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The
end of the world was just the beginning of this year's Tribeca
Film Festival. Serious
consideration of apocalyptic themes have permeated all kinds of recent
cinema, perhaps gearing up in a timely fashion for the Mayan Shakedown
forecast for 2012, so it was no surprise to note the opening weekend's
selection of First Winter—which
considers the events that immediately follow An Event. In this first
Critic's Notebook from the fest, Steve Dollar also reviews SXSW
everyman Alex
Karpovsky's Tribeca debut with a
shocking turn in Rubberneck,
the indie rom-com starring Greta
Gerwig Lola Versus,
and Adam Christian Clark's dysfunctional sisters drama Caroline and Jackie.
Read
more >>
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In
This Dispatch:
- What's
New: Let the Bullets Fly, Pariah, The Time that Remains.
- What
We're Watching: The Organizer (Criterion), The Sky Turns.
- Explore:
Film of the Week: Bernie; Retro Active: Phenomena.
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"The
first and second things to be said about Jiang
Wen's action adventure, set in
China during the warlord era of the 1920s, are that it is marvelously
funny—a screwball comedy with more layers than a
pearl—and visually sumptuous," praises Joe
Morgenstern. Jiang Wen, after 7
years of censorship, has returned to make the highest grossing
film in
China's history in this film which stars Chow Yun Fat as a corrupt
governor and the director as the man seeking vengeance for the death of
his son. But this is action-comedy fare, and "the energy and enthusiasm
recall Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle,"
adds Shawn
Levy.
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A
coming-of-age tale that also explores the trials of being a 17-year-old
African American girl coming out of the closet, Pariah
was widely touted as one of 2011's strongest directorial debuts. Dee
Rees "is an NYU film-school alumna and a protege of Spike
Lee...and Pariah
is as fresh in its theme and execution as Lee's 1986 first feature, She's
Gotta Have It. Yet the movie's
expressionist lyricism and wistful mood recall Charles
Burnett's 1979 masterpiece, Killer
of Sheep, while the hypnotically
incantatory dialogue and sympathetic focus on a family saddled with
unexpressed anger and sorrow carry echoes of Burnett's quiet 1990
domestic drama To Sleep With Anger,"
writes Ella Taylor at NPR.
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Based loosely on the director's own
upbringing in the town of Nazereth, The Time That Remains
ambitiously
covers six decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a bleak
comic sensibility. The film focuses on the Suleiman family
and locals who try their best to keep a semblance of normalcy
through the conflict. Suleiman "makes smoke without
fire—calm, acrid, almost noiseless films on a subject that is
never less than inflammatory...His method finds order in the madness.
Not that you will ever mistake the slant of his sympathies.
It’s just that his vision of suffering is so scrupulous, and
so mercifully free of histrionics, that it crosses the battle line of
the argument," writes The New Yorker's Anthony
Lane.
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There’s
a key piece of editing about halfway into The
Organizer, Mario
Monicelli’s 1963 film
about a worker’s strike in late 1800s Turin. A factory worker
has travelled to the outskirts of town to bring funds to a family
living below poverty conditions. The funds are to show solidarity
because the family’s breadwinner has been jailed due to
issues stemming from the strike. While making the rounds of the
family’s dirt-floored shanty, the factory worker opens a
wooden flap, revealing a grinning, barefoot toddler squatting on the
ground. The film then cuts to a group of society women preening in
their sparkling white gowns during a social function. Read more >> |
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In The Sky Turns, filmmaker Mercedes Álvarez returns to her
birthplace: the small Castilian village of Aldealseñor.
Nearly four decades earlier, Álvarez became the last child
to be born in Aldealseñor and, upon her return, she
discovers a place out of time in both senses of the phrase –
the way of life the village has clung to since prehistory remains an
anachronism and the village inhabitants are finally yielding to the
death knell of modernity. Read more >> |
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A
minor Richard
Linklater film is better than no
Linklater at all. Bernie
reteams Austin, Texas' finest with Jack
Black eight years after their
major-studio breakthrough School
of Rock.
Linklater's talent for normalizing potentially over-the-top material is
very well-suited for mainstream fare; the key shot of School
of Rock comes when Black yields
to the kids in his class—all bugging him to perform for
them—and launches into impassioned song. Read more >>
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[This
week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the female boarding-school
chiller The
Moth Diaries.]
Dario
Argento's fascination with sight
takes sexually anxious form in Phenomena,
the Italian giallo maestro's surreal 1985 saga of boarding school
maturation. That carnal awakening isn't overt in Argento's film, which
is nominally about a serial killer stalking young females in a remote
Swiss village, a spree that coincides with the arrival of Jennifer
Corvino ( Jennifer
Connelly), the daughter of a
famous hunky movie star, at the imposing Richard Wagner Academy for
Girls.
Read more >> |
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Tribeca
Winners
Podcasts!
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