I'll be reviewing these one by one via press screenings, which are coming up March 2 through 13th, 2015. As usual it's a mixed bag with what look already like some clearly very varied and interesting items.
Diary of a Teenage GirlThe Diary of a Teenage Girl | Marielle Heller
USA | 2014 | 100 min.
Winner of a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography at Sundance, this adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel, set in 1970s San Francisco, features stunning newcomer Bel Powley as a 15-year-old girl whose sexual awakening involves having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård). Opening Night.
EntertainmentEntertainment | Rick Alverson
USA | 2015 | 110 min.
The Comedy director Rick Alverson teams with comedians Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) and Tim Heidecker for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. A washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime works his way across the Mojave Desert on a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing. Closing Night!
Christmas, Again
Christmas, Again | Charles Poekel
USA | 2014 | 79 min.
Writer-director Charles Poekel has transformed three years of “fieldwork” peddling Christmas trees on the streets of New York into a sharply observed and wistfully comic portrait of urban loneliness and companionship, shot on 16mm by acclaimed cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Listen Up Philip, Heaven Knows What).
Screening with:
Going Out | Ted Fendt
USA | 2014 | 8 min.
Liz thinks she’s going on a date with Rob to see RoboCop, but things take an unexpected (and inexplicable) turn.
CourtCourt | Chaitanya Tamhane
India | 2014 | 116 min.
Chaitanya Tamhane’s absurdist portrait of injustice, caste prejudice, and venal politics in contemporary India won top prizes at the Venice and Mumbai Film Festivals and features a brilliant ensemble cast of professional and nonprofessional actors who capture the rich complexity and contradictions of Indian society.
The Creation of Meaning
The Creation of Meaning / La creazione di significato | Simone Rapisarda Casanova
Canada/Italy | 2014 | 95 min.
Though its title arcs toward grand philosophical inquiry, the stirring power of Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s documentary-fiction hybrid—winner of the Best Emerging Director prize at Locarno—lies in its intimacy of detail and wry political observation, filmed with a painterly Renaissance beauty in Tuscany’s remote Apennine mountains.
Dog Lady
Dog Lady | Laura Citarella & Verónica Llinás
Argentina | 2015 | 95 min.
This indelible and quietly haunting study of an enigmatic, nameless woman living with a loyal pack of stray dogs in silent, self-imposed exile on the edge of Buenos Aires follows her across four seasons with an attentive and sympathetic eye, culminating in an unforgettable extended final shot.
The Fool
The Fool | Yuriy Bykov
Russia | 2014 | 116 min.
An engineering student discovers two massive cracks in a decaying provincial housing project but is stymied in his attempts to avert a catastrophe in this stinging rebuke to the endemic corruption of the Russian body politic, which earned writer-director-actor Yuriy Bykov four awards at the 2014 Locarno Film Festival.
Fort Buchanan
Fort Buchanan | Benjamin Crotty
France/Tunisia | 2014 | 65 min.
Shot in richly textured 16mm, Benjamin Crotty’s queer soap opera chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, who seeks comfort and companionship from the sexually frustrated army wives of a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti.
Screening with:
Taprobana | Gabriel Abrantes
Portugal/Sri Lanka/Denmark/France | 2014 | 24 min.
A sensuous and debauched portrait of Portugal’s national poet Luís Vaz de Camões teetering on the borderline between Paradise and Hell.
Goodnight Mommy
Goodnight Mommy | Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz
Austria | 2014 | 100 min.
The dread of parental abandonment is trumped by the terror of menacing spawn in Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s exquisite, cerebral horror-thriller. Produced by Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is a heartbreaking tale of love and loss wrapped in one of the scariest films of the year.
The Great Man
The Great Man | Sarah Leonor
France | 2014 | 107 min.
The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s by turns heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature, which follows two French Legionnaires at the end of their posting in Afghanistan.
Haemoo
Haemoo | Shim Sung-bo
South Korea | 2014 | 111 min.
First-time director Shim Sung-bo distills a gripping drama from a real-life incident and delivers a gritty, brooding spectacle of life and death on the high seas. This tense, hair-raising nautical thriller was produced by Bong Joon-ho—whose second feature, Memories of Murder, was written by Shim.
Los HongosLos Hongos | Oscar Ruiz Navia
Colombia/Argentina/France/Germany | 2014 | 103 min.
Full of vibrant color and great music, Los Hongos is a charming and surprising coming-of-age film that follows Cali street artists Ras and Calvin, good friends from disparate class backgrounds who band together with other artists to paint a tribute to the student protestors of the Arab Spring.
K
K | Darhad Erdenibulag & Emyr ap Richard
China | 2015 | 88 min.
At once familiar and strange, this reimagining of Kafka’s The Castle is utterly specific to its striking Inner Mongolia setting, and totally faithful to is origins in portraying faceless bureaucracy as a timeless and universal frustration. Produced by Jia Zhang-ke, K is the rare literary adaptation that honors the source material even while reinventing it.
The Kindergarten TeacherThe Kindergarten Teacher | Nadav Lapid
Israel/France | 2014 | 119 min.
Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation in which a fortysomething teacher in Tel Aviv becomes obsessed with one of her charges, a 5-year-old poetry prodigy, yielding a perversely romantic work whose underlying conviction seems to be that in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad.
Screening with:
Why? | Nadav Lapid
Israel | 2015 | 5 min.
A filmmaker is asked by Cahiers du Cinéma to choose the image that made him believe in cinema.
Line of Credit
Line of Credit | Salomé Alexi
France/Georgia | 2014 | 85 min.
Nino is a forty-something woman with a small shop in Tbilisi who grew up without thinking about the complexities of finance. But when the money gets tight, Nino goes about taking loan after loan, but even as the situation grows reckless, Salomé Alexi maintains a beautifully light, comedic tone in her feature-film debut.
Listen to Me MarlonListen to Me Marlon | Stevan Riley
UK | 2015 | 100 min.
Documentarian Stevan Riley explores the on- and off-screen lives of Marlon Brando, using a vast trove of audio recordings made by the actor himself to allow Brando to tell his own story, filled with bones to pick, strong opinions, and fascinating traces of one of the most alluring figures in the history of cinema.
Mercuriales
Mercuriales | Virgil Vernier
France | 2014 | 100 min.
This freely inventive breakthrough work from ambitious young French director Virgil Vernier is a radical experiment in form that also lavishes tender attention on its characters. As two young receptionists in the titular Paris high-rise drift from one situation to the next, Vernier’s visual style grows ever more surprising and beautiful.
OwOw | Yohei Suzuki
Japan | 2014 | 89 min.
Jobless young Tetsuo and his girlfriend Yuriko are inexplicably immobilized after laying eyes on an orb-like object that appears out of nowhere, setting into motion an enigmatic chain of events and an obsessive investigation by journalist Deguchi in this deadpan mystery that just might be a comment on the social malaise and inertia of 21st-century Japan.
Parabellum
Parabellum | Lukas Valenta Rinner
Argentina/Austria/Uruguay | 2015 | 75 min.
In the midst of riots and social unrest, a Buenos Aires office worker puts his life on hold and departs for a vacation with a difference—think hand-to-hand combat and homemade explosives training in place of yoga and nature walks—in Austrian filmmaker Lukas Valenta Rinner’s carefully composed, minimalist end-of-days tale.
Screening with:
Colours | Evan Johnson
Canada | 2014 | 2 min.
A compact, chromatic visual essay on our way of seeing by Guy Maddin collaborator Evan Johnson.
Theeb
Theeb | Naji Abu Nowar
Jordan/Qatar/United Arab Emirates/UK | 2014 | 100 min.
Classic storytelling at its finest, this quietly gripping adventure tale, set in 1916 in a desert province on the edge of the Ottoman Empire, follows the younger brother of a Bedouin guide, tasked with helping a British Army Officer and his translator, as he learns to survive and becomes a man amidst the violent and mysterious agendas of adults.
Tired Moonlight
Tired Moonlight | Britni West
USA | 2014 | 76 min.
Britni West’s Slamdance-winning directorial debut, photographed on Super-16mm and featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast in semi-fictionalized roles, discovers homespun poetry among the good folk of her native Kalispell, Montana, yielding a sui generis slice of contemporary naturalism.
The Tribe
The Tribe | Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy
Ukraine | 2014 | 132 min.
Set it in a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds and told entirely through un-subtitled sign language, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize–winning feature debut overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget.
Tu dors Nicole
Tu dors Nicole | Stéphane Lafleur
Canada | 2014 | 93 min.
This disarmingly atmospheric comedy, following the summer (mis)adventures of a band of utterly unique characters and shot in lush black-and-white 35mm, is Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur’s ode to the wry tradition of Aki Kaurismäki, Fernando Eimbcke, and Jim Jarmusch.
VioletViolet | Bas Devos
Belgium/Netherlands | 2014 | 82 min.
Writer/director Bas Devos’s feature debut is a muted but harrowing portrayal of aimless, maladjusted youth. With an uneasy yet entrancing atmosphere, Violet is a continually surprising exploration of pain and guilt, an interior voyage that only grows tenser and more affecting as it arrives at darker, less comprehensible regions of the soul.
Western
Western | Bill & Turner Ross
USA | 2015 | 93 min.
Drug cartel violence and border politics threaten the neighborly rapport between Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico in Bill and Turner Ross’s trenchant and passionately observed documentary, which firmly positions the brothers at the frontier of a new, compelling kind of American vernacular cinema.
White God
White God | Kornél Mundruczó
Hungary | 2014 | 119 min.
Kornél Mundruczó’s shocking fable, which won the Un Certain Regard prize in Cannes, captivatingly weaves together elements of melodrama, adventure, and a bit of horror in order to pose fundamental questions of equality, class, and humanity, as an outcast mutt and an army of fellow canines set out to take their revenge on the humans who have wronged them.
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