Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Despair  (Rating out of 5): **
I Only Want You to Love Me (Rating out of 5): ***

I love Rainer Werner Fassbinder because he lived cinema. He slept, breathed, ate, and excreted cinema. And he died for cinema. The math tells much of the story. He died at the age of 37 having completed over 40 movies and TV shows, including two lengthy mini-series and several short films. One can only guess that he was always working on something. The films I like best of his are the ones that reflect this speed and passion, the ones that feel somewhat reckless; although, in his defense, Fassbinder's films were usually quite beautifully and rigorously shot.

And thus we come to Despair, which is not one of his best. It comes from a Vladimir Nabokov novel, and the playful Tom Stoppard adapted it. That's an interesting combination, and it suggests a movie of twisted humor, but Fassbinder doesn't seem quite tuned into the structure or the precision or the absurdity of it all.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): **½

Argentinean filmmaker Gabriel Medina's offbeat first feature The Paranoids (Los paranoicos) moves a bit slow, but it's still inventive and occasionally enchanting enough to make one curious about what the filmmaker may do next. Essentially a character study, the film follows Luciano (Whisky's talented Daniel Hendler, looking a bit like a Uruguayan Paul Schneider), a quirkily neurotic, procrastinating screenwriter who earns a living entertaining at kids' parties (garbed in a Smoochy-like suit as his character "Cachito"). He spends a lot of time brooding in his apartment because he's, well, paranoid and sociophobic. He's such the perfectionist that he's spent years struggling over one script, and unsurprisingly, all his anxieties make it hard for him to have a girlfriend. (In the midst of a fling, he's terrified of contracting an STD because the condom breaks.)

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

Seeing Ricky -- Francois Ozon’s mysterious little fable of an unusual baby and the family into which it comes -- a second time, I liked the film better than in my first encounter back in November of 2009 at BAM’s preview of new French films. Among the movie’s many delights in this age of multi-million-dollar special effects, is a creation so simple yet endearing and splendid: the special effect in question is just a baby. But what a baby.

The meaning that Ozon hopes to provide via this little wonder is another matter, and part of the movie's charm and weight comes from the fact that the writer/director leaves quite a bit of his message open-ended. Ricky is also a film of ideas: about religion (a new and "special" birth), homosexuality (a subject frequently touched on in Ozon's work, and here perhaps depicted as a different kind of "other"), the media (oh, those destructive bastards!), the family (Ricky serves each member of his rather well). Each aspect of the film works, even if not completely.

Reviewer: Steve Dollar
Rating (out of 5): *****

Not even the gnarliest horror film has left me as haunted as White Material. The 2010 film by Claire Denis, a kind of specialist in themes of French colonization and its repercussions, is the work of a director at the top of her game. You can sense the deep craft on display because the unusual, even confusingly enigmatic construction of a narrative – which relies on extremely subtle flashbacks – makes the movie somehow more compelling. It's a kind of mystery, really, and one that unfolds without a scrap of assistance from its key persona, the indefatigable Maria (Isabelle Huppert), the manager of a coffee plantation in an African country that is about to boil over into civil war.