Active Ingredients: Natural script; Keen, understated commentary
Side Effects: Flat, static style

from thedailybeast

Abbas Kiarostami’s brilliantly understated Ten derives an emotional impact from the simplicity of its conceit, without ever feeling maudlin or cheaply sentimental. The film is composed of ten segments, each documenting a car ride and a conversation between a young female driver and her passengers. Austerely shot, often in long, unbroken takes, each segment explores the complex psychology of women in modern-day Iran. Kiarostami’s minimalist, low-fi aesthetic allows the viewer to register small changes that flicker in and out of the characters’ faces and forces intimacy. While the tactic benefits the film, it does not feel an essential component to its power.

Miraculously, this very talky film never feels obviously scripted. Kiarostami has a remarkable ear for the ebbs and flows of natural conversations. He knows that people talk in circles not straight lines, just as the driver circles aimlessly and continually, much to the chagrin of her passengers. Consequently, the heart of each dialogue is uncovered only after false starts, preambles, tangents and diversions. The inner lives of the characters, their histories and relationships emerge so naturally that the sophistication of its construction passes unnoticed. It’s as if we know these characters and simply ride alongside them.

The characters talk around the ideas of love, loss and submission in Iranian society, but lofty “themes” such as these never get in the way of real, grounded dialogue. Gradually, over the course of the film and with the viewpoint of each passenger, a clear and nuanced portrait of a society emerges in which women must submit to men. Yet rather than stop at this simple, surface-level societal critique, Kiarostami digs deeper to uncover the psychological effects of submission. The women in the film struggle emotionally, coming to grips with the realization that they can never truly define their own identities.

Like 2010’s I Am Love, this film explores feminine duty and the perceived impossibility of a woman living for herself. In both Iran and the highly patriarchal world of high-society Milan, women are expected to surrender their individualities wholly to their families. Ten’s protagonist believes she knows the secret. “You must first love yourself,” she councils her friends, yet she cannot take her own advice to heart. We come to understand the driver as a quietly tortured woman: guilt weighs heavy on her mind and heart. Her young son calls her selfish; she asks a prostitute if she thinks about guilt and sin; an old woman shames her into praying more; and her sister and friend struggle to find love, while the driver deals with the responsibility of her own divorce, a fact her society cannot forgive. How can she love herself if she can’t forgive herself?

from hellonfriscobay

Nostalgia can be a powerful emotion in film, and a dangerous force. Simply hearing the sound of an old projector or seeing an old-fashioned boxy aspect ratio and a frame with rounded edges is enough to evoke it. With The Artist poised to dominate award season this year, filmmakers and audiences seem more interested than ever in exploring—or perhaps exploiting—the effects of nostalgia. Its detractors have accused The Artist of wielding nostalgia like a weapon, a technique guaranteed to produce an intended affect, but its success proves there is still room for a thoughtful and even humorous examination of how film creates such a strong, romantic connection to its own past.

While The Artist is a rare—though not unprecedented—contemporary silent film, a full 41 directors previously explored the issue of nostalgia in 1995′s Lumière and Company, a collection of shorts produced to celebrate the centennial of the Lumière Brothers’ first ever films. The filmmakers were challenged to use the unmistakable aesthetics of the Lumières’ camera and the constraints of an approximately 50-second running time to do something new, or perhaps old. Some directors in the anthology actively combat the feeling of nostalgia for an older cinema. Patrice Laconte, for example, recreates the famous Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, using the same camera placement and framing to photograph a highly modern train rushing past the station. Merchant and Ivory use the look of the Lumières’ primitive camera to lure the viewer into a feeling of nostalgia, photographing the Eiffel Tower before dollying to reveal a McDonald’s invading the scene. Another batch of filmmakers, however, embraces the effect of nostalgia, exemplified by a charming and creative short from Claude Lelouch.

Lelouch’s film is a tongue-in-cheek gag, a nod to our imagination of the era of cinema that the Lumières’ aesthetic evokes. Two lovers passionately embrace as they swivel on a rotating platform. Behind them, rotating at a different speed, we slowly realize, is a huge line of directors, cameras and lights, all working feverishly to capture the action. Most obviously, his film is a play on the famous rotating kiss in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In that film, Hitchcock created a surreal effect form the confluence of spinning platforms, heightening, even to an artificial degree, the romanticism of the kiss. Lelouch’s short slyly uses our knowledge of that iconic shot, and places the emphasizes instead on the film making process, its artifice and the ability that film has always had to generate a powerful feeling of romantic and nostalgia out of thin air.

Lelouch also neatly rises to the challenges facing the Lumières, and any filmmaker working under the limitations of such a brief running time, giving his film a beginning, middle and end and constructing a tight visual gag in under 50 seconds. It begins with the lovers alone, spinning absurdly as romantic music swells. Slowly a cameraman comes into view with a demanding director by his side. The platform continues to spin, revealing more and more directors, each making his own film. But the crew evolves, dropping period costume for more contemporary garb as the cameras becoming increasingly modern, ending with Lelouch himself operating a contemporary camera. The film moves, then, from 1895 to 1995, highlighting the changes in cinema since its inception, and, of course, the feeling of nostalgia that remains, ultimately suggesting that cinema’s purest power hasn’t changed at all.

Active Ingredients: Kinetic style; Advancement of a cinematic language

Side Effects: Beach scenes

from medienkunstnetz.de

Man with a Movie Camera opens with a declaration, which, like the film that follows it, remains iconoclastic and modern even now, over 80 years later. “This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema,” the manifesto reads, “based on its absolute separation from the language of theater and literature.” Unfortunately, director Dziga Vertov’s call to arms has rarely been answered in the intervening years of film history. Of course there have been filmmakers since Vertov to explore the potential of film as its own uniquely expressive and temporal medium (Terrence Malick comes to mind), but, so often chained to story and narrative, film art remains in its infancy. Thus, Man with a Movie Camera feels as shocking, aggressive and revolutionary today as it must have 80 years ago. A hyperkenetic, experimental combination of images, photographic effects and raw adrenaline, the film communicates deeply and effectively with each breathless cut.

From the beginning, Vertov emphasizes the presence of himself and his chief cameraman Mikhail Kaufman. As Odessa sleeps, the man with the movie camera watches all, magically emerging atop the skyline. Quickly though, the city explodes into frenzied activity: cars and carriages race through the streets, throngs of pedestrians rush about their day, populating factories like so many worker bees, functioning cogs in a massive social machine like the gears they themselves animate, and everywhere trains criss-cross improbably, bisecting and trisecting the streets in a confused geometric tangle of churning metallic lines, and over and below and among this endless crush of motion, the men and their movie cameras restlessly crank their own magic machines, both capturing life and somehow willing it all into existence.

from dvdbeaver.com

Through the incredible suggestive power of Soviet montage editing, Vertov draws thematic connections among the images he juxtaposes. Marriage and divorce, birth and death occur simultaneously; the omnipresence of machines links the industrialization of Russian society to the ability of cinema to create. Indeed, all the proletariat citizens the film documents, and especially the man with the movie cameras, are always doing something: creating, making, fabricating, producing. Vertov, in one of many very pointed juxtapositions, intercuts footage of his editor splicing and cutting the film, turing inert photography into life right before our eyes, with assembly line workers churning out packs of cigarettes and telephone operators connection lines on a massive switchboard. What Vertov shows, both in his documentation of street life (edited at a pace that would make MTV jealous) and through his inclusion of the filmmaking process, is that cinema has a unique power to create such vibrant life and to directly communicate through an edit, powers that separate it from theater and literature. Vertov also humbly acknowledges his project as an experiment, a step towards a true cinematic language, not a rigid pronouncement of its syntax and lexicon. He merely points the way; it remains up to the filmmakers of today and tomorrow to push the language even further. The fact that so few have in 80 years is not only a testament to the film’s genius, but an exciting indication of the limitless possibilities of cinema left to explore.

Active Ingredients: Eccentric and original style; Superb acting

Side Effects: Perhaps an overuse of canted angles

from darkmansdarkroom.com

The mystery of a death that never happened and a tale of wartime horrors with no fighting, The Third Man is an offbeat noir that not only ignores the conventions of its era, but seems to be unaware of their existence. From the jaunty, anachronistic zither score to a barely-present main character, the film follows its own logic confidently and unwaveringly. The Third Man is remembered for its eccentricities, but it’s the remarkably solid core that keeps it all together.

The perpetually-overshadowed Joseph Cotton plays Holly Martins, a quintessential American writer of quintessentially crummy American dime novels. He’s a bit of a boar, an offscreen drunk and a fish-out-of-water with a nose for trouble. He has no business being in Vienna just as the ubiquitous dramatically-canted camera angles have no business dominating a standard thriller. Yet still, he sticks around, much to the chagrin of the Europeans, to locate the shadowy third man seen carrying the body of his friend, Harry Lime.

The figure of Harry Lime looms over the film like a ghost, a man whom everyone seems to have an opinion of and whose charm masks a hidden evil, and the great success of The Third Man is to vastly exceed the audience’s expectations when Orson Welles is revealed as the unctuous Harry Lime. Welles gives perhaps his greatest performance, stretching his impact far beyond his scant screentime. With only one, very memorable, scene, he gives us Harry Lime the sociopath, Harry Lime who would befriend anyone just to sell them out behind their back: Harry Lime the third man.

The greatness of Orson Welles aside, The Third Man might have been little more than a curio without its exhilarating pacing and evocative, gothic black and white cinematography, distilled into a thrilling climactic chase below the city streets, where dark figures dramatically punctuate the frame. As the action subsides and Welles disappears, however, we slowly come to realize it was the melancholy and longing of the overshadowed Holly Martins which drove the film all along, beautifully encapsulated in its final, devastating shot, one of the few squared frames in the entire film.

from jewishjournal.com

Best Lead Performances of 2011

• Choi Min-sik – I Saw the Devil
• Steve Coogan – The Trip
• Michael Fassbender – Shame
• Gary Oldman – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Owen Wilson – Midnight in Paris

Best Supporting Performances of 2011

• Bruce Greenwood – Meek’s Cutoff
• Tom Hardy – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Ben Kingsley – Hugo
• Brad Pitt – The Tree of Life
• Viggo Mortensen – A Dangerous Method

[I feel bad that none of our great actresses made my lists this year. Some of the best performances were Michele Williams in Meek's Cutoff, Elizabeth Olsen in Martha Marcy May Marlene and Elena Anaya in The Skin I Live In.]

Top 10 Scenes or Moments from 2011

1) Creation – The Tree of Life

Unquestionably the most breathtaking and cinematic moment of 2011. Grand, moving and beautiful thanks to the vision of Terrence Malick and the marriage of analog and digital effects from Douglas Trumbull.

2) Overture – Midnight in Paris

A lovely collection of highly romanticized images of Paris that sets the tone of the film. Shows great patience and fells both nostalgic and modern at once.

3) Dueling Impersonations – The Trip

The war of Michael Cain impressions, each funnier than the last, works as a hilarious microcosm of the mutual respect and one-upsmanship of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

4) Strange Dinner – Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

A perfect distillation of all the weird, wonderful things that can happen in an Apichatpong film. Funny, but done with the straightest of faces.

5) The Taxi Cab – I Saw the Devil

A frenzied, dizzying orgy of blood that’s over before you know what hit you, this unforgettable moment represents the entire twisted world of the film.

6) Cloak and Dagger – Le Havre

Our main character plays a strange supporting role in a 1-minute tongue-in-cheek film noir that shows the stylistic and tonal originality of the film.

7) Dashboard Footage – Senna

I’ve never been a fan of racing, but the 1st person perspective of Senna’s joyous and aggressive style is positively exhilarating and offers insight into the man himself.

8) The End – Melancholia

I wasn’t a fan of Melancholia overall, but there’s no denying the visceral impact of its conclusion, which needs to seen in a theater with the volume turned way up.

9) The Jacket – The Artist

The Artist is a very clever silent film, but its most effective visual gag stages an endearing flirtation between Bérénice Bejo’s aspiring actress and an empty suit jacket.

10) Flamo’s Epilogue – The Interrupters

The Interrupters documents many dangerous brushes with gang violence in Chicago, but the way the most frightening and volatile encounter concludes shows the film’s genuine hope for a brighter future.

The Year in Miscellaneous Superlatives

• Best Performance from an Inanimate Object: The Cell Phone – Carnage
• Special Achievement in Interior Car Lighting: Drive
• Sweatiest Performance: The Rock – Fast Five
• Worst Performance: Keifer Sutherland – Melancholia
• Most Unfairly Maligned: Your Highness
• Wow, it Didn’t Suck: Thor
• Most Welcomed Actor: John C. Reilly – Terri, Carnage, Cedar Rapids
• Coolest Creature Design: Attack the Block
• Most Distracting Cinematography: A Horribe Way to Die
• Most Convincing Locations: Cold Weather

from screenrant.com

All told, I saw 100 films released in America in 2011. That’s considerably more than years past, so I feel more prepared than ever to unveil my Top 10 films of the year. (You can see numbers 20-11 here, and a ranked list of all 100 here.) Certainly covering the New York Film Festival helped to pad my numbers, but, as always, there are still inevitably films that I miss. This year, my list of regrets you won’t see here include Moneyball, The Descendants, Project Nim, House of Tolerance and We Need to Talk About Kevin.

2011 was a very strong year for films, but it may have taken a trip beyond the multiplex to discover some of its best offerings. I think this list also points to the malleability of so-called “art” cinema, comprising documentaries, sober philosophizing, comedy and even gruesome revenge thrillers. There’s amazing variety in film today, perhaps more than ever, as genres blend and global styles gain influence. So if you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, why not attempt some cinematic diversity in 2012?

10) Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory / Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky

Since 1993, documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have been creating films about the case of the West Memphis Three, teenagers wrongfully accused of the murder of three younger boy. What’s remarkable about the story is not just the injustice of the Three’s imprisonment, or the brutal details of the crime, but the role the films and the filmmakers themselves have played. Berlinger and Sinofsky are not afraid to enter an ethical grey-area: their films brought the case to a national audience but the media circus they represented led to judicial haste. For this concluding film, the pair revisit the case and its recent resolution with ferocious style and an uncompromising eye.

9) I Saw the Devil / Kim Ji-woon

You may call it gratuitous or you may call it unconscionable, but I call the violence in I Saw the Devil enthralling and explosive. Films about revenge aren’t exactly new, comprising a great many classic Westerns, but director Kim Ji-woon’s small, calibrated changes in pacing and his creative brand of action do feel new. The psychological story of the film’s unhinged hunter/hunted pair, as well as committed performances from Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik are more than enough to justify another revenge thriller, but its Kim’s relentless style that thrills here.

8) A Separation / Asghar Farhadi

A Separation is about a divorce, but with the precision and attention of screenwriter/director Asghar Farhadi it’s about much more. Like Cache, the film inhabits a thoroughly lived-in world, where the actions of its characters—here a middle-class Iranian family and another clan who becomes involved—are never simple plot devices. Instead their influences reverberate in myriad, unforeseeable ways, as they do in life. Farhadi masterfully juggles a convincing and emotional portrait of one family against the social backdrop of contemporary Iran, suggesting, never forcing, comparisons.

7) Cave of Forgotten Dreams / Werner Herzog

The most justified use of 3D technology yet, this documentary about ancient cave paintings offers something for the eyes and the mind, a great benchmark for any piece of cinema. Though Herzog is unable to mine curious human protagonists for thematic weigh, as he so often does in his documentaries, he provides an utterly fascinating examination of the oldest example of human artistic endeavor. As his 3D cameras, with unprecedented access, capture the subtle shadings and topographic undulations of the cave paintings, his narration explains the awe-inspiring chasm of time that separates us from the artists. Herzog can only guess at the purpose and origin of these remarkable works, but their existence alone sends the mind racing.

6) Shame / Steve McQueen

Featuring the best performance of the year from Michael Fassbender, Steve McQueen’s mesmerizing film about sex addiction turns New York into both a dark, lurid den of inequity and a colorful, glimmering city of lights. An accomplished visual artist, McQueen brings the same ability to find beauty among horror to Shame as he demonstrated in his debut film Hunger. Though Shame squarely inhabits the mental world of loneliness, denial and shame its protagonist cannot escape, McQueen also subtly introduces color and hope to the film, both visually and through the script’s mirrored structure.

5) Le Havre / Aki Kaurismäki

For a film ostensibly about the trails and hardships faced by African immigrants to Europe, Le Havre is refreshingly fantastical. It’s a comic fable, not a gritty political drama, and that formal paradox is only the most obvious of the film’s many touches of irony. Kaurismäki is known for his dry sense of humor and bleak blends of comedy and tragedy, but in Le Havre he fully embraces optimism, using his power as a writer to miraculously solve his characters’ problems just like that. It’s warm, kindhearted, immensely clever and even hilarious, but if the only way to grapple with immigration is to resort to this level of fantasy, maybe it’s even more a problem than we think. Still, you can think about that after you’ve enjoyed the movie.

4) Film socialisme / Jean-Luc Godard

Godard’s mixed-media video-art essay feels like the work of indefatigable rebel, not an assured master nearing the end of his career. Many called it an abomination or anti-cinematic, but its daring cacophony and formally experimentation, while frustrating at times, seemed to me a confirmation of the power of cinema. Somewhere buried beneath its Finnegans Wake-like melange of fractured bits of various languages, and its mix of streaming video, cell phone cameras, home videos and hi-grade film stock, Film socialisme is about the dis-integration of European identity, historical, linguistic and cultural. Yes, it’s distancing and maddening, but in its own muddled way it has a lot to say.

3) Meek’s Cutoff / Kelly Reichardt

Known for the modern “neo neo-realism” of films like Old Joy and Wendy & Lucy, Kelly Reichardt found a beautiful expression of her style on the Oregon Trail of the 19th-century. Adding an element of myth and an awareness of shared cinematic culture to Reichardt’s naturalism, Meek’s Cutoff follows the long, slow, dangerous journey of a group of settlers led by the enigmatic Stephen Meek, who may or may not know his way amongst the wilderness. The film’s sepia hues and square aspect ratio play on the legacy of old Westerns, but with a revisionist twist belonging exclusively to Reichardt.

2) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, like all of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work, is a strange and hypnotic experience, sure to captivate some viewers while alienating others. His films are better felt than understood, and this one emerges as a graceful, wryly comic spiritual work about the spaces we share with memories, ghosts, animals and spirits. Part of Apichatpong’s multimedia project PRIMITIVE, Uncle Boonmee deals with cultural and political memories of Thailand’s tumultuous past, but its pleasures are much more tactile, buzzing with jungle sounds and mesmerizing, expressive cinematography.

1) The Tree of Life / Terrence Malick

The Tree of Life is an illusory, fragmented and exhilarating cinematic experience, yet for all its experimentation, it’s not the opaque, impenetrable film it may seem. Rather, it’s a lucid, cogent meditation on the grace and transcendence present in life everywhere, from the planet we live on, to a blade of grass or a beam of light, to the thoughts inside our heads. With his unique eye for small moments of beauty and a decentralized narrative style, Terrence Malick collapses these ideas into one realm of existence, made tangible and real. For all its philosophizing, it’s still an entirely cinematic experience, crafting a full and fleshed-out existence both within and without its central character, Jack. Malick has created a design so grand and ambitious as to consider all of life, and has filled it with a dense poetry of images and layers of meaning, all the more beautiful for the impossibility of ever discovering them all.

20) The Future / Miranda July

“Quirk” has become a dirty word for indie comedies recently, but the eccentricities of The Future don’t function merely to manufacture “original” characters; they’re intrinsic to both the story and the voice of writer/director/star Miranda July. A ghostly narration delivered by a feral cat and touches of magic, for instance, serve the film’s sincere and surreal look at quarter-life crises and fears of commitment; they’re not ends themselves, as quirk has been in so many dramedies this year (Beginners, Terri, Submarine).

19) Another Earth / Mike Cahill

With great creativity and talent, newcomer Mike Cahill stretches a compelling premise and a low budget into a convincing sci-fi drama. The discovery of a duplicate of our planet in the heavens sparks not only some genuinely chilling moments familiar to the genre, but also a tentative romance and personal awakening in the film’s central pair. The haunting ending—satisfying and specific, yet happily ambiguous—typifies the tone of this thoughtful film.

18) George Harrison: Living in the Material World / Martin Scorsese

2011 was a strong year for documentaries and Martin Scorsese’s 4-hour look into the quiet Beatle was among the most successful. Using amazing archival material and performance footage, along with interviews of the people Harrison touched, the film portrays George Harrison as a man more than a musician or a legend: a man whose art speaks to a life-long and utterly genuine quest for spiritual self-discovery.

17) The Arbor / Clio Barnard

The Arbor examines the troubled life of British playwright Andrea Dunbar and the pain that addiction and poverty caused her and her family. Featuring actors lip-synching recorded interviews of the Dunbar family, The Arbor’s unique format uses striking artificiality to locate the sentimental truth of the story. The film’s beautifully shot tableau-like long-takes allow the viewer entrance into Dunbar’s life as simple recreations couldn’t.

16) 13 Assassins / Takashi Miike

A grand samurai epic in the classic mold, Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins nonetheless shows hints of the edginess of Miike’s more notoriously extreme films. The measured chamber drama of the first half of the film explodes into a gloriously staged action spectacle in the second. Lead by the fantastic Kogi Yakusho, the titular band of rogues and swordfighters slash their way through an army commanded by one of the year’s most ruthless villains.

15) A Dangerous Method / David Cronenberg

Though the talkiness of this stage adaptation has lead to jokes about A Dangerous Method’s misleading title, Cronenberg animates it with a litany of subtle cinematographic techniques suggesting layers of depth behind each scene. The feud of words between Jung and Freud emerges as a power struggle over yes, truly dangerous, ideas and a microcosm of continental politics about to explode into WWI. Still, Viggo Mortenson’s charismatic turn as Freud provides pleasure enough.

14) Senna / Asif Kapadia

Egregiously left off the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary, Senna follows the fast-paced and too-brief career of 80s Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna through TV footage of the man and his races. The film is masterfully constructed, showing the power a skilled editor has to shape existing footage into a new narrative. Director Asif Kapadia teases an immensely compelling story of rivalry, fame and passion out of his material, no doubt fresher and more electrifying than the day it was shot.

13) Hugo / Martin Scorsese

Leave to Martin Scorsese to turn a children’s fantasy fable into an ode to silent cinema, yet somehow he manages to weave a rousing adventure and satisfy his thematic concerns at once. To accomplish the first, Scorsese uses immersive 3D, creative production design and a solid cast of supporting characters; to accomplish the second, he recreates whimsical scenes from silent director George Melies and employs a surprisingly emotional montage of early cinema.

12) Midnight in Paris / Woody Allen

Though he’ll always be associated with New York, over the past few years Woody has trained his lens on London, Barcelona and now Paris, capturing the vibrancy and authenticity of each city. With Midnight in Paris, that’s evident from the very beginning, rain falling in rapturous shots of the city streets, jazz on the soundtrack. From there, aided by the best lead performance in an Allen film in a long time from Owen Wilson, Woody breezes through a charming tale of love and nostalgia.

11) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy / Tomas Alfredson

This dense and distancing espionage drama will make you work to keep up, but the efforts are rewarded with tense setpieces, a tremendous ensemble and an air of melancholy. Jumping back and forth through the Cold War and nesting stories of moles, intelligence and counter-intelligence, Alfredson focuses on men adrift, conditioned to trust neither colleagues nor loved ones. His arsenal of technical tricks and visual style may seem cold, but its the emotions hidden behind these trained spies that anchors the film.

Active Ingredients: Expressive cinematography; Sound; Atmosphere and setting
Side Effects: Story and plotting; Broad villainy

from awardsdaily.com

With The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher may be cementing his status as the best director of airplane novels around. It’s a regretful distinction, of course, one that a filmmaker with his talents doesn’t deserve, but his pattern of elevating mediocre material is troublesome. With last year’s brilliant and meaty The Social Network as an obvious exception, Fincer’s thrillers and crime films showcase his extraordinary energy and visual eye as a director. He confidently carries inferior stories over the finish line. Fincher directs the hell out of his movies because he has to. Give him a script as good as The Social Network’s and great things happen; with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo he delivers a better film than most directors could have, but one that doesn’t reach Fincher’s capabilities.

Based on Stieg Larsson’s enormously popular book, the film follows disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s attempts to solve a decade’s-old murder involving a wealthy and loathsome family of Swedish businessmen. Recalling the themes of Zodiac, Fincher is deeply interested in the investigative process, the piles of research material and late night computer sessions that add up to the solving of a mystery or the fear of uncertainty. Since the details of this case provide so little intrigue on their own (the standard grisly crime scenes and perplexing codes), the director’s interest in the obsession of detective work is welcomed, if not as incisive as in Zodiac. Meanwhile, the tortured and aggressive Lisbeth Salander struggles with constant and violent misogyny, a theme which drags her into Blomkvist’s mystery. Though the film’s portrait of Lisbeth is significantly stronger and more specific than the Swedish version, and Rooney Mara’s performance is convincing and committed, the character of the girl with the dragon tattoo simply does not fascinate me as she does millions of readers. Perhaps it’s the constant presence of monstrous, simplistic, unmotivated hatred of women—the single force driving Lisbeth and the film—that leaves no room for subtly and keeps me at a distance.

This, again, is where Fincher has done his material a fantastic service, animating its static plotting and suggesting depth it can’t muster. It’s a long and talk film, never dull but sometimes close, and it affords Fincher precious few opportunities to deliver the kinetic and purely visual setpieces he’s capable of (like a breathless De Palma-esque purse snatching scene). Instead, his pacing covers up the story’s deep structural flaws, just as his beautifully cold and metallic cinematography masks the banality of the mystery. Fincher gives us the best Girl with the Dragon Tattoo we’re likely to have gotten, but his considerable talents would be better employed elsewhere.

Active Ingredients: Underwater photography; Ship’s crew story
Side Effects: Folk songs; Somewhat repetitious

Blue Water, White Death features incredible underwater shark photography, but it knows that a real story is needed to make the film work. The film documents a 5-month expedition taken by codirector Peter Gimbel and his crew off the coast of Southern Africa to capture the first images of the deadly great white shark on film. 4 years before Jaws, this documentary builds an incredible mystique around the animals, and the footage the divers shot is just as tense and thrilling. Using a whale carcass as bait, the crew actually swim alongside the feeding frenzy of hundreds of great whites, outside the safety of their diving cages.

The underwater scenes are the main course, but codirector James Lipscomb is just as interested in the dynamics of the ship’s crew, the other dangers they face on their journey and the emotional ebbs and flows of the thrill-seeking scientists, driven to accomplish something (anything, perhaps) that’s never been done. Watching the film today, the ethics of their tactics are questionable, and the researchers appear more interested in dominating nature than in studying it. Still, their passion is palpable and the film uses it to build a compelling story with grace and artistry.

Active Ingredients: Scope; Graceful construction; Thematic connections
Side Effects: Teen gang silliness

from reverseshot.com

[A Brighter Summer Day plays for the first time in the US on November 25th at the Lincoln Center.]

Thanks to a release by the Criterion Collection, Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s heartwarming Yi Yi, one of the best films of the 2000s, is widely available in the US. Alas, not much of his other work is, so a career-spanning retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center beginning tomorrow should interest curious New York cinephiles. Perhaps most notable in the series is A Brighter Summer Day, Yang’s epic 1991 chronicling of Chinese immigrant life in Taiwan. At four hours long and with over 100 speaking roles, the film is a sprawling work, bursting with intersecting stories. Still, Yang exhibits masterful control, deftly balancing his many threads and thematic concerns.

Set on the eve of the 1960s, A Brighter Summer Day is a compassionate historical story of the anger, sadness and frustration of exiled Chinese struggling with life in Taiwan. Though Yang makes room in his expansive running time to touch on the unique situations of a great many characters, he focuses on the next generation of exiles: grade-school children who turn to street gangs to establish a new identity for themselves. They inherit their parents’ malaise, though perhaps they don’t know it. They’re concerned with girlfriends, Elvis songs and the few Western films that reach their island, not the secret police, haunting memories and unfulfilled expectations like their parents. Still, through subtly repeated dialogue and situations Yang poignantly suggests that the existential affects of exile will not disappear with the older generation. Though perhaps less warm and convincing with personal emotional material than Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day gains strength from its scope and the connections Yang makes among the disparate threads of his massive tapestry structurally, dramatically, and, most importantly, visually.