San Francisco International Film Festival 2011 (year 54)

[Chris Knipp]

Park Jung-bum: The Journals of Musan (2010)

Assistant director on Park Chang-dung's outstanding recent film Poetry (NYFF 1010) debuts with a somewhat overlong but powerful depiction of the desperate life of a defector from North Korea living on the outskirts of Seoul, with Park himself playing the role of the protagonist.

[Chris Knipp]

Lech Majewski: The Mill and the Cross (2011)

Brilliant recreation of Pieter Breugel the Elder's painting, "The Procession to Calvary," both its sixteenth-century Flemish context, with the oppression of protestants by Spanish occupiers, and the creation of the painting itself. Rutger Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling star. A triumpth, which if widely seen may rival Alexei Sokurov's Russian Ark as an art-historical tour de force and make the talented Polish director Majewski an international figure.

[Chris Knipp]

Dan Geller, Dayna Goldfine: Something Ventured (2011)

A documentary about the role of venture capital in US business since the late Fifties. Most of the key investments came in the Seventies and early Eighties. This is largely a story of Silicon Valley, and also a story of East Coast investors getting innovative companies started in California. Little companies like Apple, Intel, Google, Genentech, Cisco, Tandem and Atari.

[Chris Knipp]

Matthieu Amalric: On Tour (2010)

Big French acting star Matthieu Amalric (Best Actor, Cannes 2007 for his role in Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) depicts a failing French producer touring dismal harbor venues with American burlesque queens in this, his fourth directorial effort. It has gained more attention than previous outings as a helmer and won him the Directorial Prize at Cannes last year. The film appears somewhat directionless to a Stateside viewer, but apparently deeply appealed to the French as a metaphor for their fantasy about the US.

[Chris Knipp]

Miranda July: The Future (2011)

Miranda July's sophomore feature again stars herself, this time with Hamish Linklater as an LA couple of uncertain ambitious for whom the decision to adopt a stray cat is so earth-shaking it causes them both to quit their jobs and revamp their lives. July's surreal whimsey is more focused this time than in Me and You and Everyone We Know and takes a dark metaphysical turn.

[Chris Knipp]

Nikola Lezaic: Tilva Rosh (2010)

This loosely-slung, authentic-feeling coming of age film shot in a washed up copper mining town in Serbia about a pair of skateboarders who flirt with a girl just back from France and challenge each other in Jackass-style stunts can stand as an essential contribution to the cinema of twenty-first century youth.

[oscar jubis]

I don't believe I have ever had an opinion as divergent from yours as it is the case with TILVA ROS. Half the audience at the MIFF walked out within the first hour.
I came to my office and read the Variety review:
"Shallow skater dudes imitate "Jackass" stunts and while away time until one leaves for college in the tedious Serbian slacker drama "Tilva Ros." Though freshman scripter-helmer Nikola Lezaic aspires to say something about contempo Serbian life, his reliance on U.S. subcultures and indie pop songs speak more to the globalization of a certain brand of American idiocy. Auds partial to Lezaic's influences, particularly Larry Clark and Harmony Korine, may enjoy watching stupid people doing stupid things, and the pic's big win in Sarajevo will spur fest play, but theatrical distribution is unlikely."

And I thought critic Jay Weissberg was being too kind.