2014 Milwaukee Film Festival

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.)

Jessica Oreck’s freewheeling essay film touches on ancient Slavic folklore and modern ecological issues while quoting liberally from a variety of classic philosophical texts, but it winds up being less than the sum of its parts (and, frankly, considerably less awesome than its crazy title makes it sound).  This type of film doesn’t have to make a clear point to be effective – Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983), evidently a major inspiration for this film, is a masterpiece even though I could not tell you what it’s about – but it does have to form its disparate parts into a hypnotic whole, and the material in Oreck’s film never quite gels.  Parts of the film are quite effective – the animated stills recounting the legend of Baba Yaga (a forerunner of Hansel & Gretel) are beautiful, and the moody ambient soundtrack by Paul Grimstad is haunting.  But there are too many dull stretches that break the spell.  C+

2013 Milwaukee Film Festival

I can’t imagine that I’ll have a better filmgoing experience this year than I did at the sold-out screening of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), a celebrated classic of silent Soviet montage that here featured live musical accompaniment by the 18-piece Altos Orchestra.  Despite the film’s vaunted reputation, I admit that I’d never been able to connect with it when I watched it on a TV screen, but seeing Dovzhenko’s majestically poetic imagery splash across the Oriental Theatre’s massive main screen as the Altos’ moving original score filled the auditorium finally made the film’s mastery click into place for me.  It was a stark reminder of the superiority of the big screen, public moviegoing experience to home viewing.

Thanks to On Demand and instant streaming services, it’s never been easier to keep up with the state of the cinematic arts.  On the other hand, it’s perhaps never been more difficult to see current releases the way they are designed to be seen, in a theatre.  Unless you live in a major film market like Los Angeles or New York, a great deal of interesting and exciting films from all over the world simply aren’t going to make it to a theatre near you – and if the movies are small enough, you might not even get the chance to catch up with them at home, which is why events like the Milwaukee Film Festival are so vital to our current film culture.

In addition to special archival screenings like the aforementioned screening of Earth, the fifth annual Milwaukee Film Festival presented more than 100 new feature films and 100 short films.  (Full disclosure:  I was on the short films screening committee this year, and have been on the feature films screening committee in the past).  This year’s lineup was so stacked that it would’ve been impossible to see everything noteworthy even if I’d taken an extended vacation from work (or if I hadn’t gotten a head cold that caused me to sit several days out).  I simply couldn’t find room for Breathing Earth (the latest gorgeous-looking documentary from Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of 2001’s Rivers and Tides), the J. Hoberman-approved biopic Hannah Arendt, the acclaimed Danish Somali pirate drama A Hijacking, the intriguingly creepy looking documentary The Institute, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise:  Hope, or the surreal erotic film Vanishing Waves.  As always, I’m sure there were plenty of fantastic movies that weren’t even on my radar – discussing films with other attendees in between screenings, I heard great things about the relationship drama The Broken Circle Breakdown, locally made documentary Date America, provocative documentary God Loves Uganda, and the bee-themed documentary More Than Honey.  Below are capsule reviews of the feature films that I did manage to see.

12 O’Clock Boys (Lotfy Nathan, USA, 75 min.)

Director Lotfy Nathan’s feature film debut is one of the most beautifully filmed and edited documentaries in recent memory.  With crisp slow-motion footage and an energetic hip-hop soundtrack, Nathan captures the grace and recklessness of a loose collective of Baltimoreans who perform insane dirt bike and ATV stunts on crowded public streets.  The film doesn’t commit fully to the gorgeous impressionism of its extreme sports sequences – and the brief asides about tragic accidents that some of the riders have been involved in feel like token nods to social responsibility rather than serious looks at the negative ramifications of the crew’s illegal brand of extreme sports – but overall this is an exhilarating look at a singular phenomenon.  B

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark/Norway/UK, 116 min.)

The most mesmerizing, terrifying, and all-around audacious movie of the year is documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s unblinking look at the very worst of humanity.  In 1965 and ’66 the Indonesian military staged a coup in which they exterminated the nation’s Communist party (and anyone who they arbitrarily decided was a Communist).  Rather than being punished for their war crimes, many of the perpetrators have remained major players in the Indonesian political structure, and are even celebrated as heroes by the country’s media.  The provocative hook of Oppenheimer’s film is that he has encouraged these criminals to recreate their atrocities in the style of the Hollywood movies that they love.  Even while attempting to portray themselves as heroes, the self-described “gangsters” inevitably end up exposing themselves as vicious thugs, and much of the film’s queasy fascination lies in the way that these recreations make some of these men become self-aware of their awfulness for seemingly the first time.  In the film’s unforgettable conclusion, one of these fearsome killers, having struggled to portray the role of a victim in one of the reenactments, is reduced to a pathetic dry-heaving shell that couldn’t be further from the macho action hero that he’s always imagined himself as.  A

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (David Lowery, USA, 96 min.)

David Lowery’s moody, impressionistic crime story has more craft than originality.  But while the film’s aesthetic instantly brings to mind Badlands (1973) and Thieves Like Us (1974), it’s not because Lowery is ripping those classics off so much as because he’s tapping into the same rich vein of weird old Americana.  The elements are familiar – an outlaw (Casey Affleck), his lover (Rooney Mara), the kindly sheriff (Ben Foster), the wise old man (Keith Carradine) – but the terrific cast, the poetic dialogue, and Bradford Young’s beautiful cinematography combine to make Ain’t Them Bodies Saints feel like a timeless tale rather than a tired retread.  B+

Beyond the Hills (Christian Mungiu, Romania, 152 min.) 

Director Christian Mungiu made a name for himself with 2007’s intense abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and his new, equally harrowing film confirms his status as the most talented member of the Romanian New Wave.  Alina (Cristina Flutur) plans to help her best friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) escape from her secluded monastic life, but severely underestimates Voichita’s commitment to her cause.  As it becomes increasingly clear that Voichita isn’t on board with the plan to run away, Alina’s behavior becomes more erratic, violently disrupting her sedate surroundings.  The monastery’s attempt to help the troubled woman in the only way it knows how – by performing an exorcism – has tragic consequences.  That plot synopsis might make this film sound like a simple anti-religious screed, but while Mungiu is certainly critical of the repressive atmosphere of the monastery, he also makes it clear why that lifestyle might offer genuine solace to underclass people who have been left behind by the uncaring institutions of the secular world.  The film is also beautifully shot without seeming overly composed, and could be enjoyed simply as a masterful demonstration of the many ways that framing can be used to emphasize the growing distance between two friends.  A-                     

Blancanieves (Pablo Berger, Spain, 104 min.)

Pablo Berger’s silent, bullfighting-themed variation on Snow White won Best Film at the most recent Goya Awards (Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars), but, like The Artist (2011), it never really transcends its gimmicky origins as an homage to silent cinema.  Still, the film does have its charms, mainly found in its gorgeous cinematography and scenery.  B-

Bound by Flesh (Leslie Zemeckis, USA, 95 min.)

This biography of conjoined twin sideshow stars Daisy and Violet Hilton is a textbook example of a documentary ruining a compelling story with a generic talking heads aesthetic.  The sisters’ rise to prominence on the vaudeville scene is depicted with the exact same tone as their gradual fall from grace, giving the film a generic feel that is totally at odds with its subjects’ colorful life story.  C

Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi & Kamboziya Partovi, Iran, 106 min.)

In 2010, the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to a 20-year ban on filmmaking due to the subversive political content of his films.  Closed Curtain is the second movie that Panahi has made in secret and had smuggled out of the country since then.  It begins as a compelling allegory for Panahi’s current life situation, with a writer (played by co-director Kamboziya Partovi) boarding himself up in his house so that the authorities won’t become aware of his dog’s existence (dogs are considered unclean under Islamic rule).  The sudden arrival of two mysterious people seeking shelter from the law brings exactly the type of attention that the writer was hoping to avoid.  This opening half of the film is exciting and tense, featuring brilliant use of offscreen sound as unseen assailants storm around outside the writer’s house.  Unfortunately, when Panahi himself takes over as the protagonist in the second half of the film (as if the allegory wasn’t already clear enough), the film turns into a clumsily symbolic retread of material from 2011’s far superior This is Not a Film.  Panahi’s focus on his current predicament is understandable, but hopefully he’ll find a way to make a film about any other subject next time rather than continuing to cover the same ground.  B-

The Crash Reel (Lucy Walker, USA, 108 min.)

This documentary follows professional snowboarder Kevin Pearce from his rise to fame on the extreme sports circuit to his struggles to re-enter the scene after a failed stunt leads to a traumatic brain injury.  At various points it seems that the focus of the film will be on Pearce’s rivalry with Shaun White, on his family’s post-injury frustration with his determination to get back into the sport, or (most compellingly) as an indictment of the corporate sponsors who push young athletes into ever more dangerous situations, but director Lucy Walker favors a generic all-encompassing approach that makes the film feel indistinct despite its interesting subject matter.  The MTV-style editing and common TV-sourced snowboarding footage seems especially limited in such close proximity to the far more artistically accomplished 12 O’Clock Boys.  C+

Drug War (Johnnie To, China, 107 min.)

Prolific Hong Kong action director Johnnie To’s first film financed by and produced in mainland China appears at first to be a straightforward battle of wills between a determined undercover police officer (Sun Honglei) and a questionably trustworthy informant (Louis Koo) as they attempt to infiltrate a major drug cartel.  While the film does work wonderfully as a brutally streamlined action film, and is less outwardly bizarre than something like To’s 2010 MFF entry Vengeance, there is still plenty of offbeat humor around the margins, and the film has a slyly satirical take on the nature of drug enforcement.  Though the police are nominally the good guys and the drug dealers are ostensibly the bad guys – probably a necessity to get the film past the Chinese censors – it’s clear that this is a rigged game, with the humorlessly stoic authorities using their seemingly unlimited resources to torment the more personable dealers.  Mild subversion aside, Drug War will probably be best remembered for concluding with one of the more relentless and over-the-top shootouts in recent memory.  B

Enzo Avitabile Music Life (Jonathan Demme, Italy, 80 min.)

Italian multi-instrumentalist Enzo Avitabile is less well-known (at least in the United States) than previous Jonathan Demme music documentary subjects like Talking Heads and Neil Young, but this charmingly low-key film makes a strong case for his talent.  The film is basically a series of performances where Avitabile is joined by master musicians from all over the world, performing gorgeous music with largely esoteric instrumentation.  A little more context for Avitabile’s life and career might have been instructive, but Demme’s decision to let the music speak for itself keeps the film lively and fun.  B

Free the Mind (Phie Ambo, Denmark/Finland, 80 min.)

The subject matter of this documentary – the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder through non-chemical means – is interesting and vital, which makes it all the more disappointing that the film’s focus is so scattershot.  The 80 minute running time just doesn’t leave enough room to properly tell the stories of two Iraq war veterans, a young child struggling to get past an experience where he was trapped alone in an elevator, and a University of Wisconsin doctor whose Buddhist studies have influenced his experimental treatment techniques.  C

House with a Turret (Eva Neymann, Ukraine, 81 min.)

This child’s eye view of a Soviet Union devastated by World War II was adapted from an autobiographical novel by Friedrich Gorenstein.  When his mother passes away from illness in the middle of a trip, the young protagonist (Dmitry Kobetskoy) is forced to fend for himself in a world of starving, desperate adults.  The film’s long take, deep focus aesthetic brings to mind the classical European cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr.  Though director Eva Neyman is clearly working in the tradition of those giants, her beautifully composed film is one that either Tarkovsky or Tarr could’ve been proud to include in their respective oeuvres.  The black-and-white cinematography is stunning, leavening the film’s thick air of misery with its sheer beauty.  B+

In the House (Francois Ozon, France, 105 min.)

Having not been impressed by Swimming Pool (2003), the only other film I’ve seen by writer-director Francois Ozon, I had fairly low expectations for his latest meta commentary on the nature of storytelling, revolving around a teacher (Fabrice Luchini) who is increasingly sucked into the ongoing narrative of the writing assignments of his most mysterious student (Vincent Schmitt).  Fortunately the script (adapted from a play by Juan Mayorga) is as witty as it is clever, and Luchini is hilarious as the comfortably bourgeois teacher with frustrated artistic ambitions.  For a film that is commenting on the clichés of erotic thrillers, the film never becomes particularly sexy or thrilling, but the light comic tone assures that it never suffers from the heavy handed pretensions that brought down Swimming Pool.  B

Laurence Anyways (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 168 min.)

Laurence Anyways is the type of wildly impassioned project that takes so many risks that it constantly seems on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its ambitions.  24-year-old writer-director Xavier Dolan (already on his third feature film) isn’t always in full command of everything he’s trying to do, but it’s impossible not to admire the stylistic chances he takes in telling the decade-spanning story of a man (Melvil Poupaud) undergoing a gradual sex change, and the girlfriend (Suzanne Clement) who struggles with adapting to his shifting sexual identity.  Poupaud and Clement’s excellent performances keep the story grounded even as Dolan indulges his most flamboyant artistic whims, including a splendidly goofy sequence where the couple walks through a storm of raining sweaters.  B+

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK/Ireland, 136 min.)

The second collaboration between iconoclastic psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek and director Sophie Fiennes (after 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema) is a freewheeling essay about the hidden meanings that Zizek finds in popular Hollywood entertainments ranging from The Sound of Music (1965) to The Dark Knight (2008).  Not all of Zizek’s theories are as insightful as his hilarious class-based analysis of the ending of Titanic (1997), but there is a mesmerizing forcefulness to his nonstop Slavic drawl that carries the movie over its brief rough patches.  B

Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Germany/Netherlands, 115 min.)

Admittedly impenetrable yet undeniably stunning, Carlos Reygadas’ fourth feature offered the best pure sensory experience of this year’s festival.  Like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Post Tenebras Lux mixes an intensely personal family story with metaphysical flights of fancy, and once again the combination is as awkward as it is fascinating.  The film may ultimately be less than the sum of its parts, but many of those individual elements – a CGI devil stalking around a live action house during a storm; a bathhouse orgy that is somehow simultaneously sedate and intense; an impromptu rendition of a Neil Young song that is all the more haunting for being completely off-key; an abrupt self-decapitation - are as sublime and as beautifully filmed as anything in recent memory.  The lightning bolt edit between the first two scenes single-handedly justifies the Best Director award that Reygadas received for this film at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.  B+

The Rambler (Calvin Lee Reeder, USA, 97 min.)

This tale of a stoic drifter (Dermot Mulroney) attempting to reconnect with his family after a stint in prison aspires to be the ultimate midnight movie, combining the splatter humor of Evil Dead II (1987) with the nightmarish surrealism of David Lynch and the outrageous sleaze of a Troma production.  Unfortunately all of director Calvin Lee Reeder’s effects seem borrowed from better films, and the incompatible influences ultimately cancel each other out, making this just another pre-fabricated grindhouse wannabe cult item.  A scene where a succubus vomits on the shackled hero sums the film up nicely:  rather than seeming funny or scary or even particularly weird, it is merely gross.  D

Reality (Matteo Garrone, Italy, 116 min.)

I was not as blown away by Matteo Garrone’s breakthrough film Gomorrah (2008) as most critics were, so I was looking forward to this goofy farce simply as a radical change of pace.  But while Gomorrah may have been too didactic for its own good, its single-mindedness at least gave it a certain forceful vitality that is completely missing from this slackly paced follow-up.  A fishmonger (Aniello Arena) becomes obsessed with appearing on a popular reality show, to the point that he ultimately gives away all of his possessions.   Despite the too-obvious satirical target, this story might have worked had Garrone consistently amped up the lunacy to match his protagonist’s story arc, but stylistically the film works backwards, beginning with a party scene that suggests Fellini-esque carnival extravagance and then slowly settling into a dully respectable tonal register that just doesn’t work for comedy.  C-

Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, UK, 98 min.)

Ben Wheatley’s third feature lacks the daring tonal shifts of his impressive previous efforts Down Terrace (2009) and Kill List (2011), but still features the careful attention to character and the stylistic swagger that set the director apart from the pack of young horror filmmakers.  This horror-romantic comedy hybrid follows a young couple (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, both hilarious) on an initially peaceful RV road trip that turns violent whenever other tourist’s slight them.  The concept (a romantic comedy where the couple is made up of complete sociopaths) is fairly one-note, but it’s a note that Wheatley and his stars play exceptionally well.  B

Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, France, 122 min.)

Though this early-‘70s period piece is reportedly based on events from director Olivier Assayas’ youth, its narrative suffers from the same stasis as his previous film, Carlos (2010); it is clear, literally from the first shot, that Assayas thinks that his student activist protagonists are poseurs.  Assayas may be in a rut as a storyteller, but thankfully he remains one of the most expressive and energetic directors alive.  The fetishistic attention to specific “revolutionary” tchotchkes and fashions of the ‘70s keeps the film engaging even as Assayas seems to insist that we not invest in his characters.  B-

Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, Canada, 108 min.)

Actress Sarah Polley’s deeply personal documentary begins as a chronicle of her free-spirited mother, gradually turns into a gripping investigation into her unexpectedly complicated family tree, and ultimately uses this specific story to ruminate about the untrustworthiness of subjective memories in general.  Polley spends too much of the film’s climax expounding on that last point, and she also relies too heavily on Super 8 home video footage throughout the film, as if she doesn’t realize how fascinating her own story is.  But it really is an entertaining, wild story, and one of the more enthralling documentaries of the year.  B

This is Martin Bonner (Chad Hartigan, USA, 83 min.)

Many popular works of art claim to be about redemption, but This is Martin Bonner is the rare film that actually deals with that subject matter in an adult, realistic way.  The story revolves around the titular social worker’s (Paul Eenhoorn) attempts to help a repentant drunk driver (Richmond Arquette) readjust to society after a twelve-year stint in prison.  Bonner is dealing with his own crisis of faith, seemingly related to some unspecified family trauma, and his own distance from his loved ones mirrors the ex-con’s strained relationship with the daughter (Sam Buchanan) who grew into a different person during his prison stay.  This material could’ve easily turned into melodrama, but writer-director Chad Hartigan favors an understated, humane approach that is perfectly complimented by the subtle, lived-in performances of Eenhoorn and Arquette.  This is Martin Bonner isn’t particularly stylish – it could probably be just as easily enjoyed on a laptop screen as in a cinema – but the lack of flash is appropriate to the story.  The film isn’t small, it’s life sized.  B+

Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, USA, 96 min.) 

The quality of surreal, dreamlike films is even more subjective than the quality of most art; you either get hypnotized by them or you don’t.  Having been mightily impressed by Shane Carruth’s previous film, Primer (2004), I was prepared to follow him pretty far down the rabbit hole on Upstream Color, but I have to admit that I couldn’t really get on the film’s inscrutable wavelength.  This could be because of my preference for the long-take, creeping dread of something like Mulholland Drive (2001) over the Nicolas Roeg-style non-stop fragmented editing Carruth employs here, or it could be because the obscure plot (having something to do with a mad scientist using a virus that infects the memories of its protagonists) seems less like a compelling mystery than a somewhat clichéd sci-fi story told from an odd angle.  Carruth certainly deserves credit for his industriousness – he wrote, directed, scored, co-edited, starred in, and even helped operate the camera on this film, and made a slick looking product on a shoestring budget.  I just wish that he had used his undeniable talent on something more compelling than footage of pigs milling around, or his lead characters arguing about which of their memories are real.  Aside from one mesmerizing scene in which the wormlike virus makes its way through the female lead’s (Amy Seimetz) body, the film is largely tedious.  Don’t take it from me, though; this is one of the most acclaimed films of the year.  C

War Witch (Kim Nguyen, Canada, 90 min.)

Though it was a nominee for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards and a winner of the Competition jury prize at this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival, War Witch is a fairly generic litany of “third-world” suffering.  It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect a film about a Congolese child soldier to be.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with Canadian director Kim Nguyen’s handling of the material – the cinematography is terrific, and Rachel Mwanza is impressive as the young protagonist – but the film has nothing surprising or edifying to say about the plight of child soldiers.  C+

Wolf Children (Mamoru Hosada, Japan, 117 min.)

Mamoru Hosada’s fantastical anime is a multi-layered coming of age story about a woman tasked with raising two wolf/human hybrids on her own after her shape-shifting lover is killed during a hunt.  The animation is pretty but fairly generic, but the patient unfolding of the story is a nice alternative to the manic pacing of most children’s films, and the ways that the narrative’s events cause the children to either embrace or reject their lycanthropic heritage are surprising and touching.  B

2012 Milwaukee Film Festival

The fourth annual Milwaukee Film Festival boasted the largest lineup and longest overall running time that the festival has had to date, and as usual it offered a little of something for everyone and an embarrassment of riches for area cinephiles.  As usual, I imagine that I missed as much great stuff as I caught – among the most notable things I didn’t get a chance to check out were a special presentation by J. Hoberman (in town to promote his new book Film After Film and present archival screenings of David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil), a movie called 3,2,1…Frankie Go Boom that apparently features world’s ugliest man Ron Perlman as a transvestite, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet, Goodbye (the new film by Mohammed Rasoulof, who directed one of last year’s festival highlights, The White Meadows), documentaries about Bad Brains and The Sugarhill Gang, the much-hyped raunchy comedy Klown, the well-received Israeli suspense film Policeman, and Oscar hopeful closing-night film The Sessions.  I also imagine that there are a number of films that weren’t even on my radar that might have been excellent; the only reason that I saw Marathon Boy, my favorite film from last year’s festival, was because I was on the Features Screening Committee for the festival that year (and considering that the film hasn’t picked up any sort of critical reputation since then, it seems unlikely that I ever would have seen it otherwise).

This year I was on the Shorts Screening Committee, meaning that I came into the festival relatively cold as far as the features were concerned.  To be honest, there were only a handful of short films that made the festival that I consider to be truly memorable – with Ryan Prows’ extended action sequence Narcocorrido being the only one that stands out as a true must-see – and I wish that the festival would consolidate the best shorts into one “best in show” program like they used to rather than scattering nearly 100 shorts across eight different programs.  But there were a lot of interesting feature films this year, and I’ve written brief reviews of all of the ones that I saw in theatres below.  The only one that I saw that is not included below was an archival screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film Blackmail (1929), which was accompanied by live instrumentation from the Alloy Orchestra.  Suffice to say that it was an awesome filmgoing experience, but one that doesn’t really make sense to compare to the twenty modern-era films listed below.

11 Flowers (Wang Xiaoshuai, China, 110 min.)

Though ostensibly based on personal events from the childhood of director Wang Xiaoshuai (best known for his 2001 release Beijing Bicycle), this period drama is fairly indistinguishable from the many other Chinese films set during the Cultural Revolution.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with 11 Flowers – the cinematography is exceptional, and the performances are uniformly strong – but there is also nothing that really sets it apart from the pack.  C+

Ai Weiwei:  Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, USA, 91 min.)

First-time feature director Alison Klayman could be accused of making an overly conventional documentary about an extraordinary man, but Ai Weiwei is such a fascinating and complicated figure that this film’s aesthetics seem almost beside the point.  This thorough yet breezily entertaining portrait of China’s most prominent subversive artist manages to deal broadly with Ai Weiwei’s struggles with political authorities, his innovations as an artist, and his unconventional personal life without short-changing any of these elements.  B

 The Ambassador (Mads Brugger, Denmark, 93 min.)

Stunt documentarian Mads Brugger was last seen infiltrating a North Korean cultural festival in the underappreciated gem The Red Chapel (which was one of the highlights of the 2010 Milwaukee Film Festival).  In his latest provocation, Brugger adopts the guise of an ambassador to the Central African Republic, and gives viewers an unprecedented glimpse into the corrupt and violent world of international business.  Brugger’s hidden cameras make backstage deals involving bribery, diamond smuggling, and even murder sickeningly, grippingly transparent, and it’s frankly amazing that the director was able to escape the making of this film without getting killed himself.  Unfortunately, The Ambassador lacks The Red Chapel’s sense that Brugger is sticking up for the oppressed people who are the victims of Imperialism – he seems more interested here in exposing powerful political figures than digging into the psychology of the beleaguered Pygmies – but this is still one of the most vital documentaries of the year.  B

Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, Canada, 110 min.)

Though it is one of the few festival movies that became available on DVD before the festival started, Beyond the Black Rainbow really demands to be seen in the theatre.  A pure sensory experience, the debut feature of writer-director Panos Cosmatos relies entirely on the power of its audio-visual assault rather than its sketchy, besides-the-point plot or its thin characterizations.  While the movie occasionally feels too drawn out for its own good, and loses its way toward the end with an out of place turn into slasher movie territory, it is for the most part a genuinely spellbinding experience, a non-stop parade of gorgeously icy shot compositions set to an ominous synth score by Black Mountain’s Jeremy Schmidt.  Though Cosmatos was clearly influenced by the entire lexicon of trippy filmmakers (with Kubrick, Cronenberg, and Lynch seeming like the most obvious reference points), his slow-motion nightmare has a genuinely unnerving sensory power that is all its own.  You’ll certainly never be able to un-see the incredible flashback sequence that (apparently) involves a man dipping into a pool of oil, disintegrating and re-composing in an inexplicable field of light and smoke, and then devouring a frightened woman.  B

Citadel (Ciaran Foy, Ireland, 84 min.)

This amateurish, run-of-the-mill zombie movie should’ve gone straight to DVD.  D-

Compliance (Craig Zobel, USA, 90 min.)

This “real-life horror story” about an incredible instance of duplicity at a fast food restaurant caused quite a stir when it screened at Sundance, prompting a number of walk-outs and some filmgoers loudly accusing in-attendance writer-director Craig Zobel of misogyny.  Frankly, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about.  Zobel clearly went out of his way to avoid making an exploitation film, and he handles the more unpleasant moments in an understated, matter-of-fact way that gives the situation dramatic impact without becoming offensive.  A prank caller (Pat Healy) convinces the restaurant’s manager (Ann Dowd) that one of her cashiers (Dreama Walker) stole from a customer, and fools the manager into conducting a degrading strip search of her employee.  Zobel’s intention was to try to make sense of this absurd yet true story, but his efforts to connect the dots are sometimes unconvincing.  The film loses credibility around the time that the manager’s fiancée shows up to deliver a spanking to the wrongly accused cashier; even if this actually happened, it’s tough to buy into the depicted buildup to the event.  The decision to actually show Healy on the other end of the extended phone call fairly early in the film also seems like a poor creative choice.  That said, Compliance is never less than compelling, with Zobel displaying a fine sense of ominous pacing and Dowd delivering a heartbreaking performance as the simultaneously victimized and bullying manager.  C+

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, Russia, 109 min.)

This artsy take on the old “woman kills her spouse to gain his inheritance” story is elegantly crafted but perhaps a bit too emotionally distanced to be truly affecting.  The central relationship between the titular nurse (Nadezhda Martina) and her wealthy husband (Andrey Smirnov) is perfectly realized; the entire history of their relationship is clear without ever being completely spelled out, and their loving yet frustrated attitudes towards each other are practically written on their faces.  Elena’s reason for killing her husband (she is trying to help her dead-beat son’s family make ends meet) is also credible and plausible, as is his decision not to give away the money.  But director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s cold style (methodical paced, carefully composed shots) prevents the story from having the gut-level impact that it needs to get into the next gear.  B-

The Imposter (Bart Layton, UK, 95 min.)

An amazing true story about a Texas family that was duped by an international conman into believing that he was their missing son gets the full Errol Morris treatment in director Bart Layton’s compelling documentary debut.  It’s hard to complain too much about Layton’s blatant theft of Morris’ aesthetic when the story is this interesting and weird.  Layton uncovers some ominous and fascinating hints about why the family might have been willing to accept a French-accented, black-haired man as their American, blond-haired son, as well as a grimly entertaining side story about a folksy local detective’s attempts to find what he believes will be the dead body of the missing boy.  The film arguably ends just as things are getting really interesting, but perhaps the resulting frustration is an appropriate statement about this open-ended, truth is stranger than fiction tale.  B

The Invisible War (Kirby Dick, USA, 93 min.)

Documentarian Kirby Dick has argued passionately for transparency from the MPAA ratings board (in 2006’s This Film is Not Yet Rated) and from closeted gay politicians who vote against gay rights (in 2009’s Outrage), but he’s never had a subject as vital and disturbing as the one he deals with in The Invisible War.  Dick’s new film is about the widespread phenomenon of rape in the military, and viewers might be surprised by just how big an epidemic this is.  One of the film’s many staggering statistics reveals that female soldiers in Iraq are more likely to be raped by male colleagues than killed by enemy fire – a tragedy compounded by the fact that many of the rapists are the commanding officers who the victims are meant to report such crimes to.  Considering how damning the statistics are, and how tragic many of the personal stories told in the film are, Dick’s constant use of emotionally manipulative music seems especially obnoxious and unnecessary.  Despite this film’s shortcomings as cinema, it is a thorough and engrossing dissection of a widespread problem that is too rarely reported on.  B-

The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (Chris James Thompson, USA, 75 min.)

This might be the most laser-focused documentary I’ve ever seen.  A total of three people are interviewed for the talking heads segments, and they are pretty much exactly the people you’d want to hear talk about notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer:  the lead detective who investigated Dahmer, a forensic analyst who worked on the case, and, most fascinatingly, the killer’s former next-door neighbor.  These interviews are interspersed with the expected archival footage and staged reenactments depicting everyday moments from Dahmer’s life.  The whole thing moves by at an engrossing clip, but the reenactments, though reasonably well-executed, feel like unnecessary padding designed to bring the film to (just barely) feature length.  B-

Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang Wen, China, 132 min.)

The fact that this is currently China’s highest grossing domestic film of all time suggests that Chinese audiences have a high tolerance for frantic mugging and confusing plot twists.  Or maybe they just expected a movie titled Let the Bullets Fly starring Chow Yun Fat to be a full-blown action movie rather than a childishly goofy comedy with light action elements.  There are a handful of amusingly eccentric moments scattered throughout the film – as when a man cuts open his stomach to prove that he didn’t steal jelly from a food merchant – but for the most part this film is as dull as it is noisy and convoluted.  C

Mea Maxima Culpa:  Silence in the House of God (Alex Gibney, USA, 106 min.)

Alex Gibney is one of the most gifted documentary filmmakers working today.  Even when he is dealing with all too familiar subject matter (such as the Iraq war in his 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side) or simply summarizing major news stories (as in 2005’s Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room), Gibney is usually able to deal with these events in a thorough, coherent, and entertaining matter.  The story of four deaf men’s attempt to expose the priest who sexually abused them during Catholic school should make for Gibney’s most gripping film to date, but the film has a surprising lack of focus, frequently cutting away from the central narrative to spend time giving broad, common knowledge information about the Catholic Church’s history of sexual abuse and the Vatican’s sinister unwillingness to stop the problem.  The result is a decent but fairly generic documentary that feels like it could’ve been directed by just about anybody.  C+

Mourning (Morteza Farshbaf, Iran, 85 min.)

The press materials for this film aren’t kidding when they say that first-time director Morteza Farshbaf is a disciple of Abbas Kiarostami.  Every element of Kiarostami’s distinctive aesthetic is on display here, from the many distant, gorgeously filmed shots of cars driving down roads to the occasional conversations where the camera focuses entirely on one of the people talking.  It’s an effective style, and a fine way to tell this simple story of a child searching for his parents, but hopefully Farshbaf will be able to step out of his mentor’s shadow with his next film.  B-

Old Dog (Pema Tseden, Tibet, 93 min.)

Crappy digital photography and stiff performances prevent this film from achieving the neorealist naturalism that it aspires to.  A poor family of Tibetan farmers struggle to prevent their sheep-herding mastiff from being sold to (or stolen by) Chinese traders (who will presumably sell the dog to wealthy families as a pet, though this is never really explained in the narrative).  While much of this film was a chore to sit through, I’m still glad I caught it simply for the audience reaction to the ending, which features an offscreen act of animal cruelty that provoked more walk-outs than the extended rape in Compliance, the graphic gore of V/H/S, and the pretentiousness of Beyond the Black Rainbow combined.  C-

Sacrifice (Chen Kaige, China, 132 min.)

I was afraid that Chen Kaige’s opulent period drama might be a dull prestige film, as some of the reviews seemed to suggest, but this non-musical adaptation of an ancient Chinese opera is actually a spectacularly over-the-top melodrama filled with wild plot twists, exciting battles, and numerous eccentric touches.  The plot is too complicated to adequately describe in one paragraph, but suffice to say that it involves secret identities, an ultimatum that involves the potential slaughter of 100 babies, and an assassination by mosquito.  The story may ultimately be too broad to have any real emotional or psychological depth, but it is still one of the most exciting (and exquisitely filmed) action films of the year.  B+

Starbuck (Ken Scott, Canada, 109 min.)

This French-Canadian comedy is the second annual opening night film to feature sperm donation as a major plot point.  Thankfully, it’s a lot more entertaining than last year’s forgettable Natural Selection.  A 42-year old loser (Patrick Huard) discovers that his teenage sperm donations have made him the father of 533 kids, 142 of which are suing the hospital in hopes of revealing their father’s identity.  From there the story hits the exact beats you’d expect it to - no one will be surprised when the donor is initially reluctant to make contact with his kids before eventually deciding to quietly make a difference in each of their lives – but it does so in a relatively charming way.  Writer-director Ken Scott has a good sense of comic pacing, and he also holds the film back from becoming too mawkish during its inevitable heartwarming moments.  He is also aided by a charismatic lead performance from Huard, whose presence will undoubtedly be missed in the currently in-production English-language remake starring Vince Vaughn.  C+

 Le Tableau (Jean-Francois Languionie, France, 78 min.)

This wonderfully inventive animated film is designed for children, but has more wit and allegorical power than most films intended for adults.  The story starts out inside an unfinished painting, where a group of upper-class Allduns (completely drawn characters) lord over the Halvsies (characters missing color on part of their bodies) and the impoverished Sketchies (black and white scribbles).  A star-crossed romance between a rebellious Alldun male and a Halvsie with an uncolored face leads several characters to escape from their painting in search of The Painter who will presumably bring harmony to their lives.  Their search leads the characters to inhabit the worlds of several other paintings, each of which brings a new and enchanting visual style to the film.  Gorgeously animated and endlessly entertaining, this was the highlight of this year’s festival, and one of the best films shown anywhere this year.  B+

Tales of the Night (Michel Ocelot, France, 84 min.)

In 2000, ace French animator Michel Ocelot made a feature anthology called Princes and Princesses that depicted several short fairy tales by having black silhouetted characters play against vibrantly colorful backgrounds.  Tales of the Night returns to the aesthetic of Princes and Princesses, even going so far as to include an identical framing device in which a boy, a girl, and an elderly technician insert themselves into each story.  It’s somewhat disappointing to see a creatively fertile mind like Ocelot relying so heavily on things that have worked in the past – especially on the heels of his mind-blowing Azur & Asmar, which was one of the highlights of the 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival – but there is still a lot of charm in this style, and the six tales told here are uniformly entertaining and beautiful.  B

Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross & Turner Ross, USA, 82 min.)

This New Orleans-set quasi-documentary was perhaps the most innovative and stylistically forward-thinking film to play at the festival this year.  The film ostensibly follows the adventures of three young boys who become stranded in the French Quarter after missing the last ferry home, but that loose narrative strand is really just an excuse to present an impressionistic inner-city symphony that captures the feeling of wandering around at night, catching stray glimpses of musicians, street performers, burlesque dancers, junkies, and drag queens.  The somnambulant pace sometimes becomes tedious, especially when directors Bill and Turner Ross’ experiments aren’t quite working, but the best moments of this grungy film are practically miraculous.  It’s impossible to describe in words the way that the duo film the performance of a fire juggler/fire breather, but suffice to say that it is about as trippy as anything in the much more carefully composed Beyond the Black Rainbow.  B-

V/H/S (Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Radio Silence, USA, 115 min.)

Horror anthologies rarely have more than one or two worthwhile segments, and the faux-documentary style of horror film became tiresome the instant the The Blair Witch Project (1999) became a sensation.  So I’m happy to report that this anthology of faux-documentary horror stories is a wonderfully fun and inventive anomaly, displaying a surprising degree of consistency and wit, as well as some of the best-ever use of the rarely effective first-person camera style.  Though some segments are stronger than others, there really isn’t a weak one in the bunch.  Ti West’s tale of two vacationing honeymooners being stalked comes the closest to failing due to having the most generic concept (and a dumb twist ending), but it also features one perfectly executed jolt that made the entire midnight audience gasp.  The best segments are David Bruckner’s tale of three horny douchebags bringing home the wrong girl, and capturing her bloody rampage through one of their hidden-camera glasses; and internet collective Radio Silence’s story about enthusiastic haunted house lovers accidentally stumbling onto a house that is actually haunted, leading to some incredibly impressive special effects that never disrupt the flow of the documentary-style footage.  Though a tad uneven by design, V/H/S is an ideal midnight movie, and one of the most purely fun horror movies in years.  B+

2011 Milwaukee Film Festival

The third annual Milwaukee Film Festival offered up a typically diverse selection of international and local films, most of which would otherwise not have made it to area theatres.  Though work commitments, a wedding, the sheer breadth of films on offer, and a poorly-timed head cold prevented me from catching several of the things I was hoping to see – most notably Raul Ruiz’s four-hour period piece Mysteries of Lisbon – I still managed to see a wide variety of interesting and engaging films.  Below are brief reviews of all of the movies that I saw in theatres at this year’s festival, as well as several of the most notable films that I saw through other means.

The Bengali Detective (Philip Cox, India/UK, 101 min.)

Documentarian Philip Cox has found a fascinating subject for a documentary in Rajesh Ji, a private investigator who looks into everything from counterfeit shampoo scandals to triple-homicides, and spends his spare time either caring for his ill wife or practicing dance steps for his upcoming reality show audition.  Unfortunately, the director doesn’t have any sort of angle for this story, leaving the film at the mercy of the success of individual pieces of footage.  This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if, say, the homicide investigation or the reality show audition wound up going anywhere, but since they don’t, the film winds up feeling less like a look at a complicated, multi-faceted individual than a succession of uneven scenes adding up to nothing.  C

A Cat in Paris (Alain Gagnol & Jean-Loup Felicioli, France/Belgium/Netherlands/Switzerland, 65 min.)

This charming, lighthearted action movie for children eschews the frantic pacing, cynical pop culture referencing, pointless celebrity voiceovers and lazy computer animation of most contemporary animated films.  The tale of a polite cat burglar, his feline companion, and the mute young girl who inadvertently gets wrapped up in their adventures boasts a handsome hand-drawn style that looks like a series of oil crayon pictures come to life, a style that taps directly into childlike imagination.  B

The City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, China, 132 min.)

Lu Chuan’s epic recreation of the Rape of Nanking falls into the same trap as many films about holocausts, with the perpetrators being portrayed as evil, mustache-twirling villains, as if the film is saying “they treated us like animals – those monsters.”  But perhaps we should be glad that the film at least has enough nuance to include one token conflicted Japanese soldier, considering that that small acknowledgement of the “enemy’s” humanity was enough to get the film banned from many Chinese theatres.  What the film lacks in nuance it makes up for in sheer cumulative tragedy.  Few works of art have given such a convincingly brutal depiction of the devastation that an occupying force can have on a nation, and the stunning widescreen black and white cinematography of Cao Yu really puts across the full scale and crushing weight of the tragedy.  B

A Good Man (Bob Hercules & Gordon Quinn, USA, 86 min.)

This in-depth look at the artistic process follows avant-garde modern dance choreographer Bill T. Jones’ efforts to pull together his most ambitious production to date:  a large-scale production about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.  Jones emerges as a charismatic yet prickly figure whose struggle to express complicated feelings about racial, ethical, and historical issues frequently puts him at odds with his collaborators, most of whom are interesting characters in their own right.  The dance company’s frustrations in pinning down their leader’s careening muse is alternately moving and funny, and the periodic glimpses of the spectacular final product demonstrate why all of the hair-pulling is worth it.  B

The Green Wave (Ali Samadi Ahadi, Iran/Germany, 80 min.)

This documentary about the tragic fallout of Iran’s 2009 presidential elections cuts back and forth between traditional talking heads footage, animated recreations of police brutality, and occasional cellphone footage of shocking human rights violations, with contemporaneous Iranian blog posts providing much of the narration.  Given the nature of the material, The Green Wave is unavoidably powerful, but director Ali Samadi Ahadi’s attempts to capture the “new media” response to the election results feel too one-note, mostly due to an overreliance on the ugly comic book style animation sequences.  C+

 The Interrupters (Steve James, USA, 125 min.)

The latest documentary from socially-minded director Steve James (of Hoop Dreams fame) is a moving look at a Chicago organization that hires former gang members to diffuse violent situations and help current gang members find better opportunities.  Riveting whether it’s showing the interrupters getting in the middle of a hostile scene or simply documenting the progress of people trying to get through the day, the film nevertheless feels less in-depth than expected from a filmmaker of James’ status.  It would be nice to know more about issues like the interrupters’ relationship with the police, and the ending seems a bit too abrupt.  Still, this is trenchant, essential stuff, and one of the highlights of the festival.  B+

 Into Eternity (Michael Madsen, Denmark/Finland/Sweden, 75 min.)

Few of this year’s fiction films were as haunting or as purely cinematic as Michael Madsen’s conceptual documentary about the ongoing construction of Onkalo, an underground Finnish facility that is intended to store nuclear waste for one-hundred thousand years – which would mean that it would have to last ten times longer than any man-made structure ever built.  Madsen uncovers a fascinating and disturbing debate about how to properly warn a theoretical future society to avoid entering Onkalo, and asks scientists and scholars the tough questions about potential problems with the experiment.  Meanwhile, he and cinematographer Heikki Farm capture some of the most beautifully creepy shots of the year from inside the caves where Onkalo is being built.  The filmmakers are working almost entirely inside the Werner Herzog school of documentary-making, but there is no reason to complain when it’s clearly the right approach to the material.  B+

 The Last Circus (Alex de la Iglesia, Spain, 108 min.)

This phantasmagoric, genre-defying sensory explosion recalls the epic patchworks of Terry Gilliam and Emir Kusturica.  The latter director’s Underground is perhaps the closest analogue to The Last Circus’ mix of political allegory and outrageously baroque imagery.  Unfortunately, the new film has a lot less to say about the Franco era than Underground does about the political divides in the Balkans; anything particularly thoughtful or nuanced in writer-director Alex de la Iglesia’s vision is drowned out by his wildly excessive style.  But that style is enough to keep the movie consistently compelling, with every corner of every frame being crammed with things that you haven’t seen before.  B

 Marathon Boy (Gemma Atwal, India/UK, 98 min.)

This look at a four-year old Indian marathon runner is hardly the year’s flashiest or most high-profile documentary, but it may very well be the most gripping.  Far from the faux-inspirational “real-life Slumdog Millionaire” story that it is advertised as, this is a complicated and layered story about the limited opportunities for Indian slum kids, the thin line between exploiting said kids and giving them a chance at a better life, and the political structure that often prevents the poor from improving their situation.  First-time director Gemma Atwal pursues all of these questions to their logical end, never allowing the film to become a conventional sports documentary.  B+

Natural Selection (Robbie Pickering, USA, 90 min.)

There is potential in the odd-couple story of a devoutly Christian housewife (Rachael Harris) meeting up with the escaped convict (Matt O’Leary) who her husband birthed from a sperm bank, but writer-director Robbie Pickering can’t decide if he wants to make a nuanced character study about his lead characters or a broad comedy about the hypocrisies of conservative Christian culture.  What he winds up with is a middle-of-the-road dramedy designed to get the easiest possible laughs and tears from a large audience.  That said, Harris’ lead performance is very strong, displaying a lived-in realism that sadly eludes the rest of the film.  At any rate, this is certainly a step down from last year’s opening night selection, Blue Valentine.  C

 On Tour (Mathieu Amalric, France, 111 min.)

The great French actor Mathieu Amalric has been directing films on the side since the ‘90s, and the tone of his latest behind-the-camera effort perfectly matches the nervy tone of his best performances.  On Tour follows a group of eccentric American burlesque performers (portrayed by actual practitioners of the craft) as they travel around the homeland of their unreliable French manager (Amalric).  There isn’t much more to it than that – the film is basically divided between bizarre stage performances and scenes of the manager having awkward reunions with people from his past – but there is almost always something interesting happening between the actors, and the boozy, semi-improvised aesthetic compares favorably to late-‘70s Cassavetes.  B

 Outrage (Takeshi Kitano, Japan, 109 min.)

Takeshi Kitano’s films have always been baffling – even his relatively watered-down take on Zatoichi ended with an inexplicable musical number – but this may be the first time that it seems like there’s nothing to “get.”  The prolific writer/director/actor/editor’s latest consists almost entirely of scenes of yakuza members discussing who they are going to kill, followed by scenes of the hits taking place, and with that pattern repeated until virtually every character is dead.  Some of the variations are interestingly staged, but seeing them piled on top of each other with almost literally no time devoted to anything else is ultimately numbing and tedious.  Kitano does manage to wring some pitch-black laughs by contrasting the utter pettiness of the convoluted gang rivalry with the brutal violence of the executions, but he doesn’t even seem to be aiming for any larger point.  C

Page One:  Inside the New York Times (Andrew Rossi, USA, 91 min.)

This documentary about the financial struggles of America’s greatest newspaper sacrifices depth and focus in favor of providing a broad look at various issues affecting the institution.  Considering the sheer breadth of topics covered in 91 minutes – from the blogs vs. print media debate to the controversy over WikiLeaks to the career of crusading journalist David Carr to the massive round of layoffs that the Times has been forced to execute over the last several years – director Andrew Rossi does an impressive job of keeping the movie coherent and lively.  But he might have been better off giving an in-depth look at one of those topics than trying to cram surface-level looks at each of them into one breezily entertaining movie.  B-

 The Redemption of General Butt Naked (Eric Strauss & Daniele Anastasion, USA/Liberia, 85 min.)

The most fascinating character in any film this year was General Butt Naked, formerly a ruthless warlord in Liberia’s civil war and now a Christian preacher hoping to atone for the atrocities he’s committed in the past.  Documentarians Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasion follow the newly-christened Joshua Milton Blahyi as he attempts to reunite with, and receive forgiveness from, the people whose lives he’s ruined.  It’s never clear how sincere Blahyi’s quest for redemption is, and the filmmakers avoid any editorializing about whether a man who has committed so many atrocities even deserves to be forgiven.  The film’s neutrality is almost frustrating at times, but with a subject as complicated as Blahyi it may be more important to ask questions than to give answers.  B+

 The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, France, 82 min.)

Provocateur Catherine Breillat has been in an enjoyable classical period for a few years now, and her second straight adaptation of a Charles Perrault fairytale would seem to promise more of the same.   While the opening scenes of The Sleeping Beauty seem like a perfectly logical (if slightly safe) follow-up to 2009’s Bluebeard, Breillat begins departing from the original story and wildly defying expectations as soon as the princess’ finger is pricked.  The film turns into a ramblingly episodic, and frequently baffling, essay on puberty, the battle of the sexes, and aging.  Perhaps Breillat could’ve made a more coherent film about all of those themes by sticking closer to her source material, but it is exciting to watch her follow her muse down the least predictable paths, and it is truly impressive to see her capture so many magnificent images without ever breaking the film’s casually surreal tone.  B

 El Velador (Natalia Almada, Mexico/USA, 72 min.)

Natalia Almada’s film about the night watchman of a Mexican cemetery plays more like an experimental short film than a conventional documentary.  Long, static shots observe the watchman’s banal workplace rituals, as he tends to the elegant mausoleums that house some of his nation’s most brutal drug lords.  The largely silent scenes are punctuated by aural reminders of the violence that keeps the titular figure in business, with muffled gun shots interrupting distant musical performances and news reports occasionally filling us in on the latest murder.  Almada certainly knows how to build a creepy atmosphere, and her shot compositions are truly impressive.  But El Velador suffers from being in such close proximity to the similarly moody Into Eternity, which not only creates a creepy atmosphere but also leaves you with something to think about long after the credits role.  That said, El Velador is a very assured stylistic exercise.  B-

 Viva Riva! (Djo Tunda Wa Munga, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 96 min.)

This energetic modern blacksploitation film about small-time Congolese hoods battling for oil drums suggests what Mad Max would be like if it took place in the real world – and also disturbingly suggests through its gritty cinematography and location shooting that we may already be living in such a post-apocalyptic wasteland.  First-time writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga keeps the plot unpredictable and the pace lively, and also shows a good instinct for dismantling potentially sensationalistic moments with shocking moments of brutally realistic violence.  It seems unlikely that there will be a better action film this year.  B+

 We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, UK, 112 min.)

We Need to Talk About Kevin demonstrates that director Lynne Ramsay hasn’t lost a step in the near-decade gap since her last film, 2002’s Morvern Callar.  She handles the new film’s nonlinear structure with grace, and maintains a consistently creepy aural and visual atmosphere that really puts the viewer inside the head of Tilda Swinton’s main character, the mother of the perpetrator of a Columbine-style massacre.  Unfortunately, Ramsay’s portrayal of the violent offender as a born sociopath is a shade too purple for this otherwise impeccably crafted film.  She mostly gets away with it because the film is a psychodrama told entirely from the point of view of Swinton’s character, and the son more or less functions as a manifestation of her fears of motherhood (in the scenes set before the tragedy) and her failings as a parent (in the scenes set after).  But the film’s depiction of Kevin as pure evil prevents it from having anything substantive to say about school killings, even as it powerfully captures the fears and neurosis of his mother.  B

 The White Meadows (Mohammed Rasoulof, Iran, 93 min.)

Mohammed Rasoulof’s ravishingly beautiful mix of folklore and poetic surrealism has less in common with the films of fellow Iranian New Wave masters Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi (who is credited as an editor on this film) than it does with the ecstatically personal ethnography of Sergei Paradjanov.  The quasi-documentary, self-reflexive style of many modern Iranian films is replaced here with a series of lovely tableaus that have the primal force and potency of fairytales.  Though the film is a bit too episodic for its good, its most beautiful moments more than make up for its brief periods of downtime.  B