Best of 2015

Best Film

1. Carol (Haynes)

2. Arabian Nights: Vol. 1-3 (Gomes)

3. The Look of Silence (Oppenheimer)

4. Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller)

5. It Follows (Mitchell)

6. Victoria (Schipper)

7. Timbuktu (Sissako)

8. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Porumboiu)

9. Spotlight (McCarthy)

10. Ex Machina (Garland)

11. Shaun the Sheep (Burton/Starzak)

12. Girlhood (Sciamma)

Honorable Mentions: 45 Years (Haigh), Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (Elkabetz/Elkabetz), Mistress America (Baumbach), Junun (Anderson)

Best Unreleased Film

1. What's the Time in Your World? (Yazdanian)

2. 316 (Haghani)

3. The Treasure (Porumboiu)

4. The Club (Larraín)

5. I Want to Be a King (Ganji)
6. Much Loved (Ayouch)

Best Director 

1. Miguel Gomes (Arabian Nights)

2. David Robert Mitchell (It Follows)

3. George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road)

4. Todd Haynes (Carol)

5. Jessica Hausner (Amour Fou)

6. Sebastian Schipper (Victoria)

Best Screenplay

1. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

2. Carol

3. 45 Years 

4. Spotlight

5. Clouds of Sils Maria
6. Wild Canaries

Arabian Nights: Vol. 3, The Enchanted One

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine. 

The first two volumes of Miguel Gomes’s latest film, Arabian Nights, explore the crippling effects of economic mismanagement in Portugal, ostensibly through the magical lens of Princess Scheherazade, who narrates the tales to her husband, King Shahryar. The themes that Gomes is exploring in both volumes are similar—the causes of the financial meltdown as well as the human and emotional toll it has taken on Portuguese people—but stylistically, the volumes are drastically different. The omnibus films thus far have treated the audience to a medley of genres and tones, from an observational documentary about decaying shipyards in Viana do Castelo to the absurdist setting of a courthouse in the “Tears of the Judge” chapter. The third volume is comprised of fewer segments, but further expands the spectrum of Gomes’ experiment.

The Enchanted One begins with what appears to be the most faithful adaptation of the Middle Eastern folkloric tale that lends the film its title. Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) imagines escaping the grip of her husband to explore the sun-soaked sceneries of Baghdad and the world beyond. In a moment that encapsulates Gomes’ consistently exceptional use of pop music, an image of Scheherazade’s tearful face, as she ponders the places she’ll never live to see, cuts to images from the serene depths of the ocean, to the tune of Glenn Miller’s rendition of “Perfidia.” Music plays an even more prominent role in this opening chapter than the rest of the film; one particularly memorable sequence superimposes the lives of Bohemian Persian nomads with a black and white video of a Bahian rock band.

Scheherazade’s sorrowful rumination on her life mirrors the hopelessness of European youth today. The wistful, romantic mood of this chapter doesn’t quite prepare the audience for the remainder of the film: an 80-minute documentary about bird-trapping that, juxtaposed with the non-fiction opening of Vol. 1, neatly bookends the film. “The Inebriating Chorus of the Chaffinches” tells the story of bird-song specialists, men who train chaffinches to sing in competitions held in a suburb of Lisbon, near the southern coast of Portugal. The contests are socially and historically significant, and date back to the post-WWI era, when the country was recovering from another period of decline.

This finale is a remarkably quiet way to close off what has thus far been a rollercoaster of stories and emotions, though Gomes’s penchant for formal and narrative experimentation is still evident. There are elements of self-referentiality that connects this episode to the previous volumes—Chapas, one of the leading bird song specialists, turns out to be the man who played the role of Simao without Bowels in The Desolate One—and his exceptional use of music culminates in the film’s bravura ending, set to the tune of The Langley School Project’s “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.”

Yet, the closing chapter imposes tremendous emotional weight on the audience precisely because it is somber and, on the surface, unassuming. The plight of his countrymen is profoundly felt by Gomes, and he is aware of his obligation to bring their pain to light. Consequently, this three-part epic is as much about the enduring tragedy of Portugal’s decline as it is about Gomes’ struggle to tell this necessary but inherently unglamorous story. Arabian Nights is a work of grand ambition, a film that is at once heartbreaking and confrontational, transcendent but grounded in the mundane realities of living with poverty. Gomes has made what will quite possibly be regarded as the definitive film about the global economic crisis.

Arabian Nights: Vol. 2, The Desolate One

*This review was originally written for Movie Mezzanine. 

The first volume of Miguel Gomes’s sprawling epic, Arabian Nights, has the unenviable task of bringing the audience on board with the filmmaker’s wild vision and convince them to remain on board for another four hours. Establishing his perspective alongside Princess Scheherazade’s–the storyteller within the story–the episodes contained in the first volume vary significantly in tone, mode, and genre. In comparison, the second volume, The Desolate One, is relatively straightforward. Consisting only of three episodes, the middle film continues Gomes’s critique of Portugal’s economic policies and his study of the social and moral implications of poverty.

In “The Chronicle of the Escape of Simao Without Bowels,” the titular protagonist is an old, hardened criminal on the run from the police. Having murdered his wife and two kids, the man—who is given the nickname because of his lean physique—wanders in rural pastures as he evades arrest, but when he eventually succumbs to authorities, the villagers gather to applaud him as a hero. The acerbic humor of this chapter is pointed, damning at once of the failures of Portugal’s judicial and police systems, and of the state’s lack of popularity among the Portuguese people. Monsters aren’t just forgiven; they’re idolized if they stand up to the government.

The second chapter is thematically similar, if drastically different in tone. The setting of “Tears of the Judge” is an outdoor courthouse, in which a small crime—theft of household items by a tenant—is being adjudicated. The hilariously convoluted plot moves around the courtroom and incriminates everyone present as the maze created by the theft and its background gets increasingly complex. Gomes’s finger is pointed at the deep-rooted corruption and the needlessly complex bureaucracy of his country. The austerity measures imposed on the Portuguese by greedy politicians and foreign investors are blatantly, though with tongue firmly in cheek, incriminated; and further yet, the broad scope of this absurdist chapter allows the filmmaker to poke fun at entrenched sexism and racism within Portuguese society.

The third chapter ends the film in stark contrast with the previous two. In “The Owners of Dixie,” Gomes enters an apartment complex where the inhabitants are suffering from the effects of the financial crisis. Structured as several small vignettes about different residents in the building, our perspective is mostly that of a poodle named Dixie, at first owned by an elderly couple, then passed around to new owners who turn to another woman for help with the animal. In the process, these working-class characters open up with their heartbreaking stories.

This finale is similar in tone to the second chapter of Gomes’s previous film, Tabu. It’s tinged with a bitter sense of nostalgia for better times gone by, when the neighbours would gather for New Year parties, and Brazilian nudists would camp on the rooftop of the building. The longing voice of the narrator and Gomes’s romanticist touch paint a wistful, heartbreaking picture of the sorrow that has taken root in the community. Aided by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s tactile photography and the director’s unparalleled knack for using pop tracks effectively, “The Owners of Dixie” contains the most heartfelt and emotionally resonant moments in the Arabian Nights epic, a majestic chapter that highlights the director’s humanist sensibilities.

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine. 

The Restless One, the first of three volumes that comprise Miguel Gomes’ ambitious six-hour long omnibus Arabian Nights, begins at a shipyard in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. The decaying infrastructure of the port and the frank, solemn tenor of the narrators’ voices as they describe the decline of the shipyard convey the gloomy mood of a country that has fallen victim to economic misery. The sense of aimlessness and desperation is palpably captured in extreme long shots that capture hundreds of men wandering around the harbor.

Of course, nothing can prepare the audience for what turn the man behind films like Our Beloved Month of August and Tabu might take and, true to form, Gomes subverts the expectations set by the opening few minutes by breaking down the fourth wall and entering his film. The fictional Gomes is a director on the run, and is eventually punished for the extravagance and reverie of his filmic ambitions in a country where strict economic pressures are imposed. This hilarious storytelling detour shows a level of self-awareness that runs through the entire Arabian Night opus. Gomes’s wildest, most auspicious and gloriously messy film to date borrows the structure of the eponymous Middle Eastern collection of folkloric tales, but appropriated to modern Portugal under the government’s extreme austerity measures.

Commercial requirements have forced the film to be marketed as a trilogy—a fate that the film’s director doesn’t necessarily view as a hindrance—but the coherence in the structure of Arabian Nights only becomes clear over the course of the three films. Each volume can be studied as a separate entity and because of the episodic nature of the narrative each feels like a self-contained feature. But it is in conjunction with one another that the films reveal their thematic resonance and stylistic grandeur. The Restless One provides the underlying context of Portugal’s financial crisis and introduces us to Princess Scheherazade, the Persian wife of King Shahryar, who narrated stories to her husband over one thousand and one nights. The framing device and the poverty—economic, moral, and, consequently, emotional—felt in Portugal today establishes the audience’s grasp on the film’s continuously varying perspectives and tonal shifts.

In Scheherazade’s first tale, The Men with Hard-ons, Gomes farcically criticizes the political corruption that has led to economic disparity in Portugal. During a meeting between Portuguese ministers, European politicians, and a banker, the men are given a potion by an African magician that gives them powerful and lasting boners. The metaphor for greed among the elite is evident. That the sequence’s blunt satire is so lacking in subtlety is further emphasized as the film progresses, but Gomes’s capability to draw in the audience to stories that are individually so magnetic is such that the tonal shifts feel seamless.

The final chapter in this volume, The Swim of the Magnificents, returns the film to the form of docu-fiction again. Structured around three interviews with men and women who have lost their jobs, the conversations are raw, confrontational and painfully heartfelt. Gomes finds the depth of agony amongst his people and observantly studies the drastic effects of poverty on relationships and mental health. But the chapter, and consequently the volume, ends with a celebratory ritual—a coming together of downtrodden people on a beach for a collective moment of festivities. It’s a spiritual experience that transcends material concerns and a cinematic closure that is quite fitting. The moment of respite from the troubles of the real world is fleeting, only until Scheherazade returns with another tale.

Mustang

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine. 

It is not every day that phrases such as Islamic extremism and light-hearted fun can be used in the same sentence. Looking at the misogynistic, archaic thinking of religious communities through the lens of comedy is a tricky balance, and even more so for a debut filmmaker. Yet, that is just what Deniz Gamze Ergüven does in her joyous, beautiful, and heartbreaking first film, Mustang.

Mustang begins with Lale and her four older sisters on their way home from school on a sun-soaked afternoon in rural Turkey. Before reaching their destination, they play around in the water at a beach with their classmates, some of them boys, fully clothed. The scene and the kids are youthful and full of energy. If anything about their excursion is conspicuous, it’s their childlike innocence, but when a neighbor notifies the girls’ grandmother of their beachside diversion, they are punished and locked inside their sprawling house, banned from attending school again.

Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma and Sonay live with their uncle and grandmother, having lost both their parents. The environment of the house becomes increasingly oppressive, its day-to-day proceedings resembling, in Lale’s words, “a wife factory.” The heartwarming and commendable defiance of the girls is met with increasingly oppressive measures. Sneaking through the windows to see a boyfriend or attend a football match is met with the installation of iron railing against the windows to lock the girls in. What begins as a seemingly temporary punishment for inappropriate behaviour takes on a progressively sinister face as the family plunges deeper into the routine. If the cooking and sewing lessons appear to be a substitute for formal schooling at first, they gain new meaning when the family matriarch allows suitors into the house for her teenaged granddaughters.

The Panahi Conundrum

*This piece was originally written for Movie Mezzanine, on the occasion of the release of Jafar Panahi's Taxi. 

Take a cursory look at reviews for Jafar Panahi’s latest film, Taxi, and you’ll notice it ranks among the year’s most beloved titles. Between its premiere at the Berlinale earlier this year, where it was greeted with the festival’s highest prize, to its theatrical release in North America last week, few Western critics have anything negative to say about it. Yet, despite what one may expect, Iranian critics have not been similarly enthusiastic. This variance in response has as much to do with the film as an individual work of art as it does with Panahi’s career and his politics. To understand this cool critical reaction, it’s necessary to understand the social machinations that gave birth to Taxi.

When Panahi started his career two decades ago, Iranian cinema was at the peak of its artistic renaissance and international acclaim. With his directorial debut The White Balloon, he burst onto the scene as one of the most promising filmmakers at a time when Iran was producing films at a dizzying pace. Compared to the heights of the mid-1990s, Iran’s national cinema has been in decline for the past few years. If not for a handful of veteran directors and an even smaller group of emerging youngsters, Iranian cinema would suffer irreparable artistic regression. If there has been a single director whose consistency in producing challenging works exemplifies the national cinema’s defiance against its own malaise, it’s Panahi.

Having previously won the Camera d’or for The White Balloon and Golden Lion for The Circle, Panahi added the Berlin Golden Bear this year for Taxi, to his ever-expanding collection of festival trophies. Yet, despite the continued reverence of his work abroad, his relationship with audiences and critics at home has never been as complicated as today, a fate indebted in no small part to the aftermath of his political activism. Following his participation in a protest rally on the streets of Tehran back in 2009, Panahi was arrested and later slapped with a severe sentence that included house arrest and a 20-year ban on filmmaking. Ironically, Panahi has made films at a faster pace than ever before since the ban was first imposed, and his cinema has become, for better and for worse, intertwined with his real-life situation.

With This Is Not a Film, his first film under house arrest, Panahi demarcated his career into pre- and post-ban chapters. A rapid-fire reaction to his legal predicament, Panahi’s first documentary was a forced turning of the lens onto himself. He re-enacted the script of his would-be next film in his living room, filming on his cell phone and narrating the plot. The result was sharp and bitterly funny, even though Panahi’s anger and frustration was palpable. It was surprising, though not unexpected, to discover that a director long considered to be one of Iran’s “social filmmakers,” in the local parlance, had actually never made a film so blatantly critical. Despite their darkness and unrelenting pessimism, films like The Circle and Crimson Gold were subtle commentaries on the problems that plague Iranian society. The bleak picture painted of the lives of lower-class women in the former film, for example, is troubling to watch, but not because the film is blunt in its presentation; rather, the effect of the characters’ devastating stories crawls under our skin and lingers long after the film. Conversely, Offside’s rebellious stance against women’s second-class status was wrapped in the guise of an energetic comedy, a blissfully indirect approach to social cinema. This Is Not a Film’s uncharacteristic forthrightness was understandable because of the special circumstances under which it was made, and the film evolved Panahi’s themes and style.

Closed Curtain

TIFF Reviews: Baba Joon, Dégradé, Much Loved

*These review were originally published at The Film Experience.  

Baba Joon (Israel)
Israel’s Oscar submission is quite a unique experience: the lives of Iranian Jews who have left their homeland to live in Israel—and are consequently not allowed to re-enter Iran because of the two countries’ bitter relationship has never been portrayed on screen. In Yuval Delshad’s debut feature, the titular character and his clan—a son, his wife and their son—all live on a small turkey farm in rural Israel and live with very modest means. The tensions between multiple generations of the family, and the melancholia of living at once at home and away from home are the film’s central themes.

Baba Joon’s storytelling and the emotional beats are familiar. There is nothing in the strained father-son dynamics, troubled by decades of repression, that we haven’t previously seen on the big screen. The film’s abrupt but rather predictable ending lends it a saccharine flavour that might sit well with the Academy, but undermines the film. When the story’s resolution is presented so neatly with a gift wrap, very little is left for the audience to ponder. Still, this is a heartfelt film of genuinely well intentions, with a sizable novelty factor, whose fresh look at ethnic minorities in the Middle East is quietly delightful.

Dégradé (Palestine/France/Qatar)
This debut film from eccentrically named brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser, shows similar irreverence in depicting ethnic tensions with Israel. Part Almodovar-esque comedy of women on the verge of nervous breakdowns, part a thriller revolving a hostage situation, their film, which stars Hiam Abbas and Maisa Abd Elhadi, is based in a hair salon in Gaza, where the clientele hail from different social, religious and political backgrounds. As they wait their turns to be beautified, the salon becomes increasingly like a microcosm of Gaza’s society, and the world beyond the confines of the building is engulfed in violence.

Dégradé is an interesting look at life in the occupied territories because it broadens the conversation beyond the Israel-Palestine binary. In the film’s view, the community is rife with tensions and chasms, all exacerbated by the atrocious limitations of living in occupation. Yet, the image is much richer and layered than normally shown on screen, breaking the monolithic view of Palestinians in favour of a more complex perspective. That the film manages to convey these intricacies while remaining consistently entertaining is a significant accomplishment, and one that promises much more from the filmmaking duo.

Much Loved (Morocco/France)
The most daring film among the bunch comes from the more experienced hands of Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch. Ayouch surveys the night club scene in Marrakech, a world filled with sex, drugs and rampant decadence. Home to tourists from Saudi Arabia and Europe, the city’s nightlife is bustling and its sex industry is ever active, almost completely removed from the crisis-ridden country that surrounds it. Almost.  Following Noha (Loubna Abidar) and her entourage of less experienced escorts, Much Loved is as intimate a film as it is provocative.

Ayouch has had to field a lot of controversy, mostly due to the explicit displays of sex in his film; and while the murky release prospects of the film in the Arab world are understandable, it’s unfortunate if sex becomes the only talking point. This is the rare film that intertwines the lives of sex workers with socio-economic issues without becoming patronizing. Morocco’s complicated relationships with Europe and other Arab countries, and its tenuous political situation are subtly worked into the plot of the film. It’s intimate and superbly acted—mostly by amateur performers— and a film that's heartbreaking, humorous and evocative in equal measure. In a festival that is never short on big films from big directors, Much Loved was a true discovery.

Queen of Earth

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine. 

Elisabeth Moss’s most famous performance to date, on television as Peggy Olson in Mad Men, is a work of layered complexity and a superb example of gradual character evolution, with Moss growing into the role as Peggy did into her male-dominated world, handling the ever-shifting power dynamics with increasing confidence. Her charismatic presence, however, had not yet been given a role on the big screen that merited her considerable talents. Perhaps the closest was her role in last year’s Listen Up Philip as Ashley, a secondary character turned into the film’s most complete creation by her gravitas. It’s no surprise, then, that the writer-director behind that film, Alex Ross Perry, would elevate Moss to the leading role of his latest film, Queen of Earth, and the result is an earth-shattering performance in a film that solidifies Perry’s place among the most exciting filmmakers working in American cinema today.

Catherine (Moss) is at the bitter end of a romantic relationship when the film begins. In the tour de force opening sequence, a mostly sustained close-up of her face introduces us to a woman on the verge of emotional collapse. Moss’s ferocious energy is bursting at the frame’s seams, but the scene quickly cuts to the serene surroundings of a lakeside villa, where she is retreating with her best friend, Ginny (Katherine Waterston).

As it transpires, Catherine and Ginny spent their vacation together exactly a year previously at the same spot, a minimalist building whose precise architecture contributes significantly to the film’s eeriness. Tensions are high between the two friends, owing as much to Catherine’s post-breakup depression as to Ginny’s inability to deal with her friend’s state of distress. Worse yet, Ginny’s friend Rich (an expertly cast Patrick Fugit) enters the picture too, a sly presence who glides smoothly between being the voice of reason and a predatory creep.

The ensuing chamber drama escalates in tension as Catherine’s anxiety and depression give way to delusion and psychosis. The invasion of Catherine’s space and the breaking of her illusion of intimate safety with Ginny slide her further in a downward spiral, a progression that Moss’s performance captures with astonishing precision. Charting the constantly evolving and declining state of Catherine’s mental health, Moss switches alternatively between childish naiveté, tragic helplessness and dangerously vicious authority. She is scary, frustrating and heartbreaking, often within the space of seconds. The performance is so powerful, the character so thoroughly hers, it’s difficult to remember after the film that we lived with Moss in another skin for more than seven years.

The Look of Silence

*This review was originally written for The Film Experience. 

Midway through The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to the 2013 Best Documentary Nominee The Act of Killing, there is a seemingly innocuous moment that sends chills down the spine. The film’s protagonist, Adi, and a male companion are trudging through the forest as they discuss their assassinated family members. Slowly reciting the “Ashhad,” Muslim prayer for the departed, they arrive at a river that runs through the trees. The camera stops as they exit the frame. The forest’s natural humming and buzzing, and the slow movement of the water in dusk’s light lend the moment a haunting eeriness. The weight of their wounds lingers above the water; the emptiness of the space is terrifying.

This sequence is not unique to the structure of the film, a documentary whose emotional impact and, frequently, its thematic development, hinges on small, quiet moments; a shot of a motorcycle riding away toward the forests, a woman sitting still at the doorway of her house, a long gaze that captures the gravity of decades of history.  Every miniscule gesture is effective, and the cumulative impact of these small wonders adds up to a film that is, without hyperbole, one of the best documentaries ever made.

In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer told the story of the Indonesian genocide through the prism of politics. Focusing on the executioners who have lived as heroes for nearly five decades, the first film studied the repercussions of corruption, theocracy and abuse of power on a socio-political level. The emotional punch of the film was predicated on disbelief and disgust. That its antagonists could so nonchalantly recreate their past monstrosities and remain more or less unaffected by the experience was so shocking, so inhumane, it would have been nearly impossible to stomach the film had it not been presented as “re-creation.”

The Suicide Theory

*This review was originally written for Movie Mezzanine.

What does one do when life has become so miserable that the only option is to say goodbye to the world? What if even that ability, to take one’s own life, is taken away? That’s the answer director Dru Brown is trying to find in his second feature film, The Suicide Theory. The question is interesting in, well, theory. In practice, it isn’t only left unanswered, but the thought process behind finding a solution for it is so muddled and confused, one wonders why the director pursued it to begin with.

Steven Ray (Steve Mouzakis) is a troubled man who, in the film’s shocking opening sequence, kills a man because he cuts in line at a supermarket line. The source of his violent instincts never becomes clear, apart from the vague notion that aggression is his coping mechanism with grief. The source for this unhappiness is revealed to be a wife who died in a car crash, leaving him permanently scarred and terrified of crossing roads, what with the bitter memory of the accident constantly flashing across his mind.

Three years after her death, Steven has become a professional killer. It is in this capacity that he meets Percival, a man who demands Steven to shoot him in exchange for cash. The reason? Percival’s attempted suicides have all failed, no matter how drastic the measure taken, including jumping off a bridge. Literally bruised and battered, his only option is to hand the proceedings over to an expert. Steven agrees, but on repeated encounters with Percival, the two men begin to have a connection, even as they continue their efforts toward the impending murder.

The Algerian

*This review was originally written for Movie Mezzanine.

“Why would a man like you help a woman like me?” says Lana (Candice Coke) to Ali (Ben Youcef) when he comes to her rescue after Lana’s abusive date punches her in public. It’s a baffling question, and not just because it is despairingly clichéd. The situation doesn’t merit this question at all. A man like what? A woman like whom? What does Lana know about Ali that we don’t? As it turns out, none of this information matters to Giovanni Zelko, the debut filmmaker behind the asinine The Algerian, and, even though the exchange only happens a quarter of an hour into the film, it doesn’t matter to the viewer either. Even by that early point, it’d have to be a miracle to find a viewer who hasn’t checked out of the film yet.

The Algerian tells the story of Ali, an immigrant to the United States who, as a child, witnessed the death of his mother in a bomb explosion—or what the film assumes we will perceive as an explosion despite the risibly poor visual effects. He arrives in America with an un-American dream: to carry out a vague mission against The Great Satan. He’s a member of a terrorist cell disguised a student. Within the first few minutes, it’s clear that Zelko is going to waste a rare golden opportunity to carve a three-dimensional character from a Middle Eastern lead, but if you stick with the film, characterizations only get more disappointing. Ali meets only a handful of people in America, each a poorly sketched archetype to convey one of Zelko’s shallow ideas. Writing about these characters grants them much more legitimacy than they deserve, but two of them stick out like particularly sore thumbs.

Aside from Lana, who reveals herself to be the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, there’s Suleyman (Harry Lennix), an American Muslim inelegantly worked into the film to offset any accusation of Islamophobia—did you know there are Muslims who smile and will not give you unsolicited lectures on Middle Eastern history? There’s also Sara (Tara Holt), an attractive Jewish classmate. Ali briefly has a fling with her, only to violently push her back when he learns of her religion. This relationship provides the film’s most consistent source of unintentional laughs, what with Holt’s horrid performance—her flirting would be more subtle if she walked into every scene stark naked—and the film’s careless (and somewhat anti-Semitic) resolution to their break-up. It’s hard to imagine who is offended more at the implications of this relationship: Muslims, Jews, men, women, or blondes (who, in the opinion of the film, are definitely dumb).

The Algerian is not offensive because it doesn’t abide by rules of political correctness, but because of its sheer incompetence on every level. This is a film in which story and plot are both mistaken for relentless exposition; political nuance is forgone in favour of the simple rule of thumb that America is superior to the rest of the world; the ambiguity of race and gender relations convey the filmmaker’s misunderstanding of both; and performances are delivered with all the grace and poise of a corporate sexual harassment video. It is hard to encounter a film that lacks even a single redeeming quality; that The Algerian achieves that is probably its biggest accomplishment.

The Face of an Angel

*This review was originally written for Movie Mezzanine.

Humdrum thrillers are hardly in short supply in Hollywood. But when this kind of formulaic and intellectually vapid genre piece is directed by one of the most irreverent directors of the past two decades, the result is particularly disheartening—as is the case with Michael Winterbottom’s latest film, The Face of An Angel. A fictionalized account of Amanda Knox’s story, the film is contrived, confusing, and, despite dense plotting, severely lacking in emotional or thematic depth.

Thomas (Daniel Brühl) is a filmmaker whose life is on a personal and professional downward spiral. Having traveled to Italy in the midst of the trial of an American girl—Jessica Fuller (Genevieve Gaunt) is accused of murdering a fellow exchange student, Elizabeth (Sai Bennett), with whom she shared an apartment—Thomas finds the story he craves for his next project. His first contact in the city of Siena is British freelance journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale) who is one of several English-language journalists covering the mayhem. Thomas’ interest is further piqued when international attention on the story has turned the gruesome murder into a sensationalized endless feeder for the tabloids. Disappointed with the lack of reality and integrity in the coverage of the story, the director decides that fiction might be the way to reach the truth. The film-to-be within the film thus becomes a meta-textual commentary on Winterbottom’s own misgivings about the media.

Winterbottom, whose career has been a roller-coaster ride of excellent highs such as The Trip and dreadful lows like 9 Songs, tries to cram as much as possible into the film, thematically and stylistically. The plotting is so long-winded that the story is virtually forgotten; the sole purpose of every scene is to advance the plot one step further instead of actually serving insights into media manipulation. There is more than one romantic subplot in a film that barely register yet each is worked in so forcefully, like some Hollywood gesture that merely needed to be checked off Winterbottom’s list of cinematic obligations. It is never clear, for example, why the audience is shown Simone’s failing marriage in the background when it is immediately rendered irrelevant within the first half.

Hot Docs: Best of Enemies; The Nightmare; The Dictator's Hotel

*This column was originally posted at The Film Experience as part of the coverage of Hot Docs 2015.

It is hard to imagine today that there was once an America where political debates in the media were sensational, not just sensationalized. Harder yet is to envision a time when conservative political commentators weren’t complete buffoons, but rather eloquent, smart thinkers. That is exactly the time that Best of Enemies transports us to, Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s film about the televised debates leading up to the 1968 Republican and Democratic national conventions. ABC, then trailing as America’s third network and in search of a ratings boost, decided to pit two of the country’s most famous commentators against one another: the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. The two were known to dislike each other and their pairing on live TV was sure to cause a stir.
Their prediction proved to be correct when on the 8th night of a series of incendiary discussions, Buckley reacted to Vidal’s name-calling and being labeled a “crypto-Nazi” with a momentary burst of anger...

Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Buckley regretted this lapse of judgment for the rest of his life and was haunted by memories of that night. Vidal, the more outrageous of the two characters, carried the memory with a triumphant smirk. Best of Enemies creates an energetically paced, consistently entertaining narrative out of these debates. It is formally trapped in the familiar structure of similar documentaries, with several talking head interviews that contextualize the significance of the debates and the ramifications of it for American TV and the two. Not all of these inserts seem necessary, though most of them – such as conversations with Buckley’s brother and TV executives who knew both commentators – are exciting. Still, the best parts of the films are excerpts from the original debates. The vicious and hilarious cat-fighting leaves one pining for that golden age of TV.

A more unconventional structure is at play in The Nightmare, Rodney Ascher’s follow-up to the acclaimed Room 237. Based on the lives of eight people who suffer from sleep paralysis, the condition that was the inspiration behind Nightmare on Elm Street, the film explores the world of this strange and, literally, unbelievable disease. Those who suffer see all kinds of monsters and ghosts in their sleep, and they fall into paralysis at once, unable to move or talk at all as these demons infiltrate their bodies. Employing animated sequences and visual effects to show the nightmares of these eight people, Ascher’s film is the rare documentary that doubles as a horror film. As the subjects delve deeper into their nightly terrors, the film also raises the stakes, faithfully recreating the claustrophobic sense of indefensibility against these creatures.

The most intriguing aspect of these horrific experiences is how much their share in common, not just in their nature, but in the specifics of the violent imagery. The Nightmare traces the origins of these visions and arrives not just at recent pop culture icons, but even classical art in which shared elements of sleep paralysis – demons with red eyes, black cats sitting on a dormant person’s chest – appear across works that were produced in different countries in different era. Whether it is the familiar imagery that feeds the nightmares of the subjects or whether it is artists who have brought to life visions that terrified them is the most interesting question the film raises. But beyond the curiosity of this rare condition, Ascher doesn’t know how to deal with the material. The film touches on a superficial level the medical, religious and personal reasons behind each subject’s condition, but never fully engages with them on a deeper level. While the oddity of the topic and the horror scenes are intermittently interesting, they are not enough to keep the film from falling into a repetitive cycle of tedium from which it can never escape.

The Dictator’s Hotel proves a much more rewarding experience, despite its concise, 15-minute running time. Directed by Florian Hoffman, this one visits a newly built but completely abandoned hotel in the Central African Republic, owned by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi before his death. Still supervised by its diligent staff, the hotel’s equipment and furniture have never been touched, but it remains ready to serve at a moment’s notice. The building’s ostentatious structure and vast landscape is splendid and at utter odds with the poverty that surrounds it, though rather cleverly, we are only exposed to the surroundings through the iron gates of the hotel and the few words spoken by one of the employees. This brief visit of the building, during which a North African hotel manager acts as tour guide, is haunting, serving as a reminder of the atrocities committed by political leaders in the region and the sense of entitlement that at once secludes and protectes them from the abject destitution of people in their countries. That the film does this with so few references, and no visual depictions, of political or economic turmoil, and remains entirely within the confines of a single building, is truly extraordinary. The Dictator’s Hotel might not travel outside of specialized festival circuits, but it’s a sharp, humorous and unique film that deserves a much bigger audience.

Listen to Me Marlon

Grade: A-

*This review was originally published at The Film Experience.

The best film of last year’s Hot Docs festival was Robert Greene’s Actress, a rich and moving film about the life of The Wire’s Brandy Burre. It went on to become one of the most praised films of the year; and it’s easy to imagine the same level of acclaim for this year’s buzziest title at the festival, the similarly actor- centric Listen to Me Marlon. As the title suggests, British director Stevan Riley’s film is about Marlon Brando, and it defies any expectation one might have going into a documentary about a deceased actor. That this film has been made is something of a miracle to begin with. Brando apparently recorded more than 200 hours of audiotapes about himself, of which none has been available to the public heretofore. Riley has been granted access to these by Brando’s estate and has assembled and edited them for the voice-over narration of his film. There is no new footage and no interviews shot for this film, only archival material from Brando’s performances, his television interviews and some behind the scenes footage and rare videos of his personal life. The result, a raw and immensely personal look at the actor’s life, is absolutely mesmerizing.

Brando was notorious for being difficult to work with, a fact not lost on a film that never smoothes the rough edges of his personality to offer a hagiographic picture. Rather, like the revolutionary actor himself, Listen to Me Marlon revitalizes the agonizingly tired subgenre of biographical documentaries about artists. Whereas another film might have fallen for the clichés of such films – such as augmenting the existing material with interviews or contextualizing Brando’s significance through external perspectives – Riley gives us Marlon the way he saw himself.

Brando was an outspoken activist, about the entertainment industry and about his political beliefs. He was at the forefront of different social movements, lending his voice and charisma to causes that were personally important to him, but this film offers a much more intimate image of the man. Given the privacy of the tapes, Marlon is unusually candid and open, with a unique perspective and a sense of emotional warmth that is truly remarkable.

Brando’s observations on his own acting, his frustration with the repetitions and predictability of acting styles in cinema at the time and his insecurities about the directions in which his career took him over the years are fascinating to watch. He is refreshingly self-aware and honest about his own artistry and the politics of selecting roles, expressing disappointment and even embarrassment about certain film choices. Equally absorbing are Brando’s poetic ruminations on his troubled childhood and his elegiac reminiscences about his parents, with whom he never fully come to terms. As the film progresses, it becomes increasingly evident that the man who was known as a method actor who immersed himself completely into his performances, brought so much of himself and his wounds into the characters he portrayed.

The distance between the Brando we’ve seen on screen and the man as he introduces himself here becomes progressively smaller, a process that leads to the audience’s total, heartbreaking identification with the actor in the latter stages of the film. It is virtually impossible to watch Brando endure the troubles of his children – his son Christian’s imprisonment for murder and his daughter Cheyenne’s suicide – and stop the tears from rolling down. Such insight and poignancy have only been made possible because Riley affords Brando complete freedom to tell his own story. That the actor has been deceased for many years further lends the film a sense of novelty; yet, the truly astonishing feat is that the director – who also edited the film– accomplishes the gargantuan task of shaping a coherent narrative from the massive treasure trove of information at his disposal so seamlessly that it appears as though we spend two hours with Brando’s stream of consciousness without the presence of a mediator. Listen to Me Marlon sets a new gold standard for documentary biopics and is a film that we will surely hear about a lot at the year's end.   

Alex of Venice

Grade: C-

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine.  

Alex of Venice, actor-turned-director Chris Messina’s first feature film, begins with something of a tour de force moment when George (Messina) abruptly leaves his wife, the titular Alex (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and their son, Dakota (Skylar Gaertner). The series of events that follow this sudden change lead to increasingly difficult circumstances for Alex in a somewhat predictable narrative arc that is at once populated with underdeveloped characters and overwritten dramatic beats. Messina’s film is an admirable effort, one that feels personal and intimate but bears the mark of its director’s and writers’ inexperience.

Alex is a workaholic attorney whose father Roger (Don Johnson) lives with them in their small house. George is a house husband, an occasional painter and surfer who is frustrated by his restraint to his domestic duties. Roger is an increasingly irritating presence, though his smarminess and the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease foreshadow his redemption by film’s end. Upon George’s departure, Alex is forced to juggle her job–defending a case of environmental damage against a constructor–and home life, which proves increasingly difficult, even with the help of Lily (Katie Nehra), her carefree, sparkling sister.

Amour Fou

Grade: B/B+

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine.

“He has a rather melancholic disposition,” says one woman about the young 19^th-century poet Heinrich von Kleist (Christian Friedel) in the opening minutes of Amour Fou. It’s an observation that can only be described as a gross understatement when considering the poet’s deteriorating mental state, as Kleist is morbidly obsessed with taking his own life. In modern parlance, he is clinically depressed, but as doctors tended to call it in Germany in 1811, he suffered from “ailments of a spiritual nature.” Such is the dry humor, paired with rigorous formality, that shapes the tone of Amour Fou, Jessica Hausner’s latest film—a robust, stylish, and acerbically comic take on Heinrich von Kleist’s final days with his lover Henriette Vogel.

The revisionist historical film begins with Heinrich’s search for a romantic partner, one with whom he can commit suicide, not live. His cousin, Marie (Sandra Huller) is fond of Heinrich, but finds the request outrageous. The poet’s affections for Marie never subside, but he resigns himself to seeking a new partner in death, whom he eventually finds in the already-wed Henriette Vogel (Birte Schnoink). Married into the upper echelons of German aristocracy, Henriette spends her bleak days practicing music with her daughter and anticipating the return to home of her husband, who is far more occupied with tax regulations and vicious elitism than his family. 

Heinrich and Henriette’s paths converge among the haughty entourage of German high society members whose casual disregard for the working class is cartoonishly outdated and expertly incorporated into Hausner’s rigid aesthetic. This amusingly evil group occupies pink castles and sports grandiose hairdos that wouldn’t be entirely incongruous if they showed up in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Hausner’s humor is deadpan and vitriolic, vacillating between serious ruminations on depression and farcical casualness about the banality of the world.

Wild Canaries

Grade: B+/A-

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine.

The opening two scenes of Lawrence Michael Levine’s Wild Canaries set the absurdist tone for the wry suspense and hilarity to come. In the first, a glove-clad man mysteriously enters the apartment of an old lady and eerily caresses her face; the setting portends violence, only for the woman to wake up and smile at his familiar face, which remains hidden to us. In the following scene, Noah (Levine) enters his own apartment, calling for his fiancée, Barri (Sophia Takal, Levine’s real-life partner) without a response. The setting again suggests a bloody discovery just around the corner until the fiancée jumps out and yells “I got you” repeatedly. This dichotomy between mystery and slapstick comedy pervades the Brooklyn-based hipster neo-noir.

Although the young and engaged Barri and Noah put a ring on it, they lack the financial means or the emotional will to get married, and still share an apartment with Jean (Alia Shawkat), their lesbian friend. Barri is jobless and Noah is a filmmaker with a never-ending series of rejected pitches. He works closely with his former girlfriend, Eleanor (Annie Parisse), who left him for another woman, and is now being set up with Jean by Barri and Noah. Their neighbor, Sylvia (Marylouise Burke), is an old lady whose age—at least 80—is a matter of dispute, a disagreement that becomes rather significant after she’s found dead in her apartment. When her son, Anthony (Kevin Corrigan), begins to act strangely, Barri becomes suspicious of foul play, leading to a rapid conversation with Jean, who concocts various scenarios for his possible motives. Noah is unimpressed, but the plot only thickens further when Damien (Jason Ritter), the womanizing artist who owns their building, gets involved. He thereby becomes a secondary suspect to Jean and Barri and the object of Anthony’s separate photographic investigation.

Lovesick

Grade: D-

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine. 

"I should have gotten a haircut,” the mop-headed Luke Matheny said to uproarious laughter upon winning the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short for God of Love. That line exhibited the same kind of quirky allure that likely gained the whimsical, black-and-white short its golden statue. The film is about a crooner and darting champion who faces difficulty in attracting the girl of his dreams. Played with a goofy sense of naiveté by the big-haired Matheny and infused with a subplot involving magic, God of Love’s simple look at romance was quite charming. Four years later, Matheny delivers his feature film debut with Lovesick, which stars Matt LeBlanc as another man who has everything in his life but love. But Matheny struggles to stretch that brief but potent whimsy into feature length. Underserved by a paper-thin script and tepid humor, and stripped of any fantastical elements that could conceal the premise’s childishness, Lovesick is as disappointing a return as one can imagine for this formerly auspicious young filmmaker.

LeBlanc plays Charlie Darby, an elementary school principal who is a true American hero in the eyes of the students. Charlie is funny, loving, and compassionate. Everything in his life seems to be going well, but his luck with women is rotten and all his past relationships have ended in bitter breakups. Charlie, with his disarming smile and graying hair, is ripe for settling down—a notion that the film will not stop verbalizing ad nauseum in its opening minutes.

But at this stage in life, Charlie has decided never to fall in love again and only spend time with women he doesn’t find attractive. Thus, Lovesick launches an avalanche of putrid and contrived comedic set-pieces—the most egregious of which is a painfully unfunny and grotesque scene where his companion at a wedding – a woman who has no issues discussing her bowel movements loudly in public – happens to be racist; she calls the brown waiters “Bin Laden” and pats them down in search for bombs. After this charade, Lovesick moves on to the inevitable: as Charlie reiterates to his best friend that he has given up on romance, the perfect woman appears in the form of Molly (Ali Larter). And because no romantic-comedy cliché can be left untouched, no matter how heinously misogynistic it is, she happens to be a woman whose life needs saving by a man. Charlie seizes the opportunity to become Prince Charming.

Timbuktu

Grade: A

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine. 

Islam is a topic frequently viewed through a limited lens in contemporary cinema, particularly what is produced by and catered to North Americans. Such is not the case with Timbuktu, Abderrahmane Sissako’s first feature film in 7 years. For audiences accustomed to seeing demonized, one-note portrayals of a small, extremist faction of Muslims on screen, Timbuktu’s insight into the religion feels like a momentous breath of fresh air. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in France and Nigeria, the latter of which is still sidelined by mainstream media, it’s hard to think of a moment when conversations about Muslims and their relationship to fundamentalism would have been timelier than now. Sissako has said he was inspired to make Timbuktu a few years ago, when he opined the lack of attention given to the stoning of an unmarried Malian couple, who were charged with adultery. Timbuktu is his attempt at dramatizing their story, along with other paralleling plots, and it’s a rich, politically nuanced, and painterly portrait of life in rural Mali.

Timbuktu‘s kaleidoscopic structure cross-cuts between the unmarried couple and a large cast of characters connected by the virtue of their geographical proximity. A man, his wife, and daughter pass their days in a tent, taking care of their small herd of eight cows. A fisherman sets up his nets in the same lake as the cows drink. Islamic militants force themselves onto public spaces in nearby towns, making announcements about religiously acceptable behaviour. A local imam pleads with the mujahedeen to refrain from violence in the community. Local women fight against fanatical intolerance as kids fight for their passion for football. All these stories are loosely tied by a tenuous link to the decentralized and vigilante local justice system. Timbuktu‘s first half is devoted to running these paralleling narratives in rapidly cut, short segments, but the film never loses its fluidity as the dots begin to connect and the characters inch closer toward one another.

As Sissako traverses between stories, languages, and religions, the tone of the film shifts as well. A sequence in the first half shows a group of young boys playing football without a ball, because having footballs, or any element of earthly joy, is banned by the local militia. The boys play as though they’re unaware of the absence of the ball, passionately tackling and celebrating, thus giving this sequence quite an incantatory feel. This scene is immediately succeeded by one in which the audience witnesses a murder. The gruesome display is shot in a lush, extreme long shot. Its awe-inspiring beauty is at stark odds with the violence at its heart.