Four: LAFF Review

Four characters seeking connection on the Fourth of July form opposing dyads in writer-director Joshua Sanchezs feature debut. Despite an edgy premise, Four is beset by superficial plotting and a problematic degree of equivocating moral relativism. Although festival play is assured, commercial prospects appear dodgy. Sullen suburban teenager June (Emory Cohen) skips out on a holiday family barbecue for a clandestine rendezvous with middle-aged husband and dad Joe (Wendell Pierce), a mild-mannered Internet predator who encountered June online. Their...

Read More

London: The Modern Babylon: Film Review

A kaleidoscopic collage of social history and popular culture, momentous public events and intimate human stories, this sprawling documentary attempts the ambitious feat of telling the story of London from the dawn of the 20th century to today. Scheduled for limited release in UK cinemas this week to coincide with the London Olympic celebrations, Julien Temples archive-heavy film is a sensually rich and emotionally engaging experience. Partly backed by the BBC and the British Film Institute, it is a solid piece of work with niche theatrical potential...

Read More

Big Boys Gone Bananas!: Film Review

One little-seen documentary begets another in Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, Fredrik Gertten's examination of the controversy surrounding his own 2009 film Bananas!*. The picture both benefits and suffers from this self-reflexive approach, failing to adequately explore questions someone on the outside would address immediately. The result is of limited commercial interest, though it raises issues with broad appeal. Gertten's original film, which took...

Read More

London 2012 Olympic Shorts: Running Jump, What If, Swimmer, The Odyssey: Film Review

Cinema is playing a key role in the avalanche of flag-waving cultural activity around the 2012 Olympics, which have just opened to great fanfare in London. Danny Boyle directed the spectacular opening ceremony, which featured a host of screen stars including Daniel Craig, Kenneth Branagh and Rowan Atkinson. Director Stephen Daldry is also serving as artistic supervisor for all the citys Olympic ceremonies. PHOTOS: London 2012: Inside the Olympics...

Read More

The Sweeney: Film Review

Rebooting a much-loved British TV drama from the 1970s, this flashy biggest project yet from the writer-director Nick Love, a kind of low-rent Guy Ritchie who has earned a respectable domestic following with simplistic love letters to macho villainy such as The Football Factory and The Business. A play on Sweeney Todd, the title derives from the cockney rhyming-slang nickname for the Flying Squad, a branch of Londons Metropolitan Police first...

Read More

Supercapitalist: Film Review

Tossing Hong Kong into the mix does little to enliven high-finance clichs in Simon Yin's Supercapitalist, an ostensible morality tale that might've played off the zeitgeist in any number of ways but instead feels no more fresh than (the original) Wall Street. Box office outlook is dim. Derek Ting plays Conner, an Asian-American hedge fund analyst who, despite a strange arrogant streak around his superiors, gets sent to oversee a major deal in...

Read More

Football Rebels: Sarajevo Film Review

The French soccer legend turned actor Eric Cantona presents this globe-trotting documentary, a tribute to five fellow footballers who courageously risked their lives and careers by taking high-profile stands against political and social injustice. Co-directed by two award-winning journalists, Football Rebels combines serious subject matter with a sharply edited, fast-paced, glossy visual style. Filmed in multiple languages, it also features commentary from eminent guests including Cantonas film-making comrade, Ken Loach. Shortly after its gala...

Read More

Rites of Spring: Film Review

A grindhouse slasher pic that swings from dull to ridiculous without finding any pulpy pleasure in between, Padraig Reynolds' Rites of Spring is as anonymous as its burlap-wrapped boogeyman. Themes of pagan sacrifice and double-cross kidnapping combined don't generate enough exploitable novelty to make it a promising gamble, even on VOD. One half of the bifurcate plot concerns a farmer who, once a year for over two decades, has been abducting...

Read More

This Time: Film Review

Greatly overstaying its welcome at 110 minutes, Victor Mignatti's This Time, while intending to celebrate music-industry strivers, lumps together subjects who have little in common beyond the director's apparent affection for them. Commercial prospects are poor, and viewers drawn in by the best-known act here, once-great harmonizers the Sweet Inspirations, will likely be confused. The Inspirations, a group of female backup singers who spent the '60s and '70s working with everyone from Hendrix and Elvis to Aretha Franklin, are shown here as they...

Read More

Dreams of a Life: Film Review

A woman dies alone in a London flat, and isn't discovered for three years -- so long her flesh has "melted into the carpet." The TV is still on when her skeleton is found. But Joyce Vincent wasn't a mentally ill hermit or a woman so old she'd outlived anyone who would notice her absence: She was 38, beautiful, and had been the "center of attraction" for multiple circles of friends -- none of whom realized she'd died, because they (and the older...

Read More

Danube Hospital (Donauspital): FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE - A quiet ode to the reassuringly dull super-efficiency of the Austrian healthcare system, Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Danube Hospital (Donauspital SMZ-OST) examines Vienna's second-biggest medical facility with a suitably 'clinical' detachment. Made for Austrian television, this unfussily professional chronicle will prove a popular pick for non-fiction festivals and networks without attaining the impact and exposure of Geyrhalter's 2005 breakthrough Our Daily Bread, which explored industrial food-production practices. And while the premises...

Read More

The Ethnographer (El Etnógrafo): FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE -- Director Ulises Rosell adopts a very "softly softly" approach in The Ethnographer (El Etngrafo), a character-study of a quietly scholarly middle-aged Englishman who has devoted his life to helping one of South America's more self-effacing ethnic minorities. Delicated, hushed and sensitive in every respect, this documentary beguiles with its low-key approach to fascinating material, its charms outweighing a certain structural awkwardness. A selection at Buenos Aires' BAFICI before its international premiere at FIDMarseille, it will...

Read More

Step Up Revolution: Film Review

With their second summertime at-bat after Rock of Ages, Offspring Entertainment producers Adam Shankman and Jennifer Gibgot return to one of the things they do best making young unknowns look like the next big thing. In its fourth installment, however, the Step Up franchise has traded an air of inevitability for one of predictability. While diehard fans and dance fanatics will respond in the opening frame, ongoing competition from superheroes...

Read More

Nuit No 1: Film Review

Revealing the existential despair of two young Canadians without quite succumbing to despair itself, Anne mond's quietly raw Nuit 1 begins as a highbrow sex film but quickly becomes something much more interesting. Laudable leads and a refreshingly direct take on its subject should help arthouse prospects, especially if the picture finds some fans in the tastemaker crowd. Clara (Catherine De Lan) and Nikola (Dimitri Storoge), having met off-camera...

Read More

What Is Love: Saravejo Film Review

SARAJEVO -- Nine years have elapsed since the young Austrian writer-director Ruth Mader earned critical plaudits for her debut feature, the stark immigration drama Struggle. Fresh from showing in competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, Maders belated follow-up project experiments even further with the same hybrid style, an artful blend of fiction and documentary. Yoking together five unrelated character studies on the same loose theme, What Is...

Read More

Lion of Judah: Film Review

With its bold name and pulpy, barbed-wire-tangled poster art, Matt Mindell's Lion of Judah presents itself as the portrait of "a brave soul" whose "in-your-face" tale will shed new light on the experience of Jews during WWII. In fact, the doc is little more than the home movie of a tour through Holocaust sites, albeit one whose guide -- 81 year-old Auschwitz survivor Leo Zisman -- exhibited jaw-dropping defiance during his boyhood imprisonment...

Read More

Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time: Film Review

The lure of power and money creates an unlikely thug in Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time, a muscular and enormously entertaining South Korean crime epic that might have Scorsese looking over his shoulder. Hitching a blithe surface mood to the violent, amoral world of organized crime a la GoodFellas, the young writer-director Yun Jong-Bin (The Moonlight of Seoul, The Unforgiven) has crafted a brutal study of widespread corruption, powered by...

Read More

Porn in the Hood (Les Kaira): Film Review

PARIS -- As boldly idiotic as its English-language title, the French banlieue comedy Porn in the Hood (Les Kaira) follows the lowly adventures of three down-on-their-luck thugs trying to break into the adult film industry and make a quick Euro. Adapting from his popular Canal + series, writer-director-star Franck Gastambide piles on the tasteless jokesmany of them involving untamed animals and/or women treated as suchbut rarely offers up the self-deprecating...

Read More

A Band Called Death: LAFF Review

Detroit -- renowned home of Motown -- isnt the first touchstone associated with punk rock, despite its distinction for producing Death, regarded as the first African-American punk band. While countless docs attempt to make the case for near-forgotten musicians, Deaths unique place in musical history and the fascinating turns the bands story takes as it winds its way out of obscurity present a promising opportunity for a proactive theatrical or...

Read More

30 Beats: Film Review

Its definitely time for a moratorium on any new films or plays inspired by Arthur Schnitzlers classic La Ronde. This theatrical depiction of a sexual roundelay has served as the basis for innumerable loose adaptations since its 1920 premiere, the latest being writer-director Alexis Lloyds 30 Beats, following ten New Yorkers getting it on in a series of unmemorable vignettes. The film is mainly notable for its diverse and talented ensemble cast,...

Read More

Being There (Être là ): FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE -- There have been many documentaries about the world's penal facilities over the years, but very few can have looked or sounded much like Rgis Sauder's simultaneously slick and jagged Being There (tre l). Shot in austerely striking black and white high-definition video, the focus is here not on prison inmates - who, for reasons of confidentiality, are heard but not seen -- but rather on the female psychiatrists who treat them. Sauder's...

Read More

The Runway: Film Review

If you ever find yourself in trouble its probably best to make your way to a remote Irish village, where the quirky residents are bound to be all too happy to help you in your plight. This narrative staple of Irish films reappears yet again in The Runway, director/screenwriter Ian Powers mild but likeable debut feature starring Demian Bichir. Opening in Arizona for a limited release, the film could well score on VOD and cable thanks to its Oscar...

Read More

The Ethnographer: FIDMarseille Review

MARSEILLE - Director Ulises Rosell adopts a very "softly softly" approach in The Ethnographer, a character-study of a quietly scholarly middle-aged Englishman who has devoted his life to helping one of South America's more self-effacing ethnic minorities. Delicated, hushed and sensitive in every respect, this documentary beguiles with its low-key approach to fascinating material, its charms outweighing a certain structural awkwardness. A selection at Buenos Aires' BAFICI before its international premiere at FIDMarseille, it will find plenty of...

Read More

Valley of Strength: Film Review

Considering the exoticism of its setting, Gei Oni (Valley of Strength), an Israeli historical drama set in 1880s Palestine, doesnt live up to its full potential. Dan Wolmans film about a young female survivor of Russian pogroms who forges a new life in the Ottoman-ruled land is a deeply humanistic drama that sheds light on the plight of the first wave of Jewish migrants to the area. But its choppy, lackluster execution robs the piece of much of its innate drama. STORY: Berlin 2012: Israels Rafael Balulu Wins Berlin Today Award With Topical Drama...

Read More

Babylon: FIDMarseille Review

An outstanding documentary whose Unique Selling Point is also, ironically, the biggest obstacle to the widespread exposure it deserves, Babylon announces in the very first seconds that its three directors "have chosen not to resort to subtitles." But while two hours of 'unintelligible' footage from a Tunisian refugee camp may sound a daunting prospect on paper, viewers willing to take the risk will find themselves amply rewarded by this rough-edged...

Read More

Deranged (Yeon-ga-si): Film Review

Contagion gets a make-over in Deranged, Park Joung-woos high-pitched but engrossing South Korean medical disaster film, which has out-grossed The Amazing Spiderman in its opening two weeks domestically and is slated for U.S. release on July 27. The source of a million infections that brings Korea to its knees is a long, mutant horsehair worm that develops from a larva in the human intestine until its gruesomely ready to come out. The idea certainly...

Read More