The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty / Ben Stiller / 2013 / threestarNYFF51-135x45

Active Ingredients: Comedy; Global locations; Earnestness and sincerity
Side Effects: Overuse of music; Emotional manipulation

Ben Still in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

[The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, playing at the New York Film Festival, opens wide on December 25th.]

Ben Stiller’s fifth directorial effort is certainly his most ambitious film, though probably not his riskiest. Reimagining and embellishing James Thurber’s famous short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty blends comedy and drama, reality and fantasy to show how a thoroughly average man overcomes his fear of the world. It’s a familiar narrative, inviting us to embrace all that life has to offer, and Stiller successfully manages these tones, but the film doesn’t hide its effort to tug on our heartstrings. Read more…

2010s, 3 Stars, Festival

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October 10, 2013

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Far from Vietnam (1967)

Far from Vietnam / Chris Marker, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard & Co. / 1967 / fourstar

Active Ingredients: Vitality, a call to arms for art and politics; Manipulation of TV images
Side Effects: Fictional elements; Historical explanations and didacticism

[Far from Vietnam, which hasn’t been available in the US since the 1960s, plays in a new print at Boston’s MFA until 10/3. The film also plays throughout the country this fall.]

Far from Vietnam, a shape-shifting collaborative effort by a group of key New Wave filmmakers, creates a collage of strong reactions just as it creates a collage of images and cinematic forms. It’s riveting, moving, compelling and frustrating, just as it’s documentary, agit-prop, fiction and avant-garde. Far from Vietnam is many things—perhaps too many—but above all it’s vital filmmaking of a kind rarely seen today, art with a bone to pick both formally and politically. Read more…

1960s, 4 Stars

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October 1, 2013

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Blue Caprice (2013)

Blue Caprice / Alexandre Moors / 2013 / threestar

Active Ingredients: Compelling score; Mounting tension; Central relationship
Side Effects: Explanation of motives

Blue Caprice is a moody and knotty exploration of influence and manipulation, an examination into the dynamics of a volatile relationship that results in violence. First-time director Alexandre Moors is more interested in psychological violence than physical bloodshed, in deep internal scars we can’t see, and as a result he skillfully steers his dramatization of the Beltway Snipers away from distasteful shock and easy condemnation. Read more…

2010s, 3 Stars

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September 23, 2013

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I Declare War (2013)

I Declare War / Jason Lapeyre & Robert Wilson / 2013 / onestar

Active Ingredients: Limited scope; Interest in imagination
Side Effects: Performances; Shallow representations of childhood

ideclarewar

I Declare War posits a simple idea and uses it to animate the whole film: when kids play at war, it feels real to them. The central conceit of this film about, and not for, children is that a group of adolescent boys—and one girl who plays as well as any of them—create make-believe guns and bazookas out of tree branches and duct tape, while the audience sees instead the dangerous firearms they represent in the eyes of the combatants. Directors Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson toggle between the real and imagined weapons and use the visual gag to remind us of our powerful childhood imaginations, imaginations the film otherwise fails to ignite. Read more…

1 Star, 2010s

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September 17, 2013

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Maniac (2013)

Maniac / Franck Khalfoun / 2013 / threestarAvailable on Netflix Instant at time of posting

Active Ingredients: Emotional intimacy within horror context; Score
Side Effects: Single-character perspective; Visual glossiness

Elijah-Wood-in-Maniac-2013.jpg

Based on William Lustig’s sweaty, pulpy and genuinely disturbing 1980 film, this horror remake feels markedly different from many other contemporary genre updates. Unlike the Platinum Dunes horror remakes, such as 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Maniac‘s visual palate mercifully extends beyond the suffocating dinginess and drab grays and browns that so many recent films equate with creepiness. Simply by reversing this aesthetic Maniac stands out from the crowd, but on the strength of its source material it succeeds as an effective and offbeat thriller. Read more…

2010s, 3 Stars

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June 3, 2013

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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 (2014)

Bottled Up / Enid Zentelis / 2014 / 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 (2014)

Whitewash / Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais  / 2014 / threestar Tribeca Available on Netflix Instant at time of posting

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 (2014)

Adult World / Scott Coffey / 2014 / onestar Tribeca

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

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[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…

1 Star, 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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