Reverse Shot

I met with Varda at the Santa Monica home of Patricia Knop and Zalman King, just steps away from one of her beloved beaches, where she observed matter-of-factly, and with a touch of merry nonchalance, “I was lucky enough in my life to be at the right time in many places.” Here among the sun-dappled collection of 19th-century carousel animals and thick-bodied angels, this grand dame of cinema with the impish grin looked perfectly at ease, equally at home as both jester and queen.

Mostly deprived of his previously go-to visual possibilities, Mann has nothing but plodding plot progression to lean on, absent the narrative mastery he used to exercise alongside his self-evident visual gifts. This is perhaps the saddest loss at this stage of Mann’s career: the overvaluation of visual sheen for its own sake and a consequent neglect of the narrative foundation that he has always relied upon.

The trouble with Quiet Chaos is that there’s too much quiet and not enough chaos. The emotional turmoil spoken about by the film’s characters rarely punctures its tranquil, sleepy surface. Floating along with middle-aged businessman and recent widower Pietro (Nanni Moretti, who also co-adapted the screenplay from Sandro Veronesi’s novel) on his shambling journey of self-discovery and personal reconfiguration, we enjoy his company but rarely feel or understand his pain, leaving this slight, sentimental movie to coast on innocuous charm and little more.

The tenacity and courage of the Afghanis themselves onscreen is something to be admired, and Marking’s feature debut is overall impressive in its compassionate depiction of them, some taking incredible personal risks in order to fulfill their dreams. But Afghan Star too often falls back on trite sentiments. The film may try to offer a hopeful message about the power of music to unite people and bring joy to a country, but of course this isn’t Footloose, and music will not set Afghanistan free.

Neither as self-consciously experimental as Redacted nor as confrontational as In the Valley of Elah, The Hurt Locker observes the routines of its little band of brothers (there are no women in this Army) with unwavering focus. The accretion of suspense is organic and remorseless, egged on by a jonesing camera that lapses, without warning, into blissed-out slow-motion.

Anachronism is what fuels Rebirth. The sepia images collide with a distinctly contemporary score and current technology, and we begin to meditate on how cinema lives in a constant state of reinvention in our memories and imaginations. But in the film, this kind of disjuncture registers as hollow irony rather than rigorous intellectual and emotional engagement . . .

Introduced limping towards the camera in shabby clothes to directly assault the audience with a shockingly lengthy sampling of his withering world view (in which people are, among other things, “not fundamentally decent” and “short-sighted worms”), Boris is basically what Annie Hall’s Alvy feared he might become in his own opening direct-address monologue—no, not the “balding virile type,” but “one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.”

Imagine Doug Block’s laceratingly personal 51 Birch St. as compiled by his next-door neighbor and you’ll have a sense of the overall experience of The Windmill Movie. Rogers may be our avatar, but Olch’s never far from our consciousness, weighing in via voiceover on the process of culling through the mountains of raw footage, the problems of negotiating the material with the filmmaker’s widow with her own agenda at his side, and his place in relation to this thorny new work, an amalgamation of approximating Rogers’s intents and Olch’s mediating influence.

While Food, Inc. may not do a great job of assembling the bigger picture, it emphatically gets across that the picture is big. The film impressively portrays the sheer magnitude of the industrial food production problem, particularly via apt if obvious aesthetic choices. Kenner frequently employs aerial shots that simultaneously illustrate the amount of land devoted to industrial farming and reference American iconography of wild, open spaces tamed by human toil; indoor shots are likewise wide, always aimed at capturing the mind-boggling amount of everything, from potatoes to pig carcasses to crippled chickens.

Matthau’s endearing, casually racist Lt. Zachary Garber is given a PC makeover as Washington’s Walter Garber, whose tiresomely inherent nobility is tritely “complicated” by allegations of corruption; Shaw’s clipped, coldly intelligent British superiority is jettisoned for Travolta’s laughably caricatured, incessantly cussing faux-philosophical hothead. And the dramatic fire, of course, revolves squarely around the “mirror image” that are good guy and bad, because they’re Just the Same Underneath, can’t you see?

Science-fiction filmmaking built from brains rather than balls is an increasing rarity; finding it hitting screens deep into June is a near impossibility. We could use more speculations like Moon—as the expiration dates on our genre landmarks pass by without fulfilling their fictive promises (2001’s come and gone; Blade Runner’s 2014 is fast approaching and replicants, save perhaps the cast of The Hills, are barely a glimmer on the horizon), our collective imagination needs a bit of a refresh.

Away We Go is a defiantly bourgeois, unapologetically conventional indie road movie fueled by preciousness. A zany love story, a pot-holed journey of self-discovery, and a post-religious parable of the Holy Family, the film tracks a too-perfect hipster everycouple on a cross-country trip to find the ideal place to settle down and start a family. Yet the film’s humor is at odds with its liberal, Volvo sedan–motored progressivism, marginalizing misfits and slyly proselytizing best-practice parenting and impossibly idealized relationship dynamics. Life happens, but mostly to other people.

With such buzz and good will surrounding it, it almost didn’t matter if it was good (the words “Sam Raimi” and “horror” have already done more for Drag Me to Hell than any number of positive reviews ever could). The only genuinely shocking thing about Raimi’s new film is that, despite its generally safe audience courting and circumscribed playbook, it’s easily his best since Evil Dead 2, and maybe the best storytelling of his career.

Up, the latest creation from Pixar, directed by Peter Docter (Monsters, Inc.), left me incredibly touched, dewy-eyed, and inclined to ponder questions of mortality and lifetime partnership. Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be a movie for kids? Early on, as I searched my pockets for a tissue, a young girl, likely no more than six or seven years old, exclaimed from a few rows back, “Mommy, this is really sad!” This off-screen moment of cross-generational collusion encapsulates the unique charms of the Pixar world.

One of the strangest trends in American culture in the past decade has been the romanticization and emulation of pornography by celebrities and common folk alike (where it was once considered embarrassing to watch them at work, for instance, grown men and women now proudly brandish t-shirts emblazoned with the words “Porn Star”), and The Girlfriend Experience plays on the contradictions of our new nonchalance about, even worship of, purchased sex.

"We are dependent on modern ideology—meaning the economy. What I’m saying is very simple. The modern world worships economy and takes it as some kind of truth, but ultimately it’s nothing more than religion because there’s no logic to economy. It’s irrational, deeply irrational. Now I’m not a big theoretician of economics—it’s absolutely not my position. My position is much simpler than that. We just have to be aware that this is not where truth lives. We are free of the values of economy. When politicians tell you that this is for the good of the economy, that this is how the economy goes, they have no idea."

When I finally did catch up with Lan Yu three years ago, it turned out to have as little to do with my experience as a Chinese-American gay man as those edgier, whiter films of the New Queer Cinema or the gay caricatures in Hollywood comedies. Not unlike the communities in which we find ourselves in real life, movies marketed to marginalized demographics try to extend the comforts of sympathy and unity, but usually only end up throwing the viewer’s individuality and separateness into sharp relief.