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.

Italian auteur Michelangelo Frammartino solidified his place on the international arthouse scene with 2010′s Le quattro volte, a similarly rustic film that chronicled the four states of a old farmer’s passing soul: human, animal, vegetable and mineral. Like that impressive film, Alberi is concerned with the connections between man and his surroundings, how both vibrate with the same cellular rhythms and under the same sky.

While I expected and was given the rapturous cinematic glow of nature in Alberi, I didn’t expect the film to be equally about mankind. About half of Frammartino’s loop is dedicated to the liveliness of the trees, but the other half focuses on a rural celebration in the southern hillside town of Satriano. The men of the town solemnly and wordlessly march into the woods, collect loose vines and sticks and march back into town draped head to toe in foliage. The film “concludes” (before looping again) with a joyous dance of man and nature in the town’s piazza.

Satriano’s rural celebration, like the life of the trees in the forest, depends on the seasonal cycles of nature. The same force of time and the same cycle of life animates both man and nature, Frammartino seems to say. The parallels he draws reminds me of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, another director who mysterious and beautifully evokes the interconnectedness of all realms of life. (The “tree men” in Alberi also have a similar, slightly comedic force as the “ape men” of Uncle Boonmee.)

While on paper the video loop of Alberi perfectly matches the film’s themes, the repetition is far from seamless. The film fades out and fades back in with a sound bridge to connect each end, but rather than a sense of endless continuation, the tactic artificially marks the film with a beginning and a conclusion. Despite the unsatisfying loop, Alberi beautifully uses the domed installation space to create a new and enveloping cinematic experience. The dome, like the film, is welcoming and impressive, and it houses a film of beauty, mystery, awe and joy.

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.

By the end of the film, I appreciated the cumulative effect of the story on Melissa Leo’s Fey and Josh Hamilton‘s naive and kind Becket. Like the house plants Fey nurtures so lovingly, Leo and Hamilton slowly and unexpectedly begin to bloom. Still, director Enid Zentelis struggles to animate them from scene to scene. The duo, along with Fey’s daughter in denial of her addiction to pain medication, spend time together cooking meals and doing yard work, but mostly just waiting in vain for either humor or pathos to emerge from their chemistry.

Visually the film is as muddled as its tone, with colors and vitally washed into a dull fog of grey and beige. The aesthetic shortcomings of Bottled Up point to its overall struggle to breathe life into its characters. They somehow do begin to come alive by the film’s end, but too late and too simplistically.

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.

Church plays Bruce, an alcoholic and widowed plow driver who accidentally strikes and kills a man in a nighttime whiteout. He buries the body in the snow and keeps driving until he crashes again, deep in the frozen woods. Instead of seeking rescue, Bruce attempts to tough it out alone, stealing supplies when he can and replaying the incident in his mind.

In nonlinear flashbacks, we come to learn that Bruce knew the man he killed. He practices explaining his innocence with police questioners, but probably overplays his calm and ignorance. As the winter drags on, Bruce’s self-imposed isolation begins to get to him. Church has a gift for playing characters as simple-minded and instinctual as Bruce, a similar performance to his perpetual confused would-be criminal in Killer Joe. He betrays little of Bruce’s thought process and simply reacts as the events of the film come to him.

Characters like Bruce often appear in the films of the Coen Brothers, but its the tone of Whitewash that reminds me of those skilled craftsman. While first-time director Hoss-Desmarais surely isn’t on their level of cinematic potency and efficiency, he nonetheless shows a keen understanding of pacing. Whitewash has a killer final note on its mind—one that perfectly contextualizes and expands its thematic concerns—and it gets there on its own time even if some of the developments along the way seem arbitrary. Whitewash is a rich and rewarding first feature from a director to watch.

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.

While its use of the formulas and iconography of indie comedy is transparent, Adult World has the amiability and low-key humor to win over some fans. It features a committed (though inconsistantly pitched) lead performance from Emma Roberts as well as a solid supporting ensemble, including American Horror Story‘s Evan Peters as a conveniently available potential love interest and Armando Riesco as a crossdressing diva named Rubia. Peters and Riesco imbue their characters with some much needed sincerity, but John Cusack‘s performance as Amy’s favorite poet Rat Billings is aloof and thin.

Adult World has the requisite oddball characters and charm of a 20-something indie comedy, but it fails to justify its interest in Amy. We know she cares about poetry because she tells us, but we never believe it, and the film itself has no interest in poetry either stylistically or narratively, beyond a unique hobby for its protagonist. This is partly due to Amy’s own ignorance of the world—she needs to live before she can write, Rat explains—but it leaves the film feeling empty and artificial. Adult World does seem to love its characters, but we merely tolerate them.

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.

While other critics and scholars are remembered for contributions to academia and film theory, I think Ebert’s legacy will be as the cinematic voice of the people. With his writing and other critical endeavors like the TV show At The Movies and his film festival Ebertfest, he became a trusted public persona that consistently steered audiences towards worthwhile films, many which they perhaps might not have otherwise seen. In this respect, he might be compared to the Marshall McLuhan of film criticism, unafraid to serve as a popular icon in his field, but a thinker whose work is no less rigorous or meaningful for being widely accessible.

As a young cinephile and writer, I used Ebert’s tightly-constructed articles as models of form and style for my own non-fiction essays, whether about film or not. In particular, I made heavy use out of used galley copy of Ebert’s The Great Movies book, and checked off each title until I’d seen them all. His writing always gave me something to look for when I watched the films, and helped kickstart my own ideas after I’d seen them.

Over the years, I kept track of Ebert’s new additions to his ever-expanding online list of The Great Movies, which will continue to serve as a great list to start or deepen any film fan’s exploration of cinematic history. Through the titles on this list and his regular film writing, Ebert demonstrated an impressive range of tastes, appreciations and influences.

This will be the lesson I most remember from Ebert. Film is truly an art and a technology of great range, both as a means of mass entertainment and of intimate, personal expression. Ebert never closed himself off from either end of this spectrum, and it’s my goal as a critic to remain similarly open to all that film has to offer, and to inspire readers to do the same.

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.

Korine is best known for disturbing, polarizing and darkly comedic films such as Gummo and the appropriately-titled Trash Humpers, films that push buttons and, depending whom you ask, either say absolutely nothing or bravely present the hellish underbelly of the American dream. Spring Breakers opens itself up to the same criticism. It might be tempting for some to say that the film is as vapid as its wide-eyed teens, and as empty as their partying, but Korine’s aggressively nontraditional visual and narrative style, and his skill for having fun with his characters without ever completely condemning them, create tensions that are too potent to be ignored.

The film is loosely constructed around the hazy experiences of four college girls who steal some money to fund a trip to Florida, where they hope to find themselves. In dreamy, incantatory voice-over the quartet explain that spring break is more than just fun in their eyes. It’s an opportunity to escape the monotony and routine of life, perhaps forever.

While all the philosophizing draws too fine a point, it brings to mind Terrence Malick, whose radical editing style atomizes narrative in much the same way Korine’s does here. Scenes are often presented only in brief ambiguous glimpses, intercut with contrasting images. Others are repeated, reprised or modified. The discontinuity is jarring, but combined with the film’s loud music and gaudy neon color palate, it creates a hypnotic, propulsive drive.

At about the halfway point, they meet James Franco‘s Alien, a tattooed, cornrowed rapper whose gangster lifestyle alternately attracts or repels the girls, the exact tension of Korine’s style. Alien embodies temptation, and the girls must choose to either get out while they can or fully commit to the anarchy that is spring break. It’s a brilliant performance, full of surprises and contradictions. Alien begins as caricature but develops into much more.

So too, perhaps, does the film. Spring Breakers is about capturing and sustaining that feeling in the pit of your stomach when fun slowly turns into something dangerous and destructive, and its great success is that Korine is attuned to both extremes.

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.

Like the best films, Leviathan‘s form and content are inextricable, two sides of a single artistic expression. The grainy, low-grade video images of the filmmakers’ GoPro cameras don’t just constitute a visual or aesthetic choice, but an ethical one. This isn’t a documentary about commercial fishing in any traditional sense, but an effort to violently splinter our perspective and scatter it across the ship. The perfect tool for the job, the GoPro cameras offer us perspectives of pin-point precision. They don’t just capture a close-up of a bird, they shoot from inside its ruffled feathers; they don’t just film the deck from a low angle, but from the floorboards themselves.

Castaing-Taylor and Paravel understand the only appropriate use for a new cinematic technology such as the GoPro: not to replicate human senses in the name of “realism,” but to use technology to articulate a new realm of sensation beyond the human.

This experiential quality of Leviathan is aided by its often abstract imagery, like streaks of light against a dark sky or a jumble of canvas netting and writhing fish. We’re often not sure exactly what objects we’re seeing, or even which way is up, but the raw graphical power of the images is striking and revelatory. The effect is like some of the best avant-garde filmmaking: a move away from representation and towards pure visual expression.

Even more important to the omniscient perspective and sensory experience of Leviathan is the thunderous post-production sound design by Ernst Karel. Manipulating and embellishing the poor quality—but nonetheless remarkable—audio of the GoPro cameras, the sound design rumbles with low end and swooshes across the theater to approach a 360 degree window onto the world.

The effect is most striking during shots that continually dip under the ocean surface. The dull, peaceful quality of washed-out underwater sound is even more pronounced against the roar of the sea and wind when the camera resurfaces. When you feel the whine of the ship’s motor in your bones, you’ll understand the sea monster of the film’s title.

Between the intensity of the sound and the boldness of the visuals, the full power of Leviathan can only properly be experienced in a loud and dark theater. When you step outside the theater, however, the film’s new perspectives of sight and sound linger. It’s rare that such an experimental film appeal as much to the senses as to the mind, and rarer still that both of these sensations come so intertwined.

Active Ingredients: Gothic pulpiness; Inventive, subjective camerawork
Side Effects: Obligatory twists; A bit thin on substance

Mia Wasikowska in Stoker

South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut Stoker is a sleazy, unnerving Gothic melodrama pitched somewhere between a psychological thriller and a cheesy throwback horror film. It’s as highly stylized and visually dynamic as we’ve come to expect from the director of Oldboy, but it trades in the lugubrious tone and raw misery of Park’s less successful films for an elevated and irresistible luridness. If it’s also a bit thin on substance, well, it’s got other things on its mind.

Stoker stars Mia Wasikowska as India, a withdrawn, troubled and potential dangerous young girl mourning the death of her father. Since his sudden passing, the fog over India allows her to do little more than sit around her creaky old mansion of a house. She has nothing but disdain for cold and distant mother (a wicked Nicole Kidman) who, in India’s mind, has gotten over the death of her husband suspiciously easily. When her Uncle Charlie arrives, their fragile equilibrium is upended.

Park and actor Matthew Goode immediately sink their teeth into turning Charlie into an impossibly creepy, menacing presence right from the start. Uncle Charlie and India share a mysterious, unspoken connection and each seems to know what the other is thinking. The two quickly initiate a strange psychic power struggle. In a masterfully shot and edited sequence, Uncle Charlie and India slowly circle around each other at a party in the mansion. Without looking over her shoulder, India knows Charlie is lurking just behind her and Park uses the camera to literalize their strange dance of attraction and repulsion.

Much of their relationship, and even the name Uncle Charlie, is a clear nod to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, but unlike that great film Stoker has little on its mind besides pure style. Park has extracted all the delicious pulpiness of the story’s setting and tone and heightened it to a delirious pitch. His approach, however, works perfectly. Park isn’t an empty stylist, but a filmmaker who knows how to internalize the emotions and mood of a piece into the form itself. There is true substance to the complex images Park creates, if not in the story itself. But no matter, Park and his trio of dedicated performers are having much too much fun to mind.

Active Ingredients: James Franco; Familiar fantasy/adventure narrative
Side Effects: Over-reliance on CGI; Supporting characters

Oz: The Great and Powerful

Sam Raimi returns to Oz in this multicolored fantasy that retains many of the original film’s recognizable elements, if not its overall feeling. I’m finding it hard to decide if Oz is up to a similar trick of early-film mythmaking as Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, or if it’s simply an overblown Hollywood family film with a story like any other. Either way, it’s a fine if ultimately forgettable adventure to a place in film legend.

Oz stars James Franco as the goodhearted conman whom we find pulling the strings at end of 1939′s The Wizard of Oz. He wasn’t always so sure of his goodness, however, and Raimi’s film charts his comfortably predictable journey from an egotistical, lying circus magician to the poster boy for the mantra that Disney and Hollywood has sold since the original film: “believe in belief.” Behind the munchkins, wonder and rose-colored glasses of The Wizard of Oz, we should remember, lies a strangely cynical heart in the Wizard himself. You don’t need to go to school, just take this diploma. Who needs courage, this medal will do just as well. It’s a happy scene, of course, but the Wizard tells us that things, symbols, and a dash of belief are just as good as the real things. Raimi wisely makes trickery the center of his story and ultimately arrives at the same conclusion: belief is all you need.

Franco’s Wizard must destroy the wicked witch in order to free the people Oz and ascend to the throne. (I was never quite sure what they needed to be “freed” of; they seemed perfectly happy to me.) At first he’s only interested in the riches that come along with the title, and worries people will soon wise up to his act. He’s not the real Wizard, just a conjurer of cheap tricks. Over the course of the film, (a bit too late for my tastes) he realizes that in fact his brand of magic and wonder is actually just what the land of Oz needs.

Franco, as anyone who saw him host the Oscars knows, is a strange performer. Still, I can’t help but find him compelling. He has just the right combination of sleaze, charm and boyish earnestness in this role. That latter quality becomes very important, helping us remain interested when Franco appears alone in a sea of digital creation. There’s a lot of brightness in Raimi’s Oz, but little substance.

We should, however, be careful not to dismiss CGI worlds too quickly. For one thing, they allow for almost unlimited camera mobility (like, for example, The Adventures of Tintin.) Indeed, Raimi’s “camera,” if one was even used for much of the film, swoops and careens to animate the world. Still, there’s no feeling of gravity, for the cameras or the character. Everything feels like it could simply lift up and float away. This effect, I think, works for the magical world of Oz, but filmmakers should be careful that this strange thinness of digital imagery is appropriate. It works better in fantasy than in action films, for example. Still, I don’t think any children will be scarred for a lifetime from Raimi’s creepy digital monkeys like they were for the original film. Everything is too ethereal.

Oz: The Great and Powerful wholeheartedly buys into Disney’s ideal of blind, optimistic belief, even though it knows a faker is behind the curtain the whole time. Somehow, I kind of admire that dedication.

Active Ingredients: Documentary-like photography; Naturalism; Childhood perspective
Side Effects: Early scripted scenes

Little Fugitive

[Little Fugitive is playing in a restored 35mm print at Boston's MFA from March 6th to March 10th.]

A huge influence on François Truffaut and other French New Wave filmmakers, Little Fugitive is a simple and poignant look at childhood joy and childhood confusion. Co-directors Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin were both New York based photographers, and they deftly take their eye for small-scale social life and drama to the cinema with this film. Using lightweight, handheld 35mm cameras, Engel captures with neo-realist authenticity the ups and downs of a 7-year-old boy’s day spent alone at Coney Island. The film won the top prize at Venice Film Festival, and has lost none of its immediacy and power since.

When his pestering of his older brother results in a cruel prank, little Joey runs away to Coney Island with nothing but six dollars in his pocket. He spends his day riding the carousel at the amusement park, devouring watermelons and weaving in between sleeping beachgoers to collect Pepsi bottles for their deposit. Like the great Italian neo-realist films of Roberto Rossellini, or indeed the French New Wave classics that Little Fugitive inspired, this film largely jettisons scripted plot and focuses instead on capturing small moments of truth regarding both childhood and the exciting environment of Coney Island.

Partially filmed with a concealed camera, the visual aesthetic of Little Fugitive is closer to documentary—or better, non-narrative city symphony—than to the classic narrative cinema of post-war America. Despite some stagey early scenes with the cruel friends of Joey’s older brother which serve to set up the story, the most transcendent moments of the film are subtle and powerfully real glimpses of the architecture, people, and feeling of New York in the early 1950s. At its best, Little Fugitive‘s images are devoid of characters and full of people.

The film is also valuable for its sensitive portrait of childhood. It’s no surprise that Truffaut took inspiration from Little Fugitive to create The 400 Blows. By letting their young subject simply explore and react to the world around him, by freeing him from the obligation to “act,” the co-directors chart great emotions across his face, from his elation on the carnival rides to anxiety of the big world around him to unexplained confusion and sadness. Like the cowboys that Joey idolizes, he is independent and strong, but he also harbors a piercing melancholy.