes, small dioramas that are sometimes ingenious and sometimes strangely pretty; or occasionally overlapping to make them a part of black and white stills or insert them in archival film footage. The effect is vivid, yet detached; grim and specific, yet ironic and vague. There isn't much effort to explain the whole historical context, and those (like myself) who are ignorant of the Khmer Roue or have forgotten the details might want to do some studying up before or after.

Rithy Panh's first film was Site 2 (1989), a documentary about a notorious torture and extermination site in Phnom Penh, and this was apparently expanded in S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003). Rice People or Le peuple de la rizière (1994), based on a novel, is a semi-documentary, semi-dramatic tale of a Cambodian peasant family undergoing one hardship after another. Typically, Panh's focus is grim and tragic, an outlook not surprising givin his traumatic and dire youth. In 2008, by then well-known in France, Panh was given the opportunity to film a Marguerite Duras novel, The Sea Wall/Un barrage contre le pacifique, with Isabelle Huppert and Gaspard Ulliel; despite these well-known names and a decent reception in France (Allociné press rating 3.0). the low-keyed film got no US release, or international attention outside the festival circuit.

The "missing picture" in the title refers to the fact that under Pol Pot's totalitarian dictatorship, anyone who filmed actual conditions was executed. Most of what survives are propaganda films. We see excerpts of one that shows a fake battle recreated in a comically amateurish fashion. The phrase also refers to Panh's lost family history. They lost everything. He refers to the happy days before the horror, dinners with family and friends, books, movie-going. It is all a little unreal, the good memories and the horrible ones.

Panh shows a hand carving the clay figures as if to make clear this is a humble do-it-yourself recreation. He reminisces in detail, but also impressionistically. He tells about the hospital with wooden plank beds where he was a while and where his mother died, recreated with the little figures, like a dollhouse. The workers in the rice fields are recreated the same way, slave-laborers toiling, as he describes the starvation, the efforts to survive by eating insects, rats, and roots -- punished by the authorities. This is interwoven with propaganda films. If you look closely, he says, you can tell the small figures shown in the films working in panoramas of rice fields are moving slowly, because they are starving. Panh describes clearly enough what the life at the labor camps was like, the brainwashing -- "reeducation," eradicating of class and individual aspirations, the exhaustion, the desperation, and what the regime at the top was like, even what Pol Pot was like as observed in pubic appearances.

Yet there is an ambiguity about all this: is Panh trying to come closer to his brief traumatic past when he lost his family and almost died or is he trying, with the clay figures, to desensitize himself to it, while keeping it at one remove? And does that work? This is also a personal film (perhaps also a very French one?) in that despite the harrowing specifics (mention of the US bombing too), Panh is poetic and impressionistic as well. Hence he says, "And then one day it all ended and the Khmer Rouge were gone," but he does not say when that was or how it came about or what followed after; nor does he fill in the outline of his own story that I gave at the start. The Missing Picture deserves good marks for its originality and the validity of its personal account can't be faulted, but something also is still missing. More of a sense of structure and more historical perspective might have made the film a more enlightening experience and less of a chore to watch. In his Variety review Justin Chang says this film encourages debate about issues of representation in historical documentary.

The Missing Picture/L'Image manquante, 90 mins., debuted at Cannes 2013 and continued at other festivals, including the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review.

RICHARD CURTIS: ABOUT TIME (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/AtTm.jpg
Rachel McAdams and Domhnall Gleeson in About Time

Second chances

Richard Curtis writes his own screenplays, and well he might, since he got a First in English at Oxford. Oxford notwithstanding, he is a pop writer, a Brit from New Zealand originally who turns out English equivalents of Nora Ephron. And no harm in that. If Notting Hill wasn't so great, Love, Actually was pretty good, and Hugh Grant was shown to best advantage in both, as well as in several other films Curtis wrote the screenplays for. Unfortunately Curtiss turns to sentimentality and soppy life messages in this outing, but good fun is had by all and there's some fast, snappy rom-com action before the treacle begins to flow. Every cast member achieves maximum cuteness, whether 20-something or 60-something. Only one character dares to be rude and narcissistic, and that's the insufferable playwright whom the young protagonist goes to live with when he comes from his preposterously lovely, charmingly eccentric family life in Cornwall to become a lawyer in London. This is Harry, and he's played by Tom Hollander. If only there were more Harrys, and more and less one-note Tom Hollanders, this movie might seem less bland and banal. But you'd also have to ditch the basic premise, from which comes the title.

You may not have heard of Domhnall Gleeson. Domhnall Gleeson isn't a looker like Hugh Grant, but he makes a better everyman. He's really 30, but sometimes it takes a while to become an emerging star. Domhnall is Irish, but he does the posh-ish English accent that predominates here -- no glottal stops or regionalisms --and plays Tim, son of Bill Nighy, who on Tim's 21st birthday at that Cornwall paradise, informs him that male members of the family have the gift of time-travel. Just go into a dark place, make fists, and focus hard on where you want to go back to and you're there. (This scene and the many that follow is really more enjoyable for clear enunciation and good timing than for actual content.)

His newly discovered skill means that henceforth Tim gets second chances on all his encounters with the love of his life, as well as several almost-loves along the way. But wouldn't this ability to re-stage interactions with the female sex have benefitted Tim more during those awkward teenage years, when nothing seems to go right? Anyway, the gift of correction -- like screenplay rewrites -- allows Tim to be a success with the lady who fills that slot taken up by Julia Roberts in Notting Hill: a pretty young American woman with a rather large mouth, the better to smile at us with and draw in the Stateside audience.

Tim's skill also enables him to save Harry's drama career, and simultaneously save an actor, played by Richard E. Grant, from ignominy. (This sequence also features the late Richard Griffiths in his final appearance.) But when Tim, now married to Mary (McAdams) and with a suitably adorable kid, tries to use time travel to save his ill-starred sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) from a bad accident, he runs into a technical snarl. Sometimes going too far back will cause other things to change that you want to keep.

Sometimes it also seems this repetitious and often pointless screenplay is simply a way to escape from the fact that Curtis hasn't come up with a very interesting or amusing story, and has to keep tweaking it with these time travel alterations. They create a kind of giddy excitement, a string of what-ifs or suppose-we-didn'ts that make Tim's young life seem like a roller coaster, one that can't go wrong. Or can go wrong at first, but then can be instantly fixed, by squeezing one's fists in a closet. This is so obviously an encouragement of fairy tale thinking that Curtis has to undercut it at the end, after a saccharine goodbye to cancer-ridden Dad Bill Nighy, with the message that all in all, it's best to play the hand life deals you. We should have seen that coming, though we wish it wouldn't. Doesn't it mean all this stuff was pointless and unnecessary?

But, as I said, everybody is cute. That includes Nighy, a breezy Mum played by Lindsay Duncan (just seen as Jim Broadbent's dicey wife in Le Weekend), and the immaculately dressed but otherwise functionless Uncle D (Richard Cordery), whose one-note schtick is never to quite know what's going on. He gets saccharine toward the end too.

It's a bit strange that the English, masters of irony and the sardonic world-view, should have become a source of movies notable for their silly, lightweight humor and overwhelming sentimentality. (The director seems to think he can find that in Dickins.) But then, while this takes place in England, and Curtis has that First from Oxford, he still comes from New Zealand. Small comfort perhaps for those of us who long for Jane Austen and Pinter.

About Time, a busy 123 mins., debuted at Edinburgh June 2013 and has opened in many countries, including the UK 4 Sept. It opens in the US (limited) 1 Nov. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

FERNANDO EIMBCKE: CLUB SANDWICH (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/p1y0.jpg
Lucio Cacho, Maria Renée Prudencio and Danae Reynaud in Club Sandwich

A boy and his mom, one last time

In his nearly 20-year career the 43-year-old Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke has produced a slim but distinctive and charming body of work, usually with a focus on adolescence. There's that also in his new Club Sandwich, which shows a single mother of 35, Paloma (María Renée Prudencio) ) and her 15 year- old son Hector (Lucio Giménez Cacho) taking a cheap summer vacation at a nice seaside motel staying off season on a "promotion." But this time the attention is more on the adult, Paloma, who's lonely, adores Hector, and knows their idyll as almost-a-couple is about to end when Hector meets the busty 16-year-old Jazmin (Danae Reynaud), whose family is also staying at the motel and the two kids start hanging out. That's about all that happens: Paloma's sad realization that Hector and Jazmin are about to have sex and Hector would rather be with the girl than with her.

It sounds simple, but Eimbcke has perfect pitch and a keen sense of pace and his minimalism means not a word, glance, twitch of the eye, or a break in tempo fails to communicate its precise meaning, whether droll or heartbraking. What may appear stylized winds up feeling highly realistic in the way each scene captures the essence of things, the heat, the boredom, the games and TV to pass the time, the dips in the pool, the sun block, the conversation that's so laconic because each situation is so familiar, or so loaded, words are barely necessary.
And there's the elegant symmetry: at the outset, Hector and Paloma put sun block on each other. They sit next to each other waiting for the lotion to dry. After Jazmin has entered the scene she and Hector will be in the same pose, sitting side by side on a bed waiting for the sun block to dry. Only everything is different.

Laconicism is a thread in Latin American cinema, as are vacations when kids go astray. There's no talk in Argentinian Lisandro Alonso's haunting Los Muertos, or much in Mexican Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light. (NYFF 2007). The abandoned well-off kids in Argentine Celina Murga's A Week Alone (FCS 2009) go somewhat feral, staging their own suburban gated community Lord of the Flies. Mexican Gerardo Naranjo had fun with a couple of kids who turn against society in his breakout film I'm Gonno Explode (NYFF 2008). The Brazilian Kleber Mendoça Filho's Neighboring Sounds (ND/NF 2011) works on a larger canvas but also suggests disorder around the corner and feel of unspoken menace. Eimbcke has a drier humor and works in a quieter and lighter key than these others, but his themes sometimes overlap with theirs.

Paloma seeks to invade the little world that now threatens to capsule off Hector and Jazmin. She takes the bull by the horns by inviting herself and Hector to dine with Jazmin, her father, and her step-mother: the dinner conversation is hilariously minimal, restricted to questions like "Do you like school?" (to Jazmin) and "How long have you been married?" (to her stup-mother).

When Jazmin and Hector are sitting next to each other staring forward (the film's neutral position), Paloma pops into the room and sits in a row next to them. With his genius for using simple means to maximum effect Eimbcke creates an emotional climax with a "punishment" game Paloma, Hector, and Jazmin play after dinner. When Jazmin loses to Paloma, she says the "punishment" is Jazmin's "leaving." Then she says it's joke. When it's Hectors turn to "punish" Jazmin, and he "condemns" her to do a "sexy dance" -- a "punishment" she carries out with panache. Finally Hector gets to "punish" Paloma and he really does -- he makes her go out to the hallways looking for a coin-dispensed bag of potato chips. She finds it, and eats the chips alone on the stairs, lonely and sad.

Eimbcke has explained that he drives casting directors nuts, but his demands pay off. To begin with the ages themselves, 35 for the mother, 15 for the son 16 for the girlfriend, are precisely calibrated. María Renée Prudencio and Lucio Giménez Cacho at first look quite alike in the sun by the pool or enjoying their bedroom together; a bad spring in one twin bed even leads them for one night at least to sleep in the same little bed. Lucio Giménez Cacho is on the plump side, but rather pretty, and big. Hence his appearance is deceptive, and can go either way, androgynous boy or attractive young male. Which way he'll go is shown by his faint mustache and his secret masturbation sessions. Anyway, it's soon obvious that Jazmin can't wait to get her hands on him.

Eimbcke's features include Duck Season (2004), Lake Tahoe (FCS 2009), which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin International film festival, and the new Club Sandwich (2013), 87 mins., screened for this review as part of the Emerging Artists program of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. Joanna Hogg of the UK, whose new film is called Exhibition, is the other featured NYFF 2013 "Emerging Artist."

ARNAUD DESPLECHIN: JIMMY P., PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/jimip.jpg
Benicio del Goro and Matthieu Amalric in Jimmy P.

Just what the title says

Arnaud Desplechin's Jimmy P., Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013) seems a dubious enterprise. How can you base a movie on a shrink-patient relationship not involving a mafioso, Gandolfini, or De Niro? Mark Adams of Screen Daily thinks you can. He calls Desplechin's new film "An impressively nuanced and intriguingly un-showy drama," and " a film of subtle understatement." It resists, he says the "temptation to engage in overly dramatic flourishes" and provides "a solid platform for the charismatic talents of Benicio Del Toro and Mathieu Amalric, who deliver memorably mannered performances." Moreover this film has been well received in France, this auteur's home ground, where it got an Allociné press rating of 3.5.

Wait a minute, though. Do you want to watch almost two hours of two actors wearing wide Forties ties in Topeka delivering "memorably mannered performances" while they talk about a Native American's prewar hangups? Aren't those adjectives about being "un-showy" and "of subtle understatement" just cover words for dull? This is how Jimmy P. came across to me: dull, and inexplicable. Much has been made of Amalric's and Del Toro's "different acting styles," but mannered is mannered: they just both seem false. Amalric ain't a Hungarian Jew and Del Toro ain't a Plains Indian. They're a Frenchman (though of Hungarian Jewish ancestry) and a Puerto Rican. And Desplechin stakes his all on his two main actors, a big risk. He surely knew what he was getting with Amalric, who's in so many of his films, and is the analysand rather than the analyst in an early work, My Sex Life... (1996). Del Toro may have been largely on his own, and pretty lost.

Something may also have gotten lost in translation with the scenario. The film comes from a well-known book. Georges Devereux’s 1951 Reality And Dream, which is an exhaustive account of the French-Hungarian-Jewish anthropologist-therapist-Indian specialist's treatment of the Blackfoot vet Jimmy Picard. Picard came to Karl Menninger's Winter General Army Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, which was to become a great training ground for psychiatrists. He suffered from crippling symptoms, including terrible headaches, temporary blindness, hearing loss, jittery arm, and dizzy spells, but the specialists found nothing organically wrong and therefore at first concluded he was schizophrenic.

Devereux was called in from New York (to his delight; he had nothing to do and welcomed the project) even though he was not technically a doctor. His approach to Jimmy's problems was whollistic, and apparently successful: his patient's symptoms went away. Devereux had lived two years with the Navajo and learned their language and in discussing Jimmy's past he made constant, reassuring use of a knowledge of tribal structure, including male-female roles. Jimmy turned out to have various female issues all his life, starting with finding his mother in bed with a man not his father. He would not marry the mother of his daughter, and felt guilt over this. It's suggested by Mark Adams and the film itself that both men got therapy out of their hour a day together. What are we to make of the long visit by his Devereux's married lover Madeleine (Gina McKee)? It's inconclusive, tacked-on, and incomprehensible, as if there were some meaningful scenes that got left on the cutting room floor.

The mildly interesting but still rather plodding account of Jimmy's psychiatric voyage of healing self rediscovery (which includes occasional flashback restagings) lacks the kind of flashy drama we get, for instance, in Jung and Freud's pioneering treatment of the "hysterical" (and quite deranged) Sabina Spielrein, as depicted in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, or Charcot's treatment of an illiterate housemaid as shown in Alice Wincour's Augustine -- not that I'd recommend either of these films as depictions of psychotherapy. But is psychotherapy a good subject for a film? Some processes have to be elided or kept in the background, or, as in those two films, sensationalized, for them to come to life on screen.

Jimmy P. seems largely a misfire, a false step, for Desplechin, a bold experiment that grew out of his passion for the subject of psychotherapy and a temptation to dip his toes into American waters. Perhaps because he was in untried territory, he trods a timid, pedestrian path, slavishly following a book that's itself just a day to day record. It was in French, and translated into English by Kent Jones of the New York Film Society, where he's Associate Director of Programming of the Walter Reade Theater and Editor at Large of the society's organ Film Comment magazine. Which is to say this film is an offshoot of the New York Film Society itself, a case where the jurors of the Main Slate decided to order in. This reminds one of another NYFF vanity project that Benicio Del Toro was centrally involved in, Steven Soderbergh's Che. But while Soderbergh worked on a scale larger than he'd ever attempted before in that film, in this one Despechin narrows down his usual polyphonic approach, and the effect is a little bit claustrophobic.

Still Jimmy P. is arguably a more worthy film to be included in the NYFF than a comedy by Roger Mitchell or Richard Curtis. It seeks to be an original and experimental work. Desplechin is a worthy NYFF alumnus; his earlier films showed brilliance; this one has seriousness of purpose. However, Mike D'Angelo's Cannes tweet review gave it a 35 and said, "35. I was not expecting to leave this film thinking fondly of GOOD WILL HUNTING." In other words, the material winds up being thoroughly middlebrow, but flatter than Van Sant, and certainly than Cronenberg.

Jimmy P., Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian/Jimmy P. psychothérapie d'un indien des plaines, 117 mins., debuted at Cannes. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

CORNELIU PORUMBOIU: WHEN EVENING FALLS ON BUCHAREST OR METABOLISM (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/0azo.jpg
Alexandru Papadopol and Diana Avramut in When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

A filmmaker looks at himself, in 11-minute segments

Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian director of Police, Adjective (NYFF 2009), takes aim at more sophisticated, universal material with this sustained foray into the self-referential, post-modern cinema of exhausted ideas. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism is a formalized, ironic look at the filmmaking process centered around a worldly, egocentric, neurotic, urban director apparently as interested in seducing actresses as in making good films. But he may make quite good films. That's just not what we get to see him doing.

This instead is a series of clearly defined one-reel film segments that dryly look at a working movie director during off hours. He flirts with, plays with, dines with, discusses with, off-screen has sex with, his actress and talks about the screenplay and his stomach problems. The film ends with a look at an endoscopy, ostensibly the director's. A metaphor, perhaps, for what he has been doing here, though the interior or personal world of the director examined is of a very abstracted, formalized, trivialized sort.

The film opens in a car, dark outside. Two people talking, the director and a woman. He explains to her differences between digital and film. He says he is used to organizing his work into the eleven minutes of a single reel of film and therefore can't shoot in digital format, because it runs longer, and he'd lose the run-time shooting structure he's familiar with working in. So then each successive segment of the film we are watching, shot on film, is so organized, into a total of eight segments, eight reels, eighty-nine minutes. The result for the viewer is a sense of a formal task duly executed. Porumboiu defines the limits of the medium as he practices in it and, perhaps, in so doing transcends them.

Thus the Romanians, who dealt with failed revolution, police corruption, petty crime, illegal abortions, adultery and criminal families, move on, in Porumboiu's case, anyway, with When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism to elegant conceptual navel-gazing. But we should note that this isn't a wholly new direction for Porumboiu. Even in Police, Adjective he wound up with an aria about the tyranny and triumph of language. But this time we are treated to a consideration of whether and how chopsticks have altered the nature of Chinese cuisine, versus knife and fork for the Europeans, and eating with their hands, for the "Arabs" [sic].

But this time Porumboiu's effort may be taken as priggisly tidy, as accomplished at the cost of lifelessness. As Jay Weissberg says in his Variety reiiew, "Corneliu Porumboiu's latest drama is so carefully intellectualized that the picture has no room to breathe." it's ironic that he introduces references to Monica Vitti and Antonioni, neither of whom, depressingly enough, his young actress has even heard of. If L'Avventura is Porumboiu's model, he has fallen fall short of it. The "sick soul of Europe" has been reduced to Euclidian geometry. Corumboiu has mentioned Hong Sang-soo, but the Korean film directors bumbling around in search of women and getting drunk in bars, are good old boys compared to this self-conscious fellow, who never quite seems to enter even a cinematic "real world."

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism/Când se lasa seara peste Bucuresti sau metabolism, 89 mins., debuted at Locarno, and was screened for this review as part of the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2013.

PHILIPPE GARREL: JEALOUSY (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/jalu.jpg
LOUIS GARREL AND ANNA MOUGLALIS IN JEALOUSY

Leaving the mother and wooing the child

Garrel is on (literally) familiar, almost inbred, territory in Jealousy, a handsome new black and white 'scope film featuring his son Louis in a role based on his grandfather, Philippe's father, the actor Maurice Garrel, who died in 2011 and dealt at this age (Louis is now 30) with two girlfriends and a child by the one he has left. There were questions about Philippe's previous film, Un été brülant ("A Burning Hot Summer"), whose color when I saw it in a little Paris cinema looked bad (I hope a projection problem), and action desultory, the performance of Monica Bellucci and her casting as Louis' wife dubious. Jealousy isn't a stretch for Philippe -- it's the same kind of film he has made before; but it moves with an easy, sprightly rhythm, and Louis' improvisatory skills are shown to fine, yet unobtrusive, advantage, particularly in scenes with the feisty and irrepressible Olga Milshtein as his little daughter. Louis' sister Esther Garrel plays the film Louis' sister.

Still possessing his pale, poetic good looks and irrepressible mop of black hair, Louis Garrel has had a good decade since he first came to the attention of the international audience in 2003 (at 20, obviously) with Bertolucci's The Dreamers. He has played muse for two filmmakers, his father, who's used him four times, and Christophe Honoré, who seems madly in love with him and has wanted to use him in every film he's made since their first outing (with Isabelle Huppert) in the dicey oedipal story, Ma Mère, six times so far. His roles with Honoré have been more varied, those with his father, more iconic.

The latest Louis is an impoverished actor. He leaves Clotilde (Rebecca Convenant) at the outset, devastating her. But as the first section title says, "Je gardais les anges" (I kept the angels), which apart from a personal anecdotal meaning refers to Louis's maintaining regular (and charming) contact with little Charlotte (Milshtein). He lives in a garret with his new "femme," Claudia (Anna Lougalis), once a coming actress, now unable to find work for years. Louis tries to help Claudia get a role, in vain. Clauda becomes despondent; she hates the garret. In the director's words, "The woman cheats on him. And then she leaves him. The main tries to kill himself, but fails. His sister visits him in hospital. She's all he has left -- his sister and the theatre."

Charlotte is Philippe Garrel as he was as a child. She meets Claudia, and in admiring her, she makes her mother, Clotilde, jealous, as he once did.

The flow of scenes is rather like Philippe's personally autobiographical I No Longer Hear the Guitar (FCS 2008), with the same classical simplicity, softened by Louis' ease on screen and chemistry with the "ladies," including the little girl, arguably more technically accomplished, despite simple means. One thing that's different this time is the involvement of Caroline Deruas, Arlette Langmann, Marc Cholodenko, and Philippe Garrel in the writing of the scenes, with different people, occasionally more then one, writing a random sequence of scenes, and Philippe using what worked best, making this in the words of Leslie Felpein of Variety more "tightly scripted" than usual, also, due largely to the lightly sentimental, slightly comic father-daughter scenes, possessed of an "unexpected emotional warmth" (she adds). Philippe is well served by the hand-held Scope camera work of Jean-Paul Meurisse and Willy Kurant as d.p. Music is sparingly used as a brief connective between big segments. Editing by previous associate Yann Dedet (who worked with Truffaut and Pialat), also adds to the good work here.

It is hard to imagine my liking any Philippe Garrel film better than his deeply atmosphere meandering epic of 1968, Regular Lovers (NYFF 2005), (which makes Bertolucci's look like an empty, if pretty, bauble), but Jealousy is among the Garrel films one could enjoy coming back to. And it's blessedly short. Yes, every Louis Garrel role in a film by his father has involved a young man attempting suicide, sometimes successfully -- all part of the doomy poetic mood, lightened a bit this time. (For a beautiful but gloomier and less emotionally engaging outing of the two Garrels, see The Frontier of Dawn (FCS 2009), reviewed here at another earlier Lincoln Center series.

La jalousie, 76 mins., debuted at Venice and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Sept.-Oct. 2013. It will open in Paris 4 Dec.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/lgbw.jpg
Backlit NYFF street advert on Broadway [CK photo]

TSAI MING-LIANG: STRAY DOGS (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/Tm-L.jpg

It's a dog's life

Stray Dogs is a punishing, slow-moving, non-narrative depiction of the lives, such as they are, of a family, such as it is, of very marginal people living on the fringes of Taipei society. As Variety critic Guy Lodge put it when he saw the film at Venice, this film "will be adored by his hardcore devotees and precisely no one else."

There are long takes, sometimes up to ten minutes. In one, a woman holding a shopping bag and a flashlight stands staring at a mural in an abandoned building, a landscape with rocks, for many minutes. Then she squats, relieves herself, and moves off, stage right.

Stray Dogs shows a man who works as a billboard carrier in busy intersections, often in heavy rain. He spends the meager earnings from this on food, drinks, and smokes. His two kids seem to survive during the daytime by eating food samples given out at large supermarkets. He takes care of them at night, when they sleep in a space in a warehouse, or something. Early on a woman has been seen combing her hair, while two kids slept. Commentators believe two other actresses may be used as stand-ins for this same woman, who may be the mother. The woman feeds some dogs, hence the double meaning of the title.

Much attention is given to eating, sleeping, and attending to the bodily functions. There is very little dialogue. Toward the end there is a reunion and a moment of affection. Settings are urban, industrial, and impersonal.

Tsai has always been odd and avoided narrative, but he began as a whimsical filmmaker with references to the French Nouvelle Vague (What Time Is It Now?), and had a feisty young alter ego in his films. He has said in recent interviews that he is tired of making movies. Maybe he wants to make us as tired of watching them -- at least his.

However, devotees of the non-narrative who also perhaps take this film as useful social commentary will see it quite differently. I quoted Guy Lodge, whose reaction is similar to mine. However the Telegrah's critic writes, "Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip." The Playlist's critic enthuses that "The filmmaking here is almost impossibly well-realized, right down to the evocative sound design, adding up to an fairly unforgettable experience." Other sites have admiring dialogues about this film that assume its importance and artistic mastery. Hollywood Reporter notes, "Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in Venice, this despair-drenched portrait of a stray family on the disenfranchised fringes of Taipei society may be his sparest work yet, speaking to devotees but unlikely to lure many fresh converts. "

Stray Dogs/Jiao you, 138 mins., debuted at Toronto and Venice. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Sept. 2013.

JEHANE NOUJAIM: THE SQUARE (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/TahS.jpg
Khaled Abdallah and Ahmed Hassan in The Square

[b]The youth revolution of 25 January 2011 when hope was still high[/b]

Noujaiim's documentary, The Square, referring to Meidan at-Tahrir ("Liberation Square") in Cairo, is an astonishingly warm and emotional film even considering the intensity and significance of the tumultuous events it chronicles. This is due to some dedicated work by a handful of photographers, including the director, and their choice to highlight the experiences of a small set of people they met in Tahrir, some of whom became friends across political and social lines in the surge of democratic, revolutionary feeling that swept through Egypt after January 2011.

These people are unfailingly moving and articulate, even, and most notably, Ahmed Hassan, a young man who was virtually a child of the streets selling lemonade, who hails from a poor family living in the bast, popular Cairo district of Shubra. Inspired by the love of freedom, democracy, and revollution the removal of the dictator Hosni Mubarak awakens in him, Ahmad becomes a charismatic leader in the Square. What you won't entirely find here are what following the chosen personalities takes space from. This includes a full account of all the events in the Square itself over the two-year period roughly covered, a blow-by-blow history of all the political manoeuvring that take place on all sides, or an analysis of the deep government of the military headed by the SCAF (Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) that remains more in control than ever since the ouster of Muhammad Morsi, Mubarak's elected successor as Egypt's president.

Ahmed Hassan -- ordinary name -- is the star of this film, and reportedly he has been drafted into the Egyptian army. In a Q&A after a screening of the film for press and industry in connection with the New York Film Festival, September 2013, Noujaim said that the next film would be Ahmed in the army. If this is true it would be remarkable. There are, of course, many other people in The Square. The American-educated Egyptian Karim Amer was setting up opportunities for the youth to debate and contribute on the internet, and he met Jehane and became her producer. Khaled Abdalla, star of The Kite Runner, was a British-Egyptian actor long resident with his 70's activist father in London, who returned to his Cairo family and rediscovered his Egyptian identity and became deeply involved in the revolution. Magdy Ashour is a longtime Muslim Brotherhood member in his 40's who followed the Brotherhood's orders early on, but later, through the democratic exchanges of the Square, went through a transformation -- and also became a friend of both Ahmed Hassan and Khaled Abdalla. Ragia Omran, in her 30's, is a human rights lawyer, fights constantly for the freeing of political prisoners and protestors during the various demonstrations and repressive responses to them. Ramy Essam is a handsome singer-songwriter who emerged as the musical voice of the Square; he was brutally beaten and tortured with electricity in the Cairo Museum by policie. Aida El Kashef is a young woman filmmaker who was involved in the Square revolution very early and continues to fight against the demonization of the revolutionaries and protestors by establishment media.

These seven, but especially Ahmed, Khaled and Magdy, are the contributors to the Egyptian revolution's collective voice that The Square's photographers tirelessly follow and whose emotions and ideas are threaded throughout the film. This is the essence of what makes this film significant. When Mubarak resigns, we see Ahmed's joyous face. When Morsi wins, we see his look of deep disappointment, and we have heard his explanation of why this election is wrong. When he runs into danger in the streets and will be wounded in the head, the camera runs after him. Sometimes the cameras also go to this group's houses to follow their reunions and debates with their families.

Mubarak fell. Then the Brotherhood cooperated with the military to push through early elections, which put them in power in the parliament and led to the narrow victory of Morsi. After a year and a half huge demonstrations led to the resignation of Morsi, the elected president. A new general took over, al-Sissi instead of Tantawi. Morsi supporters began fierce protests, and the brutal repression of the Brotherhood began that now continues today. This film stops before those had reached their worst stage.

Once the voice of Sharif Abdfel Kouddous, the gifted young Egyptian Nation Fellow and Democracy Now! correspondent, is heard commenting on the political situation then developing. Sometimes I wish he and other commentators were more often heard from to describe the larger picture. But this film is best at its depiction of the main events of the first two and half years of the revolution from a personal point of view as experienced by this handpicked group of people. Larger forces, other important people, are not included, and perhaps to do so would have unduly detracted from the emotion and the momentum of the film.

The Square/Al Midan, 104 mins., debuted at Sundance and was shown at Toronto, and was enthusiastically received at both festivals. Screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Sept. 2013. Opens theatrically in NYC (Film Forum) 25 Oct.

January 18, 2014: The Square is now available streaming from Netflix.

AGNIESZKA HOLLAND: BURNING BUSH (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/3wx4.jpg

Agnieszka Holland's three-part HBO Europe miniseries is a picture of events in Czechoslovakia following a dramatic act of protest in 1969

Agnieszka Holland's superb three-part TV miniseries about the fight for liberty in a time of repression begins with the 21-year-old Czech student Jan Palach's act of protest. Out of nowhere on a damp, chilly day in January 1969 he sets fire to himself using a bucket of gasoline in Prague's Wenceslas Square (and subsequently dies) as a protest agains months of Soviet occupation of the country. Palach leaves a statement explaining he was one of a group who subsequently would continue these actions if nothing were done. Holland's beautifully staged and photographed episodes show in detail what came next, a web of people and events all fanning out from this simple shocking one.

The authorities immediately mount a frantic effort to tamp down any further protest and find out who the others in Palach's group are. Their belief ostensibly is that rebellion will bring on further Soviet repression: the purpose of Palach's action nonetheless does come out. A police officer is put in charge of an investigation, Major Jire. He is played by Ivan Trojan, who recently also played the good cop fighting a corrupt system in David Ondrícek's In the Shado (2012; SFJFF 2013), set in 1953, when the Soviets are using ex-Nazis to stage anti-Semitic show trials.

Later a Czech party hack and regional parliament member, Vilém Nový (Martin Huba), is manipulated by the Soviets to give a speech undermining Jan Palach's protest, saying he was really a fascist nut who meant to fake his self-immolation but had it backfire. When news of this is published Jan's mother Libuse (Jaroslava Pokorná) and brother Jiri (Petr Stach) call on beautiful young attorney Dagmar Buresova (Tatiana Pauhofova) to take on the party hack in a libel case, which becomes the focus of the action. This is cleverly intertwined with scenes involving members of Jan's dissident group. Major Jiri finds the student who was closest to being Jan's girlfriend, Hana Cízková (Emma Smetana), and when when she is devastated after Jan's death coerces her into reading a fabricated statement in which Jan supposedly asks his allies to refrain from further self-immolation.

It gets more complicated and inbred, but in ways that seem thoroughly logical while you're watching, and momentum comes from the energetic legal procedural story. Dagmar's legal office-mate Vladimir Charouz (Adrian Jastraban) has a daughter, Vladka (Jenovéfa Boková) who's one of the dissidents, and who's found out by secret police Major Docekal (Igor Bares). Nový's lawyer controls the judge in the libel case, who's told what the outcome must be (Ivana Uhlirova). Within this context the young dissidents still strive and so does Dagmar, the beautiful attorney, who does everything to win the libel case. The Margaret Rutherford-like Jaroslava Pokorná as Jan's mother becomes a surprisingly strong figure, an old peasant-y lady who continually grows more her son's stubborn and explosive advocate.

Nonetheless the forces of repression are relentless and Dagmar's doctor husband Radim (Jan Budar), as well as Libuse and Jiri, are battered and browbeaten by the authorities. Even Jan Palach's grave is dug up and his coffin cremated and the ashes disappeared on the grounds that vistis to his grave caused disorder. Dagmar Buresova loses the case, which takes up much of the second and third episodes, but twenty years later Jan Palach is celebrated by protesters just before the fall of the Soviet Union, and the charismatic Dagmar became the first Czech minister of jutice in the post-communist era, closing titles tell us.

First time script writer Stepan Hulik maintains momentum, interweaves multiple characters and story lines, keeps the focus constantly on both repression and idealism, and yet avoids any easy or obvious climaxes or simplistic demonizing. There are always interesting people on screen. Dagmar's office assistant and investigative ally Ondrej Trávnícek, really one of the dissenters too, is played by the very handsome Vojtech Kotek. It looks as if Dagmar and Ondrej will be the hot young couple of the piece for a while, even though Dagmar is married and has two children. One remembers Holland's vivid use of young actors in earlier works like Europa Europa; Olivier, Olivier, and Total Eclipse.

Whatever happens though, the unifying thread is the balance of fear and repression against the will to resist. Seamless costume and period design and great photography by Martin Strba and Rafal Paradowski combine with uniformly good acting to provide a very classy mini-series (Holland has worked on "The Wire" and "Trame").

Burning Bush/Horící ker, in Czech, 231 mins., was made for HBO Europe, debuted at Karlovy Vary and Roterdam, was also shown at Toronto, and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Sept 2013. It is the Czech Republic's entry for the Best Foreign Oscar.

CATHERINE BREILLAT: ABUSE OF WEAKNESS (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/h5ts.jpg
Isabelle Huppert in Abuse of Weakness

She was herself yet not herself, says the conned artist in Breillat's neat, elegant memoir

Again Breillat has made a neat, elegant, beautiful film, this time even more than usual intimately autobiographical. She really was disabled by a major cerebral hemorrhage and followup epileptic seizures, and when at home from the hospital sought out a self-declared jailbird and con man she saw on a TV show. She made him part of her life, became dependent on him, and he conned her out of about 800,000 euros -- maybe almost €1 million. It all happened eight years ago. The film is a picture both classic and unique of what it's like to be this kind of victim. And incidentally Huppert is remarkably adept at mimicking post-stroke disabilities. The story's uncomfortable to watch, necessarily so, and arguably also a bit narrow. But it rings true and is a good account of the experience of being conned, as well as a remarkable performance by Huppert.

Though Breillat likes to work with unknowns, that may not have been a real option for someone to play her alter ego here. If you were a famous French artist who's both stubborn and arbitrary seeking an actress to play yourself you'd need not look beyond the celebrated Isabelle Huppert, and Huppert delivers even more balls and panache than usual for this performance, which somehow seems both flamboyant and understated, the paradox a product of Breillat's succinct self-characterization.

First Maud (Huppert) falls out of bed, crawls to a phone, wakes up in hospital, and learns she's disabled, her left arm flopping up in the air, her legs weak and unstable (we don't see physical therapy). At home, her body "half dead," facing a new solitude. On nighttime TV Maud spots Vilko Piran (muscular, tattooed, middle-aged French rapper Kool Shen) and calls her working partner Ezzé (Christophe Sermet) to tune in. They agree his baldfaced crudeness is priceless for the part they're casting, and before long she has him over and he agrees to act in her next film. He promises to spend a lot of time with her. She never is with actors before shooting, she says, but in this new situation.... the bold, outrageous Vilko, who wears nice clothes and boasts "chugging" Chateau Petrus, is soon spending time with Maud nearly every day and becomes her "slave."

Then the "borrowing" begins, and Maud writes Vilko huge checks -- 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 euros -- right from the start. It seems to make sense at the time.

The part that rings true is that the victim gets value from the victimizer, albeit for excessive cost (Maud feels abandoned by family and needs Vilko's company and his physical help); that the victimizer needs and may deeply care for his victim, thus "kills the thing he loves"; that the victim knows she is being conned, yet goes along with it; that the relationship is an intimate and strangely "caring" one. In this case, especially with Huppert in the role, the victim largely seems stronger than the victimizer, and Vilko acknowledges Maud's "balls."

As Peter Debruge notes in his Variety review -- to which you may refer for background details such as what movie Breillat would have made, who the real con man was and what legal action she took -- Breillat's habit of casting "real" people, showing a misguided distrust of actors and leading to limited performances, further backfired in a major way in this experience. Such limitation marks the turn here by non-actor Kool Shen, whose behavior in scenes is rather one-note. In contrast Huppert's mastery makes her performance look so easy you may not at first notice how complex and contradictory her Maude is, powerful as well as frail, as sympathetic as she is chilly and off-putting.

But this is a hard movie to describe. The succinct fresh rawness of it is underlined for me by the way Maud simply clicks off her cell phone whenever she's done talking, without a goodbye.

Abuse of Weakness/Abus de faiblesse, 105 mins., debuted at Toronto 6 Sept., and will be shown a month later at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. It opens theatrically in France in Feb. 2014.

US theatrical release by Strand begins 15 August 2014. Watch for other dates and locations, or the US DVD./

JOEL, ETHAN COEN: INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/iLD.jpg
Pscar Osaac om Inside Llewyn David

The Coen brothers do the Sixties Greenwich Village music scene, with surreal touches

The Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis is a period musical film and hence invites comparison to the siblings' O Brother, Where Art Thou? Indeed again there's even a kind of "Odyssey" theme, only the milieu is of "folk" music of the early Sixties as it sprang up in New York's Greenwich Village, rather than country music and blue grass in the Thirties American South. Llewyn Davis was warmly received at Cannes and has a sky-high critical rating, but beware -- it's a head-scratcher and a bit of a downer, despite its mild manner. It lacks the penetrating ironies of A Serious Man or the violence of No Country for Old Men. Fortunately, perhaps though continually battered, frustrated, and broke, this hero doesn't come to a bad end. It may be assumed that despite vicissitudes Llewyn Davis will somehow fare forth, remaining a musician and singer if lacking material success. But at the same time, the "Odyssey" theme doesn't mean the film's "Ulysses," the eponymous hero (Oscar Isaac) ever gets anywhere. In fact the narrative is circular, the final scene showing Llewyn getting the same beating he gets outside the Village cafe as in the opening sequence, the assailant and the reason for his grudge being made clear the second time around. There are good songs, well performed, and the dark, gloomy winter images by Amélie DP Bruno Delbonnel, filling in for the Coens regular Roger Deakins, are handsome. But Inside Llewyn Davis does not emerge as the Coens at their most successful or meaningful.

In the action, Llewyn, loosely based on Dave von Ronk, couch-surfs round New York City, returning to the Village club and record producers he's seeking to use as a springboard to a success that never comes. In the film's most original passge, he rides to Chicago with a laconic Garrett Hedlund driving and a mysterous John Goodman riding in the back, playing for producer F. Murray Abraham who just says, "I don't see any money in this." Like Ulysses, he would return to sailing, trying to renew his merchant seaman card, but in that effort, like so much else, he fails. Though the theme may not be quite clear, Llewyn, like von Ronk, represents the "authentic," "period" folkies who, by implication, were swept away when folk-inspired singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan burst on the scene. This must be qualified, because there's never been anybody quite "like" Bob Dylan, and because there were other original folk-inspired songwriters before Dylan's first album.

As someone who was there, so to speak, I must also protest that people just didn't talk like this. Middle class young women like the one played by Carey Mulligan, married to a buttoned-down Justin Timbrerlake -- also a folksinging couple -- did not use the F-word in every sentence as she does, no matter how angry they were at another young man for getting them pregnant. Indeed all of the characters in this film rend the air in every scene using language that was not yet current among educated people. The profanity is used for a comic effect that relies on a falsification of the period. Hence the "inspired period detailing of production designer Jess Gonchor" Scott Foundas speaks of in his glowing Variety review of this film, indeed abounding as he says in "cramped cold-water flats" and "Kafka-esue hallways narrowing toward infinity" -- and thus evoking the pinched Lower Manhattan of artistic hopefuls of this era truly different from the posh Village of today -- is spoiled by the tone-deaf dialogue.

Another theme that may not emerge very clearly is that Llewyn is not a nice guy, but a great musician and singer, thus illustrating (no revelation, this) that genius and niceness are not necessarily linked. Jean (Mulligan's character) thinks he's an irresponsible cocksman, and indeed he has engaged the services of an abortionist before. But he never seems all that selfish or mean. He visits his senile dad and sings him a song. He weathers Jean's abuse patiently. He does have a tantrum at the MacDougal Street’s Gaslight Cafe (identified by Foundas as the venue). But given the frustrations he endures throughout the two weeks covered in the film, an explosion seems justified. So does his refusal to sing for his dead singing partner MIke's parents, or to allow MIke's mother to sing Mike's part. And yet these two outbursts are forgiven by their respective victims far too easily. I was never clear how one was supposed to take Llewyn, or the music. The Coens's habitual dryness of affect this time makes what may be meant as cool but affectionate realism feel instead like cruel and inexplicable satire.

Inside Llewyn Davis has its gloomy, patient Odyssey to nowhere. But it provides a narrative with no payoff, perhaps worse than no narrative at all. In the end its threads seems as pointless as the orange cat that escapes when Llewyn leaves Mike's parents' place early in the film, which he feels obliged to carry around with him. It's a unifying thread whose meaning we may struggle in vain to interpret. (Reports are that this film has a lot of improvisation.) The best part is the strange, surreal drive cross-country with Johnnny Five (Hedlund) and Roland Turner (Goodman), when the film forgets its dubious need to evoke an era and a milieu and wanders into pure cinematic territory. I'd like to have continued on that journey.

Inside Llewyn Davis, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix (the second highest competition feature award) and will be showcased at other festivals, including New York, where it was screened for this review. Limited US release 6 December 2013; UK release, 24 January 2014.

JOE BREWSTER AND MICHÈLE STEPHENSON: AMERICAN PROMISE (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/A4P.jpg
Idris and Seun in American Promise

Almost everything about two boys growing up, together, and then not: a document of 12 years

The parents of Idris (pronounced "EE-driss") are Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, middle-class African-Americans living in Brooklyn who are also filmmakers. He is also a psychiatrist educated at Harvard and Standford; she is a lawyer educated at McGill and Columbia. At one point, seeking in vain for work "for hire" that they could truly commit to, inspired by Michael Apted's "Up" series, they decided to take up cameras themselves and shoot their own son and other children attending the prestigious Dalton School, in Manhattan, which had a commitment to maintaining a racially diverse student body. Eventually their subjects narrowed to their son and a friend. He was Olowaseun (Seun, pronounced "SHAY-un," subsequently shortened to "Shay"), son of Stacey and Anthony Sommers, a nursing care manager and CBS systems engineer, respectively, also African-American, middle class, and Brooklyn residents, who probably met at S.U.N.Y. Binghamton, which they both attended.

As little boys both are charming. Idris is candid, articulate, and sweet. Seun is warm, a charmer. Idris is precocious in basketball at Dalton in middle school. But he hits a snag when he isn't promoted to the varsity team. Though a great player and scorer, he is small.

This documentary follows Idris and Seun over a period of 12 years, from kindergarten to the start of college, age 5 to 18 -- though Seun was not promoted from Dalton Middle School to High School and instead transferred to Benjamin Banneker, in Brooklyn. It's a rich saga, an intimate picture of the two young men, their academic struggles, and their parents' efforts to make them do well. Idris and Seun are good friends till Seun leaves Dalton; then they don't see each other very often. The "Directors Statement" offers interesting information that's not in the film. It explains that Joe and Michèle became good friends of the Sommers, to the point that they sometimes had to put down the camera when around them so as not to jeopardize that friendship, trusting that the accumulation of material would make up for the moments lost. They also note the leap forward into HD digital cameras that made the technical side easier and the results better (some of the early footage looks crappy by comparison with later images). Funding also improved.

What is the "American Promise"? Equality, no doubt; the opportunity to achieve excellence whatever one's background. And the film above all shows how hard it can be for a young black male to do well even in very promising circumstances. This film, like Apted's films, lets its subjects do the talking, along with some others, notably their parents, also school administrators and teachers. There is a class at Dalton taught by a young black man discussing Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. We see Seun being tested for a promotion in karate. We see Idriss playing basketball at Dalton. We see him visit Stanford. He does not get in, but he wants to study in California, and decides to go to Occidental, in L.A. To some extent this is a story of dreams deferred, but it's also a story of opportunity granted. Bu did Dalton really give Idris a head start, or was Seun more nurtured at the all-black school, Bannaker?

How many times do we see the parents tell Idris or Seun that they're lazy? Joe and Michèle decided to present themselves with a degree of ruthless honesty, and their, and also Seun's father's, attitude toward their sons sometimes seems unfair. Michèle comes off as a kind of stage mother, always seeming worried that Indris won't do as well as she would like. This reflects the mood of the America of this generation. The Dalton white kids' parents are worried too, and pay out a fortune for extra tutoring the black parents can't afford. But Dalton administrators say the black males have troubles the black girls don't. And specific problems are found. Both boys have academic troubles at Dalton. Seun is found to be dyslexic; later Indris is diagnosed as having "attention deficit disorder" (ADD), and Idris starts taking the common medication for this, ritalin. The film shows Idris performing differently and showing symptoms of taking a stimulant; but whether his school performance improves isn't really made clear.

Both boys seem bright. Idris particularly seems sophisticated and verbal as well as senstiive, perhaps socially less mature and secure in his own skin than "Shay." Idris's grades are average, apparently, making his goal of getting into Stanford unlikely. Why? Why don't they both do better, despite their parents working overtime to help them? Why is Idris's father, a psychiatrist, so often satisfied with the explanation that Idris is "lazy" and doesn't "push" hard enough?

All this remains something of a mystery. But ultimately we need to see this film in terms of Apted's "Up" series, an accumulation of almost an infinity of little personal day-to-day details over time about its subjects that reveal the tenor of their lives, with no need to give answers. And we can't help hoping Joe and Michèle will provide us with pictures of Idris and "Shay" in the future, at intervals, to see what becomes of them. A life is a wonderful thing to watch unfold.

American Promise, 135 mins., debuted at Sundance, January 2013, and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2013. A theatrical release will begin in NYC at IFC Center and Lincoln Center Oct. 18, 2013. There will be a PBS Premiere: February 3, 2014 in the POV series. There will also be a book planned for winter 2014 release, Promises Kept: How to Help Black Boys Succeed in School and in Life- Lessons Learned from the 12-Year American Promise Project. See the American Promise website for other information.

PAUL GREENGRASS: CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/C4P.jpg
Barkha Abdi and Tom Hanks in Captain Philips

Greengrass and Hanks' Somali hijacking film favors action and emotion over specifics

[S P O I L E R S]

Paul Greengrass' Captain Phillips is a movie based on a 2009 incident of a container ship with a US captain by this name that Somali fishermen attempted to hijack, the MV Maersk Alabama , ironically then carrying 5,000 tons of African relief supplies. Compare the recent Danish film directed by Tobias Lindholm, A Hijacking (ND/NF 2013), based on several similar incidents, and combining focus on shipboard events involving Danish crew and Somalis, with tense ransom negotiations by the shipowners back at home. The Hollywood film eschews the corporate POV at home to which A Hijacking constantly returns but adds a famous star and, for action drama, a military operation (which actually occurred) to free the ship and subdue the young Somalis. Real negotiations never actually get going between pirates and shipowners of the huge Maersk container ship captained by Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks). Why would they -- when a battleship and the Navy SEALS can be called in to sweep away the Somalis? This reportedly was the first seizure by pirates of a ship flying the American flag since the early 1800's -- but since It was the sixth vessel in a week to be attacked by pirates who'd gotten ransoms in the tens of millions of dollars, maybe the US overkill was a wise corrective move.

But seeing Greengrass' film after Lindholm's may leave you feeling cheated of the edgy drama of bargaining when big property values and human lives are at stake -- which winds up being the suspenseful process depicted in Lindholm's film, and has been happening a lot, in waters where Somalis lurk.

Maybe the Somalis this time aren't experienced enough, but the Americans resort to trickery from the start, while in A Hijacking the Danes are just out to make the toughest deal they can. Greengrass, who made the strong docudramas Bloody Sunday and United 93 and the highly entertaining second and third Bourne episodes, is definitely a world class action movie director. But in its emphasis on action Captain Phillips loses a lot of characterization detail and narrative specifics. What you do have is Tom Hanks, and despite a mundane beginning, he delivers some profoundly open emotion at the end in enacting the captain's state of nerves and devastation when his ordeal is over.

Each of these two films is well done in its way. The higher profile Tom Hanks film will get as good reviews as A Hijacking and perhaps Oscar attention but it's not yet clear how big it will be at the box office. Mainstream viewers may be put off not only by the lack of definition or subtlety among the Somalis but also a pretty muddled middle section and finale and a lot of subtitles, as well as the lack of any name actor besides Hanks.

Whereas viewers of A Hijacking will remember the slow, suspenseful negotiations, the company head and his hired advisor versus the pirates and the dire threats, tough dealing, and brutal consequences on the Somali pirates' side. In the Danish film, the Somalis are pros at their game. In the American one, the Somalis are inexperienced young hotheads who constantly fight among themselves. In Captain Phillips the American piracy experts and naval support's plans aren't fully revealed to us. Nor do we even know quite what they actually do other than lie to the Somalis and kill most of them. The contrast seems to fit differences between a small country's need to use limited means to best advantage versus American exceptionalism. The Danes make a deal; the US uses brute force.

Hanks has suggested he found an interpretive key to the real Captain Phillips, of Vermont (whose New England accent he sporadically evokes), when informed by Phillips' wife that he turns into a different, no-nonsense, ultra-serious man when he's in command of a ship. Actually, though, in the very hasty initial at-home segment, Hanks' captain and his wife (a barely glimpsed Catherine Keener) both seem pretty solemn, talking of little but how dangerous his work is and how much they both wish each time for it to be over.

Once the Somalis approach the ship, Phillips' strategy is to hide most of his crew in the engine room. He stalls the Somali's de facto leader Muse (Barkhad Abdi), getting broken glass thrown down at the engine room entrance so the barefoot youngest Somali, Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman) gets a badly cut foot. The other personality that emerges among the hijackes is the wild-eyed Elmi (Mahat M. Ali), a tall hothead who constantly pushes for more violent and extreme action.

In the event, with these problems and the captain's trickery and delays, Muse doesn't have much of a chance to negotiate a ransom, though that, as in the Danish film, is what the Somalis were aiming for. None of the Somalis on the Alabama comes close to the cool, arrogant, experienced Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), who does the hijackers' negotiating in Lindholm's film. In Captain Phillips, the situation is dangerous but one-sided. To mix metaphors, Greengrass' Somalis are loose canons but not tough cookies.

To fit Greengrass' area of excellence, everything in Captain Phillips is boldly physical and visual. There's a noisy, exciting scene on shore at the outset showing the Somalis' chaotic selection process for the random hijacking mission, and many shots of the Maersk ship and the two skiffs, reduced to one when Phillips, in his first bit of trickery, scares the others off by broadcasting faked arrangements with a police vessel. The unique event in the Captain Phillips situation is Muse's decision to take the captain off the ship in a sealed lifeboat. And then as in a Bourne movie we switch back and forth between control centers, including the special fighter ship that supervises a Navy SEALS operation that is never quite made clear.

Shut in the closed, claustrophobic lifeboat with the crazed Somalis, Phillips must endure a hair-raising and ear-shattering attack from the US Navy and weapons fired off by the hijackers, including a small rocket right next to him -- noise almost as bad as this movie's thumping, bone-shaking score by Henry Jackman. The most memorable moment in the film is when Phillips is taken on board the rescue ship to a silent sick bay where a nurse tries to calm him. Hanks does a unique impression of a man shaken, terrified, and speechless after a violent ordeal.

As Todd McCarthy notes in Hollywood Reporter, this is another one of an elite group of fall-release "survival stories," including Gravity, 12 Years a Slave, and All Is Lost, the latter two also included in the NYFF. Each has its very different and valid directorial style and feel. But I'd ultimately agree with blogger Joe Bendel of j.b.spins" who found Greengrass' hijacking film inferior to Lindholm's in almost every respect, its second half clearly weaker than its first. This isn't up to Greengrass' best work.

Captain Phillips, 133 mins., a Sony Pictures Studios release, had its world premiere at the gala opening night of the New York Film Festival 27 Sept. 2013, when it was screened for this review; will also be in the London Film Festival. Screenplay by Billy Ray, based on the book by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty. US release 11 Oct., UK, 18 Oct.

DECLAN LOWNEY: ALAN PARTRIDGE (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/w7k6.jpg
Steve Coogan

Steve Coogan triumphs as his goofily egocentric alter ego

This movie is a one-time big-screen outlet for Steve Coogan’s comic creation, originally (1997) radio, later TV. Alan Partridge is a Norwich-based radio emcee. The vain and obliviously tactless character in this iteration is called upon to serve as an intermediary when the radio station North Norfolk Digital" bought out by a multinational conglomerate and is about to be re-branded as "Shape." The station is subsequently subjected to a siege by Partridge's Irish colleague, Pat Farrrell (Colm Meaney) when he's let go in the process. "I'm Alan Partridge" was originally a BBC situation comedy starring Coogan with two series of six episodes each were produced — the first in 1997 and the second in 2000 (though Alan Partridge seems to go back to 1995).

This film, which got its North American debut at the prestigious and selective New York Film Festival is nonetheless very broad comedy material, and very English as well, as Coogan was first to point out at the New York festival Q&A. Coogan is an inspired comic, and he's most known in the US from performances in several films directed by Michael Winterbottom. Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, featuring Coogan, was part of the 2005 NYFF. Before that, Coogan had a lead role in perhaps Winterbottom's most celebrated feature, 24 Hour Party People (2002) Coogan was also very funny more recently in Winterbottom's The Trip, again a big-screen version of comedy from the Tube. Somewhat to his chagrin, Coogan often has minor roles in feature films, but he's nearly always very droll in them. I recently enjoyed him a lot, perhaps from knowing there's more there than shows on the surface, as the irresponsible art dealer husband Beale in an American film, Scott McGehee and David Siegel's contemporary version of Henry James's What Maisie Knew.

This feature film version of Alan Partridge relies on extreme situations and sometimes crude, scatological, or slapstick humor. It's more a series of jokes than anything else. It seeks, more or less successfully, to strike a balance between the triviality of a radio or TV sit-com and a serious film. It doesn't stray very far from its basic venue, the radio studios (which eventually become surrounded by onlookers, TV cameramen, journalists, and police). It stays parochial. Coogan explained that a comedy involving a siege by Al Qaeda was included, but that would have strayed onto dangerous ground. In the film Partridge warns a colleague not to joke about Islam. Christianity a lot, sure; Judaism a little. Islam, never.

Despite its broadness, Alan Partridge is anything but just sight gags. It's most of all a lot of profane, outrageous, rapid-fire verbal humor -- an intricate kind the Brits have a special knack for. It's therefore not a surprise to see the name of Armando Iannucci among the writers (who include Peter Baynham, Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons) and to remember that Coogan was included in In the Loop (2009), and Ianucci was deeply involved in the very fast, very witty, very political The Thick of It (2005).

This movie is sort of political, though not on the level of those two TV series/films: it's about a corporate takeover. That's economics, anyway. But the event is largely a pretext to display Partridge's ego. When he learns a downsizing is coming under the new owners of the radio station, he fingers Pat Farrell, and Farrell indeed gets cut. The irony (or one of them) is that Partridge should be sent in to placate the shotgun-wielding Farrell, when the latter is pretty likely to catch on at some point that this mediator is the root cause of his humiliation. Meanwhile Partridge, whose ego is forever way bigger than his talent, sees how his new role in the news as a local savior has greatly increased his fame, and concludes it's well worth his while to prolong the siege of the station as long as possible so he can stay in the limelight.

The many secondary characters are all sterling in this film, as has always been typical of British comedy and cinema. However the problem remains that however hilarious the lines and risible the action this is an enlargement of small screen material to a space where it looks a bit pushed. Certainly this is by no means an unworthy version of Coogan's most famous comic character, but it remains true that the character is better and larger than anything on screen. (The Irish-born director Declan Lowery has primarily worked in TV.)

Whether this is a movie worthy to be included in the elite and selective New York Film Festival is a question to be left up to the historians. Certainly the NYFf has included less important and less worthy stuff, and Coogan is an alumnus. The choice also fits in with the new Program Director Kent Jones's (or this year's Jury's) revealed penchant for English comedy, resulting in inclusion of Roger Mitchell's Le Week-End, a sardonic senior citizen relationship comedy, and Richard Curtis's sci-fi fantasy rom-com, About Time. Each fills a different space in the British comedy spectrum.

Alan Partridge (original UK title Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa), 90 mins., debuted in the UK in July and August; its North American premiere is in the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review.

KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: REAL (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/j497.jpg
Haruka Ayase and Takeru Satoh in Real

A muddled romance from the other Kurosawa

Real is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's first feature film since Tokyo Sonata( (2008). And it's beginning to seem like a very long time since the director's distinctive yet wholly Japanese horror films, The Cure (1997) and Pulse (2001). Kurosawa's 2012 TV mini-series Penance (SFIFF '13) was finely crafted and highly watchable but somehow the original distinctiveness and promise were lacking; and for that matter despite its garnering perhaps justified praise in the West, Tokyo Sonata (NYFF '08) wasn't an altogether original idea. This one isn't either, and it presents more wan material. Real delves into a Matrix-like connecting up of separate consciousnesses, only this time the consciousnesses are just two. They belong to young lovers who live in a nice apartment in Tokyo. One is in a coma, while the other tries to help by participating in a fancy neurological treatment method known as "sensing." So we get a romance, with fantasy and science fiction.

What could be more Japanese than the circumstances: a manga artist obsessed with work and unable to cope with the world outside the drawings, suicidal and obsessed with childhood? Kurosawa achieves a delicate look, using delicate-looking actors. The result is a film that's nicely crafted, with some good monster special effects, moirée links, and manga fantasy-corpses; but it's repetitious and overlong, taking forever to arrive at a long-obvious finale, flipping back and forth too often along the way. To Matrix and Inception are added Freudianism and a touch of Jurassic Park which really is more a reference to Japanese Fifties monster movies, which Kurosawa gets to do over with state-of-the-art CGI, but limp results. And to top it off this premise was already more intensely dealt with very recently in Lithuanian Kristina Buozyte's Vanishing Waves.

A young couple, Koichi (Takeru Satô) and Atsumi (Haruka Ayase) were childhood friends, now young adult lovers, who pledge to be together forever. One, now, is in a hospital in a coma after a failed suicide attempt. The other submits to the "sensing" process whereby the two's brains are connected, in hopes of finding why the act was done and restoring normal consciousness. "Real" is a giveaway title that warns you: you're not supposed to know what is and isn't. Who is the manga artist, and who is the neurologist? Who's in the coma, and who's delving into the unconscious lover's mind? Is any of this happening? "You can be in my dream if I can be in yours" Bob Dylan said. But who's dreaming?

Whatever the answers to these questions, you are in for a lot of visits to the couple's apartment and a lot of trips to an island where they both lived for a few years as kids. You're going to get a lot of glimpses of a little boy drenched with water. You're going to go hunting repeatedly for a childish sketch of a Plesiosaur that was unusually well executed. This for some reason might get the manga artist's confidence back. As Koichi, Takero Satoh is a pretty male ephebe type always dressed in loose cut-off paints, who draws more attention and gets more screen time than Haruka Ayase as Atsuko, the girl, and has elaborate hair that is dramatically askew in key scenes. After a while his hair began to seem more interesting than most of the rest of the movie.

It seems "sensing" leaves you with "side effects," like LSD. You may see things when returned to normal consciousness. And so the line between "real" and "unreal" begins to become blurred. The trouble is that Kurosawa has eventually blurred too many of his lines, to the point of not caring. And he has substituted a fairyland supernaturalism for the truly terrifying spookiness of his horror films, and chooses to end with a soppy romanticism. In short he has chosen treacle as the alternative to scaring the hell out of us. This is definitely a misstep by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who seems to have lost his sense of feature film timing and structure after working on the lengthy, multi-section Penance.

Real/Riaru: Kanzen naru kubinagaryû no hi, 127 mins., opened in Japen June 2013, and was shown at Locarno and Toronto. Mike D'Angelo relayed the reaction of some when he tweeted: "I can't top this. RT @Astrostic: Real: INEPTION." (For further unfavorable fest reactions see Kayframe.) There really is a clumsiness about Kurosawa's over-and-overing of Coma stories, Inception, and Matrix. Screened as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center for this review, to which it was a last minute addition, perhaps out of loyalty to the director as a NYFF alumnus.

AGNÈS B.: MY NAME IS HMMM...(2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/Hmm.jpg
Lou-Leila Demiac in My Name is Hmmm. . .

Collage of abuse and escape marks debut for designer agnè b. [Agnès Troublé]

"That trip was the happiest memory of my childhood," says a woman we see only from behind, who speaks of satisfaction with a child of her own and trustworthy husband. "I often thought of Peter." So ends the fashion designer agnès b.'s feature film debut, the a story of an 11-year-old French girl (in Orléans), the oldest of three kids, who is sexually abused by her out-of-work dad and runs off from domestic trauma by leaving a school beach picnic with a strangely obliging Scottish trucker (that's Peter) for a drive southwest across France. Child sexual abuse is a disturbing theme that impresses us even as we find the cinematic means of enlivening the road trip clumsy and distracting. The irrelevant experimental clutter includes multiple screen formats with garish 16mm. color, an overlaid drawing, double images, a scene in black and white, previews flashed on a a TV monitor, two ashen butoh dancers in a wood, music from a Vivaldi contata, and other devices that all add artistic pretension without a necessary contribution to the action and wind up feeling amateurish and overreaching.

The film is also uncertainly paced and overlong. Even the opening at-home section establishing little Céline Meunier's oppressive situation drags, when it should shock and enthrall. The long section of the girl's flight with the trucker is shapeless and emotionally flat due to uninteresting writing and shaky actors.

Still the tragic aura of incestuous child sexual molestation hangs over the narrative. The power this lends the film also gets at least an initial boost from a notable cast the well-connected agnès b. has assembled. In the role of Céline-AKA-Hmmm's miserable father -- a weepy, perpetually nervous chap we're asked as much to pity as despise -- the film cast Jacques Bonnaffé (Lemming, The Page Turner), who positively exudes portentous gloom. As the girl's grandmother, too religious and innocent to guess what could be upsetting her, there is the French film and theatrical great Marie-Christine Barrault. As the girl's mother, we get the art-house idol Sylvie Testud (Fear and Trembling, La Vie en Rose, Lourdes). Claire Denis muse Grégoire Colin even has a cameo. More screen time however goes to the stiff Lou-Lélia Demerliac as the emotionally repressed girl (who does resemble Testud) and to non-actor, documentary filmmaker Douglas Gordon as the truck driver, a central character whose behavior never makes much sense.

It's initially established that mom (Testud) is out working at a local bar all the time, struggling to pay the bills with dad (Bonnaffé) moping around the house, tippling, and taking Céline upstairs in the evening to abuse her sexually before mom gets home. His brief soliloquys make it clear he hates himself, but can't stop. To externalize Céline's isolation and give her a voice the film resorts to the rather artificial device of having her constantly talk to a ratty little Barbie doll, in effect her main companion. Her classmates think her odd. She begs grandma to take her in, but grandma doesn't see cause to remove her from home. The school trip provides her escape. It's not clear exactly how she gets Peter to give her a ride in his truck. He shows her a little photo of wife and kids and utters a single word: "Dead." That is our explanation and motivation for what follows. Peter and Céline develop a playful, fun relationship that's obviously doomed, since radio reports of the girl's disappearance are followed up by posters of her face everywhere. She gives away that she's hiding by refusing to give her name. "Je m'appelle Hmmm. . ." (My name is Mmm) is all she'll tell anybody.

Eventually authorities close in, and Céline and Peter are taken away separately. What he does is surprising, inexplicable, and arguably irrelevant, a distraction from the theme that also shows an inability to work out a coherent narrative thread on the part of Agnès and co-script writer Jean-Pol Fargeau (who has often collaborated with Claire Denis).

My Name Is Hmmm. . . undoubtedly makes an impression but one may seriously question whether the filmmaking is accomplished enough to justify high profile film festival presence. Simpler means, better writing, and sharper pacing might have made of this an effective film.

My Name Is Hmmm. . . , 127 mins., debuted at Venice Aug. 2013 and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, September 2013. "agnès b." is the name of the clothing line owned by Agnès Troublé. Having a net worth in excess of 65 million euros and being a major patron of the arts, she has previously been involved in various film projects, including the restoration of Jacque Tati's Playtime. Theatrical release of Je m'appelle Hmmm... Apr. 2014 (AlloCiné press rating 2.1 (42%) from a limited response of 11 reviews; US release NYC Jan. 2015; Metascore: 32%.

HANY ABU-ASSAD: OMAR (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/atu0.jpg
Adam Bakri and Waleed F. Zawaiter in Omar

Obligatory betrayals

Omar is Hany Abu-Assad's first film set in Palestinian territory since Paradise Now eight years ago (NYFF 2005). It's a clean, sharp, chiseled movie, like the look of his handsome and charismatic lead, Adam Bakri, who plays Omar. The issues are not so sharp or clear. In Paradise Now, which also had a stark, definitive look, the two young would be suicide bombing martyrs were muddled about their commitment. This plot is even more tangled. Maybe Omar makes sense if you're a Palestinian living in the territories. To outsiders it may look like game-playing or confusion. I would look further. Everything is relevant to the world depicted. But despite good acting, accomplished, lean filmmaking, and strong material, Omar feels in some ways contrived. And its boundaries are blurred, as shown by the fact that the Separation Wall Omar keeps scaling to see his girlfriend divides not Arabs from Jews, but Palestinians from Palestinians.

There are four young characters (all first-timers). Omar, the brave one, is in love with Nadia (Leem Lubany), the schoolgirl sister of his activist friend Tarek (Eyad Hourani), the adventurer. Together with the small, young jokester Amjad (Samer Bisharat), the pals plan to shoot an Israeli soldier. One of them makes the plan, another steals the car, and the third has to shoot the soldier. When it's done, Omar is captured, beaten, tortured, and released into the prison population, where he tells an undercover informant, "I'll never confess," which to the Israelis is confession enough. But they want the shooter. So the informant, Agent Rami (Waleed F. Zuaiter) offers to get Omar released. If he can point them to Tarek, who they think held the gun, Omar can avoid jail time.

Omar goes back out, but instead of turning in Tarek gets involved in another action he plans to ambush soldiers in a cafe. This goes awry, though, showing that someone is betraying them. Omar is connected with his friends, Nadia, her family. Who is it? Strangely enough, Agent Rami sticks his neck out, so he says, to get Omar released one more time, with a second chance to turn in Tarek.

Now because Omar has been in jail, the community begins to suspect him. Eventually that includes Nadia. Indeed Omar has made a promise to Agent Rami. Is the latter Israeli or Arab? One scene makes that confusing, but may be meant to show how good Israelis are at posing as Palestinians. Finally, it comes out who the opportunist has been. Omar winds up at a dead end, left with nothing but a choice between complicity or a desperate act.

Acting is good, from experienced pro Waleed F. Zuaiter (also producer) on down, particularly the sensitive-faced lead, who as Abu-Assad says, "jumps off the screen." The way Abu-Assad complicates the web of complicity and suspicion by adding love makes Omar seem almost Shakespearean, but hence also more theatrical -- and not at all time-bomb-tense like Paradise Now.. With Omar, this filmmaker has now had the distinction of having two Palestinian films submitted for the Best Foreign Oscar, and Paradise Now was the only Palestinian film actually made a finalist for the award. These are a far cry from the subtle ironies of Elia Suleiman, whose Divine Intervention was the first such submission (2003) I personally wonder if "freedom fighter" AKA "terrorist" acts might be the wrong material for Palestinians to submit, and if the joint Israeli-Palestinian film Ajami (Israeli's 2009 Best Foreign Oscar nominee) isn't a more rounded and human cinematic depiction of the brutal, chaotic world Palestinians live in.

Omar, 93 mins., debuted at Cannes (Un Certain Regard; Jury Prize), and was screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. The film opened in New York and Los Angeles Fri. 21 Feb. 2014 and A.O. Scott reviewed it in the NY Times, admitting he risked insensitivity in doing so but unable to resist saying that the conflict has been "a boon to ambitious genre filmmaking." Scott noted in this connection that Omar, "tightly plotted and cleanly shot (and an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film), has the speed and suspense of a crime thriller." He described Omar, the protagonist played by Adam Bakri, as "the sensitive one, handsome and athletic with the soul of a poet."

JAMES GRAY: THE IMMIGRANT (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/gbqg.jpg
Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant

Long slow vicissitudes

James Gray, grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants to New York, has made a film about a Polish Catholic woman in the early Prohibition era who runs afoul of an exploiter who saves her from being deported at Ellis Island in exchange for becoming a prostitute. It's like indentured servitude. Her sister was put in the hospital with TB and -- well, it's a long, sad story. And it's told for us through Marion Cotillard as Ewa, the Polish woman, Joaquin Phoenix as Bruno Weiss, the "impresario," and Jeremy Renner as Bruno's magician cousin, Emil, AKA Orlando. They deliver, especially the ever-soulful Cotillard, who even acts some of her scenes convincingly in Polish. But a story like this should be epic, and intense, and rich in adventures, and Gray's screenplay, cowritten with Ric Menello (who collaborated on his fine Two Lovers) never quite finds tone or momentum. What we get are authentic details, sepia tints, handsome photography and delicate lighting. It's enough to set a mood, almost even cast a spell. But we get nowhere to go with it.

That's the point, of course: Gray takes his time to lovingly create a mood in which a woman is trapped, but has the fortitude and moral strength to survive squalid circumstances. Ewa's behavior on board the ship reportedly was improper (the men were brutal on the unprotected women), and her sister's being quarantined means she must struggle to stay in the country and somehow by nearby to help. Bruno comes along when needed, with undefined connections with Immigration authorities, and gets her released into his care. Both actors are interesting together, Phoenix a mixture of kindly and exploitative, Cotillard a roiling blend of resentment and gratitude. What Gray's aiming at is a portrait of forgiveness. He's said that's why he chose to focus on a Catholic woman rather than the Jews of his own family. He's interested in compromises and moral complexity and the willingness to acknowledge indebtedness even when the benefactor had questionable motives.

This, of course, isn't an action movie. A return to Ellis Island to see Ewa's sister, with a magic show (meaningfully involving levitation) involving the cousin (Renner) and singing performance by Caruso, and a couple of abortive trips by Ewa to her aunt in Brooklyn; even dramatic fights between Emil and Bruno, who begin to compete for Ewa's attentions, still don't keep the placid trajectory from seeming a bit tame and static. In a way Gray is still thinking in the dualistic terms of Two Lovers. And maybe he ought to have stayed more that way, instead of introducing the competition for Ewa between Phoenix and Renner. The latter hasn't the heft of Phoenix as a personality, and though his fly-by-night character, a trickster and gambler who yet claims to be more of a decent fellow, is a new departure for Renner and interesting casting, the subplot just seems like a distraction.

People are saying this affirms Gray's classicism as a filmmaker inspired by golden decades of Hollywood (the Fifties? Seventies?), but his old-fashioned-ness had more sex appeal when he dealt with gangsters. Cotillard can never do wrong and Joaquin Phoenix remains an actor with an odd unexpected edge, but this seems like simply an impressive-looking wrong turn.

The Immigrant, 120 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2013, with subsequent showings at a number of international film festivals, including New York, at Lincoln Center where it was screened for this review. Theatrical release scheduled for various countries, including France 27 Nov, 2013. Limited US release began 16 May 2014.

CLAIRE DENIS: BASTARDS (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/cf37.jpg
Vincent Lindon ant the pretty Alfa Romeo in Bastards

Pleasing mystification not so good when it comes clear?

This is one of Denis's puzzlers, like The Intruder, except it's not that pleasurably mysterious, and lacks its vigorous, tonic physicality, unless you call moments of sex and violence that. Many of the usual players are there, with Vincent Lindon of Friday Night in the foreground throughout, Michel Subor as a morally dubious rich man again, Alex Descas of 35 Shots of Rum, and others seen before, including Grégoire Colin, seen almost always. Actually while it provides few points of obvious reference, up to a point Bastards is easy to explain compared to The Intruder. A ship's captain, Marco Silvestri (Lindon) comes back to find his family is losing their shoe factory and has been involved in some ugly corruption (drugs, sex) that he didn't know about. He occupies a nearly empty flat in a nice ("Haussmanian") building -- to observe dubious magnate Edouard Laporte (Subor), and start screwing Laporte's mistress Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni), with whom she shares a little boy, "little Joseph" (Yann Antoine Bizette).

Other characters include Marco's sister Sandra (Julie Bataille); whose husband Jacques (Laurent Grevill) commits suicide in the opening scene, being massively in debt to Laporte; and a young woman, evidently their daughter Justine (Lola Créton), traumatized by devious practices, who wanders the streets at night stark naked except for high heels. She has been in the care of a Dr. Béthanie (Descas), who's also a psychiatrist. Involved in a scene of orgies out in the country, which Marco visits, are several people glimpsed fleetingly, including Xavier (Colin). Marco's behavior is mysterious. He sells a valuable watch, and then to a friend and former naval associate who collects cars, he sells his pretty robin's egg blue Alfa Romeo. Evidently he has taken time off to help his sister deal with the debuts, and to observe Laporte. These elements accumulate by an achronological precess of accretion rather than conventional narrative flow.

Various cool, mysterious, vaguely exciting, and eventually disquieting things go on that may be more interesting when we don't yet understand what they are. The view of Mike D'Angelo, who saw the film when it debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, is that it can be compared to Assayas' Demonlover, also related to corporate evil and devious sex, also cool, but mundane when it reveals its secrets toward the end. D'Angelo points out this is loosely based on Faulkner's Sanctuary. He recounts some hocus-pocus having to do with a bar of soap and a shirt, and the repair of the boy's bike used as an intro between Marco and Raphaëlle. D'Angelo concludes, "while Bastards is never less than enthralling while it unravels, its resolution—again, like that of Demonlover—feels shallowly sordid, as if the entire movie was really just a prolonged moralistic scold cleverly disguised as something richer and more mysterious." And he thinks this will be a footnote to Denis' main filmography, which follows, if his analysis is right. Her collaborator on the writing, as on a number of occasions, was Jean-Pol Fargeau.

This is probably a film that's more fun to analyze than watch, though it also, like The Intruder, will probably be more enjoyable after being more thoroughly worked through. Scott Foundas in Variety, who seems enthusiastic, also notes a link to Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well. He describes this as a "hypnotic nocturnal thriller" that exercises a "dreamlike pull." Les salauds (the original title) opened in France in August, where it has mixed press (Allociné 2.9), due to a split between the hipper, more sophisticated journals cited (Les Inrocks, Cahiers) that appreciated and the more mainstream (Le Monde, Télérama) that didn't at all. Even Cahiers found the final explanatory sequence irrelevant and thought it would be more artistically pure without it: why be mysterious and elusive and then explain things? This is probably what D'Angelo's bothered by. Music by usual collaborators Stuart A. Staples and British indie outfit Tindersticks is excellent. Shot by Agnès Godard as usual but in digitial this time.

Bastards/Les salauds, 83 mins., debuted at Cannes May 2013, opened in France 7 Aug., screened for this review as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center; opens NYC 23 Oct.

SEBASTIÁN LELIO: GLORIA (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/x8li.jpg
Paulina García in Gloria

Acknowledging another's unworthiness becomes one's strength

Santiago, Chile, present day: Gloria (Paulina García), a fifty-something woman who's been divorced some years, likes to go dancing. She meets Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), a man pehaps her own age, recently divorced, who's very interested. A relationship follows. Then things run into trouble when he seems not as free of his former marriage. The ex-wife and two grown daughters do not work, and live off him. And he seems unable to pull free of their cloying dependency. His neuroticism extends to connecting with families. He hides his relationship with Gloria from his daughters, and when invited to Gloria's son's birthday party to meet her ex-husband and his new partner, he is so overwhelmed by their normalcy, he flees unannounced. Gloria breaks off with Rodolfo, but at his continual pleading, resumes it. But trouble looms again. Eventually Gloria triumphs over this failure, as symbolized in a final sequence where she dances and sings Umberto Tozzi's "Gloria", famous as a disco song recorded by Laura Braunigan.

The film follows a simple trajectory, with a few key sequences. First is the meeting of Gloria and Rodolfo. A scene at Rodolfo's outdoor game concession featuring paint guns. Then the birthday party at Gloria's son's place. Then a trip to a resort when Rodolfo fails Gloria again. A semi-comic motif of Gloria at home features her annoying, noisy, perhaps suicidal neighbor upstairs, whose hairless cat keeps sneaking into Gloria's flat.

Gloria's revenge against Rodolfo may have too much a facile feel-good quality. However, this becomes a study in resilience in which a person, and a divorced woman, not probably Latin America's most advantaged, comes to define her strengths by being forced after trying to ignore the warning signs (twice) to see how another human being is unworthy of her.

Paulina García won the Best Actress award at Berlin, and this is indeed a rounded, fearless performance in an unusually rich character study, even if the film is uncomplicated.

Gloria, 110 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 2013, shown at numerous other international festivals, including the New York Film Festival (Oct. 2013), where it was screened for this review. Limited US release began 24 January 2014, with extremely positive critical response (Metacritic 83%). Good in France too (19 FEb. 2014 release; AlloCiné press rating 3.7).

BEN STILLER: THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/Mitty.jpg

Almost "Life"-like

Big studio Hollywood isn't good at maintaining the boundaries between reality and illusion -- whose starkness was the point of James Thurber's classic little short story. The Ben Stiller Secret Life of Walter Mitty distorts James Thurber's idea, as did the 1947 Danny Kaye version, only this time even more so. Stiller's Mitty starts out with the theme of the meek office worker who escapes into fantasies, but tarts it up, and then tosses it away. It also has another theme -- actually several. It's not only about an urban cipher. It's also about the death of print journalism, and about downsizing, even about the glories of film photography compared to digital. There is too much going on here. And at some point it begins to seem this isn't Walter Mitty's fantasy, but Ben Stiller's. Is it Walter, or Ben, reimagining himself as a bold outdoorsman, a mountain climber, and (on an Icelandic highway, no less) a heck of a skateboarder? Oh yes, and he gets the girl (Kristen Wiig). (Thurber's Walter Mitty was a henpecked husband; Danny Kaye had Mommie issues.) And saves the honor of Life Magazine -- whose print edition, miraculously, is just being shut down in 2013. And hobnobs with Sean Penn, in the person of a legendary, maverick photojournalist.

What happened to the fantasies? All this starts to be actually happening. Just like in a movie. Sounds like a Twentieth Century Fox release, and it is. And a Twentieth Century Fox fantasy. Bearing in mind, though, that Stiller has said he "came relatively late" to this project, maybe it's not his fantasy at all.

In any case, this Secret Life limps badly at first, focusing on nerdy Walter's attempt to meet a fellow worker at Life through an online dating service, then shifting, unable to make this theme click (though it keeps belaboring it even in the most unlikely places), to an economic drama: Life Magazine has been sold, and Walter comes face to face with the condescending, odiously bearded Transition Manager (Adam Scott), who, strangely, orders Walter to find the negative of a new shot by legendary photojournalist Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn). It's going to be the cover photo for Life's final issue.

At first the movie shows Walter having fantasies, more or less as in the original Thurber story. He's flying through the air, rescuing animals from a burning building, and so forth. But that doesn't go anywhere, so the writers just gradually drop it.

And with such incoherent writing in Steve Conrad’s screenplay, no wonder there's a disconnect: in the opening scene Walter's got an anonymous little office space. Later, he turns out to be down in a dark library, in charge of the magazine's photo negative file -- a pretty important job, by the way. Other images are on the sheet, but the one requested, no. 25, is missing. Using the ones they've got, this becomes a treasure hunt that somehow takes Walter to Greenland and then to Iceland and finally Afghanistan, in search of the photographer himself. It may not be altogether clear whether Walter has plunged full time into his fantasy world, or has just been inspired by the challenge of finding Life's final, "quintessential" cover image to seek out Sean O'Connell to the ends of the earth. The screenplay forgets Walter Mitty was a guy who (as in Thurber) had a boring life and lived in his fantasies and turns him into a guy whose adventures, now actually happening, are so good he starts to score big on the Web dating site. As often happens with big budget screenwriting, the original concept of the character is tossed out in the interest of lively action.

Finally this movie clicks on some level when it finds some nice locations, notably a surreal little dive bar in a place called Nuuk, Greenland where the men drink beer from giant boot-shaped glasses, and Walter meets a giant, seedy, drunken pilot you could never make up (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson). (This is where Stuart Dryburgh's cinematography, which hitherto looked bright, neutral and generic, finally begins to work.) Stiller now takes on a bronzed, rugged, ultra-healthy look. This is where he dives into the ocean from a helicopter flown by an Icelandic drunk, dodges sharks, and zips cross country on a longboard skateboard he trades from a couple of Icelandic boys for a stretchy doll. He's really doing this stuff. What happened to Walter Mitty? Nonetheless on a simple adventure story level the movie now begins to be fun.

Sean Penn's brief scene is nice. Sitting gnarly and leather-skinned in front of a mammoth telephoto lens, he zeros in on a snow leopard -- giving Walter a peek -- really -- but chooses not to click the shutter. Sometimes he likes to save the moment for himself, he says. A concept for the Instagram, social media generation to ponder.

And the man can act. Even a hokey little scene like this, he can make memorable. Shirley MacLaine (as Walter's mother) and Sean Penn both look like weathered freaks here, out of place in the studio's squeaky-clean version of the imagination. But it's not clear where Ben Stiller's directing begins and ends here. His iconic role was Zoolander, and his best serious acting part was in Greenberg. This Walter Mitty is so distorted he lacks the courage to show the character's neediness and inadequacy. This isn't fantasy. It's "self-realization." In 21st-century Hollywood, the illusions don't end with a jolt. They come true.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, 114 mins., was premiered as the Centerpiece film at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. Scheduled for worldwide December release, Christmas Day in the US. (Critical response was poor: Metacritic 54%.)

STEVE MCQUEEN: 12 YEARS A SLAVE (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/qv9t.jpg
Chewetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave

The ordeal of the ancestors

12 Years a Slave, adapted from the true account by Soloman Northrup, a free black man resident in New York who was kidnapped into slavery from 1841 to 1853 in the South, is British artist Steve McQueen's third feature film, after his powerful debut Hunger (NYFF 2008, about Bobby Sands' fast to the death for the Irish cause) and his less successful Shame (NYFF 2011, about a New York man with an unhealthy obsession with sex). This new one has more mainstream American (or North American) appeal. It takes the material of exploitation Mandingo movies and treats it as straight, ultra-serious, and unsexy -- as well as without humor or witty dialogue, since one can't help but think of Tarantino's recent genre-bending slavery saga Django Unchained, which went over similar subject matter.

Is it safe not to like McQueen's new movie? Given that it has been winning nearly universal praise and got the People's Choice Award at Toronto along with Oscar-bait tweets, it may be unwise. And 12 Years a Slave is beautiful, powerful, and superbly performed. But it suffers from shapelessness and corny or obvious speeches -- such as Brad Pitt's near the end -- that comes at a moment when it seems quite unnecessary.

12 Years is episodic, like its source, and at times feels like a nightmarish, deeply ironic pageant of the most shameful aspects of southern history -- and more a series of tableaux than a progressive narrative. Its protagonist gets stuck in a terrible situation, and stays there for most of the film, and then quickly gets out again. McQueen, who says his existence is owed to Grenadian ancestors who managed to survive as slaves, wanted the story of a free man wrongly enslaved so anyone today could identify, and Northrup's book fell into his hands.

First, therefore, we see Soloman (played with memorable sympathy and passion by Chiwetel Ejiofor) living in considerable dignity as a fiddler and carpenter in Saratoga, New York with a wife and kids. He is apparently tricked by an offer of handsome pay into going to Washington to play in a kind of circus. (Details aren't made fully clear.) Within sight of the Capitol, the "agents" get him drunk and drug him. He wakes up in chains. It's over. He's a slave. He hasn't any papers to prove who he is. Protesting that he's free and educated now only gets him a brutal beating. Other victims he's transported to the South with warn him to keep his mouth shut. Eventually the spirituals sung in the fields (many of the images are outdoors and lovely) begin to speak for him, and he will begin to sing along. But that comes later.

Several well known actors play odious figures in the tale that follows. Paul Giamatti is slave trader Theophilus Freeman, displaying naked black people in a living room and naming their prices. Northrup, his name changed to Platt Hamilton or simply Platt, is sold himself. At first he goes through several relatively decent slave owners, played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Bryan Batt. Then due to a violent conflict with vindictive plantation sub-manager John Tibeats (Paul Dano) who tries to lynch him and is out to kill him, William Ford (Cumberbatch) has to trade Platt away where he'll be safe, and he winds up in the hands of the psychotic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). All scenes are from the viewpoint of Platt/Ejiofor, but now Epps grabs center stage played by the powerful and versatile Fassbender, the Irish-German actor who first came to international prominence through his performance as Bobby Sands for McQueen. Fassbinder has now been in all three McQueen films, his virtual muse.

With Epps dominating the scene another theme takes over, alternating with Platt's struggle to maintain morale and his attempts to contact the north and gain his liberty again. This is Epps' twisted passion for the most beautiful and vigorous of his female slaves, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who picks 500 pounds of cotton a day, while Platt can barely reach 200, though any man who can't make that quota gets a beating. Here also enters a theme familiar from exploitation slavery movies: the jealous slave owner's wife (here, Sarah Paulson) who sees and abhors her husband's attraction to a black slave woman. Epps' warped lust for Patsy leads him first to pamper her, then rape her, then savagely beat her. And Platt must beat her too. There is a lot of beating in 12 Years a Slave, though of course not as much as Northrup underwent, witnessed, or had to administer himself.

In fact though Platt gets to play the fiddle and do some engineering and run errands for Epps' wife, it's surprising his accomplishments, even if despised in a slave, don't lead over time to his becoming more of a "house nigger." He seems not much good at picking cotton. (In the actual account Northrup had a greater succession of slave owners and situations than shown in this film, which contracts and intensifies its source, turning this protagonist, like those played by Fassbender in Hunger and Shame, into a martyr triumphing through self-restraint.)

Brad Pitt, who produced the film, also gets to play the protagonist's savior, a man named Bass, a carpenter and contractor originally from Canada, standing apart from the victims and victimizers who sees slavery as an unjust and ultimately doomed system. Platt is able to prevail upon Bass to take the information about his kidnapping to the north, and he is rescued and returns to his family. Ejiofor, who has cried often before, weeps again when confronted with his grown children, his daughter's new husband, and his little grandson. Get out your handkerchiefs.

McQueen's films have all been harsh and relentless, and this one still reads as an art film, if only for its stern seriousness and long takes. But that is undercut by moments of sentimentality and cliché. This third film seems much more mainstream and less personal than Hunger and Shame. It's a slicker, more accomplished film, with its integration of the traditional elements of cinematography, acting, editing, sound design, another excessive score by Hans Zimmer, and, of course, more of a "name" cast. But with this the movie also seems to have gotten away from McQueen, in a way. Its dialogue, apart from ornate "period" effects, goes in many conventional directions. So instead of saying "This is a true Steve McQueen film," or thinking he's gotten back to the authenticity and strength he achieved in Hunger but lost with the drift of control that seemed to come with adopting a U.S. location for Shame, one begins to wonder if there is such a thing as a Steve McQueen film. But that's not to say he isn't still a force to reckon with. This adaptation incidentally was written by John Ridley; McQueen is not listed as the co-writer this time.

12 Years a Slave, 133 mins., debuted at Telluride, was shown at Toronto and will be shown at other festivals, including New York, where it was screened for this review. US release 18 October 2013 (limited); UK, 24 January 2014.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/12y.jpg
Gavin Smith and McQueen, NYFF P&I Q&A [Chris Knipp photo]

Walter Chaw's Telluride review says it better than I could -- why we cannot love yet cannot help admiring this film -- and makes close and telling comparisons with the book. Armond White was scathing in his condemnation, doubtless a partial reason for his expulsion from the New York Film Critics Circle.

J.C. CHANDOR: ALL IS LOST (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/ac6r.jpg
Robert Redford in All Is Lost

A sacrament of survival

The only appropriate thing to say about J.C. Chandor's highly original and brilliantly executed second feature is nothing, because it is wordless, or nearly so. It follows someone for days in a life and death struggle who hardly speaks at all. Our Man (Robert Redford) has gone away at sea in a nearly new, well-fitted 39-foot sailing yacht, far off in the Indian Ocean, adrift 1,700 nautical miles from the nearest land. He has left family behind. We hear a letter he wrote to them in voice over at first. "All is lost." He feels he has failed them. So he has gone. That's all we know, no back story, no details. Only the action. Which is dire, beginning at once. As he wakes up, a container that has fallen off a cargo ship, filled with running shoes, has just floated into the boat, and punctured it. It is filling with water. The boat has lost GPS, electronics, communications. The radio works after a while, but only for a few minutes. Our Man's SOS probably goes astray. He patches the hold. He saves what he can. He is becalmed. Then, a big storm comes. Then other things. This is a story of survival. It's like Beckett, without the words. This is a kind of pure cinema.

It is not silent. The sound design is interesting, rich, and important. Unfortunately, the filmmakers, like those behind Gravity, another current survival film of merit, set in space, forget that where their character is there are no string orchestras. It's not as bad as in Cuarón's film, but at times the music is obtrusive, and certainly unnecessary.

The screenplay reportedly is thirty pages long. It would be interesting to see it. Obviously, there is no dialogue. Redford has said that he admired how specific it was. As Our Man, he must perform a multitude of tasks and go through a multitude of motions, rather than "act." His expression is neutral. He is a good sailor, strong and adept for his age (Redford is 77), though not extraordinary. He reacts, he improvises. He does what he knows how to do. When the storm redoubles its efforts, the boat is beginning to sink. He has the life raft, the survival kit. He uses them. Floating out in the life raft he uses a map and instructions and a sextant, and relies on currants to sail into a shipping lane where he hopes to flag down a passing vessel. But when that doesn't succeed, it appears that all is indeed well and truly lost.

The beauty of All Is Lost is that you're wholly caught up in the action. At least it offers that opportunity to you. We live in an age of rampant inattention, and in front of me as I watched in the crowded cinema there was a man who regularly lighted his electronic device to check the time. Evidently he had somewhere more interesting to be. I did not. I relate well to pure visceral adventures. Think 127 Hours, only with a lot more going on, the deep sea below, a school of pilot fish, sharks circling, and the need to make drinkable water. But this is just as intimate and physical. Eventually Our Man, whom we've only heard reading the letter sent before he set sail, and briefly sending the futile SOS, throws his head back in the life raft and yells "FUUUUUUUUK!" And you know what he means.

Editing is fast and seamless. When Our Man climbs the mast, the camera moves around him, catching him from different angles. But it never seams self-conscious. If you are paying attention, you just don't think about it. And you don't think about Redford. Redford is the vessel for the action, no pun intended. He doesn't get in the way. He is like somebody performing a Japanese tea ceremony. A sacrament of survival. With his debut, Margin Call, Chandor made the best movie about Wall Street. Now he has made this. Is every movie he makes going to be the best of its kind?

All Is Lost, 106 mins., debuted at Cannes 22 May 2013, and has been shown at other international festivals, including New York, at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. Release date US 18 Oct., UK 26 Dec.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/redf.jpg
Chandor and Redford at NYFF P&I Q&A [Chris Knipp photo]

ALEXANDER PAYNE: NEBRASKA (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/neb1.jpg
Bruce Dern and Will Fort in Nebraska

Father and son

Payne goes back to his state of origin, with another road trip, and is cruel in order to be kind in this heartbreaking little tale of a not very accomplished son Dave (Will Forte), who sells TV's and stereos (and has just been dumped by his live-in girlfriend), trying to spend some quality time with Woody (Bruce Dern), his alcoholic, eighty-ish, borderline-Alzheimer's father. But he doesn't have Alzheimer's, Dave says, he "just believes what people tell him." And he's gotten one of those letters promising him a million dollar Mega Sweepstakes Marketing prize and believes that. So Dave gives in to Woody's stupid, crazy attempts to head out to collect the nonexistent million dollars, takes time off from work and drives him from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska for it, to shut him up, and spend some time with him. Only along the way they stop at the little town of Hawthorne in central Nebraska where Woody grew up, and there are scores to settle there and memories to return to.

Woody is a simple man. He speaks little, but he speaks truth. His wants are few. His only desire with the million dollars is a new pickup truck and a compressor. These are not things a man needs a million to buy. Davd may be able to make his father's dream come true.

Following a screenplay by Bob Nelson, shooting in no-nonsense digital black and white, Payne deftly handles what may seem a simple story but in fact works on many levels, private and public, present and past, and, of course, serious and comic. Woody's boozy naivete also serves as a laser beam to delineate the pettiness and greed of many and the authentic sweetness of a few in his old home town, with his blunt-spoken wife Kate (June Squibb of About Schmidt) also exposing secrets and lascivious details, when she comes to town too. Hovering in the occasional foreground also are Woody's older son Ross (Bob Odenkirk), a local Billings TV anchorman, and an old garage business partner, Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), one of the greedy ones. But much of the little town turns greedy, when they hear the false rumor of Woody's coming wealth. There are a lot of inarticulate, nearly comatose old men too -- as well as mindlessly stupid younger men. This is where Payne's portrait of rural Nebraska, rural America, perhaps, becomes hilariously cruel. But the cruelty is offset by the sweetness that remains when all the pettiness has been sifted out.

The visit to Hawthorne is fleshed out with various events that inform Dave about Woody's past. The town would make him a celebrity, and sends a boy to shoot his photo. They go to the paper, and meet an old flame (Angela McEwan), who lost out to Kate. She shows him a story about his Korean war service; Ed Pegrem tells Dave about how Woody wanted to leave Kate for a Native American woman. When Kate and Ross show up they all go to visit the roomy farmhouse, now derelict, where Woody grew up, and an effort to settle a score with Ed leads to a comedy of errors.

This is not only a blunt picture of rural, working class America. It's a stark picture of families. And it's a clear-sighted look at age. While some looked at Payne's last film, The Descendants (NYFF 2011), as too conventional, a soap opera, others may look at this one as too caricatural. It's a tragicomedy, its heartbreaking realities freely laced with guffaws. It is, in any case, a wonderful opportunity for actors (who usually love to work with Payne), and a central role showcase for his talents Dern, who has so often played quirky character parts, had not expected to be given. It's an opportunity he took good advantage of, delivering a performance that is both funny and real. (He's said that the non-actors used in the film helped keep him honest and on his toes.) Also in every scene with Dern, Will Forte, mostly a comic and TV actor, has said he could hardly believe his luck in getting this part, and he too performs with a simple authenticity that touches the heart. This is the kind of film that may keep you laughing, and then get you starting to cry as you walk out of the cinema. For me The Descendants was richer and more enjoyable. But Nebraska may cut closer to the bone.

Nebraska, 115 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes, where Bruce Dern got the Best Actor award. It has shown in a number of other festivals including the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. US release 22 Nov., UK 6 Dec.

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/dern.jpg
Bruce Dern and Alexander Payne at NYFF P&I Q&A [CK photo]

RALPH FIENNES: THE INVISIBLE WOMAN (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/IvWm.jpg
Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Jones in The Invisible Woman

An unexciting secret

Do not look for passion in Ralph Fiennes' second outing as director. It's a tepid account of Charles Dickens' thirteen-year affair with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, in which the children's costumes, the Victorian interiors, and an accurately staged train wreck are more interesting than the main action. Fiennes himself plays Dickens, and Felicity Jones plays Ellen or Nelly. The Invisible Woman, unlike Fiennes' directorial debut, a raw modern-day staging of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, is a worshipful costume piece that barely has a pulse. Arty moments -- Ellen pacing on the dunes, blurry extreme closeups, and surges of ridiculously loud string music -- do not alter the conventionality of the whole. Kristen Scott Thomas as Ellen's mother Frances Ternan and Tom Hollander as Wilkie Collins are among the actors lost amid the maundering and gloom.

Things begin badly with a pedestrian framing passage of Ternan years later when she is married with kids and she and her husband run a school at Margate (though East Sussex is the location used in the film). Then we're switched to years earlier and a new set of people, when Dickens spots the eighteen-year-old in a play, and we eventually learn that she, her two elder sisters, and their mother (Scott Thomas) all tour, but she's the least talented. History recounts that Ellen was a vibrant and intelligent woman. This screenplay by Abi Morgan (based on a book by Claire Tomalin) conveys only that she worshipped Dickens' writing -- and wasn't such a good actress. Eventually the writer supported her, she stopped acting, and they remained lovers till he died in 1870 leaving her (not mentioned in the film, which is vague about dates) with an income for life.

When the two meet Dickens is at the height of his fame and is rich from his books and reading tours. He has ten children. His wife, Catherine (Joanna Scanlan, excellent but like others, wasted) has grown fat. The actress is forced to appear briefly nude, apparently to explain why Dickens might find her no longer attractive. Dickens pursues meetings and Catherine and Frances notice his interest in the girl. This is not exciting to watch. A highlight, such as it is, is an evening when the two stay up late alone counting money Dickens has raised for illegitimate children. Before that a brief encounter between Dickens and a prostitute (whom he primly rebuffs) and a tableau of dirty street children is the only sequence of a "Dickensian" world beyond the cushy tameness of the film.

History recounts that matters came to a head when a piece of jewelry meant as a gift from Dickens to the young woman was delivered by mistake to Catherine. The film gives Catherine the further humiliation of being sent by Dickens to deliver the jewel to Ellen and acknowledge the relationship. She also explains that for her husband, the public role as great author may outweigh personal ones. This is telling, rather than showing. But it has been shown that Dickens broadcast his separation from Catherine in a newspaper column, and that is how the family found out about it.

The toothy young Jones was Cordelia in the feature film Brideshead Revisited and Miranda in Julie Taymor's Tempest. She has radiance and youth (though actually thirty) but gets no interesting lines or strong scenes. But the point, though it undercuts the romance, is that Nelly is old fashioned and reticent. By the time she gives in we may have lost interest. And then after all the delay the full-on affair is rushed through. Maybe it's not the point. But then what is? It's hastily shown that Dickens installs Ellen in a house. They finally have sex, eighty minutes in, she gets pregnant (and wanders in the grass) and the baby dies in infancy, in France (a conjecture the film insists on). Yet it's hard to understand what he's talking about when Dickens says Ellen has been all his inspiration for a very long time, felt in every line he writes. The screenplay does not bring to life that inspiration.

The Staplehurst rail crash on 9 June 1865, so nicely recreated here with a dramatic mash-up of period-style railway cabinetry, comes when Dickens and Ternan are regularly traveling together. It shows their affair remains secret. She's injured and apparently in shock, yet he leaves her and pretends he is traveling alone.

None of this is a flattering picture of Charles Dickens. The reason for this tale being a subject of fascination, the topic of a play, two TV docudramas, a number of books, and this film, is not because so much is known (all correspondence and records surrounding it were destroyed) or that it's a great romance, but because Dickens is a writer of such importance in English fiction and because until all Dickens' children had died it was kept a secret. Avoid this film and watch instead Terrance Davies' superb screen version of Terrance Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. Hopefully Fiennes will drop the Masterpiece Theater schtick and surprise us again as he did with Coriolanus.

The Invisible Woman, 111 mins., debuted at Telluride in Aug., showed at Toronto in Sept., and also 9 Oct. at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. The NYFF is also presenting a tribute to Ralph Fiennes the evening of 9 Oct. at Alice Tully Hall. The film releases in the US Christmas 2013, and in the UK 7th Feb. 2014. Sony Pictures Classics, of course.

JIM JARMUSCH: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/luv.jpg
Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in Only Lovers Left Alive

It's not so fun to be nearly extinct

With Only Lovers Left Aive Jim Jarmusch temporarily steals the vampire mode away from Stephanie Meyer. The movie, however, though drenched in beauty, is static and disappointing -- and otherwise unlikely to gain purchase with the Twilight crowd, not that doing so is a desirable aim. At first the director offers a few, alas too few, good laughs, such as abounded in little early masterpieces like Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Night on Earth (even then Jarmusch's world was largely nocturnal, or at least deliciously gloomy). Then it begins to feel increasingly like spending a series of allnighters with hippie drug addicts waiting for the Man. (Blood is like a strong drug for them and they score it rather than kill for it. Blood out in the field, in people, is too impure these days.) But at least for this darkness-soaked moment, Jarmusch has made the genre his own -- more particularly, using it as a peg on which to hang favorite preoccupations, with certain kinds of music, writers, thinkers, and critiques of current civilization that he likes. It's a personal, haunting, deeply atmospheric movie. But nothing happens. Watching it seems to take as long as the centuries its protagonists have lived.

Naturally Jarmusch's vampire lovers -- their romance truly epic since it's lasted centuries -- are weary nocturnal hipsters. We first encounter them living apart. Adam (Tim Hiddleston, Loki in Thor, a man of impeccable diction and elegant disdain), the elder of the pair, is a musician, an audio whiz and a connoisseur of electric guitars. He resides in desolate Detroit (a redundant phrase these days), making music but cautious about releasing it to the world. His favorite word is "no." There's not much he likes. Eve (Tilda Swinton, who was surely destined one day to become a vampire) hangs out in Tangier, in the native quarter, where her best friend, Christopher Marlowe -- yes, that one -- (William Hurt) gets really good blood for her from a French doctor. He has Bilal (Slimane Dazi) an aging younger Moroccan man who serves him, also a writer, perhaps a reference to the world of longtime Tangier resident Paul Bowles. Adam gets his at a hospital from Jeffrey Wright. (Is he a vampire too? Or just jumpy?) Blood for Adam and Eve, anyway, is is like heroin. They sip it from sherry glasses and throw back their heads as on an intense drug high (showing their blood-soaked teeth and a hint of fang). One can imagine them OD-ing.

In a video phone conversation Adam persuades Eve to come to him in Motor City, flying via Paris on two planes that take off and land at night (if that is really possible? but if you travel first class you can get anything). At the same time they get an unwelcome visit from Eve's younger sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), from (bad sign) L.A., who has some life in her but also has a way of messing things up. Ava spends a night with Ian (Anton Yelchin), who was a nice comically conventional young musician guy very helpful to Adam, till Ava gets hold of him. A. and E. kick out Ava and dump the corpse in some underground water ("don't ask") and then head back, again by night connecting flights (Madrid this time), to Tangier, where they find Kit Marlowe in a bad way, and the French doctor's top quality blood out of stock. Is it a dead end? The tragic note doesn't quite come off here, but it's also true that the humor after all does continue at some level all thorough.

Adam says the world' is increasingly chaotic due to the "zombies," by which he simply means humans, everybody else -- one of the signs Jarmusch isn't bothering to think through the particulars of horror folklore or (perhaps as well) to spell out his critique of the world.

Maybe we didn't know the director had even this jaded kind of romanticism in him. But as many elements here are a pleasure, others are a disappointment. Nothing is more a cliché in the vampire genre than trading tales about the famous historical figures one has run into, and yet that is what goes on between Adam and Eve. And why must Jarmusch drag in that tiresome quackery about somebody else, this time Marlowe, writing the works of Shakespeare? We aren't meant to take any of this too seriously, but Hurt's character seems sloppily conceived. It also seems self-indulgent, or hopelessly inbred, to show a wall full of photos of famous people Adam has "met," partly dobutless favorites of the director's. Nice to see Infinite Jest in Eve's Tangier collection, even if it's too heavy to pack for her trip. But the talk of geniuses ignored, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Tessla, Einstein, and so on, seems so routine and second hand. The play with other names, like Dr. Faust, Dr. Watson -- and what about "Adam" and "Eve", for goodness sake? -- things like this are why ultimately the atmosphere of this film winds up being as near-dead as its burnt-out central couple.

Of course plotlessness could add to the film's appeal for certain viewers, but even they may find this, a film that's acted with passion and filmed ravishingly, winds up feeling a bit "frivolous," exactly the word Mike D'Angelo uses in his typically heartfelt and personal AV Club Cannes review, "just a series of mildly amusing riffs" at the end, though he feels that earlier it deserves great credit for aspiring to very much more and coming "tantalizingly close to achieving it." Because it came close for a while to being one of his favorite films ever, D'Angelo still ranked Only Lovers second of his Cannes films, just below Asghar Farhadi's The Past.

The cold Alexa motion picture camera digital photography is by French dp Yorick Le Saux (the director's first time with digital and first time with this cinematographer (Potiche, Carlos, Swimming Pool), who provides gorgeous yellow-drenched nocturnal scenes in both Detroit and Tangier. The music, overindulged in the film, which repeatedly comes to a halt for it, may be more freely enjoyed in the coming soundtrack album.

Only Lovers Left Alive, 123 mins., debuted at Cannes, and has shown at Toronto and many international festivals up to Dec. 2013, when it begins theatrical release. It showed 10 Oct.. in the New York Film Festival, where it was screened for this review.

ABDELLATIF KECHICHE: BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/Adele.jpg
Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux in Blue Is the Warmest Color


Graphic first love story

With the French title, La Vie d'Adèle - Chapitres 1 et 2, this film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes after receiving an overwhelmingly positive response from the festival audience and jury. Likewise on its French theatrical release it got raves, Allociné press rating 4.7 (out of 5).

The subtitle reveals something. Kechiche got the idea of a lesbian love affair between two young women both with a sense of personal calling in their lives from a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, Le bleu est une couleur chaude ("Blue Is a Hot Color"). With his chapters, he also grants that his protagonist, whose name he changed from Clémentine to Adèle to keep the name of the actress, the talented Adèle Exarchopoulos, may sort of be his "Antoine Doinel." That is, she might be his female equivalent of François Truffaut's alter ego (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) who was carried along through three films from childhood into adulthood. Kechiche may want to likewise film the "Life of Adèle" through successive chapters, following her on through adult life.

These first chapters, if that's what they are, take Adèle (Exarchopoulos) from age fifteen, a beginning lyçée literature major who plans to teach young children, through a torrid love affair of several years with a university fine arts major, Emma (Léa Seydoux), after a brief less torrid one with a handsome and smitten young male classmate, Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte), a science major. And then Adèle, who's outclassed by Emma in various ways, but not in youthful sexiness, feels lonely and, after she's begun teaching, and lives with Emma, sleeps a few times with Antoine (Benjamin Siksou), an ardent young male fellow teacher, and the big breakup happens and Emma kicks her out. Time passes, both become good at what they do, and they have a brief reunion that's also a farewell. That's the whole story.

The two women's class differences are defined through dinners at home where they introduce their lovers to their parents. Adèle's working class (there's also a joyous workers street rally) and her parents can't understand and aren't expected to: she just tells them Emma is tutoring her in philosophy (which she has sort of done early on). Emma's parents are from the intelligentsia or arts class and seem to understand the relationship and Emma's sexuality and be fine with it.

This is a complex film to write about, in its storyline ordinary to the point of complete banality, but in attenuated length of presentation and the graphic sex scenes, extraordinary. It leaves an overall good impression, first because of the adept filming and the talented and 150% committed acting (the sex scenes are specific and real, but that's only the beginning) and second and equally importantly because of the lively, specific writing. Kechiche has explained repeatedly that everything is precisely written out, though he allows for improvisation too, and likes to establish a scene's rhythm in the process of shooting it and editing it. Considering how fast-moving the scenes are -- for example the two young women's huge breakup fight, and early on the several rapid-fire dramatic exchanges among Adèle's classmates outside their lyçée, Kechiche not only writes very well, but directs with amazing fluidness.

But this is a film that polarizes, even as it arouses wild enthusiasm. Yes, it's remarkable and wonderful, as good as anything Kechiche has done. The two actresses are vibrant and individualized. Their love-making, while sculptural -- their entwined bodies are filmed like works of art, is intense, specific and nearly as graphic as any porm movie. They're not faking. Right after Adèle is first seen by her lyçée classmates hanging out with Emma, who they spot as a "dyke," they have a yell-fest where she insists she's not lesbian and one shouts that she'll be eating pussy any minute, and very shortly she is, on screen. Does all the on screen sex really define the extent of their love, or is it just unnecessary, and distracting? Does it deepen our understanding of their relationship, or is it just another art house merit badge to collect, this time in Lesbian Sex Watching?

Moving beyond the unusually graphic and lengthy sex scenes, does almost every other scene also have to be so prolonged? For example, some time after the affair is over, when Adèle goes to the opening of Emma's triumphant show -- I found her work rather kitsch, by the way -- at a top gallery, do we have to follow not only Adèle's polite conversation with Emma, but her desultory wanderings around the gallery ? Much earlier, when Adèle is installed with Emma and cooks all the dishes for a big party Emma gives, do we have to watch her bring out all the courses? We know from The Secret of the Grain that Kechiche likes to do this kind of thing. But this time his approach is more replete than ever. You may begin to wonder if this "slow cinema" style in the case at hand is a way to make a very ordinary (though beautifully staged and acted) tale seem extraordinary by presenting it in a form that old fashioned viewers will think is an hour or even an hour and a half too long.

The Secret of the Grain also seemed overlong, and Kechiche's last film Black Venus (NYFF 2010) seemed also excessive in other ways, but this film works on a smaller canvas, and with its many closeups, feels claustrophobic. If this film had been made about a torrid young gay male love affair, would the straight male-dominated audience tolerate it as well? Would they like the age differential (18-27)? Is it fine for a straight male director to shoot unusually long, vivid, graphic, and intense scenes of girl-on-girl lovemaking and have it be considered a socially-aware and politically-correct film? Nevertheless, it's not so shocking that Kechiche got the top prize at Cannes shared by the two actresses -- though Mike D'Angelo, who was at Cannes, and rated many of the films, would have given the top prize to Farhadi's The Past -- not shown at the New York Film Festival, where Blue Is the Warmest Color was screened for this review -- and rated four films above Kechiche's.

Kechiche seems like an artist who's good at closeups but can't do long shots. Everything is up close, nothing in perspective. Similarly he lacks the light touch Nouvelle Vague filmmakers like Truffaut had with his Antoine Doinel. Mia Hansen-Løve's Goodbye, First Love/Un amour de jeunesse (NYFF 2011) is an example of a similar story dealt with more delicately. Mia Hansen-Løve's young lover, like Adèle, is devastated when her lover goes away, but she provides a fuller sense of her young female protagonist's living out her vocation, and even supplies her with a more mature and probably more appropriate replacement lover. Kechiche's approach has wonderful intensity, to say the least, and still does well the student group scenes he did in his early (2003) Games of Love and Chance -- and remains interested in the role of the French literary classics can play in working class French kids' lives -- but he lacks the ability to compress, step back, or laugh.

Blue Is the Warmest Color/Le vie d'Adèle - chapitres 1 et 2, 179 mins., debuted in competition at Cannes May 2013, where it also won the FIPRESCI Prize, and it has shown at many other festivals, including the New York Film Festival (11 Oct.), where it was screened for this review. It opens in US theaters 25 Oct., in the UK 15 Nov.

I recommend Justin Chang's admirably thorough and knowledgeable description of this film and the director in his Variety review.

SPIKE JONZE: HER (2013)

http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/3hqz.jpg
Joaquin Phoenix in Her

A mechanized rom-com that goes soft

Her takes us to a futuristic LA deftly constructed using exteriors shot in Shanghai. It's a pretty, pastel world. But there's small fun in it because its inhabitants, made up chiefly of thirty-somethings, can't relate. The protagonist, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is a neutral, mustachioed sad sack. He's a sweet fellow, as we're told and shown way too often, whose job, a variation on Miss Lonelyhearts, consists of spending all day writing (sweet) customized letters for people that are made up by a computer to look handwritten. That's odd, because people don't write letters much any more. Maybe that's why they need a professional to write them. But if nobody writes them, why bother? This is a Spike Jonze world of high concepts, with the hard edge, and a lot of the smarts, that Jonze is known for excised. Her is a soft, sentimental movie that's too little critical of the commitment- and relationship-averse world of today's American thirty-somethings. It certainly does illustrate what Thoreau wrote as long ago as Walden: "We are become the tools of our tools." But it offers no criticism of that development, either.

Theodore is smarting from the process of a divorce after eight years with Catherine (Rooney Mara) who's really awesome -- a word that comes up, like, once too often. He's lonely, but, well, you know. He's afraid to be with a real woman. So how lucky he is to take possession of a new computer operating system (OS) designed to keep him company just like a real person, without being one. At his request the OS has a woman's voice (Scarlett Johansson's) and at its own initiative its (her) name is Samantha. And we're off and running. Props to Phoenix and Johansson for acting in a void: they never meet corporeally on screen. It would be mean to say Johansson phones in her performance, because that's all she's allowed to do. And if Phoenix's acting is flat, all he's got to relate to most of the time is a cell phone or a computer screen.

Samantha develops apace, and so does Theodore's dependence on her. Before long they're having hot virtual sex. I've never quite understood how that works. But it works in a movie. River Phoenix goes through his paces smoothly, skirting the borderline (as he so often does) between normal and creepy. An effort at a blind date (with Olivia Wilde) ends badly. But his comfort in the company of Samantha cheers Theodore up so much he has the courage to meet with Catherine for her to sign the divorce papers. Theodore declares that he is in love with Samantha. He dares to tell his co-worker in the letter-writing business that his girlfriend is an OS -- it's not uncommon nowadays -- and the co-worker and his girlfriend, Theodore, and Samantha go out on dates together. Would this be like going out with a really, really handicapped person? But that's just a wicked thought; it's not in the movie.

Theodore's best friend, Amy (Amy Adams) is ditched by her longtime companion Charles (Matt Letscher), and that brings Theodore and Amy closer together -- and allows more space for talk about relationships, how much they're needed and how hard they are to maintain, how much it hurts when they end. About these things, this movie has nothing new to say, but goes on saying it -- rather than showing it, which would have been preferable.

But this is, of course, a new twist as romantic comedies go. And Her's crisp, pretty look and briskly handled actors make it a thoroughly pro effort. Just don't expect much in the way of science fiction, because the rom-com part takes the lead. Choosing to make Samantha sound just like a regular girl all through, Jonze wastes the opportunity to develop odd events that might occur relating to artificial intelligence -- the kind of tiny glitches you'd expect him to have fun with. There's not much fun here. The "aw shucks!" and "gee whiz!" buttons are pushed down all the way, with not a moment to inject darkness or sharp wit. The film plays around a bit with computer games -- Theodore has one, and Amy is designing a high-concept (but lame) one about a champion competitive "mom." The twee factor rises there, but the humor remains limp, overwhelmed by cuteness and sadness. Miranda July is one of the friends Jonze consults with on his movies? That makes sense.

Ultimately of course the computer love affair fails just as human ones do, because the couple, never having been together in real space to begin with and being of different species, easily drifts apart. Samantha (whose name comes from the part being originally planned for Samantha Morton) is of course independently connected to the Internet. She also possesses a vast memory. Gradually she hooks up with a host of other CS's, as well as a computerized recreation of the brain of Zen philosopher Alan Watts,, and turns out to be too big for Theodore alone. She's sort of all things to all people, and like God, but not quite, because only a megalomaniac would be jealous because God is omnipresent and omniscient, but with Samantha, for Theodore, it sort of hurts that she's turning out to be that way.

Those developments might have been fascinating if they had happened more and earlier, but they just usher in the end. After a while, the soppy truisms about love and relationships really get old, and for us, that hurts too. With Jonze doing all the writing, without Charlie Kaufman or even Dave Eggers channeling Maurice Sendak, everything just turns to treacle. There reportedly was a 90-minute edit done by Steven Soderbergh from Jonze's two-and-a-half-hour version, which might have been good to see. But Jonze only cut half an hour.

Her, 119 mins., had its world premiere as the closing night film of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, 12 Oct. 2013, when it was screened for this review. Nominal release 18 Dec. 2013; regular US and Uk release, 10 Jan. 2014.