2013 CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: DAY-BY-DAY GUIDE

Another year's festival over. Here, the record of all the things I saw at CIFF this year, with links to reviews.

Friday, 11 October, 2013

5:30 PM-
Wałęsa: Man of Hope (Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Quite possibly the best possible outcome for such a generically pure biopic, in which a Great Man flashes back over his life. Two things, primarily, are responsible: first is that the film focuses more on Lech Wałęsa's actions than his personal drama, and since those actions were important enough on a sufficiently global scale to win the man a Nobel Peace Prize, it's as gripping as any life story you could hope for. Second, Robert Więckiewicz's performance as the title character is an eye-popping display of oversized personality and political passion at their most excitingly watchable. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

5:45 PM-
Illiterate (Moisés Sepúlveda, Chile)
A bombastic performance from Paulina Garcia as a proud, disagreeable illiterate woman gives this brief two-hander a lot of bite and emotional impact, but there's not a whole lot of "there" there besides. The script sacrifices drama for meaty character moments, but those aren't always strong enough, or effectively-written, to land with the impact that the film seems to think. And while Sepúlveda deserves credit for making an uncompromised debut film, his visual vocabulary needs a lot of work. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
The Blinding Sunlight (Yu Liu, China)
One could, not unreasonably, sum it up as "Bicycle Thieves in China": a three-generational family that gets by mostly through one man's illegal motorcycle taxi tries to stay in front of the unsympathetic government bureaucrats who just want to see the rules followed blindly, and it attempts to capture the real feeling of poverty in Beijing by casting non-actors. It would feel slightly monstrous not to concede that the results are compelling from a sociological standpoint, and this kind of sharply intelligent and critical political movie is never unwelcome, no matter what. But Yu's camera is rarely used to interesting effect, and let's just say that the cast puts the "non" in "non-actors". 6/10
(Reviewed here)

9:00 PM-
Monsoon Shootout (Amit Kumar, India)
A dizzying mixed bag. Some images and conceits that left me convinced that I was watching one of the most striking films of this year's festival butt right up to moments of profound, lazy tackiness, and the notion of a trio of "what if?" stories about the consequences of a policemen acting or not acting in a moment of crisis isn't always 100% honest with itself. The balance between "this is brilliant!" and "this is trite" remains favorable right until an overdetermined, needlessly twisty ending scuttles it, but on the whole, it's a satisfying experience, just not an entirely focused one. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

10:15 PM-
Contracted (Eric England, USA)
Here's a thing you don't automatically expect to see at a major film festival: a so-bad-it's-good cheapie horror movie. And I am reasonably certain that Contracted is, in fact, so-bad-it's-good, and not just so bad. The story of how drunken heterosexual copulation turns a lesbian into a rotting vampire certainly seems like it thinks it's saying something interesting about sexual behaviors and identity, but the whole thing is so silly and burdened by one-note characters that any attempts to link this to actual human experience is doomed from the start. And the acting is The Room-worthy. 2/10
(Reviewed here)


Saturday, 12 October, 2013

1:00 PM-
Burn It Up Djassa (Lonesome Solo, France-Ivory Coast)
A microscopically-budgeted, rushed production has not prevented this anecdotal story of life in the ghetto from being unexpectedly polished beneath its obvious DIY technique, nor amateur lead Abdoul Karim Konaté from giving a captivating, lively performance as a headstrong raconteur. Less a story than a blast of freewheeling storytelling, the 70-minute film hasn't left itself much space to actually develop its ideas or emotions beyond their most immediate expression, but that tends to suit the protagonist's attitude rather than limit the film in any way, and its presentation of a grimy underclass is so direct and potent that even as nothing more than social studies document, it's incredibly difficult to turn away for the brief time that the movie needs to make itself felt. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

1:30 PM-
Yema (Djamila Sahraoui, Algeria-France)
The languid, almost totally silent opening half is fine stuff, by any yardstick: focused with maddening intensity on the steady actions of a stern-willed, pathos-tinged aging woman in an isolated patch of dry land in an unspecified Arabic-speaking country. But it's the second half, when all of the hints and moments that we've heard start to coalesce into a story of family ties broken by violence and rebellion that the film transcends its somewhat been-there, done-that art house aesthetic and becomes a deeply satisfying domestic tragedy. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

3:00 PM-
A Thousand Times Good Night (Erik Poppe, Norway)
As I described it to a friend the day I saw it: dreary bourgeois tosh. The argument that the industrialised world has done a terrible job of helping with the humanitarian crises of Africa and other developing regions certainly deserves to be made frequently and loudly, but when it's married to such easy, middleweight filmmaking that undercuts its own arguments at every blandly handsome turn, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anything of real merit is being done here. 5/10
Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
Battle of Tabatô (João Viana, Guinea-Bissau/Portugal)
Stunningly gorgeous black and white photography serves to alleviate some of the most inscrutable excesses of this unusually symbolism-laden story of post-colonial Africa finding its identity in a combination of ancient and modern traditions. And there's probably a real question to be asked if that's something that needs to be "alleviated" at all. Still, there's a lot of cryptic arcana being flung at the screen in just a short span of time (the movie is a hair over 80 minutes), and Viana is not always in enough control of his technique to keep the film from being stiff and inhumane at points. That being said, you probably have never seen anything at all like it, and it sticks in the memory something fierce. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

6:00 PM-
Die Welt (Alex Pitstra, Netherlands-Tunisia)
In the broad strokes, and even some of the details, we've all definitely seen this film before (idealistic, impoverished Third Worlder (Tunisia, in this case) dreams of an impossibly better life in the magical land of Europe), and there's honestly not that much in the presentation that makes this version of all versions "essential". Aesthetically, it's quite straightforward, all longish takes and slow-moving scenes and pointedly meandering development until it hits a heavily ironic final sequence with an ambivalent final shot. What pushes this one higher than the average of the forms is Abdelhamid Nawara as the central romantic, earnest and driven without necessarily begging for (or receing) our affection and admiration; and even more, an unexpectedly tart sense of humor in which the movie takes the piss out of its own seriousness in some consistently nimble ways. Nothing terribly special, but a worthy 80 minutes. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

6:15 PM-
The Miracle (Simon Staho, Denmark)
Turns out that a movie can be too pretty. The film's central drama is a not hugely revelatory exploration of stifling wedlock in a small, obsessively religious Danish community, and it's well enough acted and written to remain interesting despite how overworked most of the basic plotline is. But the film is so blatantly over-romanticised in every lusciously gorgeous frame that what should be more sparing in its application of grandiose emotion feels monotonously epic; every story beat is tethered to the same brand of postcard-ready photography and as a result every one starts to feel the same after a while. A tremendously great story might be able to survive this kind of one-note filmmaking, but the story is already so provisional here that the entire edifice lands up at handsome, well-meant storytelling that's neither resonant nor interesting. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

6:30 PM-
Blue Is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, France)
The winner of the 2013 Palme d'Or isn't nearly as flawless as its most impassioned boosters want to be the case, but there are so many compensating factors that it effectively doesn't matter. An epic-scale domestic drama following the birth and death and decay of a romantic relationship, it boasts an incandescent performance by Léa Seydoux as the One True Love and a quieter but no less rich performance by Adèle Exarchopoulos as the self-assembling protagonist, to go with its brutally honest and probing screenplay. Media carnivals around things like 12-minute lesbian sex scenes are distracting, but not enough to pull focus from how intense and powerful all this really is. 9/10
(Reviewed here)

8:00 PM-
Black South-Easter (Carey McKenzie, South Africa)
An entirely well-made and solid "good cop squares off against the system" drama, with just enough explicit post-Apartheid tension to give it more bite than the broad generic strokes might suggest is likely; so why did I find it so massively unengaging? Part of it, I fear, might be own pig-ignorant cultural blindness, but that might simply be me hoping that the film is better than it is. The problem is, for all that the story is cleanly told and smartly twisting, nothing that happens onscreen really establishes the stakes: why do we care about this cop investigagint this crime? The answer might be obvious to someone picking up on all the social cues, but for myself, I found it to be all efficient technique without a story worth the telling 6/10
Reviewed here)

8:45 PM-
Infiltrators (Khaled Jarrar, Palestine-UAE-Lebanon)
"Oh God," you are thinking, "another documentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict? WHAT'S LEFT TO SAY?" Not much, but at 70 minutes, Infiltrators doesn't pretend to be definitive, and it's remarkable perspective, shot right in the midst of people attempting to illegally cross the wall using junky little cameras that lend it an exhilarating patina of authenticity and intimacy. It is an urgent, grubby little thing, and that, as it turns out, is what was left to say, or at least what it takes to make one more turn with the subject totally worthwhile. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

10:00 PM-
Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam, Belgium)
If you're paying absurdly close attention to every last detail, you puzzle out what "actually" happens, but even without that, this is a terrific thriller-cum-fairy tale-cum-social satire. A strange bearded man on the run from a priest with an assault rifle begs for help at a very poshly-appointed house deep in the woods; when it is granted, this triggers the beginning of a long, weird chain of events in which he and his colleagues muddle with the life of their bourgeois victims in very odd, unnerving ways. Leavened with a very bizarre sense of humor that keeps it stitched together even when the plot is at its most cryptic, this is the very definition of a film that's not for everybody, but the sense of standing on the edge of a cliff, leaning forward that comes from not knowing where it's going is giddily exciting. 9/10
(Reviewed here)

10:15 PM-
Raze (Josh C. Waller, USA)
Like to watch women punch each other to death? Like to watch women punch each other to death, but need some thin fig leaf of intellectual respectability about, I dunno, "empowerment" or some such bullshit that misogynists use to pretend they're being progressive? Then Raze has you covered. For everyone else, this nihilistic exercise in extreme genre - I will not dignify it with the graceful word "horror", which I have made it my life's work to legitimise as describing more than mere freak shows like this - has absolutely nothing to offer but tongue-in-cheek humor that isn't funny and lousy fight choreography. 3/10
Reviewed here)


Sunday, 13 October, 2013

12:30 PM-
Monsoon Shootout (Amit Kumar, India)
A dizzying mixed bag. Some images and conceits that left me convinced that I was watching one of the most striking films of this year's festival butt right up to moments of profound, lazy tackiness, and the notion of a trio of "what if?" stories about the consequences of a policemen acting or not acting in a moment of crisis isn't always 100% honest with itself. The balance between "this is brilliant!" and "this is trite" remains favorable right until an overdetermined, needlessly twisty ending scuttles it, but on the whole, it's a satisfying experience, just not an entirely focused one. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

1:00 PM-
Raze (Josh C. Waller, USA)
Like to watch women punch each other to death? Like to watch women punch each other to death, but need some thin fig leaf of intellectual respectability about, I dunno, "empowerment" or some such bullshit that misogynists use to pretend they're being progressive? Then Raze has you covered. For everyone else, this nihilistic exercise in extreme genre - I will not dignify it with the graceful word "horror", which I have made it my life's work to legitimise as describing more than mere freak shows like this - has absolutely nothing to offer but tongue-in-cheek humor that isn't funny and lousy fight choreography. 3/10
Reviewed here)

2:15 PM-
Wałęsa: Man of Hope (Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Quite possibly the best possible outcome for such a generically pure biopic, in which a Great Man flashes back over his life. Two things, primarily, are responsible: first is that the film focuses more on Lech Wałęsa's actions than his personal drama, and since those actions were important enough on a sufficiently global scale to win the man a Nobel Peace Prize, it's as gripping as any life story you could hope for. Second, Robert Więckiewicz's performance as the title character is an eye-popping display of oversized personality and political passion at their most excitingly watchable. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

3:00 PM-
Honor Diaries (Micah Smith, Canada-UK-USA)
The threat of violence and abuse facing women in reactionary Islamic countries has a real claim on being the world's single biggest humanitarian crisis. I actively believe that, and think that any project which throws any light on that crisis is inherently valuable. But this is grabby sensationalism (if it committed no other sins, I could never forgive the film its haranguing soundtrack), and the structure of watching a room of activists congratulating each other for being in the right is hardly going to raise any consciousness or change any minds. It's propaganda for a uniquely righteous cause, but incredibly artless propaganda. 5/10
(Reviewed here)

3:15 PM-
The Blinding Sunlight (Yu Liu, China)
One could, not unreasonably, sum it up as "Bicycle Thieves in China": a three-generational family that gets by mostly through one man's illegal motorcycle taxi tries to stay in front of the unsympathetic government bureaucrats who just want to see the rules followed blindly, and it attempts to capture the real feeling of poverty in Beijing by casting non-actors. It would feel slightly monstrous not to concede that the results are compelling from a sociological standpoint, and this kind of sharply intelligent and critical political movie is never unwelcome, no matter what. But Yu's camera is rarely used to interesting effect, and let's just say that the cast puts the "non" in "non-actors". 6/10
(Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, Austria-France)
Of the four "spin-offs" created by Lanzmann out of the mountain of unused testimonials shot in the mid-'70s for his epic documentary Shoah, this comes by far the closest to matching that film's scope and weight, not least because of an exhaustive 218-minute running devoted almost solely to Lanzmann's 1975 interview with the controversial rabbi and traitor-to-some Benjamin Murmelstein. Not remotely like the collection of morbid recollections that its older sibling was, it's much more a psychological portrait and exploration of the bureaucracy of the Holocaust, and a self-examining coda to Lanzmann's career of both documenting and editorialising history, and while I might quibble with some of the newly-shot footage as being a tad indulgent, that's a laughably small complaint to make about something this rich and morally complex. 10/10
(Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
Die Welt (Alex Pitstra, Netherlands-Tunisia)
In the broad strokes, and even some of the details, we've all definitely seen this film before (idealistic, impoverished Third Worlder (Tunisia, in this case) dreams of an impossibly better life in the magical land of Europe), and there's honestly not that much in the presentation that makes this version of all versions "essential". Aesthetically, it's quite straightforward, all longish takes and slow-moving scenes and pointedly meandering development until it hits a heavily ironic final sequence with an ambivalent final shot. What pushes this one higher than the average of the forms is Abdelhamid Nawara as the central romantic, earnest and driven without necessarily begging for (or receing) our affection and admiration; and even more, an unexpectedly tart sense of humor in which the movie takes the piss out of its own seriousness in some consistently nimble ways. Nothing terribly special, but a worthy 80 minutes. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

5:00 PM-
Trucker and the Fox (Arash Lahooti, Iran)
Unexpectedly, disarmingly sweet and charming for what it is: a hobbyist experimental filmmaker and truck driver staves off depression by starting up production on his latest animal-driven narrative film, in which a crafty fox separates two donkeys in love. An unapologetically affectionate tribute to its odd but immensely pleasant subject, the film trades an awful lot on getting cheap "awwwwwws" from it audience by showing them unbelievably cute animal footage. And look, I love cute animals as much as anybody, and I thoroughly enjoyed the film in all its brevity, but I can't help but feel that there's a meatier project to be made from this exact same material. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

5:30 PM-
Illiterate (Moisés Sepúlveda, Chile)
A bombastic performance from Paulina Garcia as a proud, disagreeable illiterate woman gives this brief two-hander a lot of bite and emotional impact, but there's not a whole lot of "there" there besides. The script sacrifices drama for meaty character moments, but those aren't always strong enough, or effectively-written, to land with the impact that the film seems to think. And while Sepúlveda deserves credit for making an uncompromised debut film, his visual vocabulary needs a lot of work. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

7:00 PM-
Battle of Tabatô (João Viana, Guinea-Bissau/Portugal)
Stunningly gorgeous black and white photography serves to alleviate some of the most inscrutable excesses of this unusually symbolism-laden story of post-colonial Africa finding its identity in a combination of ancient and modern traditions. And there's probably a real question to be asked if that's something that needs to be "alleviated" at all. Still, there's a lot of cryptic arcana being flung at the screen in just a short span of time (the movie is a hair over 80 minutes), and Viana is not always in enough control of his technique to keep the film from being stiff and inhumane at points. That being said, you probably have never seen anything at all like it, and it sticks in the memory something fierce. 7/10
(Reviewed here)


Monday, 14 October, 2013

2:00 PM-
Die Welt (Alex Pitstra, Netherlands-Tunisia)
In the broad strokes, and even some of the details, we've all definitely seen this film before (idealistic, impoverished Third Worlder (Tunisia, in this case) dreams of an impossibly better life in the magical land of Europe), and there's honestly not that much in the presentation that makes this version of all versions "essential". Aesthetically, it's quite straightforward, all longish takes and slow-moving scenes and pointedly meandering development until it hits a heavily ironic final sequence with an ambivalent final shot. What pushes this one higher than the average of the forms is Abdelhamid Nawara as the central romantic, earnest and driven without necessarily begging for (or receing) our affection and admiration; and even more, an unexpectedly tart sense of humor in which the movie takes the piss out of its own seriousness in some consistently nimble ways. Nothing terribly special, but a worthy 80 minutes. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

6:15 PM-
Black South-Easter (Carey McKenzie, South Africa)
An entirely well-made and solid "good cop squares off against the system" drama, with just enough explicit post-Apartheid tension to give it more bite than the broad generic strokes might suggest is likely; so why did I find it so massively unengaging? Part of it, I fear, might be own pig-ignorant cultural blindness, but that might simply be me hoping that the film is better than it is. The problem is, for all that the story is cleanly told and smartly twisting, nothing that happens onscreen really establishes the stakes: why do we care about this cop investigagint this crime? The answer might be obvious to someone picking up on all the social cues, but for myself, I found it to be all efficient technique without a story worth the telling 6/10
Reviewed here)

8:15 PM-
The Miracle (Simon Staho, Denmark)
Turns out that a movie can be too pretty. The film's central drama is a not hugely revelatory exploration of stifling wedlock in a small, obsessively religious Danish community, and it's well enough acted and written to remain interesting despite how overworked most of the basic plotline is. But the film is so blatantly over-romanticised in every lusciously gorgeous frame that what should be more sparing in its application of grandiose emotion feels monotonously epic; every story beat is tethered to the same brand of postcard-ready photography and as a result every one starts to feel the same after a while. A tremendously great story might be able to survive this kind of one-note filmmaking, but the story is already so provisional here that the entire edifice lands up at handsome, well-meant storytelling that's neither resonant nor interesting. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

8:15 PM-
A Thousand Times Good Night (Erik Poppe, Norway)
As I described it to a friend the day I saw it: dreary bourgeois tosh. The argument that the industrialised world has done a terrible job of helping with the humanitarian crises of Africa and other developing regions certainly deserves to be made frequently and loudly, but when it's married to such easy, middleweight filmmaking that undercuts its own arguments at every blandly handsome turn, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anything of real merit is being done here. 5/10
Reviewed here)

8:20 PM-
Infiltrators (Khaled Jarrar, Palestine-UAE-Lebanon)
"Oh God," you are thinking, "another documentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict? WHAT IS LEFT TO SAY?" Not much, but at 70 minutes, Infiltrators doesn't pretend to be definitive, and it's remarkable perspective, shot right in the midst of people attempting to illegally cross the wall using junky little cameras that lend it an exhilarating patina of authenticity and intimacy. It is an urgent, grubby little thing, and that, as it turns out, is what was left to say, or at least what it takes to make one more turn with the subject totally worthwhile. 8/10
(Reviewed here)


Tuesday, 15 October, 2013

1:00 PM-
Monsoon Shootout (Amit Kumar, India)
A dizzying mixed bag. Some images and conceits that left me convinced that I was watching one of the most striking films of this year's festival butt right up to moments of profound, lazy tackiness, and the notion of a trio of "what if?" stories about the consequences of a policemen acting or not acting in a moment of crisis isn't always 100% honest with itself. The balance between "this is brilliant!" and "this is trite" remains favorable right until an overdetermined, needlessly twisty ending scuttles it, but on the whole, it's a satisfying experience, just not an entirely focused one. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

3:15 PM-
Cheap Thrills (E.L. Katz, USA)
Two major caveats about this pitch-black comedy-thriller depicting two broke guys performing increasingly degraded dares for the pleasure of two rich people: first, I really wish it wasn't so obviously aware of the existence of Funny Games. Second, it doesn't take much time at all for its political argument to come through loud and clear (the underclasses are treated as performing dogs, begging table scraps from the 1%), and from that point on, the film starts to feel somewhat repetitive and shocking for the sake of it. All in all, though, you've got to love the film's bent energy and inexhaustible creativity in inventing gross-out scenes, though I'm not where where the line dividing "cinema" from "freak show" lies here. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

5:30 PM-
Honor Diaries (Micah Smith, Canada-UK-USA)
The threat of violence and abuse facing women in reactionary Islamic countries has a real claim on being the world's single biggest humanitarian crisis. I actively believe that, and think that any project which throws any light on that crisis is inherently valuable. But this is grabby sensationalism (if it committed no other sins, I could never forgive the film its haranguing soundtrack), and the structure of watching a room of activists congratulating each other for being in the right is hardly going to raise any consciousness or change any minds. It's propaganda for a uniquely righteous cause, but incredibly artless propaganda. 5/10
(Reviewed here)

7:15 PM-
Trucker and the Fox (Arash Lahooti, Iran)
Unexpectedly, disarmingly sweet and charming for what it is: a hobbyist experimental filmmaker and truck driver staves off depression by starting up production on his latest animal-driven narrative film, in which a crafty fox separates two donkeys in love. An unapologetically affectionate tribute to its odd but immensely pleasant subject, the film trades an awful lot on getting cheap "awwwwwws" from it audience by showing them unbelievably cute animal footage. And look, I love cute animals as much as anybody, and I thoroughly enjoyed the film in all its brevity, but I can't help but feel that there's a meatier project to be made from this exact same material. 7/10
(Reviewed here)


Wednesday, 16 October, 2013

12:40 PM-
A Thousand Times Good Night (Erik Poppe, Norway)
As I described it to a friend the day I saw it: dreary bourgeois tosh. The argument that the industrialised world has done a terrible job of helping with the humanitarian crises of Africa and other developing regions certainly deserves to be made frequently and loudly, but when it's married to such easy, middleweight filmmaking that undercuts its own arguments at every blandly handsome turn, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anything of real merit is being done here. 5/10
Reviewed here)

3:20 PM-
Wałęsa: Man of Hope (Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Quite possibly the best possible outcome for such a generically pure biopic, in which a Great Man flashes back over his life. Two things, primarily, are responsible: first is that the film focuses more on Lech Wałęsa's actions than his personal drama, and since those actions were important enough on a sufficiently global scale to win the man a Nobel Peace Prize, it's as gripping as any life story you could hope for. Second, Robert Więckiewicz's performance as the title character is an eye-popping display of oversized personality and political passion at their most excitingly watchable. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

3:30 PM-
The Blinding Sunlight (Yu Liu, China)
One could, not unreasonably, sum it up as "Bicycle Thieves in China": a three-generational family that gets by mostly through one man's illegal motorcycle taxi tries to stay in front of the unsympathetic government bureaucrats who just want to see the rules followed blindly, and it attempts to capture the real feeling of poverty in Beijing by casting non-actors. It would feel slightly monstrous not to concede that the results are compelling from a sociological standpoint, and this kind of sharply intelligent and critical political movie is never unwelcome, no matter what. But Yu's camera is rarely used to interesting effect, and let's just say that the cast puts the "non" in "non-actors". 6/10
(Reviewed here)

5:30 PM-
Contracted (Eric England, USA)
Here's a thing you don't automatically expect to see at a major film festival: a so-bad-it's-good cheapie horror movie. And I am reasonably certain that Contracted is, in fact, so-bad-it's-good, and not just so bad. The story of how drunken heterosexual copulation turns a lesbian into a rotting vampire certainly seems like it thinks it's saying something interesting about sexual behaviors and identity, but the whole thing is so silly and burdened by one-note characters that any attempts to link this to actual human experience is doomed from the start. And the acting is The Room-worthy. 2/10
(Reviewed here)

8:00 PM-
Chasing Fireflies (Roberto Flores Prieto, Colombia)
Honor demands my unstinting honesty: I checked this one out primarily to fill out my slate with South American films, not because the suggestion in the festival guide of an ickle-poo cutesy story of an isolated man relearning how to be a person after a surprise visit from his daughter seemed even vaguely appealing. The joke's on me: not only is the drama executed with far more care and thought than syrupy sentiment, the film's visual style is one of the most arresting that I've seen at this year's festival, beautiful and austere, innovative in composition, and perfectly suited to keeping the emotions felt by the characters firmly away from bland warm fuzzies. The ending stumbles a hair, but it's all beautiful stuff. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

8:15 PM-
The Priest's Children (Vinko Brešan, Croatia-Serbia)
An agreeably snarky tale of a priest leading a conspiracy to ruin the condom supply of a tiny community to combat its dwindling population, the film is charming and satiric by turns, but it's hampered by two major flaws. One is that it's satiric target is a unfixed: depending on the scene, it might be a satire religious conservatism, religious hierarchy and power-hungry mini-tyrants, patriarchal control over women's bodies, or the fact that religion exists at all - and at the same time it wants us to genuinely like the priest. The other flaw is that there's basically only one gag for more than half of the running time, explored in a number of iterations that are frequently the most obvious possible joke that could be made in a given moment. It's pleasant more often than not, but really insubstantial. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

9:15 PM-
Go Goa Gone (Krishna D.K. & Raj Nidimoru, India)
You got your stoner comedy in my zombie picture! Yeah, well you got your zombie picture in my stoner comedy! Two flavors that go AMAZING together in this vigorously juvenile movie that's practically its own New Wave, so flighty but unified are the stylistic gestures and unhinged performances. It's much too funny to be an honest horror-comedy (more like a comedy with horror film monsters), but it's a pretty damn great midnight movie even so, and I count it a great regret that I didn't see it early enough to suggest to to anyone while it still had showings at CIFF. 8/10
(Reviewed here)


Thursday, 17 October, 2013

2:30 PM-
The Notebook (Szász János, Austria-France-Germany-Hungary)
Handsomely chilly-looking European films about children in wartime, especially WWII, have a shtick all their own, albeit one that tends to get waved through by critics and audiences mistaking sobriety for art; this one does manage to rise above the crowd largely because of its off-kilter fairytale atmosphere. There's nothing even vaguely realist in this fable of twin boys being hardened by wartime, which helps to take the edge off a collection of miseries that might otherwise be absurdly pessimistic, and the young actors are scary good. 7/10
Reviewed here)

5:45 PM-
Banklady (Christian Alvart, Germany)
The story of Germany's first-ever female bank robber is given magnificently glitzy treatment in this thriller-biopic, but beneath the surface level razzle-dazzle and poppy editing, there's a muddled attempt at thematic resonance. Nadeshda Brennicke is a terrific force in the main role, but the obligations laid on her to ground one woman's crime spree as a response to society's insatiable desire to depict women as sexualised visual objects is a lot for any performer to bear, and it bogs her and the movie down in intellectual feints that only resonate as long as the film remembers to foreground them. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

5:45 PM-
The Priest's Children (Vinko Brešan, Croatia-Serbia)
An agreeably snarky tale of a priest leading a conspiracy to ruin the condom supply of a tiny community to combat its dwindling population, the film is charming and satiric by turns, but it's hampered by two major flaws. One is that it's satiric target is a unfixed: depending on the scene, it might be a satire religious conservatism, religious hierarchy and power-hungry mini-tyrants, patriarchal control over women's bodies, or the fact that religion exists at all - and at the same time it wants us to genuinely like the priest. The other flaw is that there's basically only one gag for more than half of the running time, explored in a number of iterations that are frequently the most obvious possible joke that could be made in a given moment. It's pleasant more often than not, but really insubstantial. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

6:10 PM-
Of Good Report (Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, South Africa)
Intriguing black and white cinematography adds a sense of otherworldliness to this grimy little crime drama that helps leaven what might otherwise be more sordid than insightful. A painfully shy teacher begins a new job, and barely any time has passed before he's involved in an affair with one of his students; things go violently bad from there, as we find out that "shy" can just as easily be a cover for "psychotically obsessive and incapable of dealing with women as people". The best thing about the film is the way that this quiet, nice man is revealed to be an unfathomable monster right before our eyes, without ever becoming less quiet, or less nice; the film errs on the side of cheap production, but it packs a wallop. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Le Week-End (Roger Michell, UK)
"Welcome back, what the hell happened to you?" prizes all around for director Michell, screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, and star Jim Broadbent, none of whom have been as good in a long while as they are in this piercing, pragmatic story of two old married finding that they haven't been able to stand each other for quite some time. Little-regarded-in-the-US Lindsay Duncan is astounding as Broadbent's resentful wife; only a regrettable third act imbalanced by Jeff Goldblum's weird performance as a former colleague keeps this from being a modern classic of the evergreen "dying marriage" genre. 7/10

10:30 PM-
Cheap Thrills (E.L. Katz, USA)
Two major caveats about this pitch-black comedy-thriller depicting two broke guys performing increasingly degraded dares for the pleasure of two rich people: first, I really wish it wasn't so obviously aware of the existence of Funny Games. Second, it doesn't take much time at all for its political argument to come through loud and clear (the underclasses are treated as performing dogs, begging table scraps from the 1%), and from that point on, the film starts to feel somewhat repetitive and shocking for the sake of it. All in all, though, you've got to love the film's bent energy and inexhaustible creativity in inventing gross-out scenes, though I'm not where where the line dividing "cinema" from "freak show" lies here. 7/10
(Reviewed here)


Friday, 18 October, 2013

1:00 PM-
Black South-Easter (Carey McKenzie, South Africa)
An entirely well-made and solid "good cop squares off against the system" drama, with just enough explicit post-Apartheid tension to give it more bite than the broad generic strokes might suggest is likely; so why did I find it so massively unengaging? Part of it, I fear, might be own pig-ignorant cultural blindness, but that might simply be me hoping that the film is better than it is. The problem is, for all that the story is cleanly told and smartly twisting, nothing that happens onscreen really establishes the stakes: why do we care about this cop investigagint this crime? The answer might be obvious to someone picking up on all the social cues, but for myself, I found it to be all efficient technique without a story worth the telling 6/10
Reviewed here)

2:00 PM-
La Paz (Santiago Loza, Argentina)
Recklessly dancing around the line that separates "elliptical, intuitive character building in the absence of stark drama" from "glacial pacing with a blank protagonist to whom nothing fucking happens", Loza's film courts the dismissive use of the word "pretentious" more than anything else I've seen at CIFF this year. In the end, I think he ends up on the right side of the ledger; the main character's traumatised psychology deserves the kind of tentative, slantwise exploration that the film grants it, and as his feelings come into focus in the second half and begin to fuel a more incident-filled plot, it's much easier to embrace what the movie is trying to do, even if the movie refuses to embrace you back. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

5:30 PM-
Chasing Fireflies (Roberto Flores Prieto, Colombia)
Honor demands my unstinting honesty: I checked this one out primarily to fill out my slate with South American films, not because the suggestion in the festival guide of an ickle-poo cutesy story of an isolated man relearning how to be a person after a surprise visit from his daughter seemed even vaguely appealing. The joke's on me: not only is the drama executed with far more care and thought than syrupy sentiment, the film's visual style is one of the most arresting that I've seen at this year's festival, beautiful and austere, innovative in composition, and perfectly suited to keeping the emotions felt by the characters firmly away from bland warm fuzzies. The ending stumbles a hair, but it's all beautiful stuff. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

5:45 PM-
The Notebook (Szász János, Austria-France-Germany-Hungary)
Handsomely chilly-looking European films about children in wartime, especially WWII, have a shtick all their own, albeit one that tends to get waved through by critics and audiences mistaking sobriety for art; this one does manage to rise above the crowd largely because of its off-kilter fairytale atmosphere. There's nothing even vaguely realist in this fable of twin boys being hardened by wartime, which helps to take the edge off a collection of miseries that might otherwise be absurdly pessimistic, and the young actors are scary good. 7/10
Reviewed here)

6:00 PM-
Shorts: Animation - Cel Division
An unusually strong collection of films, with only one outright clinker and maybe two more that I'd consign to the "primarily of interest to animation buffs only" ghetto. There's probably not a sold 10/10 masterpiece the lot, but I'd say that Marilyn Myller and The Bungled Child are each worth the price of admission all on their own.
(Reviewed here)

7:00 PM-
The German Doctor (Lucía Puenzo, Argentina-France-Norway-Spain)
There's nothing absolutely wrong, and many things right, with this historically derived family drama about an Argentine clan crossing paths with one of the greatest monsters of the 20th Century. Except that with all it ominous shots of medical sketches of dissected wombs and creepy pedophilic stares and walls of eyeless doll skulls, the movie keeps promising that it's literally just seconds away from erupting into geysers of Cronenbergian horror, and it always remains steadfastly tasteful and serious. That's my problem more than the film's of course; what is the film's problem is its constant habit of foreshadowing plot developments to make sure that even the least-attentive viewer will be miles ahead of the story, free to bask in amazement at the weirdly melodramatic use of Nazis. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Imbabazi: The Pardon (Joël Karekezi, Rwanda)
There will probably never come a point where stories about the Rwanda genocide will be unnecessary, not while the rest of the world remains so comfortable about not caring about then or since. Still, we have enough of these now that a film needs to be more than just "about" that period, and this story of a Hutu man swept up nationalism to betray his Tutsi friend, and the agonising reacquaintence between the men fifteen years later, is too hectically paced at just 73 minutes, with too little time setting up the characters as more than stock figures in a tragedy, for anything to register beyond the level of "sad stuff happens, isn't that sad?" 5/10
(Reviewed here)

10:30 PM-
Go Goa Gone (Krishna D.K. & Raj Nidimoru, India)
You got your stoner comedy in my zombie picture! Yeah, well you got your zombie picture in my stoner comedy! Two flavors that go AMAZING together in this vigorously juvenile movie that's practically its own New Wave, so flighty but unified are the stylistic gestures and unhinged performances. It's much too funny to be an honest horror-comedy (more like a comedy with horror film monsters), but it's a pretty damn great midnight movie even so, and I count it a great regret that I didn't see it early enough to suggest to to anyone while it still had showings at CIFF. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

11:00 PM-
Shorts: Midnight Mayhem - Night Terrors
Too broad to call it the "horror" short film slate, this is more of the adults only/fucked-up shit program. I've only been able to see five of the eight films in the program, so I shouldn't really speak about the whole thing. I will say that three of those five are pretty terrific flights of visual fancy, one of them with a few genuinely freakish images. Only one of the films was any kind of grind to get through, though it was also the longest.
(Reviewed here)


Saturday, 19 October, 2013

11:45 AM-
Chasing Fireflies (Roberto Flores Prieto, Colombia)
Honor demands my unstinting honesty: I checked this one out primarily to fill out my slate with South American films, not because the suggestion in the festival guide of an ickle-poo cutesy story of an isolated man relearning how to be a person after a surprise visit from his daughter seemed even vaguely appealing. The joke's on me: not only is the drama executed with far more care and thought than syrupy sentiment, the film's visual style is one of the most arresting that I've seen at this year's festival, beautiful and austere, innovative in composition, and perfectly suited to keeping the emotions felt by the characters firmly away from bland warm fuzzies. The ending stumbles a hair, but it's all beautiful stuff. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

4:15 PM-
Mothers (Xu Hui-jing, China)
An intimately-scaled documentary about how the draconian attempts to enforce China's One Child policies affects one small village and the female bureaucrat charged with sterilising as many local women as she can get her hands on. The whole thing, obviously a singularly personal and important work for the director, has some very lovely moments throughout, but it's surprisingly unfocused for something that's just 68 minutes long; where Xu should be honing his arguments and limiting his sprawl, he indulges in parentheticals and more subjects than he can balance. Instead of the humanistic takedown of a broken system, it ends up being a sweet-hearted meander that never quite assumes a complete shape. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

4:15 PM-
Of Good Report (Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, South Africa)
Intriguing black and white cinematography adds a sense of otherworldliness to this grimy little crime drama that helps leaven what might otherwise be more sordid than insightful. A painfully shy teacher begins a new job, and barely any time has passed before he's involved in an affair with one of his students; things go violently bad from there, as we find out that "shy" can just as easily be a cover for "psychotically obsessive and incapable of dealing with women as people". The best thing about the film is the way that this quiet, nice man is revealed to be an unfathomable monster right before our eyes, without ever becoming less quiet, or less nice; the film errs on the side of cheap production, but it packs a wallop. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

5:30 PM-
Le Week-End (Roger Michell, UK)
"Welcome back, what the hell happened to you?" prizes all around for director Michell, screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, and star Jim Broadbent, none of whom have been as good in a long while as they are in this piercing, pragmatic story of two old married finding that they haven't been able to stand each other for quite some time. Little-regarded-in-the-US Lindsay Duncan is astounding as Broadbent's resentful wife; only a regrettable third act imbalanced by Jeff Goldblum's weird performance as a former colleague keeps this from being a modern classic of the evergreen "dying marriage" genre. 7/10

6:15 PM-
The Notebook (Szász János, Austria-France-Germany-Hungary)
Handsomely chilly-looking European films about children in wartime, especially WWII, have a shtick all their own, albeit one that tends to get waved through by critics and audiences mistaking sobriety for art; this one does manage to rise above the crowd largely because of its off-kilter fairytale atmosphere. There's nothing even vaguely realist in this fable of twin boys being hardened by wartime, which helps to take the edge off a collection of miseries that might otherwise be absurdly pessimistic, and the young actors are scary good. 7/10
Reviewed here)

7:45 PM-
The German Doctor (Lucía Puenzo, Argentina-France-Norway-Spain)
There's nothing absolutely wrong, and many things right, with this historically derived family drama about an Argentine clan crossing paths with one of the greatest monsters of the 20th Century. Except that with all it ominous shots of medical sketches of dissected wombs and creepy pedophilic stares and walls of eyeless doll skulls, the movie keeps promising that it's literally just seconds away from erupting into geysers of Cronenbergian horror, and it always remains steadfastly tasteful and serious. That's my problem more than the film's of course; what is the film's problem is its constant habit of foreshadowing plot developments to make sure that even the least-attentive viewer will be miles ahead of the story, free to bask in amazement at the weirdly melodramatic use of Nazis. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
H4 (Paul Quinn, USA)
My friend put it perfectly: "I love the idea. The way they did it..." The idea, for the record, is an adaptation of the two parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV set in south-central Los Angeles, and it's so close to being a good marriage: but neither the Shakespeare nor the African-American social issues survive entirely intact. The real problem, though, is the inordinately cheap staging (some of the set choices simply do not work at all) and crude cinematography. It's mostly well-acted, though, with Harry Lennix (for whom this has been a passion project) a clear stand-out, and the concept is so fascinating that it manages to be arresting cinema almost despite itself. I should point out that the version screened at CIFF was very possibly not picture-locked; there are editing problems that go much deeper than "that wasn't edited well" into "that wasn't edited at all". 7/10
(Reviewed here)

9:30 PM-
Burn It Up Djassa (Lonesome Solo, France-Ivory Coast)
A microscopically-budgeted, rushed production has not prevented this anecdotal story of life in the ghetto from being unexpectedly polished beneath its obvious DIY technique, nor amateur lead Abdoul Karim Konaté from giving a captivating, lively performance as a headstrong raconteur. Less a story than a blast of freewheeling storytelling, the 70-minute film hasn't left itself much space to actually develop its ideas or emotions beyond their most immediate expression, but that tends to suit the protagonist's attitude rather than limit the film in any way, and its presentation of a grimy underclass is so direct and potent that even as nothing more than social studies document, it's incredibly difficult to turn away for the brief time that the movie needs to make itself felt. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

9:30 PM-
Heli (Amat Escalante, Mexico)
This is, in large part, a gimmick movie: the whole thing rests for its impact on a two-minute passage around the halfway mark, where an apparently shapeless meander through picturesque Mexican poverty suddenly clicks into focus, so abruptly and violently that I literally bolted upright. The movie falls apart if that moment doesn't take, but it fortunately does so with aplomb, fully justifying a Cannes Best Director win and everything else. The unrelievedly bleak places that the film goes make it a virtually impossible recommendation for anyone without a cast-iron tolerance for screen violence, but the depiction of unescapable brutality both physical and emotional suggests the work of Cormac McCarthy or Ernest Hemingway at their most unforgiving, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. 9/10
(Reviewed here)

11:00 PM-
Dracula 3D (Dario Argento, Italy-France-Spain)
I haven't watched each and every late-period Argento film, so I'm not one to say if this is his worst movie all time. I hope it is, though. It's alreaydy too much to think of a once-great horror visionary reach these depths, let alone lower ones. It's a goddamn goofy and ill-executed, shlocky combination of a watery Thomas Kretschmann as the least charismatic count in a legitimate adaptation of the book that I've ever seen, hallucinatory CGI mantises, and the most inarticulate, head-lolling performance of Asia Argento's career. Oh well, at least the music is nice. 3/10
(Reviewed here)


Sunday, 20 October, 2013

11:45 AM-
The Miracle (Simon Staho, Denmark)
Turns out that a movie can be too pretty. The film's central drama is a not hugely revelatory exploration of stifling wedlock in a small, obsessively religious Danish community, and it's well enough acted and written to remain interesting despite how overworked most of the basic plotline is. But the film is so blatantly over-romanticised in every lusciously gorgeous frame that what should be more sparing in its application of grandiose emotion feels monotonously epic; every story beat is tethered to the same brand of postcard-ready photography and as a result every one starts to feel the same after a while. A tremendously great story might be able to survive this kind of one-note filmmaking, but the story is already so provisional here that the entire edifice lands up at handsome, well-meant storytelling that's neither resonant nor interesting. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

1:30 PM-
Shorts: Animation - Cel Division
An unusually strong collection of films, with only one outright clinker and maybe two more that I'd consign to the "primarily of interest to animation buffs only" ghetto. There's probably not a sold 10/10 masterpiece the lot, but I'd say that Marilyn Myller and The Bungled Child are each worth the price of admission all on their own.
(Reviewed here)

2:00 PM-
H4 (Paul Quinn, USA)
My friend put it perfectly: "I love the idea. The way they did it..." The idea, for the record, is an adaptation of the two parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV set in south-central Los Angeles, and it's so close to being a good marriage: but neither the Shakespeare nor the African-American social issues survive entirely intact. The real problem, though, is the inordinately cheap staging (some of the set choices simply do not work at all) and crude cinematography. It's mostly well-acted, though, with Harry Lennix (for whom this has been a passion project) a clear stand-out, and the concept is so fascinating that it manages to be arresting cinema almost despite itself. I should point out that the version screened at CIFF was very possibly not picture-locked; there are editing problems that go much deeper than "that wasn't edited well" into "that wasn't edited at all". 7/10
(Reviewed here)

2:45 PM-
Yema (Djamila Sahraoui, Algeria-France)
The languid, almost totally silent opening half is fine stuff, by any yardstick: focused with maddening intensity on the steady actions of a stern-willed, pathos-tinged aging woman in an isolated patch of dry land in an unspecified Arabic-speaking country. But it's the second half, when all of the hints and moments that we've heard start to coalesce into a story of family ties broken by violence and rebellion that the film transcends its somewhat been-there, done-that art house aesthetic and becomes a deeply satisfying domestic tragedy. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

3:45 PM-
Banklady (Christian Alvart, Germany)
The story of Germany's first-ever female bank robber is given magnificently glitzy treatment in this thriller-biopic, but beneath the surface level razzle-dazzle and poppy editing, there's a muddled attempt at thematic resonance. Nadeshda Brennicke is a terrific force in the main role, but the obligations laid on her to ground one woman's crime spree as a response to society's insatiable desire to depict women as sexualised visual objects is a lot for any performer to bear, and it bogs her and the movie down in intellectual feints that only resonate as long as the film remembers to foreground them. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
The circumstances of Panahi's life (banned by the Iranian government from directing movies) obviously constrain the sort of movies he's able to smuggle out into the world, and I admire how much he was able to make this retread of the themes in the diary film This Is Not a Film feel like a different movie and not just a companion piece. It's still a little bit of a strain; the back half takes a turn for metacinema better suited to the director's countryman Abbas Kiarostami, fitting oddly with Panahi's own realism-shaded style and the cries of "self-indulgent!" dogging the film since its Berlin premiere are hard to disprove. Still, it's far more essential and telling than a great many "better" films. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
Imbabazi: The Pardon (Joël Karekezi, Rwanda)
There will probably never come a point where stories about the Rwanda genocide will be unnecessary, not while the rest of the world remains so comfortable about not caring about then or since. Still, we have enough of these now that a film needs to be more than just "about" that period, and this story of a Hutu man swept up nationalism to betray his Tutsi friend, and the agonising reacquaintence between the men fifteen years later, is too hectically paced at just 73 minutes, with too little time setting up the characters as more than stock figures in a tragedy, for anything to register beyond the level of "sad stuff happens, isn't that sad?" 5/10
(Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
La Paz (Santiago Loza, Argentina)
Recklessly dancing around the line that separates "elliptical, intuitive character building in the absence of stark drama" from "glacial pacing with a blank protagonist to whom nothing fucking happens", Loza's film courts the dismissive use of the word "pretentious" more than anything else I've seen at CIFF this year. In the end, I think he ends up on the right side of the ledger; the main character's traumatised psychology deserves the kind of tentative, slantwise exploration that the film grants it, and as his feelings come into focus in the second half and begin to fuel a more incident-filled plot, it's much easier to embrace what the movie is trying to do, even if the movie refuses to embrace you back. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

6:30 PM-
At Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman, USA)
Four gloriously comprehensive hours exploring the life of a major American university over the course of a few months. It's not possible to describe this movie and make it sound fun, but the detail and wide range of the subjects that stumble across Wiseman's camera make it an invaluable document of people studying and working in the specific world of higher education. Better yet, the subtle ways in which the film suggests the impact of the 2008 financial crisis of that world make it a great cross-section of life in the 21st Century as a whole. 9/10

6:30 PM-
Of Good Report (Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, South Africa)
Intriguing black and white cinematography adds a sense of otherworldliness to this grimy little crime drama that helps leaven what might otherwise be more sordid than insightful. A painfully shy teacher begins a new job, and barely any time has passed before he's involved in an affair with one of his students; things go violently bad from there, as we find out that "shy" can just as easily be a cover for "psychotically obsessive and incapable of dealing with women as people". The best thing about the film is the way that this quiet, nice man is revealed to be an unfathomable monster right before our eyes, without ever becoming less quiet, or less nice; the film errs on the side of cheap production, but it packs a wallop. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

9:00 PM-
Cheap Thrills (E.L. Katz, USA)
Two major caveats about this pitch-black comedy-thriller depicting two broke guys performing increasingly degraded dares for the pleasure of two rich people: first, I really wish it wasn't so obviously aware of the existence of Funny Games. Second, it doesn't take much time at all for its political argument to come through loud and clear (the underclasses are treated as performing dogs, begging table scraps from the 1%), and from that point on, the film starts to feel somewhat repetitive and shocking for the sake of it. All in all, though, you've got to love the film's bent energy and inexhaustible creativity in inventing gross-out scenes, though I'm not where where the line dividing "cinema" from "freak show" lies here. 7/10
(Reviewed here)


Monday, 21 October, 2013

2:00 PM-
Imbabazi: The Pardon (Joël Karekezi, Rwanda)
There will probably never come a point where stories about the Rwanda genocide will be unnecessary, not while the rest of the world remains so comfortable about not caring about then or since. Still, we have enough of these now that a film needs to be more than just "about" that period, and this story of a Hutu man swept up nationalism to betray his Tutsi friend, and the agonising reacquaintence between the men fifteen years later, is too hectically paced at just 73 minutes, with too little time setting up the characters as more than stock figures in a tragedy, for anything to register beyond the level of "sad stuff happens, isn't that sad?" 5/10
(Reviewed here)

3:00 PM-
Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam, Belgium)
If you're paying absurdly close attention to every last detail, you puzzle out what "actually" happens, but even without that, this is a terrific thriller-cum-fairy tale-cum-social satire. A strange bearded man on the run from a priest with an assault rifle begs for help at a very poshly-appointed house deep in the woods; when it is granted, this triggers the beginning of a long, weird chain of events in which he and his colleagues muddle with the life of their bourgeois victims in very odd, unnerving ways. Leavened with a very bizarre sense of humor that keeps it stitched together even when the plot is at its most cryptic, this is the very definition of a film that's not for everybody, but the sense of standing on the edge of a cliff, leaning forward that comes from not knowing where it's going is giddily exciting. 9/10
(Reviewed here)

5:30 PM-
Soul (Chung Mong-hong, Taiwan)
Some of the editing, primarily in the very first scene, is so eager to foreground the movie's art-film credentials that it borders on parody, but despite that and a few other flickers of too much self-seriousness, this is a pretty terrific thing: a psychological thriller that delves more heavily into the "psychology" half of that equation than almost any movie of this sort. A young man who may be possessed by a demon or may just be suffering from a profound psychological dysfunction is imprisoned by his father and the two of them engage in a mesmerising dance of wills, up until a twist ending that comes early enough for the movie to actually spend some time exploring its ramifications. A freaky but deeply nuanced family drama, and it's still better horror than anything in the nominal "horror" category at CIFF. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

6:00 PM-
Stop-Over (Kaveh Bakhtiari, France-Switzerland)
A devastatingly intimate study of illegal immigrants from the Middle East cooling their heels in Greece while trying to make it further into Europe, Bakhtiari's sprawling personal diary makes up in earnest, in-your-face humanity what it undeniably lacks in sophisticated filmmaking technique. The individual scenes are all fascinating, but the film comes together roughly and without nearly enough context for how events fit together with the greater world outside. Still, as a literal document of a culture on the edges, it's invaluable, and deeply touching. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

7:00 PM-
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney, UK)
The satire is a little bit blunted in comparison with the various TV incarnations of Steve Coogan's fatuous, self-adoring media personality; the comedy, however, is not. Outside of a third act that starts to bog down in plot (the one point where the difference between TV and movies works against Partridge's big screen debut), this is a blisteringly fast, consistently hilarious story of one man's attempt to use a hostage crisis to improve his career; the only concession to making it "likable" to a broader audience is by throwing a few supporting characters in there even more openly awful than the protagonist. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

8:00 PM-
Mothers (Xu Hui-jing, China)
An intimately-scaled documentary about how the draconian attempts to enforce China's One Child policies affects one small village and the female bureaucrat charged with sterilising as many local women as she can get her hands on. The whole thing, obviously a singularly personal and important work for the director, has some very lovely moments throughout, but it's surprisingly unfocused for something that's just 68 minutes long; where Xu should be honing his arguments and limiting his sprawl, he indulges in parentheticals and more subjects than he can balance. Instead of the humanistic takedown of a broken system, it ends up being a sweet-hearted meander that never quite assumes a complete shape. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Heli (Amat Escalante, Mexico)
This is, in large part, a gimmick movie: the whole thing rests for its impact on a two-minute passage around the halfway mark, where an apparently shapeless meander through picturesque Mexican poverty suddenly clicks into focus, so abruptly and violently that I literally bolted upright. The movie falls apart if that moment doesn't take, but it fortunately does so with aplomb, fully justifying a Cannes Best Director win and everything else. The unrelievedly bleak places that the film goes make it a virtually impossible recommendation for anyone without a cast-iron tolerance for screen violence, but the depiction of unescapable brutality both physical and emotional suggests the work of Cormac McCarthy or Ernest Hemingway at their most unforgiving, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. 9/10
(Reviewed here)

8:45 PM-
Burn It Up Djassa (Lonesome Solo, France-Ivory Coast)
A microscopically-budgeted, rushed production has not prevented this anecdotal story of life in the ghetto from being unexpectedly polished beneath its obvious DIY technique, nor amateur lead Abdoul Karim Konaté from giving a captivating, lively performance as a headstrong raconteur. Less a story than a blast of freewheeling storytelling, the 70-minute film hasn't left itself much space to actually develop its ideas or emotions beyond their most immediate expression, but that tends to suit the protagonist's attitude rather than limit the film in any way, and its presentation of a grimy underclass is so direct and potent that even as nothing more than social studies document, it's incredibly difficult to turn away for the brief time that the movie needs to make itself felt. 8/10
(Reviewed here)


Tuesday, 22 October, 2013

1:00 PM-
Illiterate (Moisés Sepúlveda, Chile)
A bombastic performance from Paulina Garcia as a proud, disagreeable illiterate woman gives this brief two-hander a lot of bite and emotional impact, but there's not a whole lot of "there" there besides. The script sacrifices drama for meaty character moments, but those aren't always strong enough, or effectively-written, to land with the impact that the film seems to think. And while Sepúlveda deserves credit for making an uncompromised debut film, his visual vocabulary needs a lot of work. 6/10
(Reviewed here)

3:00 PM-
Banklady (Christian Alvart, Germany)
The story of Germany's first-ever female bank robber is given magnificently glitzy treatment in this thriller-biopic, but beneath the surface level razzle-dazzle and poppy editing, there's a muddled attempt at thematic resonance. Nadeshda Brennicke is a terrific force in the main role, but the obligations laid on her to ground one woman's crime spree as a response to society's insatiable desire to depict women as sexualised visual objects is a lot for any performer to bear, and it bogs her and the movie down in intellectual feints that only resonate as long as the film remembers to foreground them. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

5:45 PM-
Yema (Djamila Sahraoui, Algeria-France)
The languid, almost totally silent opening half is fine stuff, by any yardstick: focused with maddening intensity on the steady actions of a stern-willed, pathos-tinged aging woman in an isolated patch of dry land in an unspecified Arabic-speaking country. But it's the second half, when all of the hints and moments that we've heard start to coalesce into a story of family ties broken by violence and rebellion that the film transcends its somewhat been-there, done-that art house aesthetic and becomes a deeply satisfying domestic tragedy. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

8:00 PM-
La Paz (Santiago Loza, Argentina)
Recklessly dancing around the line that separates "elliptical, intuitive character building in the absence of stark drama" from "glacial pacing with a blank protagonist to whom nothing fucking happens", Loza's film courts the dismissive use of the word "pretentious" more than anything else I've seen at CIFF this year. In the end, I think he ends up on the right side of the ledger; the main character's traumatised psychology deserves the kind of tentative, slantwise exploration that the film grants it, and as his feelings come into focus in the second half and begin to fuel a more incident-filled plot, it's much easier to embrace what the movie is trying to do, even if the movie refuses to embrace you back. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

8:15 PM-
Closed Curtain (Jafar Panahi, Iran)
The circumstances of Panahi's life (banned by the Iranian government from directing movies) obviously constrain the sort of movies he's able to smuggle out into the world, and I admire how much he was able to make this retread of the themes in the diary film This Is Not a Film feel like a different movie and not just a companion piece. It's still a little bit of a strain; the back half takes a turn for metacinema better suited to the director's countryman Abbas Kiarostami, fitting oddly with Panahi's own realism-shaded style and the cries of "self-indulgent!" dogging the film since its Berlin premiere are hard to disprove. Still, it's far more essential and telling than a great many "better" films. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Purgatorio (Rodrigo Reyes, Mexico-USA)
Of all the immigration documentaries I saw at CIFF this year, this is easily the most ambitious, beautiful, rhetorically daring, and frequently the most overreaching and self-inflating. But all in all, this is gorgeous and challenging, less about the US-Mexico border and the travails therein than the concept of "The Border" to begin with. A distinctive lack of context for any of the people or places scene reinforce the idea of something mythic and poetic built into the title, and Reyes's lack of grandstanding is wonderful, though his occasional reliance on cheap pathos is not. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

8:45 PM-
Soul (Chung Mong-hong, Taiwan)
Some of the editing, primarily in the very first scene, is so eager to foreground the movie's art-film credentials that it borders on parody, but despite that and a few other flickers of too much self-seriousness, this is a pretty terrific thing: a psychological thriller that delves more heavily into the "psychology" half of that equation than almost any movie of this sort. A young man who may be possessed by a demon or may just be suffering from a profound psychological dysfunction is imprisoned by his father and the two of them engage in a mesmerising dance of wills, up until a twist ending that comes early enough for the movie to actually spend some time exploring its ramifications. A freaky but deeply nuanced family drama, and it's still better horror than anything in the nominal "horror" category at CIFF. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

Wednesday, 23 October, 2013

1:00 PM-
Soul (Chung Mong-hong, Taiwan)
Some of the editing, primarily in the very first scene, is so eager to foreground the movie's art-film credentials that it borders on parody, but despite that and a few other flickers of too much self-seriousness, this is a pretty terrific thing: a psychological thriller that delves more heavily into the "psychology" half of that equation than almost any movie of this sort. A young man who may be possessed by a demon or may just be suffering from a profound psychological dysfunction is imprisoned by his father and the two of them engage in a mesmerising dance of wills, up until a twist ending that comes early enough for the movie to actually spend some time exploring its ramifications. A freaky but deeply nuanced family drama, and it's still better horror than anything in the nominal "horror" category at CIFF. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

2:15 PM-
Trucker and the Fox (Arash Lahooti, Iran)
Best of the Festival: Gold Hugo for Best Documentary
Unexpectedly, disarmingly sweet and charming for what it is: a hobbyist experimental filmmaker and truck driver staves off depression by starting up production on his latest animal-driven narrative film, in which a crafty fox separates two donkeys in love. An unapologetically affectionate tribute to its odd but immensely pleasant subject, the film trades an awful lot on getting cheap "awwwwwws" from it audience by showing them unbelievably cute animal footage. And look, I love cute animals as much as anybody, and I thoroughly enjoyed the film in all its brevity, but I can't help but feel that there's a meatier project to be made from this exact same material. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

6:00 PM-
A Thousand Times Good Night (Erik Poppe, Norway)
Best of the Festival: Founder's Award
As I described it to a friend the day I saw it: dreary bourgeois tosh. The argument that the industrialised world has done a terrible job of helping with the humanitarian crises of Africa and other developing regions certainly deserves to be made frequently and loudly, but when it's married to such easy, middleweight filmmaking that undercuts its own arguments at every blandly handsome turn, it's hard to claim with a straight face that anything of real merit is being done here. 5/10
Reviewed here)

6:30 PM-
Purgatorio (Rodrigo Reyes, Mexico-USA)
Of all the immigration documentaries I saw at CIFF this year, this is easily the most ambitious, beautiful, rhetorically daring, and frequently the most overreaching and self-inflating. But all in all, this is gorgeous and challenging, less about the US-Mexico border and the travails therein than the concept of "The Border" to begin with. A distinctive lack of context for any of the people or places scene reinforce the idea of something mythic and poetic built into the title, and Reyes's lack of grandstanding is wonderful, though his occasional reliance on cheap pathos is not. 8/10
(Reviewed here)

6:30 PM-
Stop-Over (Kaveh Bakhtiari, France-Switzerland)
A devastatingly intimate study of illegal immigrants from the Middle East cooling their heels in Greece while trying to make it further into Europe, Bakhtiari's sprawling personal diary makes up in earnest, in-your-face humanity what it undeniably lacks in sophisticated filmmaking technique. The individual scenes are all fascinating, but the film comes together roughly and without nearly enough context for how events fit together with the greater world outside. Still, as a literal document of a culture on the edges, it's invaluable, and deeply touching. 7/10
(Reviewed here)

8:15 PM-
Borgman (Alex van Warmerdam, Belgium)
If you're paying absurdly close attention to every last detail, you puzzle out what "actually" happens, but even without that, this is a terrific thriller-cum-fairy tale-cum-social satire. A strange bearded man on the run from a priest with an assault rifle begs for help at a very poshly-appointed house deep in the woods; when it is granted, this triggers the beginning of a long, weird chain of events in which he and his colleagues muddle with the life of their bourgeois victims in very odd, unnerving ways. Leavened with a very bizarre sense of humor that keeps it stitched together even when the plot is at its most cryptic, this is the very definition of a film that's not for everybody, but the sense of standing on the edge of a cliff, leaning forward that comes from not knowing where it's going is giddily exciting. 9/10
(Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Wałęsa: Man of Hope (Andrzej Wajda, Poland)
Best of the Festival: Silver Hugo for Best Actor
Quite possibly the best possible outcome for such a generically pure biopic, in which a Great Man flashes back over his life. Two things, primarily, are responsible: first is that the film focuses more on Lech Wałęsa's actions than his personal drama, and since those actions were important enough on a sufficiently global scale to win the man a Nobel Peace Prize, it's as gripping as any life story you could hope for. Second, Robert Więckiewicz's performance as the title character is an eye-popping display of oversized personality and political passion at their most excitingly watchable. 8/10
(Reviewed here)