2000s

Vargas, a 54 year old man, gets out of jail in the province of Corrientes, Argentina. Once released, he wants to find his now adult daughter, who lives in a swampy and remote area. To get there, he must cross great distances in a small boat on the rivers, scoring deep into the jungle. Vargas is a quiet and self-contained man. He possesses the restraint of those living close to nature. A deep mystery surrounds him, the people he encounters and the places he goes through, all that taking in the unalterable world he finds almost unchanged after his long years of incarceration.Read More »

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Two brothers are divided by matters of love and politics in this feature by a former actor and assistant director for Nanni Moretti.Read More »

Craig Johnson’s poised and poignant first feature follows Sam (Mark Duplass), an, unbeknownst to him, washed-up rocker in the early stages of haggard. Jobless and apartment-less, he crashes with his aunt (a compassionate Melissa Leo) as a last resort and becomes reluctant camping-trip chaperone to her teenage son and a pal. That the three males are on par, maturity-wise, makes for engaging ensemble juvenilia. But in the stirring Pacific Northwest wilderness a surprising discovery turns dire — and the distance from boy to man must be covered overnight. Duplass’s ballsy and at times balls-out performance is a winner, particularly when Sam at long last takes stock of himself: it ain’t pretty.Read More »

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A detective tracking a serial killer who preys on young women finds his investigation complicated by a glamorous Hollywood starlet and a ruthless crime kingpin in director Bertrand Tavernier’s adaptation of the James Lee Burke novel In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.Read More »

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How is it that the same movie can seem tedious on first viewing and absorbing on the second? Why doesn’t it grow even more tedious? In the case of “Distant,” which I first saw at Cannes in 2003, perhaps it helped that I knew what the story offered and what it did not offer, and was able to see it again without expecting what would not come.Read More »

“Narrated by actress Charlize Theron, Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies (2001) is a documentary about the Hollywood legend whose acting career was overshadowed by her much-criticized love affair with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The film features the final on-camera interview with Davies’ biographer Fred Guiles as well as interviews with film historians Kevin Brownlow, Jeanine Basinger, and Cari Beauchamp; former film critic Charles Champlin; and actress Virginia Madsen, who researched Davies for her portrayal of the star in the made-for-TV movie The Hearst and Davies Affair (1985). First-hand accounts of events in Davies’s life will be shared by Carl Roup, a studio newspaper boy who was chosen by Davies to appear as an extra in The Red Mill (1927); Davies’s friends, including actress Constance Moore and King Vidor’s daughter, Belinda Vidor Holiday; and Life magazine correspondent Stanley Flink, who taped interviews with Davies in 1951, excerpts which are heard in the documentary.Read More »

Review by Michael Hastings (Allmovie)

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Though Paul Schrader isn’t often tapped to direct scripts other than his own, his touch proves essential to Auto Focus, a true-life tale of sex, celebrity, and videotape that seems tailor-made to the man who dreamed up Taxi Driver and American Gigolo. Schrader’s clinical, detached directorial style proves well-matched to the genial, humorous tone of Michael Gerbosi’s script; it’s like Hardcore without all the proselytizing (and without the sight of George C. Scott in a campy porn-producer costume). What Auto Focus is most interested in is not the narcotizing effects of anonymous sex — though that’s undeniably a big part of it — but the latent homosexuality lurking behind Bob Crane and John Carpenter’s buddy-buddy sexcapades. Finally cast in a role that successfully sends up and subverts his All-American charm, Greg Kinnear perfectly captures Crane’s kid-in-a-candy-store sexual awakening; meanwhile, Willem Dafoe underlines the desperation at the heart of the swinging lifestyle. Schrader overplays his hand in the film’s “downward spiral” sequences, switching to hand-held camera and bleached-out film stock, but even those minor technical miscalculations don’t detract from the film’s portrait of Crane as a man whose determination to lead the unobserved life ultimately led to his death.Read More »

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Synopsis

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
—Socrates

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets…

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.Read More »

Zeitgeist Films wrote:
Manufactured Landscapes is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.Read More »