All the Light in the Sky (Joe Swanberg, 2013)

Swanberg’s prolificacy has allowed those who follow at least a portion of his rapidly-multiplying filmography to effectively see him gain more and more understanding of his craft with each project, and in terms of visual acumen, it’s hard to believe this is the same man who made the captivating but aesthetically enervating Hannah Takes the Stairs. If Swanberg does not cede to his rarely broached sustainability topic to add illusory depth to the movie, he nevertheless folds the idea of a more naturally sustainable lifestyle into his lush cinematography, which lovingly depicts Marie’s beachside home without the critique of, say, Sofia Coppola, and cuts elegantly from Dan helping out with handiwork to a scene of him and Marie walking on the sand.

Highly recommended. Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

White Reindeer (Zach Clark, 2013)

I saw White Reindeer earlier in the year, and it was in my top 10 until the very last week before I had to submit polls to various publications. It trades in all the usual holiday irony expected of a Christmas-set black comedy, but I was taken aback by the sincerity that routinely bubbled up from its superficial snark, its deep reservoirs of character that emerged from even the most facile types. It's exactly what I want from indie filmmaking, not merely cheek but an adventurousness that would never be allowed in a bigger production.

Read my full review of this great film at Spectrum Culture.

DVD Review: Computer Chess (Kino)

I belatedly caught up with Computer Chess when I received a DVD copy to review, and oh what an utter delight of a picture, what reassurance that American independent cinema can still stretch beyond the now-horrid confines of "Sundance" (there were a surprising, delightful number of movies that accomplished that this year, or maybe I'm finally getting a hold of the right screeners). This film is a new high for the great Andrew Bujalski, a work that starts with programmatic logic befitting its topic before slowly collapsing, its surreal dips a match for how the programmers' own sense of their narrow world is thrown off by the unpredictability of life. Perfectly cast and boasting the year's best script, Computer Chess should be seen by anyone who feels that indies have become as hidebound as blockbusters.

Read my full review at Slant.

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)

Oh, I'm starting to hate Paolo Sorrentino. After his decent but Scorsese-cribbing Il Divo, I never got to his This Must Be the Place, and after this ostensible magnum opus, I'm in no rush. A florid blend of Fellini, Antonioni and other Italian masters that replicates their gloss but none of their rich inner life, The Great Beauty instead comes off as the artiste's rant against the ills of society, almost none of which have to do with the pitfalls of Berlusconi's Italy and instead go after real power targets like pretentious performance artists, wannabe Marxists and vain nuns (oh, and did I mention practically every target is a woman?). Sure, Toni Servillo's director stand-in comes in for some criticism of his own, but that is delivered so lightly, with such affection, such an apology for the light rap of the knuckles, that to conflate it with the hostility spared for the film's low-hanging fruit is disingenuous.

My full review is up at Movie Mezzanine.

Breakfast with Curtis (Laura Colella, 2013)

Breakfast with Curtis starts out with a man threatening a child and the child's father threatening the man, yet the movie proves otherwise free of conflict, a light, warm observation befitting its summertime bliss. Perhaps its parade of types is easy to take because I've known all of them: the burnout hippie for whom YouTube is a means of making the world listen to his babble; the benign yuppies; the shy millennials who, all in all, wouldn't mind just staying indoors at a computer over dealing with people. Just short enough to not overstay its welcome, this is a pleasant divertissement in the midst of Serious Movie season.

My review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Faust (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2013)

By turns intoxicating and repellent, Faust is definitely a Sokurov film, but its adaptation of the Faust legend is so perverse I cannot help but find it fascinating. Never mind infinite knowledge: this Faust just wants a reason to live in his shit-stained, death-filled world, and to find something pleasant in Sokurov's world is worth all the omniscience in the universe. It's so strange (and I'm so half-used to Sokurov) that I have my doubts, but I have a feeling that future visits will prove even more rewarding than the first one.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

Capital (Costa-Gavras, 2013)

Oof, Costa-Gavras, how the mighty have fallen. Capital could have been any one of the recent Hollywood spate of disgustingly sympathetic portrayals of financial fat-cats, and its stabs a satire—from characters' confusion over the hedge fund schemes they themselves concoct to a coda that gives the equivalent of a "boys will be boys" justification with a sly wink—is so obviously rendered as to be neither funny nor piercing. Perhaps the issue is that for all the protagonist executive's jet-setting and skirt-chasing, we get little sense of his unchecked depravity, which only makes me more eager to see Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Toad Road (Jason Banker, 2013)

I hate to kick an independent trying to get their start, but I also cannot abide the laziness with which so many treat horror as a cynical means to a quick paycheck. Toad Road has aspirations to a commentary on drug dependency but its improvisational style requires too much of its nonprofessional cast, who struggle to articulate anything even resembling humanity as the film lurches toward a final act that plays at psychological terror but instead looks like a high-schooler dicking around with iMovie effects. To even call it a film is about as charitable as one can be about it.

Read the rest of my review at Spectrum Culture.

How I Live Now (Kevin Macdonald, 2013)

I've somewhat cooled on this already tepid response in the month since I reviewed it, but I nonetheless feel there are aspects of How I Live Now to admire, mainly in the first act when the kids act naturally against a looming threat of war. After the bombs go off, though, I'm not so sure, and the atrocity exhibition of the final act is particularly gross, especially when it ends with an affirmation of a creepily reactionary family unit of teens. Still Ronan is great, as ever, and there are enough moments to make it worth at least one viewing.

My full review is at Spectrum Culture.

Paradise (Diablo Cody, 2013)

I've previously been a defender of Diablo Cody's but her directorial debut is everything her detractors have accused her of being: simplistic, condescending, so caught up in her cute dialogue that character is left out in the cold. Its insultingly reductive view of religion can make even a staunch atheist blanch with embarrassment and sympathy, and any film that must rest on the shoulders of Julianne Hough is doomed from the start. A heinous picture.

Read more at Spectrum Culture.

The Dirties (Matthew Johnson, 2013)

The Dirties is one of my favorite films of the year, an exceptionally timed black comedy about a lonely, movie-obsessed boy getting lost in the project whose vicarious revenge against his bullies tips ever more precipitously into a literal quest for vengeance. Matt Johnson, director, co-writer and star, captures with uncomfortable accuracy the young man who can communicate only in obvious and obscure references, and who gets so fixated on the one thing that gives him solace that it becomes an escape from reality that threatens to horribly alter that reality. Yet it remains funny, Johnson's pubescent cherub face an open book as he naïvely carries on, deluded with flashes of self-awareness. And in the end, where his decisions start to become less about his rational, human choices than a slavish devotion to the narrative arc of his movie, that grim humor becomes fully tragic.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2013)

I've been dying to see this film for nearly a year and a half, and I'm thrilled to say that Leviathan more than lives up to its reputation as very possibly the greatest and most singular cinematic achievement of the decade so far. My review scrambles for a few literary and filmic touchstones just to process it, but this film feels so unlike anything I've seen, even other works by the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. I cannot recommend it enough, and even though I lack a reference to the film's theatrical impact, I can safely say that Cinema Guild's Blu-Ray gets the job done.

Check out my review of the film and its home-video release at Slant.

In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey (James Cullingham, 2013)

John Fahey is one of the best and most overlooked guitarists of the 20th century, and James Cullingham's mini-feature does about as good a job as one can do in bringing the recluse to life. Fahey left little in the way of anecdotal or personal value, which leaves little for the director to sink his teeth into. But then, Fahey left behind a considerable back catalogue of avant-garde but eminently listenable music, a nexus point of Eastern classical and Memphis blues that found constant variation in repetitious structures. Cullingham is at his best when he finds ways to visually ape those compositions, but in all this is one of those documentaries that succeeds artistically only in the sense it makes you want to see out the subject's work.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

The Canyons (Paul Schrader, 2013)

I neither think of The Canyons as a maligned film maudit nor a justified one. Instead, it is a film whose flaws are readily apparent but also, on occasion, the thing that makes the film so fascinating. It's hard to watch Lohan in this, not just for the times in which it looks as if she definitively wasted her potential but for the fleeting moments in which she shows she still has something to give. In all likelihood, the work is her Wrestler, a role so specifically calibrated around her downfall that she could never match it again, nor could any role offer the chance. Now, she's no Mickey Rourke, and this movie's no Wrestler (though it's tawdry, ramshackle nature reveals itself to be the level on which Bret Easton Ellis' coke-dusted nonsense should operate, instead of shinier, higher rises), but if Lohan doesn't get at least some boost from this—and she won't—part of the reason is encoded into this movie and its caustic look at an industry that sets upon anyone who dares to stop pretending that it is all good times.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

Stranded (Roger Christian, 2013)

Poor Roger Christian, director of Battlefield Earth: who else could have a film this bad and it not be the worst of his career by a long shot? Another belated link, check out my review at Spectrum Culture.

Camille Claudel, 1915 (Bruno Dumont, 2013)

This was my first Bruno Dumont film, and I've heard it's something of a departure for casting so prominent a star as Juliette Binoche. On the evidence of this film, though, I'm not exactly rushing out to catch up on his filmography. Nakedly exploitative, the film relies on a cast of actual mental patients to hammer home the point that Binoche's sculptor does not belong in an asylum, lending the numerous close-ups of blank smiles or pained facial contortions a grotesque element that draws no humanity from their faces. Elsewhere, the blandly ascetic frames, suggesting no inner life, only the starkness of external patriarchy weighing down on the artist, suggest Bresson by way of someone who hasn't paid much attention to Bresson, and for all the didactic fuss the film attempts to make about Claudel's outrageous silencing, the camera itself only ever takes the point of view of the men.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Metallica: Through the Never (Nimród Antal, 2013)

I've long outgrown my metal phase, but I still love to listen to Metallica. Even so, I never expected to like Through the Never as much as I did. Antal wisely does not chase that rabbit of replicating the concert experience (impossible when cameras reside on-stage), but the film actually does end up putting forward a vision of both the material reality of putting on a Metallica show, and the subjective interplay between the band and the reaction their music prompts. In other words, it's almost the film Godard wanted Sympathy for the Devil to be, albeit with a half-assed approached to politics that thrillingly fades away into the simpler pleasures of getting your skull pounded out by riffs.

My full review is up at Movie Mezzanine.

Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener, 2013)

Belatedly linking to last week's review of the fine, sometimes beautiful Enough Said, which sports two incredible lead performance that are so good that the film hits a wall whenever the two main actors aren't both on-screen feeding off each other. In particular, it is hard to see Gandolfini, as he did in Not Fade Away, truly move away from Tony Soprano, and to know that we will never get to see the full development of this next stage of his career. But at least there's this performance, and at least Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to enjoy a renaissance of her own. So many ancillary elements of the film weigh it down, but these two are alchemical.

Read my full review at Movie Mezzanine.

TIFF Capsules

Here are links to the capsules I wrote for Movie Mezzanine during TIFF.

This link contains capsules for Bastards (Claire Denis), Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch) and La última película (Raya Martin and Mark Peranson).

This one talks about Horns (Alexandre Aja) and 'Til Madness Do Us Part (Wang Bing).

This link features capsules for A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Ben Rivers and Ben Russell) and Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt).

Also, here are Dork Shelf capsules for Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partov), A Field in England (Ben Wheatley) and Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez).

TIFF Review: Gravity

My other post makes my feelings more plain, as this was a quickly written mini-review, but these were my first thoughts on the disappointing Gravity. Read them at Movie Mezzanine.