Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ****

The name Roberto Rossellini generally brings to mind films such as Open City and Paisan, along with the phrase Italian neo-realism. Like most world-class filmmakers, Rossellini is more profound and complex than any label might indicate, as the recent Lionsgate release of two of his lesser-known works (to Americans) should make clear. One of these, Era Notte a Roma (Escape By Night), from 1960, is an interesting example of Rossellini's neo-realist style at work on a tale of Italy toward the end of WWII's German occupation. I've reviewed Notte in greater length on my blog TrustMovies, but it is the second – and earlier (1954) – movie, Dov' e La Libertà (Where Is Freedom)?, that most surprises.

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Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog's gorgeous documentary about the people (and creatures) who live at least some of the year on (and under) Antarctica, may not have the shock and drive of his Grizzly Man, but it's a poignant and even haunting work nonetheless. The film was created for the National Science Foundation, and was short around the NSF's headquarters at the McMurdo Station; home to eleven hundred people, it's the one community the continent has. Encounters is a bit episodic in structure as Herzog journeys around the area with the marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, truck drivers and other people into this surreal and often absurd world.

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Reviewer: Walker Koppelman-Brown
Rating (out of 5): ***½

What We Do is Secret chronicles the story of the seminal Los Angeles punk rock band The Germs. With a style that combines traditional narrative with documentary qualities, the film delivers an intimate look inside the punk rock scene in the late seventies. Those without a deep knowledge of that world will find themselves illuminated, able to see the beauty in its darkness.

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Two of our regular reviewers were both so excited by the release of the Boetticher set that we're taking the unusual course of having them both give their own takes on it. This week, we bring you Jeffrey Anderson's.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

There's little question that the release of the five films comprising the Budd Boetticher Collection is arguably the DVD event of the year. I've been waiting many years to see some of these films, and I'm absolutely thrilled and honored to have had the chance, at last.

Budd Boetticher (1916-2001) was a rare breed in Hollywood. At some point early in his life he drifted south and studied bullfighting, which won him a job as a consultant on a bullfighting picture. From there, he was assigned to direct a series of "B" pictures, then graduated to his own bullfighting picture, the Oscar-nominated Bullfighter and the Lady (1951). But undoubtedly his greatest achievement is this series of seven low-budget, quickly-made Westerns starring Randolph Scott and produced by Harry Joe Brown (hence the nickname the "Ranown" Cycle). These films have an intense, economic artistry almost otherwise unseen in any other films, then or since. I could go on about his flawless use of actors, compositions, editing, music and cinematographers, but that's probably fodder for an entire book. It's telling that we can count Clint Eastwood, Taylor Hackford, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese among his fans. Yet some might argue that Boetticher is just part of the reason for the films' success (and they were very financially successful), given that writer Burt Kennedy, Scott and Brown were also part of the equation, and that none of these artists did anything nearly as interesting on their own. The first film in the cycle, Seven Men from Now (1956), was produced at Paramount and is already available on an essential DVD. The other film, Westbound (1959), was produced at Warner Bros. and has never been released on video.

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

For film fans looking for more of Daniel Craig, unclothed especially, the opening scene of Flashbacks of a Fool (dreadfully pretentious title!) should keep you happy, as the menage-a-trois shown is full of fire-lighted flesh and frisky lovemaking. But then it’s the morning after and the angst sets in. Writer/director Baillie Walsh's film is actually one large flashback that covers the character played by Craig in late adolescence, as he discovers sex, love and dancing, all of which leads him to become the has-been star we see at the film’s beginning. How his stardom happened, what it entailed and who this character is – these go completely unremarked upon, which makes the movie seem like a novel that’s been hacked to half-length and then given a TV-level treatment.

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

Australian director Gillian Armstrong has had an interesting career in which she's tackled various genres (musical: Starstruck; wartime: Charlotte Gray; prison break/love story: Mrs Soffel; family dramas: High Tide, The Last Days of Chez Nous; classic adaptation: Little Women); all, except the latter classic, handled in her own interestingly off-kilter manner. Yet Armstrong has not made as immense an impression since her first big film – My Brilliant Career, which helped launch the international careers (one brilliant, the other very good) of Judy Davis and Sam Neill.

Here comes this talented director again, this time with a rather lavishly budgeted story that tracks the nearing of the end of Harry Houdini's career and the further burnishing of his legend. Death Defying Acts offers Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the lead roles and Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) and Timothy Spall lending their usual fine support, so you can’t fault the film for lack of star presence. It is generally quite beautiful to look at and written (by Tony Grisoni and Brian Ward) and directed with enough flair to keep you going.

What is finally missing -- and becomes apparent early on -- is a strong enough central concept. Instead it gives us a mash-up of the usual hooey about spiritualism and prescience (is it real or is it not?), Freudian mother fixation and a so-so love story. Still, as time-wasters go, this one has its moments, many of which are visual treats. Pearce is interesting, as always (though one continues to wish that he will eventually again find that magical combo: a good role in a good movie), while Zeta-Jones is surprisingly warm and real in a mostly underwritten role.

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

She has been for such a long while -- in my mind, at least -- a celebrity photographer (in both senses of the phrase) that, until I saw Annie Liebovitz: Life Through A Lens, I had pretty much forgotten her early work for Rolling Stone: the San Francisco hippie revolution, politics, police, even Nixon's resignation. So this new-to-DVD documentary, directed by Annie's sister Barbara Liebovitz, is a very good reminder of, shall we say, better times. First televised in 2006 via the PBS American Masters series, the 80-minute film is, yes, hagiography of sorts. Yet, to her credit, B. Liebovitz allows some criticism of A. Liebovitz to emerge from the mouths of a few of her interviews.

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Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

Anthology films are always a good idea, but for some mysterious reason, they very rarely ever work out. The French New Wave film Six in Paris, directed by superstar filmmakers Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard and the lesser-known Jean Rouch, Jean Douchet and Jean-Danile Pollet, is no exception. Each of the six was assigned a different Paris neighborhood, not unlike last year's Paris je t'aime, though with more detailed results. Douchet, best known as a Cahiers du Cinema critic, kicks things off with a pretty traditional short, complete with an obligatory O. Henry-type twist. A girl sleeps with a handsome young man, and then discovers that he wasn't who she thought he was.

Rouch's segment was the only one to be singled out on the year-end Cahiers du Cinema top ten list. Rouch was better known as a documentary filmmaker, and he films his little sketch in perhaps two or three shots. A man (played by future director Barbet Schroeder) and a woman (Nadine Ballot) fight during their morning routine. The woman wants more than the man has resigned himself to. She storms out and takes the elevator down (Rouch may have cut once during this dark sequence). On the street, she meets a stranger (Gilles Quéant), who seems to want the same things she does, but with a price.

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Reviewer: Tara Black
Rating (out of 5): *****

Mushi-Shi opens up with an Oba-san (a Japanese woman of mature years) explaining that there are creatures beyond our world, creatures respected and feared by people. They are called Mushi. The Mushi, also known as Green Things, are closest to life itself. Most people cannot see or hear them, but can be affected by them. This is where Ginko comes in. He is a Mushi-shi, basically a medicine man who specializes in problems caused by the Mushi. There are as many Mushi in the world as there are other organisms. Most are benign, a few are parasitic in nature, others simply harmful by their very presence. Much of their effect is almost mystical in nature, such as stealing sound from their host. Others have varying levels of sentience that bring an almost god-like, spiritual quality to the story. Ultimately, however, Mushi are living creatures like any other.

The main character, Ginko, is mysterious and kind. Through his eyes, we see the people he encounters sympathetically and often more generously than it'd otherwise be. While he is not the narrator, he does give a tone and voice to the series as a whole and a more balanced view of Mushi, often more balanced than the people he encounters. Different episodes have different moods. Some are sweet or amusing with slight, understated humor while others are tragic or grim. Either way, the people Ginko meet all have unique stories that never leave you untouched.

Mushi-Shi is a gorgeous series in every respect. All elements of the series mesh well, complementing each other. From the theme, you quickly get a feel for Mushi-Shi. The song is folksy and happy, set to a backdrop of what is largely nature artwork. The character drawings are very plain, with people looking like human beings and not some nebulous anime idea of people, and the backgrounds are often given more detail than you'd find in any other series. There are no reproductions of backgrounds that I could tell, no bland buildings. And since much of the series occurs in the forested mountains of Japan, there's a lot of gorgeous scenery.

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(Jon on Oct 31, 2008 6:29 AM) Made into the live action movie "Bugmaster" by Katsuhiro Otomo, also very quiet, very good.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **

Craig Lucas is one of my favorite writers for theatre and film. From his mid-1980s off-Broadway success Blue Window-- still one of the most poetic and original ensembles pieces ever created for the stage -- to Prelude to a Kiss and The Dying Gaul (both the film and stage versions), and the much-maligned but prescient and challenging God's Heart, Lucas has given us a fertile and intense body of work. (His screenplay for The Secret Lives of Dentists helped enable director Alan Rudolph to make one of his best films in a long while.) So it is with some pain that I have to report being gravely disappointed in Lucas' new film Birds of America, which, like The Dying Gaul, he both wrote and directed.

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Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

The Greek-born director Constantin Costa-Gavras usually signs his films with only "Costa-Gavras," as if he were creating a brand name for political thrillers. The thriller part invites audiences to have fun at the movies, while the political part makes them think they're seeing something more than "just" a thriller. Costa-Gavras first broke out in 1969 with Z, which earned him a Best Director nomination and won two other Oscars, and in 1981, he was invited to make his first American film, Missing (now out in a Criterion DVD), with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.

Missing takes place in an unnamed country, presumably Chile, in the early 1970s, when a military coup toppled the reigning government (presumably Allende's). A happy, liberal American couple, Charlie Horman (John Shea) and his wife Beth (Spacek) live there, keeping a pet duck, drawing cartoons and occasionally translating articles for left-wing newspapers. They find life increasingly difficult under the new military rule -- with its strict curfews -- and begin to wonder if Charlie's habit of keeping notes on everything is very safe. Soon, Charlie has disappeared and his right-wing, Christian Scientist father Ed (Lemmon) flies down to help investigate. Ed can't understand his son's way of life and believes that Charlie must have created his own trouble; he can't believe that people would be arrested for no good reason. But of course, the major arc of Missing is Ed's awakening and realization that black-and-white thinking just doesn't apply to the real world.

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Reviewer: Bryan Thornally
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Gus Van Sant's newest film, Paranoid Park, dives deep into modern teenage life with a stylized look beyond any of his earlier works. It most directly feels like an outgrowth from his 2003 film about a school shooting, Elephant, as they both take an unconventional look at the everyday life of American youth and its collision with brutal violence.

Much like Elephant, Paranoid Park uses non-linear storytelling and a meandering plot to flesh out its characters; to the film's benefit, our attention is focused primarily on just one character this time, an alienated teenager named Alex infatuated with skateboarding.

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Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

Director Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Edmond) returns with another amazing, comical, exploitation shocker, this one supposedly "based on a true story" (though Gordon himself takes the "story by" credit). Stuck's terrific opening introduces us to Brandi (Mena Suvari), a nurse at an assisted living home; she cheerfully makes her rounds among the old folks as hardcore hip-hop plays on the soundtrack, drowning out all other sound. At the same time, we meet Tom (Stephen Rea), an out of work sad sack no longer able to afford rent on his crummy apartment. A failed job interview later and he's on the street.

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Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): **½

Are you looking for something that might pick you up in these trying times, something that might lighten your load a little bit, take your mind off that pending foreclosure? It would be hard to imagine a movie more vacuous than this Hong Kong action/comedy/espionage flick.

Seoul Raiders is the sequel to the overseas hit Tokyo Raiders from 2000, stars the great Tony Leung as Lam, designed as a kind of Asian James Bond -- though really coming closer to an Asian Remo Williams. The comedy is broad, the action is deeply silly and the sets exotic for those among us who haven't spent time in Seoul's financial district and its attendant tony condos.

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½ (movie) ***½ (DVD)

Appreciating Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1972), just released by Koch-Lorber in its original four-hour version, will depend somewhat on one's understanding of the place of royalty -- particularly the King -- in the minds and hearts of the people being ruled. Americans may intellectually understand the concept of royalty and divine right, but have no direct connection to it. Italian director Visconti, himself an aristocrat, understood royalty's positives and negatives rather well, as demonstrated most by his film version of The Leopard, as well as by Senso and Ludwig.

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Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Ratings (out of 5): ***

Most horror aficionados know by now how the British studio Hammer re-invented the genre by taking the classic monsters and filling them in with color (especially garish red) and a little suggested sex. All they had to do was make the monsters different enough from Universal's classic black-and-white creations to avoid lawsuits. But on the downside, Hammer spent most of the 1960s trying to cash in on their early successes, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), which meant "sequelizing" their own films and looking for more properties to "borrow." And so, though the studio has a large cult following today, not all of its sixty-plus horror films are really worth watching.

To prove it, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has released a more-or-less random two-disc DVD collection of four movies from the Hammer vaults (and distributed in America by Columbia Pictures). Another thing the collection shows is that director Terence Fisher, probably the best of the Hammer contract players, was not infallible. His first contribution to this collection is arguably the least interesting, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960). For Hammer, this was the first of two attempts at adapting the Robert Louis Stevenson story; Fisher's version makes Jekyll a decrepit hermit and Hyde a smooth, seductive ladies' man. But after that, the movie pretty much follows the original story, without using its new twist in any interesting ways. (Jerry Lewis used the same idea to much better effect in The Nutty Professor three years later.) Paul Massie plays the two lead characters, with Dawn Addams as his devious wife and Hammer stalwart Christopher Lee as a backstabbing friend.

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Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

2007 was a terrific year for foreign language films, with titles like 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Persepolis, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The Band's Visit, The Orphanage and others. So when the Academy came up with its five Best Foreign Language Film nominees, it was a little shocking and surprising that the list not only ignored the year's best films, but also that it was so obscure. A closer look revealed that all five of them were war films, which was not so surprising. And all five seemed ready-made for awards committees, none more so than the winner, the overrated Holocaust drama The Counterfeiters, and the brain-dead battle epic Mongol. (Nikita Mikhalkov's 12, from Russia and Andrzej Wajda's Katyn, from Poland, have yet to be released here.) Happily, of those nominees, Israeli director Joseph Cedar's Beaufort proved refreshingly different and markedly superior to its competition.

Set in 2000 near the Lebanese border, Beaufort tells the story of a band of Israeli soldiers stationed in an old fortress at the end of 18 years' worth of occupation. The Israeli army prepares to withdraw the troops and shut down the fort, but the process takes forever. Meanwhile, the troops suffer needless attacks, numbing boredom and helpless frustration. A bomb expert, played by Ohad Knoller -- a familiar face from Eytan Fox's films Yossi & Jagger and The Bubble, as well as Brian De Palma's Redacted -- arrives to help clear a deadly device from the road, and the troops' commanding officer (Oshri Cohen) questions his own effectiveness in battle. Cedar, who also directed the very interesting Campfire (2004), prefers to let his expansive set and hard-boiled characters tell the story from a ground level rather than implying a commentary about the bigger picture and the futile nature of war. It's as if a weight were lifted, and the 132-minute film moves like a breeze.

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Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ***½

With W in theaters this weekend, the last face-to-face matchup of McCain and Obama in the rear view mirror behind us and Election Day less than three weeks ahead, there are few films as timely at this juncture as Jay Roach's terrific, peppy Recount.

By different measures, it's a contemporaneous horror film that if you think about too much, will give you screaming nightmares, yet another terrific HBO Films docudrama, and easily Kevin Spacey's best starring vehicle since American Beauty.

Recount is the story of the contentious end of the presidential election in 2000 told from the trenches of both Vice President Gore's and then-Governor Bush's post-election campaign headquarters in Florida. There's the expected numbers of hanging/dimpled/pregnant chads, the in-over-her-head Katherine Harris played with impressive self-possession by Laura Dern, and the same unbelievably depressing conclusion as in real life.

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Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of 5): ***½

Gay liberation takes on a whole new meaning with A Very British Gangster, the documentary by Donal MacIntyre that explores the infamous Noonan family of Manchester, England. Initially appearing like a rowdy bunch of over-age high-schoolers, the Noonan clan, friends and hangers-on slowly morph into something far more complex -- and troubling. And so, too, does the film itself.

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It's always a worrisome sign when a fairly high profile release arrives as a screener DVD in one's mailbox several months before the film's opening date. Still, I had some hopes for War, Inc., given my appreciation for all things Cusack and the potential for satire in its setting.

But, as War, Inc. now officially arrives on DVD after a short theatrical run, if it isn't a bomb, the film's about as messy as our own current situation in the Middle East.

Joshua Seftel, whose previous work included the hit and miss documentary Taking on the Kennedys, on that famous political clan, directs his first feature, and may be a little over his head here. This absurdist political farce has its moments but requires a deft touch for satire, and with Billy Wilder no longer available, perhaps no one could have made the uneven script (by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser and its star John Cusack) work. It's ambitious, and while I don't know if some of the criticism it's received for being "already out of date" is quite fair (alas, the quagmire in Iraq is still current, even if the particulars tackled here would have been fresher a few years ago), but that's the least of its problems.

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(Harley on Oct 22, 2008 10:07 AM) Thanks for the review. I was planning on watching War Inc, but I may not now as it sounds like there are better titles out there.