The Messenger
Oren Moverman | USA | 2009
112 min

The Messenger treads a noteworthy path. It is a slice-of-life film, focusing on essentially three characters in everyday America, yet is about a lot more than it shows. It brings a global conflict to our doorstep and down to a personal level. Although it is about grief, the movie is not heavy-laden with the emotion itself. This becomes the movie’s biggest accomplishment. continue reading »»

Dubai International Film Festival 2009
Details (all meat, no potatoes)

WearetheMovies.com has been diligently covering the festival since last year (our writers are pretty comprehensive and brutal; see links on the right), and this year we will once again jump into the fray, all guns blazing. Dubai is a city we love and we love it even more during the film festival. (Wait, I think I hear Bloomberg and Financial Times nerds crying foul, screaming “standstill” and “meltdown” — screw ‘em, what do philistines know about art.) The DIFF website has just unveiled the entire roster of films, schedule and price details. The information is a bit dense there, so here is a snapshot summary: continue reading »»

Chop Shop
Ramin Bahrani | USA | 2007
84 min

Ramin Bahrani is interested in not only people but how people live. This young Iranian-American director has professed a great love for the Italian Neorealist movement, particularly the films of Vittorio De Sica. The influence is pervasive in Chop Shop, Bahrani’s new film about a brother and sister who live and work in an impoverished part of Queens, New York. The boy’s real name is Alejandro Polanco and his sister in the film is played Isamar Gonzales — both of them get to keep their first names for their characters. Ale and Isamar are non-professional actors, and by allowing them to keep their real names it seems Bahrani helped them overcome the artifice of the kind of screen-acting so endemic to the ‘serious indie film.’ continue reading »»

My Winnipeg
Guy Maddin | 2008 | Canada
80 min

In Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, the director films his autobiography into a docudrama. None of the secrets of the city or his family are spared his intense scrutiny and he lays his life bare, almost naked, for artistic consumption. It’s the best and only form of self psychoanalysis by way of filmic recreations that anyone has ever performed or anyone has ever seen, but it asks the question, how obsessed can a man be with his own life and history. For Maddin, the answer to that question is insignificant for he asks “Who gets to vivisect his own childhood?” continue reading »»

Wendy and Lucy
Kelly Reichardt | USA | 2008
80 min

Wendy and Lucy is a disparaging film about the continuous misfortunes that befall its main character Wendy. Lucy is of course her dog, who gets lost and must be found. Director Kelly Reichardt’s film is about the effect of poverty and the search for that great moment in a person’s life when things will change for the better. In her film, loss and regret are key traits, just like they were in her earlier film, the sleepy, artsy Old Joy, and both films share the same shortcomings — a good idea stretched to feature film length in a film that can’t sustain our interest for too long. continue reading »»

Frozen River
Courtney Hunt | US | 2008
97 min

Crime is always about money, but it becomes far more interesting when it turns into greed. Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River, her remarkable debut film, quickly and very succinctly establishes the main characters need for money early on and everything thereafter simply falls into place. Melissa Leo’s Ray is a mother with two kids living just above the poverty line after her Mohawk husband abandons her one morning. With Christmas around the corner, she needs to come up with a way to pay for her new house and the gifts she plans on putting underneath the tree at home. Fate deals a strange hand and she finds herself bumping into a Mohawk woman who suggests a good and uncommon use for her car with “button release trunks”. It’s not immediately obvious what this usage might be, and discovering this and where it leads becomes one of the films many fascinating joys. continue reading »»

Metroland
Philip Saville | UK | 1997
105 min

I am a big fan of The Kinks song, Do You Remember Walter?. I have always found the song lyrics somehow moving and troubling. The movie might as well be an adaptation of that song, except it is told from Walter’s perspective:

“Walter, remember when the world was young
And all the girls knew Walter’s name?
Walter, isn’t it a shame the way our little world has changed?
Do you remember, Walter, playing cricket in the thunder and the rain?
Do you remember, Walter, smoking cigarettes behind your garden gate?
Yes, Walter was my mate,
But Walter, my old friend, where are you now? continue reading »»

Hunger
Steve McQueen | UK/Ireland | 2008
96 min

Hunger is about a man that starved himself to death for his principles. His name was Bobby Sands, and he was an IRA member whom the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher eulogized as ‘…a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life.’ In this meticulously crafted film, images play a crucial role and expository dialog is at the mercy of economy — yet there is a 17-minute conversation about morality, religion and politics between Bobby Sands and a visiting priest, all shot in one long take from a static camera, that is a touchstone of writing, acting and cinematography. Sound is also important to director Steve McQueen, who uses it most effectively in the wordless third act, as we watch actor Michael Fassender, playing Sands, gradually reduce to skeletal bones before our very eyes. continue reading »»