Movies That I Wanted
To See That I Missed
20,000 Days on Earth (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, UK,
2014, 97 min.)
An Honest Liar (Tyler Measom & Justin Weinstein, USA,
2014, 93 min.)
Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, Australia, 2013, 108 min.)
Human Capital (Paolo Virzi, Italy, 2014, 109 min.)
In Bloom (Nana Ekvtimishvili & Simon Gross, Georgia,
2013, 102 min.)
Still Life (Uberto Pasolini, UK/Italy, 2013, 92 min.)
Movies That I’ll Be
Catching Up With On Netflix Shortly
Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2013, 120
min.)
The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, Cambodia, 2013, 92 min.)
Young & Beautiful (Francois Ozon, France, 2013 95 min.)
The Expedition to the
End of the World (Daniel Dencik, Denmark, 2013, 90 min.)
A group of artists, scientists, philosophers and sailors
travel beyond the rapidly melting ice mastiffs of Greenland and into uncharted
territory in this intriguing but ultimately directionless documentary. Despite featuring a polar bear attack, a
partially heavy metal soundtrack, and even the discovery of a new species,
Daniel Dencik’s film still feels like a fairly generic travelogue. Certainly it suffers from comparison to
Werner Herzog’s similar but far more eccentric Encounters at the End of the World (2007). The scenery is nice, but the film never
really develops a point of view beyond a general bemusement regarding the human
race’s insignificant place in the universe.
C+
Man with a Movie
Camera (Dziga Vertov, Soviet Union, 1929, 68 min.)
With Live Musical
Accompaniment by Alloy Orchestra
Though a Sight &
Sound poll of critics and filmmakers has declared Man with a Movie Camera the greatest documentary of all time, it
really belongs more to the tradition of experimental avant-garde film, and
boasts an anarchic playfulness to rival Luis Bunuel’s contemporaneous Un chien andalou (1929). Rather than focusing on a central subject,
the film hops restlessly between sensationally filmed imagery ranging from an oncoming
train filmed at track level to explosions in a mine to a graphic child
birth. Much of the footage is captured
with the aid of then-innovative (and still strikingly impressionistic) use of
fast and slow motion, superimpositions, and even a bit of stop-motion
animation. There is no dialogue but you
can practically hear the filmmakers shouting “LOOK AT THIS” throughout the
film. Vertov is always credited as the
film’s auteur, but Elizaveta Svilova deserves an enormous amount of credit for
editing her husband’s mounds of unrelated footage into a coherent (if chaotic)
tribute to the possibilities of cinematic expression. A
Manuscripts Don’t
Burn (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2013, 125 min.)
Equal parts suspense film, impassioned agitprop, and howl of
despair, Manuscripts Don’t Burn
bluntly details the horrors of living under a fascist regime. Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof knows this
subject firsthand – he made this film in defiance of a 20-year band on
filmmaking levied by the Iranian government, and had to leave the names of his
cast and crew out of the credits to protect them against retribution. The narrative, drawn from real life, follows
a pair of poor killers hired to execute a group of writers who threaten to publish
a story exposing a particularly heinous act of government corruption. Amazingly Rasoulof manages to makes one of
these killers a nuanced (at times even sympathetic) character, who struggles
with crippling debt and mounting guilt even as he grimly (and graphically)
fulfills the demands of his profession.
Unlike some of the recent, similarly themed work by Jafar Panahi, this
really feels like a full-fledged film, as gripping as any action blockbuster of
recent memory despite its purposefully muted style. A-
Mood Indigo
(Michel Gondry, France, 2013, 94 min.)
The third film adaptation of Boris Vian’s 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream suffers from an
excess of whimsy but nonetheless charms thanks to the boundless visual
inventiveness of director Michel Gondry.
The couple (Romain Duris and Audrey Tautou) at the center of this love
story has the depth of stick figures, which makes it hard to get invested in
either their meet-cute or the tragedy that occurs when she develops health
issues. Still, on a purely formal level
the film is a constant delight, offering up something funky and strange to look
at in virtually every frame. B-
Of Horses and Men
(Benedikt Erlingsson, Iceland, 2013, 81 min.)
The feature debut of writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson is
a series of interconnected vignettes revolving around men and their equine
companions. Though it never reaches the
surreal heights of its obvious inspiration Songs
from the Second Floor (2000) it does have some dryly funny moments of its
own, and sometimes comes across as the world’s most deadpan sketch film. The first two segments, revolving respectively
around a pompous horse rider’s humiliation when his mare is humped mid-ride,
and a drunkard who takes a horse into deep water to score some vodka from a
passing commercial boat, are highlights.
B-
Patema Inverted
(Yasuhiro Yoshiura, Japan, 2013, 99 min.)
This charming anime has a sci-fi concept perfectly suited to
the visual freedom of the animated medium.
A scientific disaster has split the world into two radically different
societies, one made up on “inverts” whose reversed gravitational pull forces
them to live underground so as to not fall into the sky, and another of
surface-dwellers who have been taught that they are a superior race. The visuals are spectacular, but writer-director
Yasuhiro Yoshiura hasn’t thought through what he wants to say with the film’s
muddled allegory (beyond the obvious “respect each other’s differences”
message). The inevitable star-crossed
romance between two members of the separate worlds is nothing we haven’t seen
before, but the film’s odd conceit and lovely animation are strong enough to
keep things entertaining throughout. B-
The Tribe
(Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, Ukraine, 2014, 130 min.)
Told entirely in unsubtitled Ukrainian sign language and
without the aid of background music, Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s bold feature
debut earns credit for sheer stylistic audacity. The narrative is so elemental, and the sign
language so expressive, that it’s never a challenge to follow the tale of a
young man’s initiation into a fearsome gang at the school for the deaf that he
attends. Cinematographer Valentyn
Vasyanovych’s masterful tracking shots drop the viewer right in the middle of
this alien world, and the results are utterly transfixing, at least in the
early going. Eventually it becomes
disappointingly clear that this stylistic innovation is being used in service
of a story that grows increasingly nihilistic, climaxing in a series of
pointless acts of ultra-violence. Still,
this is a rare film that offers a truly new way of telling a story, and for
that alone it’s one of the most noteworthy films of the year. B
The Vanquishing of
the Witch Baba Yaga (Jessica Oreck, USA/Ukraine/Russia/Poland, 2014, 73
min.)
