LIZA JOHNSON, “RETURN”

By Brandon Harris

A low-key drama that articulates the ennui of a returning servicewoman after a tour in the Middle East, Liza Johnson’s Return strikes a delicate balance between familial melodrama and suffering vet pic. Light on exposition and heavy on expert thesping, it features a striking performance by Linda Cardellini, once the most sly and attractive of the awkward high schoolers on Freaks and Geeks, and now a fully mature screen actress making the most of her copious talents. We meet her character Kelly at the airport, freshly arrived in Ohio after a stint in an unnamed theater of war, and only slowly begin to understand the broad disconnect she has with her plumber husband (Michael Shannon) and two young girls.

Unable to adjust to life at home, she doesn’t exhibit the classic PSTD symptoms, but an underlying sense of purposelessness and dissatisfaction overcome her in their modest house and at her job in a warehouse. As her indulgences in swearing, drinking and loud rap music grow into a larger inability to maintain social affability in nearly any context and her awareness of her husband’s activities in the year she’s been away comes to fruition, Cardellini’s Kelly must figure out whether there is any longer a home to be salvaged, or simply a place as alien as the desert she may secretly yearn to get back to.

Helmer Johnson is a multi-dimensional artist who has worked as a professor and curator while making a series of acclaimed short films. Her short film South of Ten was the opening night short at the 2006 New York Film Festival, and her gallery work and installations have been exhibited at MoMA, the Walker Arts Center and the Centre Pompidou as well as major European film festivals such as the Berlinale and Rotterdam. Her feature debut Return, which had its world premiere at last year’s Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, opens this Friday.

Filmmaker: A lot of your short work features non-actors. How did the experience of working with trained performers alter your working methods?

Johnson: For the last five years … Read the rest

BEN WHEATLEY, “THE KILL LIST”

By Damon Smith

A rising star of the under-40 British indie director set, Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace) may not yet be a recognizable name in the States, but years from now his latest film, the brain-bending, spookily enigmatic The Kill List may well be regarded as a milestone in the horror genre. It isn’t just that Wheatley has concocted an ingenious new way of frightening audiences—the film’s ending shocked and thrilled viewers at South by Southwest, who flocked to the Internet to praise its unholy attributes—but that his free blending of seemingly incompatible genre conventions seems so natural as we enter the psychic landscape of his characters. The Kill List opens in an aggressive domestic mode not too distant from the dreary kitchen-sink realism of the late ’60s: edgy thirty-something Jay (Neil Maskell) and his outspoken wife Shel (MyAnna Buring), who have a young son too often present for their marital squabbles, are having a ferocious row about their finances. He’s incredulous that she has spent 40,000 pounds he had stowed away in their home; she assails him for being out of work the past eight months. Moments later, they are snuggling; their relationship is tight and loving, we come to understand, if  turbulent. When they are joined for dinner by Jay’s best friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his raven-haired companion, Fiona (Emma Fryer), we learn that the two fellows are professional hit men, and that something went traumatically awry for Jay on his last assignment in Kiev. With some prompting from Shel, who is close enough to Gal to confide her anxieties, Jay agrees to meet with a powerful and intimidating new client who assigns the duo a list of people to knock off.

Obviously old hands at the dirty-deeds business, Jay and Gal have a relationship every bit as intimate and volatile as Shel does with her husband; he’s a coiled spring who unleashes his obscure fury on a smut peddler and harmless merrymaking Bible thumpers alike. With a few deft moves, Wheatley subtly shifts the film from gut-punch domestic drama to heady thriller. But it’s when his killers … Read the rest

“SCALENE” WRITER/DIRECTOR ZACK PARKER

By Brandon Harris

Zack Parker’s Scalene is a small midwestern gem of a psychological thriller, with several moments that are as shocking as any that will find their way to commercial movie screens all year. Parker and his co-writer, longtime collaborator Brandon Owens use two storytelling devices that have gone in and out of vogue — out-of-sequence and multiple-perspective recounting of events — to marvelous effect. Shot in the filmmaker’s home state of Indiana, it is a heady and tragic mind bender, one that has been unduly overlooked by the major American fests while having had a long run on the regional circuit.

The film opens with Janice, expertly played by Margo Martindale, character actress extraordinaire, in her first starring turn after winning an Emmy for her role in FX’s Justified, arriving at the suburban home of Paige (Hanna Hall, who once played Forrest Gump’s daughter) and brutally assaulting her. The film then jumps back in time to the past, where we slowly learn what caused this horrific event. As we learn over the course of the next hour-and-a-half, it is Janice’s disabled son Jakob (Adam Scarimbolo) whom Paige had been hired to watch over, who is the source of the trouble. Parker coaxes fantastic performances out of Scarimbolo and especially Martindale, whose anger and heartbreak are palpable from the film’s earliest moments.

Scalene is Parker’s third feature, following the 33-year-old director’s Inexchange (2006) and Quench (2007). It finishes its run at the Brooklyn’s ReRun Gastropub Theater this week.

Filmmaker: What provoked you to tell this brutal and bleak story in such an unusual, structurally sophisticated way?

Parker: The idea came about on two fronts. This is my third feature. It came about because of the response to my other two, which were quite polarizing among critics and audiences. There were people who really responded favorably to the films, and then there were some who truly hated them. On Netflix and IMDb you would see people saying these are the worst movies ever made. I was just sort of taken aback by how polarized and drastic the reaction to them … Read the rest

GERARDO NARANJO, “MISS BALA”

By Howard Feinstein

A model hybrid of seemingly effortless form and true-to-life action is the astonishing Miss Bala, by 42-year-old Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo. His earlier, teen-focused works, Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode, while they are expertly crafted (and especially alluring for those with a penchant for handheld camera and super-8), were a tad heavy-fisted for the subject matter, as if they were laden with an extra injection of  testosterone. Could it be that in making Miss Bala (bala means bullet, and is a pun on Baja) about grown-ups and placing a 23-year-old woman (and her POV) front and center, he has, in the best way, both softened and retooled his creative hand?

The play of light and dark pushed beyond the usual boundaries, frequent panning and reframing that respect characters and their dilemmas, and long, sometimes baroque takes testify to his growth as a filmmaker with a more subtle yet ultimately stronger aesthetic. Hungarian cinematographer Matyas Elderly, who worked in his home country with the smooth, unhurried Kornel Mundruczo (Delta, Tender Son), aided in the transformation.

Naranjo has a strong feel for architecture, his characters dramatically shot against structures and interior detailing. He knows how to move them efficiently and dramatically through the spaces in between, whether inside a huge auditorium (a marvelous scene full of confetti and mariachi music, when the protagonist wins the Miss Baja California title), a claustrophobic bedroom, the patio of a grand hotel, or the inside of a car. At the same time, he captures the the right, and generally most striking, angles of her elongated ex-model’s torso and face with planes worthy of Picasso. 

At the drama’s center is Laura (Stephanie Sigman), a reserved, poor, but naturally glam 23-year-old who lives outside Tijuana, functioning as mother for her father and beloved younger brother in their shack of a home. She hopes that winning the pageant will help her earn money. Her noble goal is to pay for the kid’s education.

In a chi-chi nightclub where her pushy best friend and fellow contestant takes her to meet important people, she becomes the only witness to a massacre of police and American … Read the rest

ROBERT GREENE, “FAKE IT SO REAL”

By Brandon Harris

Big-time professional wrestling has long been a lucrative business, but for the men of Lincolnton, North Carolina’s Millenium Wrestling Federation, the social cohesion and outlet for their imagination the sport provides is their primary compensation. As chronicled in director Robert Greene’s fantastic new documentary Fake It So Real, wrestling has never seemed as intense and physically costly. Yet Greene is not interested in mining the sport for tales of snake-bitten men reaching for a glory that will never come; this isn’t a doc version of The Wrestler. Woebegone men are few and far between in this world, despite the fact that Lincolnton seemingly doesn’t provide much in terms of career prospects. A sense of community and mutually-appreciated craft pervades the scene.

Fake It So Real is Greene’s second festival hit in as many years. His debut film Kati with an I was nominated for the Gotham Award‘s Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You in 2010 after premiering at the True/False Film Festival. Fake It So Real premiered there in 2011 before going on to play many of the circuit’s most well-regarded doc and regional fests, including Sarasota and CPH:DOX. The film opens this coming Friday at Brooklyn’s ReRun Gastropub Theater.

Filmmaker: Did your interest in wrestling, like so many adult males in their twenties and thirties, begin in your childhood in the ’80s, as the popularity of the sport was expanding?

Greene: I am a huge wrestling fan through and through. I was born in ’76. My dad still calls it “wrasslin.’” He still wants to think about it as being real! I’m a wrestling nerd. I surf websites about wrestling. The first wrestling I recall watching was Wrestlemania II, because of the whole Mr. T appearance; I was somehow AWOL during Wrestlemania III, which featured the famous match between Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan. For Wrestlemania IV, V and on and on, I was hooked. I was a huge Ultimate Warrior fan. My enthusiasm dropped off as the ’90s wore on. I knew about the great Bret Hart/Sean … Read the rest

NURI BILGE CEYLAN, “ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA”

By Brandon Harris

Over the course of one long night, a cadre of lonely men — which includes an overbearing, barely competent police chief, a handsome and thorough doctor, a cautious district attorney, several drivers, civil servants, grave diggers, and two brothers accused of homicide — drive through the hills of rural Anatolia in search of a body buried at a spot the young and frightened siblings can’t quite recall. We glimpse their sorrows, their vanities, their brief bouts of interconnectedness, but mostly we watch their boredom. Still the crime gets solved, motivations are revealed, a small but significant cover-up is enacted. Along the way, we get a rare chance to watch life as it’s actually lived, rendered with such beauty, clarity and care that one wonders why all movies aren’t so attuned to the visceral mysteries of everyday pain.

Although Nuri Bilge Ceylan forged his reputation as one of the most exciting new practitioners of “Slow Cinema” to emerge during the late ’90s, the Turkish filmmaker’s engrossing films, which have reached their apex with his masterful Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, have increasingly found their basis in the outlines (if not the rhythms) of genre filmmaking. Not that this has earned him any notoriety in our genre-obsessed American movie culture. That this incredibly gifted filmmaker, whose style leans heavily on Antonioni but seems to have a dexterity, an interest in apparitions and a socio-national identity all its own, is not more well known stateside is some sort of misdemeanor offense. Were it another era, the cinema of Ceylan would already have been hailed as essential viewing for those trying to understand the intersection between the West and Islam that is modern Turkey.

The 52-year-old Istanbul native won a trip to the 1995 Cannes Film Festival with his very first short Cocoon, but it wasn’t until his third feature, Distant, appeared at the festival in 2002 that he began to acquire an international following. That was followed by a run of films that are as impressive a body of work as anyone assembled in the aughts, including his shattering 2006 relationship … Read the rest

ASGHAR FARHADI, “A SEPARATION”

By Damon Smith

Though not as well known outside Iran as Abbas Kiarostami or Jafar Panahi, writer-director Asghar Farhadi has been steadily building an impressive cinematic resume since graduating from Tehran University in 1998 with a degree in dramatic arts. After a stint developing stage plays and TV series for Iran’s national broadcasting corporation, Farhadi co-scripted Ebrahim Hatamikia’s post-9/11 political farce Low Heights, about a desperate man who hijacks a plane carrying his wife and handicapped son. He then moved into the director’s chair with Dancing in the Dust and Beautiful City, a social-issue film concerning the archaic custom of “blood money” (under sharia, the relatives of a murdered Muslim can accept payment for legal vengeance in lieu of capital punishment for the perpetrator) that screened at Film Forum in 2006. Three years later, Farhadi won numerous awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, for About Elly, a tense, character-driven drama about three well-to-do Persian families whose holiday in a Caspian Sea coastal town turns disastrous after a mother attempts to match her daughter’s teacher with a divorced German acquaintance. Like so many fine playwrights, Farhadi works closely with his actors, setting them in true-to-life dramatic situations that speak volumes about class, gender, patriarchy, religion, and politics within contemporary Iranian society, all while somehow evading the ire of Islamic censors.

Farhadi stands a good chance of being better known in the States after Sony Pictures Classics releases his latest drama, the Golden Bear–winning A Separation, this week. In the film’s prelude, a minimally composed and admirably played two-shot lensed by esteemed cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari (Offside, The Wind Will Carry Us), fortyish Nader (Peyman Moadi) and his wife Simin (Leila Hatami, star of Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila) argue before an unseen magistrate: She has just gotten her visa after a yearlong wait, and wants to emigrate with her 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) — “I don’t want to raise her under these circumstances,” she says a bit carelessly, declining to specify what she means to the Islamic judge — yet Nader refuses to leave his elderly … Read the rest

WIM WENDERS, “PINA”

By Alix Lambert

German filmmaker Wim Wenders started taking photographs at the age of seven. Over the years he has turned his attentions to medicine, philosophy, painting, and engraving, but it is his four decades directing that has most often caught the publics’ attention. I first saw and loved his films with Wings of Desire; later I could be found carrying around a copy of his book Once religiously.

His new film Pina, is a loving tribute to his 20-year friendship with, and admiration of, the dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. It is a documentary that uses new 3D technology to exquisite effect. As he relates below, Wenders first approached Bausch about making a film together after being moved to tears by her dance performance, Café Müller. She agreed, but it then took him those two decades, and the advances in 3D technology, before he felt he could do justice on film to her work. The resulting film is a beautiful film/dance journey that explores love, life, and loss – and without words, represents the friendship of two great artists.

Wenders: Where are you calling me from?

Filmmaker: New York City. Where are you?

Wenders: I’m in Hamburg Germany. I hope your weather is not as bad as it is out here. It’s so nasty here, I’m sneezing, I’ve been shooting all week with my students in the freezing rain. We were looking for a week of sunshine and instead we had a week of hail and snow and rain. I think we got some good stuff but I am just looking forward to being indoors again.

Filmmaker: Are you sick of talking to people yet about Pina?

Wenders: No, no no – it’s nice to speak about Pina. I have not done any talking for the last few days in that context. I look at interviews the way I look at filmmaking and try to follow the advice that I give my actors: do it like it’s the first time. I think the only way to do an interview is to forget that you ever answered the question before. … Read the rest

DAVID POMES, “COOK COUNTY”

By Brandon Harris

The rapid growth of methamphetamine use in rural America has been unabated for years now, but it has just now found its definitive cinematic dramatization in David Pomes’ bittersweet crime thriller Cook County. Contemplating the final weeks in the life of an east Texas drug din as its proprietor spins out of control, Pomes’ film details the dark underbelly of addiction within an entire community that silently affirms the control meth has taken over many of its citizen’s lives. Meditating on the particularly harsh affect the drug has had on a family through three generations, Cook County is at heart a film about family. The meth-pushing brothers at the center of the film, played with startling authenticity by Anson Mount (AMC’s Hell on Wheels) and Xander Berkeley (Sneakers, Gattaca, Safe), are one of the more contentious and complicated set of siblings to grace screens in quite some time.

Cook County was a hit at the 2009 SXSW film festival, where it won the audience award. Since then it has enjoyed a strong run on the American regional circuit, winning prizes in Nashville, Dallas and at Birmingham’s Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. Pomes, a Houston, Texas native who lives and works in New York and had been a lawyer for a decade before turning to film, has already shot a second film, Sunny Side Up, with Kathryn Erbe and Parkey Posey. His debut Cook County opens in New York at the Cinema Village tomorrow.

Filmmaker: Did you have any experience with meth or meth addicts before embarking upon this film? Was your way into the story an interest in how they operate?

Pomes: I didn’t start out writing about that. I started writing about people living on the margins of society I guess, living outside of urban areas, really kind of secluded backwoods of the country. I began to write about and do research on some of these people, the type of people I grew up around in these outside, bordering areas of Houston. My family is from Louisiana, so going there and … Read the rest

CEDRIC KLAPISCH, “MY PIECE OF THE PIE”

By Damon Smith

Over the past two decades, French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch (L’Auberge Espagnole) has distinguished himself as a writer-director of mature, well-balanced social dramas with a comedic edge. Films like Russian Dolls and Paris (both featuring heartthrob actor Romain Duris, who has made six films with the director) explore the emotional dynamics of ambition and disappointment, love and family relationships against the backdrop of Europe’s ever-shifting cultural identity in the 21st century. Now Klapisch wades into the waters of world financial distress with a snappy satire about haves and have nots that in some respects channels the sentiments of Zuccotti Park’s most recent inhabitants, dramatizing the hubris and lack of accountability of the financial-services industry.

My Piece of the Pie tells the story of laid-off factory worker France (Potiche’s Karin Viard) who, as a divorced mother of three in the blue-collar port town of Dunkirk, chooses to enroll in a housekeeper training program rather than join her co-workers in fighting for wages they’ve been denied. Installed in the ultra-exclusive Paris apartment of Steve (Gilles Lellouche, the ever-hirsute star of Point Blank and Tell No One), a cocksure trader recently relocated from London, France dutifully presses shirts and tidies up, while hardly registering as a human presence to her strikingly handsome employer, a shark who hunts a fashion model (Marine Vacth) with as much zeal as a weak currency. When Steve’s ex drops off their toddler-age son Alban for a month long reprieve, he hires France to be their live-in nanny, and the work-for-hire relationship begins to soften into something more like a tentative friendship. She dispenses advice on women; he gives her a quick-and-dirty lesson on short selling. If the match-up between a fortysomething menial laborer and a pitiless power broker seems too good to be true, it is. Klapisch establishes the basic class dichotomy between Steve and France, peppering the drama with moments of crisp humor (Steve can’t seem to understand why he should read his son a bedtime story) and goofy levity (France concocts a cartoonish Russian accent to ward off the resentment of … Read the rest