Alberi (2013)

Alberi / Michelangelo Frammartino / 2013 / fourstar Tribeca

Active Ingredients: Installation setting; Surrounding sound
Side Effects: Video loop

[Alberi plays through April 27th at MoMA PS1, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.]

Alberi (Trees) is a bewitching and mysterious cinematic art installation about nature and the nature of repetition. Playing in a large domed theater at New York’s MoMA PS1, the half-hour video loop envelops the audience in a lush, 360-degree soundscape of rustling leaves and snapping twigs. The vibrant and richly detailed greens and browns of the forest come alive—quite literally—in this strange and loving ode to the beauty of both nature and community. Read more…

2010s, 4 Stars, Festival

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April 24, 2013

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Bottled Up (2013)

Bottled Up / Enid Zentelis / 2013 / threestar Tribeca

Active Ingredients: Thoughtful character development
Side Effects: Drab photography; Awkward comedy

[Bottled Up plays at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 23rd.]

Bottled Up is a frustratingly confused indie dramedy combining hippie environmentalism with pain pill addiction. These two forces—levity and happiness; misery and weightiness—pull both the film and Melissa Leo‘s single mother protagonist in opposite directions. While neither ultimately has the power to carry Bottled Up, they nonetheless create sympathetic, if shallow, characters. Read more…

2 Stars, 2010s, Festival

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April 24, 2013

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Whitewash (2013)

Whitewash / Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais  / 2013 / threestar Tribeca

Active Ingredients: Droll humor; Unique setting; Ending
Side Effects: Thematic development; Inconsistent voiceover

[Whitewash plays at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 27th.]

Whitewash is close to a one-man show for Thomas Haden Church, and he quietly and unassumingly carries this tricky film. It’s a darkly comic story of existential guilt, or else just the misadventures of a poorly-equipped outdoor survivalist. Either way, French-Canadian director Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, like the Coen Brothers’ neighbor to the Great White North, nicely understates both the humor and suspense within the many cosmic jokes he plays on Church’s accidental criminal hiding in the snowy wilderness of Quebec. Read more…

2010s, 3 Stars, Festival

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April 24, 2013

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Adult World (2013)

Adult World / Scott Coffey / 2013 / twostar Tribeca

Active Ingredients:  Supporting cast; Affable tone
Side Effects: Generic story; Disjointed pacing

[Adult World is playing at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 26th and April 28th.]

Earnest and well-meaning, Adult World adopts a familiar and pleasantly casual mood to chart the quarter life crisis of budding poet Amy (Emma Roberts). With mounting student loan debts and a growing stack of rejection letters from literary magazines, Amy’s post-college life is off to a rocky start. She knows she’s brilliant, and doesn’t mind telling anyone who will listen, but to finance her entry into “the adult world” she reluctantly takes a job at a sex shop called, that’s right, Adult World. It’s an apt and tidy metaphor, one which even the tenacious young poet can appreciate, but the film’s handling of Amy’s maturation leans on the same artificial posturing as her verse. Read more…

2 Stars, 2010s, Festival

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April 21, 2013

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A Tribute to Roger Ebert

As a contributor to Criticwire, I was recently asked to send in my thoughts and memories of the great film critic Roger Ebert, who passed away this week at the age of 70. I never met Ebert, but I’ll remember him most as a writer of great clarity and precision, and as a champion of cinema and of increased cinematic knowledge in the general public. Read more of my thoughts below.
Read more…

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April 7, 2013

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Spring Breakers (2013)

Spring Breakers / Harmony Korine / 2013 / fourstar

Active Ingredients: James Franco; Fragmented narrative; Textured visual style
Side Effects: Philosophizing phone calls; Thin characters

Spring Breakers from edgy provocateur Harmony Korine will catch many viewers off guard. And that’s probably the point. Starring a bevy of former Disney princesses, the film promises sex, drugs and a heavy dose of hedonistic spring break revelry. The film certainly delivers titillation, but that it comes along with equal parts insidious danger threatens to spoil the party. For all its purposeful sloppiness, Spring Breakers is actually delicately balanced on a razor’s edge, having its party and crashing it too. It’s a delirious rush and the strangest wide release to hit theaters in some time. Read more…

2010s, 4 Stars

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April 5, 2013

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Leviathan (2013)

Leviathan / Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel / 2013 / fivestar

Active Ingredients: Immersive sound; Abstract visuals; Multiplying perspectives
Side Effects: Application of style to depictions of crew members

The experience of life—all kinds of life—aboard a large commercial fishing vessel reaches almost mythic proportions in the experimental documentary Leviathan. Armed with a fleet of tiny, cheap GoPro cameras, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Véréna Paravel (Foreign Parts) render the creak of metal, the crash of the ocean and the throngs of sea creatures larger than life. From one shot to the next, our perspective swings across every corner of this floating ecosystem, gradually constructing a composite beast made from equal parts of man, nature and machinery. Leviathan positively floods the senses, and the result is a unique and exhilarating cinematic experience. Read more…

2010s, 5 Stars

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April 2, 2013

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