New York Film Festival 2010

[Chris Knipp]

PABLO LARRAÍN: POST MORTEM (2010)


Alfredo Castro and Antonia Zegers in Post Mortem

An eerie horror show that evokes real political events by indirection

Alfredo Castro plays the kind of sleazy creep you'd like to scrape off your shoe. The Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who is interested in how politics seeps through to the unpolitical, has twice now made him his protagonist. In the 2008 Tony Manero Castro was a petty thief, accidental murderer, and would-be Travolta imitator during the Seventies military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In Post Mortem, which takes place earlier, he's morphed into a morgue worker (based on a real person) named Mario Camejo, who types up autopsy reports and was present when Allende's body is brought in. The film begins with a prologue of military vehicles roaring over the rubble of wrecked streets. Larraín's cool, arresting images evoke a vaguely surreal world of dead-end spaces-- you half expect some insect creatures out of William S. Burroughs to pop out around a corner.

The world is not very different, as Larraín depicts it though Alfredo Castro, before and after Allende. Larraín was born three years after the coup, and he's only imagining the atmosphere of the time, but he revels in a uniquely clammy kind of moral rigor mortis. It may be that Mario Camejo is just coming to life at the end of the film, when he slowly constructs a barricade trapping his would-be girlfriend and neighbor with the younger man she's been hiding with. He holds with the opinion favored by the military (and the official view now), that Allende, who was shot point-blank, committed suicide: in other words, he favors the military. When Nancy prefers Victor (Marcelo Alonso), a young long-haired leftist, Mario in effect buries the couple alive, blocking them in their hiding place with the little dog he has rescued earlier.

The special pleasure of the film is the macabre alienness of its principals. Two meals Mario shares with Nancy earlier, in the period of his doomed courtship, are feasts of dry non-communication. Watch how they decide what to pick from the menu of a big Chinese restaurant, and how they share an egg fried in a little pan at Mario's grim lodgings. "Nice place you're got here," says Nancy. "I like the furniture." They sit at his table dishing up the egg, and she slowly begins to cry. Then he cries too.

Larraín's protagonist this time leads a less eventful life than the violent, striving anti-hero of Tony Manero but he conveys a full sense of the world turned upside down just outside the frame. Mario is taking a shower and barely hears when much of his street is torn apart and Nancy's house is demolished. We hear it, though Larraín need only show Mario showering, and the effect is much more disturbing that way (rich sound design is as essential as cinematography in creating the film's world). Nancy's father hosted union meetings. So her parents are never found after the coup.

This event is depicted by rubble, burned automobiles in front of the Bim Bam Bum Club from which Nancy was expelled and the piles of bodies that come to the morgue. Mario's coworker Sandra (Amparo Noguera), who does the cutting, and their coroner Dr. Castillo (Jaime Vadell), who does the autopsy reports, are instructed to speed things up and simplify. Sandra later goes haywire and the captain in charge fires into the corpses to show her rescuing people is forbidden. She and Mario had tried to save several people who arrived not yet dead.

Much of the style of both these films is due to the contribution of the cinematographer, Sergio Armstrong, who used grainy 16mm film to create a washed-out, seedy Seventies atmosphere. With his long straight gray hair, small thin frame, sepulchral pallor, and dedicated neutrality, Alfredo Castro is a memorable figure. When he's joined on screen by a vast accumulation of corpses Post Mortem comes very close to becoming a a horror film. While this, Larraín's third feature, seems less compelling than the deliciously repellent Tony Manero, he has again shown his considerable knack for crabwise depiction of Seventies Chile, and a sense of how civil disorder invades behavior and consciousness. Not exactly fun stuff; big box office is not to be expected.

Ultimately it's a narrow, limited way of seeing the world -- what about the good people? Families? -- but it's an extremely evocative one. You can't get it off your shoes, and will find it still sticking to them weeks or months later. For me, however, the creepiness of Tony Manero was greater, partly because Larraín's visual style and his use of Alfredo Castro were fresh then, partly because the focus on the coup lessens the impact of the personal realm. Larraín has a unique vision, though his sense of a low-keyed ghoulishness resembles Matteo Garrone's portrait of a man with a similar occupation in The Embalmer. Both films are dripping with vague eeriness.

Larraín was inspired by a news story mentioning an actual Mario Camejo as present for the autopsy on Salvador Allende. What might he have been like? the director wondered. And he imagined this film. Post Mortem debuted at Venice on September 5, 2010. “If you read the autopsy of Allende, which is public, it’s on the Web, you will find a very powerful text. It is the autopsy of Chile,” Larraín said in a Venice interview. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010.

[Chris Knipp]

CHARLES FERGUSON: INSIDE JOB (2010)


Eliot Spitzer in Insider Job

Bad Economics 101

Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, filled with interviews and graphic illustrations and narrated by Matt Damon, is a documentary film that describes and analyzes the world financial crisis, its roots, its key events, and prospects for the future. Anyone who saw Ferguson's 2007 No End in Sight, about the lack of planning behind the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, will expect a clear, incisive, devastating account, and that's what we get. Ferguson has established himself, along with Errol Morris of The Fog of War, Alex Gibney of Taxi to the Dark Side, Adam Curtis of The Power of Nightmares, the team of Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott of The Corporation and a very few others, among the best of the new investigative political filmmakers who lay out a large, controversial topic for us in terms so compelling and lucid that the result becomes a definitive film statement.

Some of these films might not have gotten as widely seen, or perhaps even made, without the influence of Michael Moore since his Bowling for Columbine won the big prize at Cannes, but they have a different approach. In his Capitalism: A Love Story Moore uses his by now somewhat tired shtick of bearding participants at the gates, asking them to explain what a credit default swap is, just to suggest the ordinary guy doesn't know what all this stuff means. Inside Job is for smart people who want to become a little smarter, so while it subtly confronts many of those complicit in the financial meltdown in interviews, it doesn't throw up its hands about the complexity of it all but instead sets out to help us understand. The film simply explains what credit default swaps are, as well as other things like derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, predatory loan practices, subprime mortgages and other financial terms that enable us to understand historically how the financial system post-Reagan became more and more able to feed on itself, deriving greater and greater profit even from the unwisdom and illegality (in classic terms) of its transactions, turning the entire world economy essentially into one big Ponzi scheme, till the collapse of the housing bubble brought the investment banks and the world's economies to the brink of disaster.

Ferguson, whose team assembled a wealth of material and who's said his two editors, Chad Beck and Adam Bolt, performed a more complex than usual function to make sense of it all, begins with an account of Iceland, a whole country that went under because it chose to privatize its main banks and deregulate investment. Iceland got so quickly and thoroughly into the Ponzi scheme its deregulated banks borrowed a total worth ten times the GNP of the country, and for its size as a country Iceland's banking collapse is the largest in history so it's a nice (using the word in neutral terms) illustration of the situation which in the USA makes us think more of tent cities of people who lost their homes with unemployment and predatory loan practices and of CEO's belonging to the richest tenth of a percent of a country in history who paid themselves multimillion-dollar or billion-dollar bonuses after the 2008 collapse.

Beck and Bolt and Ferguson have organized Inside Job so tightly it's hard to summarize but we can note some points of special interest. There are several devastating interviews with economics professors (Glen Hubbard, Frederic Mishkin) whose involvement in government and consulting makes their teaching suspect (the point is the universities are part of the problem: they taught that all the dangerous practices were good). These guys fall apart on camera and these interviews are coups. Certain people we don't know, like Lee Hsien Loong, current president of Singapore and Charles Morris, author of The Trillian Dollar Meltdown, show unusual wisdom. There are experts who warned us, like financier George Soros, economist Nouriel Roubini, and Allan Sloan of Fortune magazine. New York ex-governor Eliot Spitzer persecuted wrongdoers before his own high-roller pleasures forced him to resign. Speaking of which, there are details about Wall Street's involvement in drugs and prostitution, and Kristin Davis, a madam whose home base was blocks away from the big financial houses, explains how her girls' very expensive services were billed to the companies, and investigators didn't want to know the details. A shrink who services the CEO's attests that these sleazy pursuits are favored right up to the top.

Which brings us to the final, sad story: where we are now. Of course the financial markets were saved but average Americans paid for it, and millions lost their homes, and the 1999 Glamm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed banks to be investment banks, commercial banks, or insurance companies simultaneously, thus endangering everybody's money -- we're still stuck with that. Why? Because the Obama presidency is "a Wall Street administration." Obama brought back key players in the crisis to mind the store, Geitner Treasury Secretary, Summers director of the NEC, reappoints Bernanke as chairman of the Fed, and appoints many Wall Street executives to senior regulatory and economic policy positions. Guess what? With that setup nothing is essentially going to change.

Ferguson's film has an elegant restraint. Note the title, however, which denotes crime. It is not implicit but explicit that the financial world is manned by well-dressed and enormously overpaid criminals, whose errors we are all paying for, even as they are richly reworded for committing them.

The San Francisco-born Ferguson has a BA in math from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT. He has been a consultant to government and the high tech industry, founded a software company he sold to Microsoft, spent several years as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting lecturer at MIT and UC Berkeley. Then he became a filmmaker. Let's hope he remains one.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center with public screenings of the film Oct. 1 and 4, 2010. Sony Classics release. Limited US theatrical release begins Oct. 8 (New York) and Oct. 15 (Los Angeles). The DVD will be of particular value because some of the wealth of additional material can be made available in that format. At the Q&A Ferguson wished he could have included more of the many interviews, and the press kit includes photos with brief bios of 35 people, pages of glossary, and a six-part time-line. It's a keeper.)

[Chris Knipp]

JORGE MICHEL GRAU: WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (2010)


Carmen Beato, Francisco Barreiro and Alan Chávez in We Are What We Are

Guess who's coming for dinner

Mexican first-time director Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are/Somos lo que hay is another movie that pumps fresh energy and rich implication into a tired genre, this time the horror film, cannibal division. The Swedish Let the Right One In comes to mind because again the ghoulish protagonists are an impoverished family, struggling just to stay supplied with their daily nutrition, and the younger ones are lonely, alienated, and confused. This time cops are investigating and there's a violent finale. It's the surprising violence and the visual flair of continually murky greenish bluish images that makes this take on flesh-eating curiously pleasurable, and the convincing focus on desperation, corrupt surroundings, and a power struggle in the family adds food for thought.

In the opening sequences two youths lose their permission to run a sidewalk watch shop because one of them attacks customers. Meanwhile the pater familias (Humberto Yanez) whose sole source of income was fixing watches wanders like a zombie -- or just a homeless man at the end of his rope -- in a posh Mexico City shopping mall. After longingly grasping at girl mannequins behind a shop window, he vomits and drops dead on the sidewalk -- and is swiftly swept away. An autopsy that reveals a human finger in his stomach leads a couple of low level cops to want to investigate, mainly in hopes of making money if this brings them notoriety. Meanwhile in the dingy cellar of the family's slum projects home, wife and mother Patricia (Carmen Beato), her self-confident and beautiful daughter Sabina (Paulina Gaitán of Sin Nombre) and two young sons Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) and Julian (Alan Chávez) are frantic and argumentative. Dad, who they gradually realize is dead, has been the one who's brought home the human flesh, which had to be consumed according to special ritual, presumably Satanic, whose importance Patricia must continually remind the kids of. Now one of the sons has to be the new leader. The sulky, dark Julian is a loose cannon given to bursts of sudden anger and cruelty. The buttoned-down Alfredo is recessive and conflicted. Sabina has more confidence and authority. But Patricia insists it's Alfredo, as the elder son, who should take over, despite her gradually evident dislike of him.

And family dynamics are more complicated still. Alfredo turns out to be a closeted homosexual. Julian and Sabina have incestuous desires for each other. Patricia is long suffering: her husband spent all his time with whores. But didn't he bring them home to dinner, as the entree? Now she seems more concerned that the streetwalkers stay away from her sons, and she creates a kind of class hostility by depositing the corpse of a whore in front of a bunch of her colleagues as a warning.

At first the boys repeatedly fail at efforts to bring home the bacon, first clumsily attacking a gang of homeless boys under a bridge. That attempt is a washout because Julian is too violent and Alfredo is too timid. Next they lure a prostitute. Then either in a gruesomely extreme expression of homosexual panic or else an act of very bad judgment, Alfredo spends an evening following a group of young gay men and brings the boy he's most attracted to home from a disco -- thus likely to wind up as dinner. Meanwhile several opposing teams of cops are closing in.

Sometimes Grau makes nice use of a withdrawn camera, as when cops, or the family, shut a door on the lens to have a private conversation, or a long shot, as when Julian is shown from a distance on the highway moving a victim from the back seat into the trunk, as people go by unconcerned. Alfredo's sexual confusion adds a plaintive element. He can't master either his sexuality or the role of family leader being thrust on him. Julian's inner conflicts may be even greater, given his constant explosions.

The director's references to Mexico's poverty and moral corruption are clear without being overstated -- though when a guy at the morgue says "You'd be surprised how much people eat each other in this city" the social message is pretty blunt. Mostly the family members, on the other hand, are circumspect. They don't overtly say what their need is, though toward the end Patricia blurts out, "We're monsters."

The violence at the end is crazy, which is not a bad thing. However, this does not have the subtlety of the Swedish film's wonderfully scary swimming pool revenge. And there are obvious lacunae in the whole conception. What exactly did the father do? How did he go about bringing home the family meal? What is the ritual and what's the midnight rule? What was life in the family like, before things fell apart? It might help if one character were more positive and seen in more depth. However, other elements compensate. The cast is an interesting and potent combination of opposing elements: the harried Patricia; seething Julian; imploding Alfredo; serene, mysterious Sabina. Santiago Sanchez's deliciously dark widescreen compositions and smooth tracking shots are excellent. He nicely alternates static shots with hand-held closeups. Enrico Chapel's sparingly used, attractively screechy chamber music creates an original mood. Grau is also good at making the horror clear without actually showing much. His shrewd balance of understatement with clear enough references to classics of the genre means not only more sophisticated devotees but also mainstream audiences can find satisfaction in the film, just as with Let the Right One In. Jorge Michel Grau is another new Mexican director to watch.

Introduced at the 2010 Cannes Directors' Fortnight series, We Are What We Are was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and shown to the public Oct. 7 and 8, 2010. Also already included in five other festivals. In the US IFC has the distribution rights.

[Chris Knipp]

JULIE TAYMOR: THE TEMPEST (2010)


Helen Mirren in Julie Taymor's The Tempest

An overwhelming feast of sight and sound -- and fury, signifying not quite enough

Julie Taymor, who has proven her skill at exotic and spectacular staging both in theater and the movies, has said that The Tempest is Shakespeare's "most visual" play. And this, along, presumably, with the play's significance as a great final statement, is her reason for committing it to the screen (her first return to the Bard since the 1999 Titus). Herein lies both the strength and the complication of Tayor's Tempest, because if the play is Shakespeare's most visual, that's because images are most vividly conveyed in words. And if Taymor creates a dazzling visual spectacle to recreate the play, as she has done, she overwhelms the words, particularly the most important ones. Besides which, Shakespeare didn't want us just to visualize. He wanted us to think.

On the other hand, the play draws implicit parallels between its master of revels, Prospero, and the playwright himself, as a creator and simulator of marvels, and Taymor herself, with all the technical wonders at her command as a contemporary American director, successfully usurps that role. Modern stage and opera designer-directors are like some contemporary architects: in the supreme wisdom of their egos, they create works in which form dazzlingly overwhelms function, and image, to the delight of promoters, dwarfs meaning. Taymor's Tempest is a beautiful thing to watch (though there are plenty of more beautiful films), and it shows a thorough familiarity with the play, as it would, since she has directed stage productions of it. Though she has cut the text, as one must, she has not radically twisted it. She has just competed too much with it, while adding too little spin to the performances.

This is not to say that the language of the play is impossible to hear, or poorly delivered, or that the acting is dwarfed by special effects, though of special effects there are aplenty. It's hard to find fault with Ben Whishaw as Ariel. This Ariel is a creature of pale see-through imagery, who flits away and shrinks into deep space in an instant and leaves behind multiple shadowy after-images in the air as only CGI could allow, and still he is a fine Ariel, his performance as mercurial and delicate as the effects (which some think could be better, particularly in coordinating Whishaw's in-studio greenscreen acting with Mirren's). The visual airiness of Whishaw's Ariel is appropriately balanced by the earthy Caiban of Djimon Hounsou, who is coated in mottled brown and white and what looks like cracked mud, but whose powerful, vivid performance is not at all aided by CGI. Nor is there any CGI about Russell Brand's very Russell Brand Trinculo, whose garish outfit looks quite 16th-century, and yet quite like the way he actually dresses. If this is "stunt casting," still Brand has never been better, and his scenes with Hounsou and Alfred Molina as a convincingly, embarrassingly proletarian Stephano are the film's most entertaining. When these three, Caliban, Tephano, and Trinculo, are together, notably on a pretty barren landscape, fireworks happen, and it's all in the acting and the dialogue. This is only a foil to the main action, but it's an element that works.

Things get off to a bad start, however, with the earsplitting storm, which of course in Shakespeare's time could not have been staged very powerfully. In Taymor's film, we are rocked about with a floating camera that zeroes in on turbulent figures -- and so much noise of artificial tempestuousness that we can't hear a word of what they are saying. Maybe it doesn't matter. It's just prologue. (But then why are they yelling speeches at each other?) The film has done in this opening sequence what movies too often do nowadays. It overwhelms the senses and practically causes a heart attack before things have even begun. This is unlikely to have been how Shakespeare wanted to lead his audience into the calm scene of exposition that follows, where Prospero -- here (adding a superficial feminist touch) changed to Prospera (a worn-out looking Helen Mirren) -- explains to Miranda (Felicity Jones) what happened before she was conscious of things.

Felicity Jones and young Reeve Carney as Ferdinand are to be the young lovers. Carney is also to be the star of Julie Taymor's Broadway musical of Spider-Man. He is a musician who has a somewhat androgynous young ingenu quality. Neither Carney nor Jones is an actor of great distinction. A certain arbitrariness is characteristic of Taymor's usual castings. Using Mirren is the most obvious of these, but the feminism and genre-bending seem unexceptional given Mirren's universal acceptance as a great actress nowadays. Using a black man, Djimon Hounsou, as a slave was, in Taymor's view, a daring, and politically incorrect, bit of casting. But that depends on how the character of Caliban is presented in the production, whether as a savage sent packing by civilized colonists, or as a wronged native to be liberated. It's not quite clear what Taymor has in mind, but anyway, an actor as powerful as Hounsou has no trouble justifying and transcending the possible stereotyping of his casting. Whether his performance is part of a coherent concept of the character or the play is another matter. Whishaw, Hounsou, Molina, and Brand are outstanding. Mirren seems as usual articulate and intelligent, but otherwise uninspired. As the "court," the shipwrecked Alonso (David Strathairn), Gonzalo (Tom Conti), Sebastian (Alan Cumming) and Antonio (Chris Cooper) are highly competent, but not memorable.

The particular irony of Taymor's Tempest is that Shakeapeare's late romances are profound, outwardly simple in some ways, but subject to complex multilayered interpretation and rich in philosophical import. The Tempest has implications about the nature and power of art, the spiritual vs. the physical, new worlds, colonialism, the function of learning, morality and politics, and other themes, as well as perhaps being meant as Shakespeare's own swan song. Glitzing up the imagery, casting a bunch of big names, mostly from movies, and some total lightweights, and giving colorful landscapes (shot in Hawaii) and dazzling CGI free reign but not imposing much discernible interpretation in the direction is not the way to deliver material that requires serious thought. In short, Taymor has given us a very pretty, at times pleasing, at times over-loud, sometimes wonderfully and other times merely competently acted version of The Tempest that is intellectually unimpressive when it should have been the opposite. This is a Tempest for sensualists, not for smart people.

Julie Taymor's The Tempest was introduced at Venice Sept. 11, 2010. It was seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was presented as the Centerpiece film Oct. 2. This is a Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films release that will open in US theaters December 10.

[Chris Knipp]

MIKE LEIGH: ANOTHER YEAR (2010)


Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen in Another Year

The kindly ones

In a New York Film Festival 2010 "critic's notebook" survey, Manohla Dargis of the NY Times says of Mike Leigh's Another Year that it "schematically and too tidily follows, across the seasons, a late-middle-aged couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) and the usual collection of Leigh twitchers (including Lesley Manville in a hate-it or love-it turn)." Traditionally it has seemed that Leigh's actors work together extensively, developing their characters' "back-stories," and then hone a series of scenes through improvisation. It is hard to believe Another Year is improvised. The dialogue dovetails too perfectly. Every word is in place, and there are no surprises or non sequiturs.

Yes, Another Year -- the title signaling both the four-season division of sequences and Leigh's spotlighting a couple who're getting older -- is well organized. But the counter to Dargis' accusation of schematic structure and excessive tidiness is the wonderful acting -- a given with Leigh, but even more notable here. Focusing on two of his finest actors, Jim Broadbent and Rugh Sheen, and giving a central role to his most frequent collaborator, Lesley Manville, is a guarantee of satisfaction. As the geologist Tom and therapist Gerri, a long-happiy-married couple, Broadbent and Sheen build a sense of ease, warmth, and mental health that is uncannily natural. One almost wants to reproach the actors for fooling us so successfully, but one also loves and admires the couple they represent.

Manville's "love-it or hate-it turn" is a splendid and complex meltdown. At first (in the "Spring" sequence) Gerri and Mary (Manville) go for a drink at a pub after work and Mary seems a fun person, just lonely, and disappointed when the man who's been staring at her is met by a girlfriend after Gerri leaves. Then Mary later on comes for dinner with Tom and Gerri and gets so drunk she has to sleep over. It begins to seem that she's not just a bit sad and lonely, but depressed and desperate.

Later (in the "Summer" sequence) we meet Ken (Peter Wight), an old friend of Tom's who comes to visit and also gets drunk, smokes too much, and is lonely and maudlin. He is an older counterpoint to Mary, and when Mary comes for a party she rebuffs Ken's overtures and instead pushes herself upon Joe (Oliver Maltman), Tom and Gerri's much younger, still unattached son, a community lawyer. Mary has been talking about buying her first second-hand automobile, and she arrives greatly flustered because now that she has bought a car she finds driving terribly stressful. The car is going to be the symbol of Mary's meltdown, a disaster from the start, ultimately taken away months later in return for only twenty pounds.

"Autumn" brings the discovery that Joe has found Katie (Karina Fernandez), a physical therapist who's the love of his life. Joe and Katie turn up to surprise Joe's parents, on an afternoon when Mary is invited for tea. Mary is horrified to find Joe paired off and is rude to Katie. And her car troubles have gotten worse. Her bad behavior alienates her from Gerri, who was her chief confidante.

In the "Winter" sequence, rather obviously shot through a blue filter, a certain dourness counterblancing the celebration of Joe and Katie is established by a sequence in which Tom and Gerri go north for the funeral of Tom's older brother Ronnie's wife. Ronnie (David Bradley) is a laconic individual, whom they take home for a while to ease his adjustment to widowerhood. While Tom and Gerri are off tending their allotment garden -- a theme throughout -- Mary comes to the door, not having been in touch for some time, and is let by in by Ronnie in a distraught, much deteriorated state. She has not slept, and got drunk on a twenty-pound bottle of champagne she drank by herself following the demise of her car. The film ends with the happy couple, Joe and Ketie, at the table with Tom, Gerri, Ronnie and Mary, with a fade-out on the face of Mary, contemplating the wreckage, it would seem, of her life.

The best parts of Another Year are the "Spring" evening when Mary is alone with Tom and Gerri and gets very drunk, and the various moments of intimacy when Tom and Gerri are alone together. When one describes the plot one realizes that in the way of working with all these characters, each with occupation, personality, back-story and relationship with the principals, a certain rigidity sets in to organize how they all fit together into the film. Curiously there is an analogy between this film and Woody Allen's. Both directors get together a group of good actors and let them do their thing, but the difference is that Leigh's attitude to life, though mature and partly rueful, is not as negative and pessimistic as Allen's has become. After one has watched Another Year one is conscious of having had a very good time, and yet somehow there is nothing crucial or climactic enough about the action to make it all truly memorable. Just as with Woody Allen. Except for the big difference that Another Year is full of homely but very warm observations about life.

The central theme of Another Year, or a central one at least, is helping people, which is obviously what Tom and Gerri do -- Gerri, even, as a profession. Because they are happy and stable they give back to the community of their friends and relatives the help they are capable of giving and that the others need. Their challenge is to decide how much to trust and how much to give. They trust Joe to find a good woman, and trust that Katie is one. They rue the decline of Ken but send him on his way. They help Ronnie when his wife dies, but they are unsure about Mary. They would like to kick her out. She has behaved badly toward Joe and Katie. But they let her stay for dinner. They are a little like Edward and Lavinia in T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. Their mission is not to become martyrs in Africa like Edward's mistress Celia, but to, in effect, give a party, to welcome people and give them a little help without turning their own lives upside down in the process. The acting is wonderful, the structure is a little superficial and obvious, but the film is full of wise humanity and offers food for thought.

Another Year debuted at Cannes and played or will play at Toronto, Telluride and London. It is a Sony Pictures Classics release and opens in US theaters December 31. Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2010, where its public screenings were Oct. 5 and 6.

[Chris Knipp]

KILLY REICHARDT: MEEK'S CUTOFF (2010)


Paul Dano in Meek's Cutoff

Native guide

Nothing new here for Kelly Reichardt, the respected Amerindie director of Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Meek's Cutoff, like them, is a quiet, meandering tale about people lost and confused in the Pacific Northwest. Except that this time she's made a minimalist, politically emphatic western, which labors solemnly with the issue of the white racism of the people who settled the American West in the mid-nineteenth century, while following three wagon-training Oregon Trail traveling families relying on a hirsute mountain man (and Indian killer) to lead them over the Cascade mountains. He gets lost, and they find an Indian. The kicker is that for all we ever know the Indian, who takes over guiding them, may be lost too. While Meek (veteran nasty Bruce Greenwood, a bit better than in his clunky recent turn in Mao's Last Dancer) wants to execute the Indian from the first, the sensible liberal who mends his moccasin by way of conciliation and wards Meek off is Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), one of three plucky, laconic young wives in bonnets, whose long cotton dresses seem like armor against the ravages of a cruel desert that progressively smudges everybody's faces with dirt because they haven't enough water to wash.

Reichardt certainly approaches the Western, or more accurately the world of American school history books, with a fresh eye. This is as startling a look at the 19th-century West as E.L. Doctorow's in Welcome to Hard Times, though instead of a verbal picture of a dead-end frontier town and a lawless destroyer, this is primarily a matter of visuals, specifically the striking 1.33 aspect ratio natural-light imagery (which lends an old-timey quality) of Chris Blauvelt, and of a cool, remote approach where the dialogue among men is often imperfectly audible in the middle distance, as if this were all from the women's point of view, which it mostly is. "What are they saying?" one lady asks another, of the men. It's a given that if the ladies are to prevail, it must be outside the posturing and debates. Nobody really lets on much how scared, desperate, or worn out they are, though the water is getting low and the prospect of ever seeing the sought-for Willamette Valley is growing remote. But it is consistently Mrs. Tetherow who first casts doubt on Meek's competency, and then defends the Indian (stunt man Rod Rondeaux). If they'd only had an interpreter. The Indian talks plenty, in his language. But there is no verbal communication possible between the whites and the Indian and little real communication among anybody.

Sometimes the stilted redundancy of Jon Raymond's dialogue seems downright silly, as in exchanges like: "I am doubtful."--"I too have doubts." And Paul Dano's habitually pompous manner (which made him well cast for P.T. Anderson's fraudulent preacher in There Will Be Blood) doesn't help any to moderate the absurdity here. Ultimately the individuals on the trip are barely delineated. There's also only bare-bones action, though there are several serious mishaps, and that is the point. The film is about the gathering dread of a journey where nobody is really in charge and nobody knows anything. Sometimes the meticulous images and the sense of a strangely confined-feeling space really are enough, and sometimes the whole fantasy threatens to vanish into thin air. Maybe a slight air of conscious absurdity, such as Jim Jarmusch achieves in the opening sequences of Dead Man, helps protect an original interpretation of period better than a deadpan manner.

You don't get close to anybody here -- Reichardt is normally at one remove from her characters -- but unlike the director's previous two films, this plays out on a broader canvas in every sense. There are many more characters in play. The wide open spaces of the desert scenery (especially dramatized in two striking shots of night sky dotted with palpable clouds) provide a sense of openness and possibility despite the harsh prospects of the travelers. There is a chance of appeal to a broader audience, and Reichardt has used ia bigger and more known and seasoned cast. Besides Michelle Williams from the last film, there is Greenwood, Will Patton, emerging newcomer Zoe Kazan, and other experienced actors, including Brit Shirley Henderson. Even 13-year-old Tommy Nelson as Henderson's son, is an acting vet.

Meek's Cutoff is an odd mixture. The images are textured and beautiful, and the feel of the pioneer experience has authenticity about it even though characters and incident are underdeveloped. But the film is heavy-handed, sometimes unintentionally comic, in its handling of nineteenth-century sexual roles and prejudices. This is not a situation for subtlety, perhaps, but when the dialogue is sparse it ought to have been better. The ending is both lame and blunt. Reichardt's stories are about people going nowhere, but this time she's approached an adventure story and drained all the excitement out of it (retaining only a touch of dread). Since the genre is so familiar, it's hard not to think of other directors who'd have made something more powerful or more subtle -- or both -- out of these raw materials. Nonetheless the whole concept is unique, the cinematography is fine, and Jeff Grace's very sparing music is one thing that really is subtle.

Debuted at Venice, included in Toronto, London, and other festivals, seen and reviewed at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was scheduled to be shown to the public Oct. 8 and 9, 2010. Oscilloscope is the North American distributor, but a US release date has not been announced.

[Chris Knipp]

OMNIBUS FILM FROM MEXICO: REVOLUCIÓN


Isaac Figueroa Borquez in Gael García Bernal's Lucio

Ten short films to commemorate, and ruefully comment upon, the Mexican revolution

A collection of 10 min. short films directed by: Mariana Chenillo, Patricia Riggen, Fernando Eimbcke, Amat Escalante, Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo García, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá & Carlos Reygadas, 2010, Mexico, 105m.

Omnibus films are hard to write about -- to be thorough, you must write eight or ten reviews just about a film that may last little over an hour and a half -- and harder still to describe when you don't get to see them all. A problem with the sound track caused the NYFF P&I screening to be halted after four segments, so as a stopgap I will summarize with quotes from Leslie Felperin's coverage from the Berlinale in Variety. I would concur with his evaluations of the first four. My comments: Eimbecke's film The Welcoming is very nicely photographed and its humor is redolent of promises not kept and rural backwardness. One might question his heavy use of long blackouts in such a short film. Riggen's Beautiful & Beloved indeed is highly conventional, though its references to a dream deferred, however obvious, are well taken. García Bernal's Lucio promises a great deal with its hint of revolution in the very young character, Omarcito, who takes down the crucifix from the wall, and his young actors are lively and attractive. The ending is a little weak, perhaps from the improvised nature of the film Felperin assumes. Amat Escalante's The Hanging Priest begins with spectral, haunting images (one is in the world of Bueñuel or Cormac McCarthy) and ends with the priest and two children appealing to real people on the street (their faces blurred out) for help and being turned away. Pretty strong stuff. This is as far as I can go from personal observation. The projection was halted a few minutes into This Is My Kingdom.

Felperin notes that the ten-film collection was initiated by the production company Canana's funders Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna, and Pablo Cruz. Films by García Bernal and Luna are included. There is some unevenness in quality both artistic and technical, but "a subversive streak throughout" augurs well for the future of Mexican filmmaking. A running theme is to question what the revolution has achieved and suggest that ceremonial platitudes about it are pretty hollow at this point in the country's history. There is a considerable coherence in the unfolding of the films.

The Variety review notes that Einbecke (of Duck Season and Lake Tahoe) seems to have shot his black and white film with "proper film stock," with images in "soft, pencilly grays." The film focuses on a rural tuba player (Ansberto Flores Lopez) practicing to perform with the town band at a ceremony to welcome an honored guest who, in the event, does not arrive. The tubista has to juggle farm chores and caring for a baby with late-night solo practice. When the event comes next day and the local official gives up and lets citizens and band alike go home, the tuba player stays and waits longer, but to no avail. In what follows I am often, or wholly, summarizing from Felperin's Variety review of the collection written when it was shown earlier in the year at the Berlinale.

Riggen's Beautiful & Beloved is a "schmaltzy but well-intentioned segment about an American-reared woman (Adriana Barraza) who finds "an inventive way to get her father's corpse (Ramon Duran) across the border so he can be buried in his hometown." Felperin says the film provides "another spin on themes of family and migration at play in Riggen's feature debut, Under the Same Moon." Line deliveries are "stilted."

In contrast Gael Garcia Bernal's Lucio "appears to be improvised" -- having no screenplay credit and showing "spontaneity" in the young cast, some kids who are visited by a slightly older cousin called Omarcito (Isaac Figueroa Borquez), who startles the kids by declaring Catholic rituals undesirable (though he believes strongly in God) and at bedtime taking down the crucifix from the wall and sliding it under the bed. This is discovered by the kids' "devout grandmother (Samantha Mayer)" who punishes them. Felperin feels the "accessible tale" is "let down by patchy digital lensing."

The powerful The Hanging Priest is the narrative of a pair of lost children (Hector Cortes Barrientons and Ambar Sixto Marroquin), "whose whole village has been wiped out." They rescue a priest hanging upside down from a little tree in a desolate field. All three ride a donkey to safety; the donkey does not survive. The film was written, directed and edited by a pupil of Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante (The Bastards). His film carries themes of violence and despair that resonate with and set the stage for the next entry.

The next short film, This Is My Kingdom, was directed by Reygadas himself. It's a" kind of quasi-docu," Felperin notes, recording a wild rural fiesta "at which Mexicans and the odd Anglophone first get smashed, and then smash stuff up (mostly cars), while in one disturbing cutaway, a family of peasants looks on impassively from outside the party." As Felperin points out, Reygadas, the most internationally respected of the directors of this omnibus, deviates here from the tranqulity of his recent feature Silent Light (shown in the 2007 New York Film Festival), and goes back toward "his notorious sophomore outing, Battle in Heaven to again make reference to the prominent roles of violence and exces "within the nation's soul" and to point to the significance of class differences.

With The Estate Store, according to Felperin, the director Mariana Chenillo (of Nora's Will, a "local hit") fantasizes how workers in a Walmart-like big box store might behave if they were paid partly in vouchers redeemable only at the store, as in fact was "a policy in practice before the real revolution." Felperin feels the segment's screenplay "lacks subtlety" but has a good performance by its lead Monica Bejarano "as a cash-strapped store employee."

R-100 is "a taut but fragmentary mini-action film" about a man (Noe Hernandez) who "resorts to desperate measures on a remote desert highway to get help for his wounded friend" (Manuel Jimenez). The director is Gerardo Naranjo, whose I'm Gonna Explode was in the Main Slate of the 2008 New York Film Festival. I saw his rougher Drama/Mex at an earlier London Film Festival, in 2006.

30/30, by Rodrigo Plà, is a "strong" segment, Felperin writes, that suggests "with pointed irony that the Revolution's legacy is often used as a meaningless vehicle for empty rhetoric by politicians." Rodrigo Plà's previous films are La Zona and The Desert Within) Here, Francisco (Justo Martinez), the elderly grandson of Pancho Villa, is seen "arriving in a town for the centennial parade and party. The local honchos want him there only as a figurehead and never give him a chance to read his carefully prepared speech."

Felperin notes that Diego Luna's feature debut as a director, Abel, was well received at Sundance this year, but his segment here, Pacifico, is "one of the complilation's weaker contributions." It tells a "schematic story of a would-be property developer (Ari Brickman) arriving at a coastal town to find he's been conned, prompting a re-evaluation of what's really important in life." The "tech credits" are "subpar."

Variety's review concludes that the best is saved for last. This is Rodrigo Garcia's 7th Street and Alvarado, a tableau in super-slow motion without dialog, depicting a troupe of "exhausted, sad-eyed revolutionaries in period dress, riding on horseback down the colorful streets of the titular Los Angeles intersection, unnoticed by the residents walking by." The scene is accompanied by a "swelling, plangent musical score by the Newton Brothers." This is shot on "luscious color stock." The horsemen's "disappointed expressions mutely speak volumes."

The implied message of several of the films is that not only has Mexico today after a hundred years reverted to violence, corruption and chaos as bad as anything in the old days, but it all becomes rather irrelevant when so many of the breadwinners drain off to El Norte as illegals or Green Card holders supporting their families and villages by providing the backbone to the US economy. This does indeed seem like an unusually good omnibus film, and one that would introduce me to several important new Mexican directors whose work I am unaquainted with. Too bad about the sound track of the copy at the Walter Reade October 5. The film is scheduled for public showing at the New York Film Festival October 9, 2010, and was seen in part and reviewed in part at Lincoln Center.

Upadate after re-watching the whole anthology in Paris in May 2011 here.

[Chris Knipp]

SEBASTIÁN SILVA, PEDRO PEIRANO: OLD CATS (2010)


Bélgica Castro, Claudia Celedón, Catalina Saavedra, and Alejandro
Sieveking in Old Cats

Growing old with a good husband and a bad daughter

Old Cats has a wonderfully lived-in setting and the cast feels right. The writing is a bit extreme and you will not be surprised to learn that the favorite plays of the screenwriter (co-director and regular collaborator Pedro Peirano) are Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Sometimes it feels as if the dialogue is an obstacle to the wonderful acting, especially of Bélgica Castro, who plays opposite her real-life husband, Alejandro Sieveking, in their apartment, with their own wise and patient and overweight cats. (The filmmakers not being beyond a bit of symbolism, we're meant to see that everybody is some kind of "old cat.")

Thirty-something Chileans Silva and Peirano have teamed up for three films, Peirano generally doing the writing and Silva the directing. They've worked with these same actors, famous in Chile. This time they turn from a upper-bourgeois family's abuse of their live-in servant in The Maid to the perils of aging along with ne'er-do-well offspring. The main focus is on an old couple. Isadora (Bélgica Castro) is becoming forgetful and having strange episodes of zoning out, mainly when she's around water. (Men dressed as bees also seem to have an odd effect on her.) Isadora and second husband Enrique (Sieveking) are visited for tea by their abusive, tiresome daughter Rosario (Claudia Celedón, the mistress in Silva's 2007 The Maid), who's just back from a trip to Peru. Understandably, they don't want to see her. Nor are they happy to receive Rosario's butch lesbian lover, who now calls herself Hugo (Catalina Saavedra, the stony-faced maid in the previous film).

Rosario, herself not getting any younger, is a perpetual freeloader. This time she wants the old couple's apartment, an unpretentious but lovely one, with many nice decorations -- and the cats. Isadora is supposed to sign the place over to Rosario and move into something smaller and at ground level. That part makes sense: Isadora has bad hips and the flat is seven flights up. When the elevator is on the blink, which it often is, she's trapped there. Isadora is not meant to be left alone with Rosario, but Enrique and Hugo run off to get some pastries, and an emotional fight between Isadora and her daughter leads to trouble, and then a kind of resolution.

It's nice to live in a small country where you can engage the services of some of the best actors in your films. Such are Claudia Celedón and Catalina Saavedra, who are even more arresting as lesbians than they were as mistress and servant; (Saavedra has a more minor role here, and Celedón a bigger one as the daughter from hell.) Bélgica Castro and Alejandro Sieveking are veritable national institutions -- Castro is an acting giant who has played great roles and established her own national theater; Sieveking is a well-known playwright as well as an actor. Their generosity in lending their own digs to the production (and those emblematic cats) is a huge contribution. When they wake up in their own bed as the film begins and take their pills, well, it's beyond authentic. The hardest thing is to play yourself, but Castro and Sieveking are equal to the task. More than that, Castro shows further generosity in so convincingly embodying an old woman who is much more challenged than she is in real life (though her trouble with the stairs, it seems, is real).

The daughter is not so well conceived. It is the language of Rosario and her and Hugo's coke-snorting in the bathroom that seem strained and a little irrelevant. Her words and actions spoil the slow developing sense of what Isadora is going through. The partly ironic feel-good conclusion additionally seems a bit forced, and reminds us that so much of the talk has been unreal.

The young Silva and Peirano may have only an inkling what it's like to grow old, but they do deserve credit for knowing how to hold our attention. And a lot of us would be lying if we said our family lives hadn't been a horror show at one time or another. Whatever Became of Baby Jane? may be camp, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is simply heightened reality.

Seen and reviewed as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2010. Details of other releases and festival screenings unknown.

[Chris Knipp]

Comments on the NYFF and an index of NYFF 2010 reviews

Time hasn't allowed me to write a more formal summing up, but here are some general comments on this year's NYFF.


THE SCREENINGS. As usual the Press & Industry screenings are a pleasure, beautifully presented in comfortable surroundings and if not the most cutting edge series, at least the classiest and nicest to watch of my movie year. They're presented separately from the public ones, at the Walter Reade Theater, a venue that's cozier than the large, handsomely renovated public screening auditorium, Alice Tully Hall, yet has superb image and sound facilities, and a stage where Q&A's are conducted. Refreshments and coffee are provided in the spacious gallery across the lobby. There is a first-rate staff headed by theater manager Glenn Raucher, who in two and a half years in the job has emerged as more and more indispensable -- as well as a pleasure to have around. Screenings are scheduled over a longer period than the festival itself, on weekdays only, spread out so that anyone with the time in mornings and afternoons to spare can watch everything in a civilized manner.

THE FILMS. Favorites that I'd call mainstream or conventional are the brilliant, fast-paced The Social Network (David Fincher); subtle, complex Poetry (Lee Chang-dong); the thrilling biographical miniseries Carlos (Olivier Assayas); the French drama of the clash of politics and religion, Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois); and an original first film, a German character study about a crook who's also a star athlete, The Robber (Benjamin Heisenberg) -- which I'd rate in about that order. These are my top picks. But not all I recommend. And highlighting them doesn't mean the festival doesn't have depth, even if there was nothing in 2010 as great as Haneke's The White Ribbon or as provocative on a grand scale as von Trier's Antichrist or on a lesser scale Precious and Trash Humpers, all included in last year's NYFF.

Movies I liked a lot that are a edgier and demanding are the dark political portrait of Seventies Chile, Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín), and the cannibal genre film We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau).

Manoel de Oliveira's Strange Case of Angelica is in a class by itself. From what I've seen of de Oliveira's work, it's feather-light, but lovely. Likewise I'd put Clint Eastwood in a class by himself. He is an old-fashioned filmmaker. Hereafter deserves respect. It's not quite successful, but it has class, it's thought-provoking, and it has fine acting and terrific action scenes, unusual because they have both punch and restraint.

I'm not so happy with Kiarostami's Certified Copy, which was so well received at Cannes. It's beautifully made, but it seems a put-on, posing as something profound (and melding into polished European filmmaking, after a lifetime of working in Iran), but its game-playing by a couple who may be long married or have just met seems gimmicky. I'd not have included it. Thought art house film-goers will love this film, it left me feeling empty and a little played-with.

Another Year (Mike Leigh) is beautifully made and acted but seemed too pat and schematic. Leigh gets great performances and has a powerful working method, but his recent films seem fun yet don't leave such a strong impression. Julie Taymor's The Tempest, chosen partly to sell tickets as the Centeriece film, has some nice acting, but isn't at all an interesting interpretation of Shakespeare. Just window dressing.

Offerings from Eastern Europe and Russia or Ukraine continued familiar veins for where they came from and were quite disappointing. Cristi Puiu's slow motiveless study of multiple murders Aurora (not up to his Death of Mr. Lazarescu) and Radu Muntean's family breakdown movie Tuesday, Before Christmas, both from Romania, are very similar, slow, flat, obsessively quotidian. They have a certain quality but don't seem very memorable, perhaps due to a lack of narrative structure. Aleksei Fedorchenko's Russian folkloric tale Silent Souls wasn't very memorable either. Sergei Loznitsa's debut My Joy may seem radical to some but impresses only for its ultraviolence--and, admittedly, some fine camerawork. It makes ultimately no narrative sense and is a series of anecdotes posing as a coherent story. Nothing outstanding. The Romanians seem overrated, the Russians not living up to past performance.

Other disappointing features were Kelly Reichardt's attempt at a radical western, Meek's Cutooff, a lame misfire; and Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's Oki's Movie. Hong, whose almost Nouvelle Vague-like studies of male-female relationships and vain movie directors I've loved in the past, seems to be repeating himself and running in circles. The followup of The Maid by Chiliean Sebastian Silva and his partner Pedro Peirano, Old Cats, seemed to ruin a good setup and actors with writing of the daughter's part that fell into caricature. The brilliant French-Arab director Abdellatif Kechiche's Black Venus was much too long; he seemed to want to punish the audience with his message of 19th-century white racism and this was a falling off from earlier work closer to his own experience.

Two greats produced works I couldn't quite tune in to. Godard's Film Socialisme's provocations seem largely incomprehensible; images are intermittently ugly -- beautiful. Raúl Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon is gorgeous, its mise-en-scene rich, its tales fascinating. But the tales-within-tales failed to dovetail; the long film is impossible to follow. Mysteries of Lisbon is a very fine film -- almost. A masterpiece manqué.

Festivals naturally and properly favor films that set themselves apart from mainstream fare. This means a leaning toward work that is hard to understand, glacially slow, often shot cooly, like Hou Hsiao-hsien's and some other great Asian directors', from a certain distance with a stationary camera. There's also a taste for features that merge fiction with documentary elements, especially exotic ones. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the Thai festival darling Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes 2010 top prize winner, fills the bill. He has every right to go his own way. However when all is said and done he works so far out on the margins that he connects emotionally only occasionally. This study of rural spiritualism and communication with the dead has haunting and beautiful moments, but also seems disjointed, fey, and self-indulgent.

Documentaries of the festival kind similarly are ones that test an audience, are hard to follow (not a crime), without commentary or with mysterious commentary. Le Quattro Volte and Robinson in Ruins were of that kind, and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaşescu, a valid portrait of the Romanian dictator but one that could probably have been an hour shorter. Fred Wiseman's repetitive and boring Boxing Gym did not enchant me. He has covered everything but when he takes the fun out of even ballet I balk. These sometimes haphazard documentary efforts do no honor to the work of great directors included in the festival, whose jurors might rethink their documentary selecting process. On the other hand the conventional documentaries LennonNYC and Letter to Elia (a sidebar) and the handsomely mounted financial meltdown study Inside Job were very worthwhile -- especially the latter, the important (if not unique) Inside Job, which was as smart as The Social Network. Lennon, Elia, and Inside Job are of interest, but does their aesthetic merit warrant inclusion? Docs remain a moot point for the NYFF. Maybe they should include only one really fine one and let it go at that. A doc on a level with Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, or Philibert's To Be and to Have, and other great ones. But when you consider content apart from form, you go astray.

Unfortunately I could only see part of the Mexican short collection, but it shows Mexican filmmakers have coherence and more of a sense of commonality than directors of any other Latin American country. Latin America in general remains a source of vibrant new work, while Korea has fallen back somewhat, and Japan and Italy remain in decline from past glories.



INDEX OF LINKS TO ALL REVIEWS

Another Year (Mike Leigh 2010)
Aurora (Cristi Puiu 2010)
Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu, The (Andrei Uticǎ 2010)
Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche 2010)
Carlos (Olivier Assayas 2010)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami 2010)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard 2010)
Hereafter (Clint Eastwood 2010)
Inside Job (Charles Ferguson 2010)
LennonNYC (Michael Epstein 2010)
Letter to Elia, A (Scorsese, Jones 2010)
Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt 2010)
My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa 2010)
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz 2010)
Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois 2010)
Oki's Movie (Hong Sang-soo 2010)
Old Cats (Sebastián Silva, Pedro Peirano 2010)
Poetry (Lee Chang-dong 2010)
Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín 2010)
Quattro Volte, Le (Michelangelo Frammartino 2010)
Revolución (ten short films from Mexico, 2010)
Robber, The (Benjamin Heisenberg 2010)
Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller) 2010
Silent Souls (Alexei Fedorchenko 2010)
Social Network, The (David Fincher 2010)
Strange Case of Angelica, The (Manoel de Oliveira 2010)
Tempest, The (Julie Taymor 2010)
Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean 2010)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weeresethakul 2010)
We Are What We Are (Jorge Michel Grau 2010)



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