For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism
Dir: Gerald Peary (USA)
Andrew Sarris, Janet Maslin, J. Hoberman and Roger Ebert are among the critics featured in Gerald Peary’s entertaining and informative look at the writers who thought film mattered–and still do. A timely reminder of the role played by those Americans who sought to elevate the medium to the level of art.
THE EXPLODING GIRL
Dir: Bradley Rust Gray (USA)
Winner, Best Actress (Kazan), Tribeca 2009
An epileptic, Ivy has learned to control her feelings to lessen the stress on her body, but her repression eventually becomes too much of an anchor to bear.
Bradley Rust Gray’s (Salt) delicately delineated character study unfurls like a poetic meditation. Ivy (Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia), newly returned from university and balancing a long-distance relationship with a burgeoning attraction to a close friend, holds the film’s titular focus with ease.
Today Is Better Than Two Tomorrows
Dir: Anna Rodgers (Laos/Ireland)
Two 11-year-old cousins living on the Mekong Delta in Laos find their rural lives turned upside down when their uncle insists they study in the city–and learn English. Anne Rodgers’ carefully etched documentary–four years in the making–shows how modernization can be both good and bad for rural Laotians.
To Die Like a Man
Dir: João Pedro Rodrigues (Portugal)
Set in Lisbon’s flourishing drag-queen demimonde during the late 1980s, João Pedro Rodrigues’ latest foray into the gay body politic is a sensitive and transfixing look at Tonia (Fernando Santos), an aging pre-op transsexual under pressure from her much younger junkie boyfriend to make her sexual transformation into something permanent. But this is no drag of a movie: Rodrigues achieves moments of pure magic with, other, less flamboyant, numbers sung or played on the soundtrack, most of them popular Portuguese songs. To Die Like a Man thus retains the feel of a kind of intimate, melodramatic musical, one of those behind-the-scenes portraits from the 1950s.
I Killed My Mother
Directed by: Xavier Dolan
Xavier Dolan’s debut feature may be the greatest Canadian film success story of the year. It received a triumvirate of prizes at the Cannes Festival’s Quinzaine and is the talk of the town–and a significant box office smash–in Québec. At just 17, Dolan penned the script for this semi-autobiographical story of a stormy relationship between a mother and her son. Call it therapy.
Tetro
Dir: Francis Ford Coppola (USA)
Francis Ford Coppola returns with this pungent family drama set in Buenos Aires. Vincent Gallo is a failed artist and star-in-the-making Alden Ehrenreich is his estranged younger brother come calling to ask some pointed family questions. Klaus Maria Brandauer is their egomaniacal orchestra-conductor father. Also featuring Carmen Maura.
Backstory
Dir: Mark Lewis (UK/Canada/Germany/France)
Visual artist Mark Lewis explore the history and culture of cinema, fusing his curiosity about historical filmmaking techniques with a carefully aestheticized approach to cinema as both a fan-based and industrialized cultural phenomenon. Backstory explores the personalities and artistry behind rear projection technology in Hollywood and Cinema Museum visits a unique private collection.
The New Rijksmuseum
Directed By: Oeke Hoogendijk
Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is the epicenter of Dutch cultural life: it’s where they keep the Rembrandts, the Ruysdaels and the millions of artworks, documents and objects accumulated by a very wealthy country over several centuries. And like a lot of venerable cultural institutions it’s in the midst of a vast, expensive, controversial and yet-to-be completed reno. Oeke Hoogendijk’s documentary–as undidactic and clear-eyed as her 2002 The Holocaust Experience–with great economy manages and visual flair to dramatize a long, complex period of conception, planning, negotiation, halting progress and agonizing setbacks as charismatic director Ronald de Leeuw and his team of planners, architects and curators try and realize their ambitious vision.
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Dir: Lee Daniels (USA)
“An urban nightmare with a surfeit of soul…. To simply call it harrowing or unsparing doesn’t quite cut it; Precious is also courageous and uncompromising, a shaken cocktail of debasement and elation, despair and hope… But this is, for all its scorched-earth emotion, a film to be loved.” — Variety.Winner, Grand Jury Prize, Sundance 2009.
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl
Dir: Manoel de Oliveira (Portugal/France/Spain)
At a spry 100 years of age, Manoel de Oliveira is certainly the oldest great film director in the world. The inequities, curiosities and eccentricities of love take on new flesh in this “perfectly formed miniature.”–Screen Daily. Adapted from a short story by Eça de Queirós.
At the Edge of the World
Dir: Dan Stone
Few films offer as dramatic and spectacular a view of the Antarctic Ocean as does Dan Stone’s captivating documentary. Eco-activist Paul Watson and the Farley Mowat, along with her sister ship theRobert Hunter, may be in over their heads when they take on the Japanese whaling fleet…
Around the World with Joseph Stiglitz: Perils and Promises of Globalization
Le monde selon Stiglitz
Dir: Jacques Sarasin (France)
In Jacques Sarasin’s hard-hitting documentary about the perils and promises of globalization, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz takes a tour of the world which starts in his hometown of Gary, Indiana, and encompasses developing countries like Ecuador and Botswana, as well as industrialized powers like India and China.
The Age of Stupid
Dir: Franny Armstrong (UK)
I hate this film. I felt as if I was watching all my own excuses for not doing anything about climate change being stripped away from me. And it’s tender and funny and wise as well. Can I just pretend I never saw it?–screenwriter William Nicholson. “The most powerful piece of cultural discourse on climate change ever produced.”—author Mark Lynas
Rembrandt’s J’accuse
Dir: Peter Greenaway (Netherlands)
Peter Greenaway’s visually and intellectually compelling docudrama recreates the time, the place and the exceedingly seedy politics that produced Rembrandt’s celebrated masterpiece The Night Watch . As the director argues that the painting is indeed a murder mystery rendered in oils, the film enters the realm of a tour de force.
Face
Lian
Dir: Tsai Ming-liang (France, Taiwan)
Tsai Ming-liang’s hallucinatory, spectacular, intriguing, sexy, musical masterpiece is set almost entirely inside (and underneath) the Louvre Museum in Paris. A Taiwanese director comes to Paris to film a surreal version of Salome with supermodel Laetitia Casta, but becomes enmeshed in a web of spectacularly photographed fantasy.
Watching “Trash Humpers” might make the viewer think they’ve stumbled across some senior citizen’s snuff film. Shot and edited with a hand-held video camera, the actors wear grotesque old-age masks and makeup, hunched over and shuffling like crippled denizens of a retirement home. But any resemblance to the feeble and aged ends there. Clip after clip show these “ancient” vandals infiltrating suburban America to smash household items, sodomize vegetation, defecate, and of course hump trash cans. This is an anarchic celebration of destruction; the oldsters laughing and dancing in their mayhem, singing nursery rhymes of murder. A freak show of outrageous characters are visited, including a joined-at-the-head Siamese twin and transvestite poet, each spouting a sometimes hilarious monologue or a civilization-destroying rant. During a night time neighborhood drive one of the trash humpers remarks, “We choose to live like free people”, mocking the residents of the houses, soon to rise and prepare for work, as “A stupid way to live.” The makers of “Trash Humpers” reflect a grisly, distorted mirror on our terminal civilization, firing a big middle finger to the world and the audience.
An October 5th Interview with 
W: With the level of craziness post 9/11 and especially after the election of a black president, was it tough to out-crazy present day politics?
