2012 CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: DAY-BY-DAY GUIDE

The 48th Chicago International Film Festival is in full swing, and for any of my readers who happen to be in the city - or are simply interested in the wide world of international movies they'll never have a chance to see - this post shall be the compendium of all this blog's capsule reviews. It will be updated every morning to keep that day at the top of the list.

Full reviews, when possible, will post the day of the film's first CIFF screening, at least three hours before such screening begins.

Wednesday, 24 October, 2011

4:00 PM-
The World Is Funny (Shemi Zarhin, Israel)
BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND
A massive hit in its native country, there's a hell of a lot of cultural specificity - to a considerable degree, the film's effectiveness hinges on one's affection for and knowledge of a massively influential Israeli comedy group that, to my Anglo tastes, is profoundly unfunny - making it tricky for a non-native to capture all of the nuances of a multi-tiered family dramedy. But that dramedy itself is top-drawer: sensitively acted, written for maximum impact and minimal hand-holding and exposition, and resolved with uplift and not a drop of saccharine sentiment. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France/Germany)
GOLD HUGO: BEST FILM
SILVER HUGO: BEST ACTOR
SILVER HUGO: BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Deranged without being garish, and overstuffed with generic and stylistic experimentation without being indulgent, this is cinematic imagination and energy at its most undiluted, spiked with just enough of a human element that it never feels like an exercise in style for style's sake. The fifth of the director's features, it's the first that I've personally seen, so maybe they're all like this; but for right now, I'm content to call it among the most determinedly enthusiastic films I've seen all year. 9/10 (Reviewed here)


PREVIOUS DAYS


Friday, 12 October, 2011

6:15 PM-
Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK)
It has absolutely no chance of converting any of the director's naysayers, unlike 2010's Uncle Boonmee; but as a member in good standing of his cheering section, I was never less than enthralled with this nominal documentary (only if we're willing to stretch the definition of that word long past where it breaks) repurposing unfilmed scenes from an abandoned project as the backbone for story about cannibalistic ghosts in a riverfront hotel, mixed with considerations of how a violent history shapes the present, and the nature of real life as filtered through cinema. Gorgeously opaque. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

6:15 PM-
Otelo Burning (Sara Blecher, South Africa)
In the waning days of apartheid, three black teens are groomed to become champion surfers, breaking into a sport that had previously been strictly whites-only; along the way, lessons are learned, and sexual jealousy between two of the boys leads to tragedy involving the country's paramilitary groups. It's the kind of broadly uplifting but vague story that you assume only got made because it was inspired by a true events; given that no such factual basis exists, the whole thing seems even more wobbly and pointless, however nice. Terrific ending credits, though. 5/10 (Reviewed here)

6:30 PM-
Tey (Alain Gomis, Senegal)
Less a narrative than a feature-length metaphor, this is a breezily-made film on the most serious of topics: how we deal with our own mortality. In a film where the characters are stand-ins for greater concepts rather than actual flesh and blood, there's little room for real drama, but American poet Saul Williams is a reaffirming anchor in the lead role, keeping the film tethered to something like actual human experience; and while the film's theme is pitched at a frequently maddening level of abstraction, I confess that it took my breath away. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

8:15 PM-
Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)
It's easy to see the mind behind the masterful 4 Months etc. in this intimate epic about an inflexibly traditional monastery and the tragedy it begets; several moments, taken individually, are among the best I've seen in recent years. But the film as a whole is regrettably unfocused, never building up to a unified narrative or thematic whole. It's wonderful that Mungiu wants to expand his aesthetic, but his film ends up a hodgepodge of ideas, compelling, magnetic, and frustratingly sloppy - although perhaps that sloppiness has an underlying purpose I haven't apprehended yet. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

9:00 PM-
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France/Germany)
Deranged without being garish, and overstuffed with generic and stylistic experimentation without being indulgent, this is cinematic imagination and energy at its most undiluted, spiked with just enough of a human element that it never feels like an exercise in style for style's sake. The fifth of the director's features, it's the first that I've personally seen, so maybe they're all like this; but for right now, I'm content to call it among the most determinedly enthusiastic films I've seen all year. 9/10 (Reviewed here)

9:15 PM-
The Final Member (Zach Math & Jonah Bekhor, Canada)
In a small town in Iceland, Siggi Hjartarson runs the Icelandic Phallological Museum, the only museum in the world dedicated to mammalian penises. This alternately silly, mocking, engaging, and ultimately touching documentary follows Siggi's quest to complete his collection with a specimen from a human being, with an American and Icelandic man competing for the honor of donating first. If it's ultimately more frivolous than the filmmakers seem to realise, that doesn't keep it from being gleefully fun and humane: The King of Dong, basically, in the best possible sense. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

11:00 PM-
Citadel (Ciáran Foy, Ireland/UK)
A slow-burn horror picture about a fear-wracked man trying and failing to protect his infant daughter from a gang of mutated youth thugs who smell fear; some real potential, no? And it even gets there, kind of, in the incredibly dark lighting of the gang's decrepit and unnerving makeup effects of the mutant kids. But the first half spends an inordinate amount of time setting up social themes that the back half doesn't merely ignore, but actively contradicts, and the characters are difficult to empathise with, deadly for horror. 5/10 (Reviewed here)


Saturday, 13 October, 2011

1:00 PM-
Tey (Alain Gomis, Senegal)
Less a narrative than a feature-length metaphor, this is a breezily-made film on the most serious of topics: how we deal with our own mortality. In a film where the characters are stand-ins for greater concepts rather than actual flesh and blood, there's little room for real drama, but American poet Saul Williams is a reaffirming anchor in the lead role, keeping the film tethered to something like actual human experience; and while the film's theme is pitched at a frequently maddening level of abstraction, I confess that it took my breath away. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
Winter of Discontent (Ibrahim El-Batout, Egypt)
A docudrama about the January, 2011 protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the film is frankly political in the most bracing, engaging way; and by focusing on three individuals who share a common history - an activist, a policeman, and a journalist - the film finds a grand way to cut through the abstraction of headlines and editorials to find the all-important humanity of the culture-changing event it depicts. My one reservation is by no means the film's fault: with this narrowed focus, the film cuts out enough social context that a dumb 'Murkin like myself could just barely keep up. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

4:30 PM-
The Land of Hope (Sono Sion, Japan/UK)
Spiked with a few terrifically bold visual flourishes, and shot on the doorstep of the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant, this symbolic re-living of the events following 2011's tsunami and nuclear disaster in the form of a stately family drama clearly has its brain and its heart in the right place; but its brain and its heart aren't quite working in tandem, and despite rich performances of strongly-conceived characters, the movie is perpetually in search of its precise theme, which it finds only on the back side of a wholly unjustified 133-minute running time. 6/10 (Reviewed here)

8:00 PM-
Out in the Dark (Michael Mayer, Israel/USA)
After an unpromising opening 10 minutes that suggest a generic Weekend in Tel Aviv, the film suddenly goes someplace entirely different, and much more compelling than my other pithy one-liner, "Gay Israeli/Palestinian Romeo and Juliet". In fact, the film ends up as a reasonably unique and intelligent study of the conflict between national and sexual identities in that region; the only real misstep is the Israeli half of the central couple: he's underwritten to such a degree that it interferes with the smooth functioning of the drama. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

10:30 PM-
Citadel (Ciáran Foy, Ireland/UK)
A slow-burn horror picture about a fear-wracked man trying and failing to protect his infant daughter from a gang of mutated youth thugs who smell fear; some real potential, no? And it even gets there, kind of, in the incredibly dark lighting of the gang's decrepit and unnerving makeup effects of the mutant kids. But the first half spends an inordinate amount of time setting up social themes that the back half doesn't merely ignore, but actively contradicts, and the characters are difficult to empathise with, deadly for horror. 5/10 (Reviewed here)

11:00 PM-
Sleep Tight (Jaume Balagueró, Spain)
Not a new twist on the relatively well-traveled ground of movies that delve into the psyche of a madman, just a well-above average example of the form: first we get to feeling sorry for our hero, then we like him, then we learn that he is a crazy rapist monster, in what feels awfully like a psycho-thriller gloss on Talk to Her. Nothing terrifically revolutionary in style or substance, but the way that our identification with the central character is used against us freshens thing up considerably. 7/10 (Reviewed here)


Sunday, 14 October, 2011

1:00 PM-
Otelo Burning (Sara Blecher, South Africa)
In the waning days of apartheid, three black teens are groomed to become champion surfers, breaking into a sport that had previously been strictly whites-only; along the way, lessons are learned, and sexual jealousy between two of the boys leads to tragedy involving the country's paramilitary groups. It's the kind of broadly uplifting but vague story that you assume only got made because it was inspired by a true events; given that no such factual basis exists, the whole thing seems even more wobbly and pointless, however nice. Terrific ending credits, though. 5/10 (Reviewed here)

3:15 PM-
The Final Member (Zach Math & Jonah Bekhor, Canada)
In a small town in Iceland, Siggi Hjartarson runs the Icelandic Phallological Museum, the only museum in the world dedicated to mammalian penises. This alternately silly, mocking, engaging, and ultimately touching documentary follows Siggi's quest to complete his collection with a specimen from a human being, with an American and Icelandic man competing for the honor of donating first. If it's ultimately more frivolous than the filmmakers seem to realise, that doesn't keep it from being gleefully fun and humane: The King of Dong, basically, in the best possible sense. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

3:30 PM-
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, France)
The slow disillusionment of youthful revolutionaries is hardly a new subject for movies, and Assayas's lightly, palpably autobiographical story of teenage radicals in the early '70s has absolutely no new observations to make. But an unexpectedly neutral, even clinical tone, along with an appealling lead performance by Clément Métayer, and just a few moments of really bravura filmmaking are sufficient to make the film, however minor in the context of its director's career, more than just the lukewarm retread of La chinoise that it seems to be at first. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

4:00PM-
Sharqiya (Ami Livne, Israel)
The spare, long-take, frequently hand-held aesthetic is more than a little stale, but this story of a Bedouin living in Israel asks some sharp questions about national identity while finding a new twist on the "Israeli filmmakers questioning their country's treatment of non-Jewish populations" subgenre. It takes an awfully long time for the narrative to take shape, but once it does, this is an above-par depiction of the desperation of the disenfranchised and invisible members of society. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

4:30 PM-
The Land of Hope (Sono Sion, Japan/UK)
Spiked with a few terrifically bold visual flourishes, and shot on the doorstep of the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant, this symbolic re-living of the events following 2011's tsunami and nuclear disaster in the form of a stately family drama clearly has its brain and its heart in the right place; but its brain and its heart aren't quite working in tandem, and despite rich performances of strongly-conceived characters, the movie is perpetually in search of its precise theme, which it finds only on the back side of a wholly unjustified 133-minute running time. 6/10 (Reviewed here)

5:45 PM-
Winter of Discontent (Ibrahim El-Batout, Egypt)
A docudrama about the January, 2011 protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the film is frankly political in the most bracing, engaging way; and by focusing on three individuals who share a common history - an activist, a policeman, and a journalist - the film finds a grand way to cut through the abstraction of headlines and editorials to find the all-important humanity of the culture-changing event it depicts. My one reservation is by no means the film's fault: with this narrowed focus, the film cuts out enough social context that a dumb 'Murkin like myself could just barely keep up. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

6:00 PM-
Out in the Dark (Michael Mayer, Israel/USA)
After an unpromising opening 10 minutes that suggest a generic Weekend in Tel Aviv, the film suddenly goes someplace entirely different, and much more compelling than my other pithy one-liner, "Gay Israeli/Palestinian Romeo and Juliet". In fact, the film ends up as a reasonably unique and intelligent study of the conflict between national and sexual identities in that region; the only real misstep is the Israeli half of the central couple: he's underwritten to such a degree that it interferes with the smooth functioning of the drama. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

7:45-
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, France/Germany)
Deranged without being garish, and overstuffed with generic and stylistic experimentation without being indulgent, this is cinematic imagination and energy at its most undiluted, spiked with just enough of a human element that it never feels like an exercise in style for style's sake. The fifth of the director's features, it's the first that I've personally seen, so maybe they're all like this; but for right now, I'm content to call it among the most determinedly enthusiastic films I've seen all year. 9/10 (Reviewed here)


Monday, 15 October, 2011

8:30 PM-
Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, Romania)
It's easy to see the mind behind the masterful 4 Months etc. in this intimate epic about an inflexibly traditional monastery and the tragedy it begets; several moments, taken individually, are among the best I've seen in recent years. But the film as a whole is regrettably unfocused, never building up to a unified narrative or thematic whole. It's wonderful that Mungiu wants to expand his aesthetic, but his film ends up a hodgepodge of ideas, compelling, magnetic, and frustratingly sloppy - although perhaps that sloppiness has an underlying purpose I haven't apprehended yet. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
The Cleaner (Adrian Saba, Peru)
With a concept straight out of the Post-Apocalypse Indie Handbook - a man, who sanitises apartments after their inhabitants die of a mysterious plague, has to take care of a young boy he finds hiding in one of them - there's no reason to expect the film to make its wholly unexpected swerve into rich humanism: less a story of survival in a dying world than of reconnecting with fellow humanity even in the face of severe hopelessness, it navigates a cunning line between dry black comedy, harrowing apocalypse imagery, and genuinely sweet uplift. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

10:30 PM-
Citadel (Ciáran Foy, Ireland/UK)
A slow-burn horror picture about a fear-wracked man trying and failing to protect his infant daughter from a gang of mutated youth thugs who smell fear; some real potential, no? And it even gets there, kind of, in the incredibly dark lighting of the gang's decrepit and unnerving makeup effects of the mutant kids. But the first half spends an inordinate amount of time setting up social themes that the back half doesn't merely ignore, but actively contradicts, and the characters are difficult to empathise with, deadly for horror. 5/10 (Reviewed here)


Tuesday, 16 October, 2011

2:30 PM-
Tey (Alain Gomis, Senegal)
Less a narrative than a feature-length metaphor, this is a breezily-made film on the most serious of topics: how we deal with our own mortality. In a film where the characters are stand-ins for greater concepts rather than actual flesh and blood, there's little room for real drama, but American poet Saul Williams is a reaffirming anchor in the lead role, keeping the film tethered to something like actual human experience; and while the film's theme is pitched at a frequently maddening level of abstraction, I confess that it took my breath away. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

3:30 PM-
Sleep Tight (Jaume Balagueró, Spain)
Not a new twist on the relatively well-traveled ground of movies that delve into the psyche of a madman, just a well-above average example of the form: first we get to feeling sorry for our hero, then we like him, then we learn that he is a crazy rapist monster, in what feels awfully like a psycho-thriller gloss on Talk to Her. Nothing terrifically revolutionary in style or substance, but the way that our identification with the central character is used against us freshens thing up considerably. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

3:45 PM-
Winter of Discontent (Ibrahim El-Batout, Egypt)
A docudrama about the January, 2011 protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the film is frankly political in the most bracing, engaging way; and by focusing on three individuals who share a common history - an activist, a policeman, and a journalist - the film finds a grand way to cut through the abstraction of headlines and editorials to find the all-important humanity of the culture-changing event it depicts. My one reservation is by no means the film's fault: with this narrowed focus, the film cuts out enough social context that a dumb 'Murkin like myself could just barely keep up. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
The Bella Vista (Alicia Caro, Uruguay/Germany)
Invisibly combining interviews and staged re-enactments, and setting itself up to explore a conflict that gets resolved offscreen and dropped without another word, this debut documentary is befuddling, though I'm still undecided whether that befuddlement signifies poetic abstraction or straight-up lousy filmmaking. Let's give the film the benefit of the doubt, and praise it for its success at capturing the spirit of a place; I still wish, desperately, that there was even a smidgen more context that gave the people we meet more identity than what they can put across in a speedy 73 minutes. 6/10 (Reviewed here)

5:45 PM-
The Cleaner (Adrian Saba, Peru)
With a concept straight out of the Post-Apocalypse Indie Handbook - a man, who sanitises apartments after their inhabitants die of a mysterious plague, has to take care of a young boy he finds hiding in one of them - there's no reason to expect the film to make its wholly unexpected swerve into rich humanism: less a story of survival in a dying world than of reconnecting with fellow humanity even in the face of severe hopelessness, it navigates a cunning line between dry black comedy, harrowing apocalypse imagery, and genuinely sweet uplift. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

7:00 PM-
Consuming Spirits (Chris Sullivan, USA)
Fifteen years in the making, this animated epic about the grotesque secrets of a small Appalachian community wins pretty much all the style points: combining unnervingly organic paper puppet animation with crude toy models and pencil on paper, it would be worth looking at solely for its collision of media. It tells a atmospheric, robustly Gothic story, too, full of lies and miseries and heartache; but frequently, the script too happily wallows in its own bleakness, and any way you cut it, 133 minutes of this grim material is a lot, outstanding technique notwithstanding. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Meeting Leila (Adel Yaraghi, Iran)
Co-written by Abbas Kiarostami, and starring Leila Hatami, the raging nucleus of A Separation, it's easy to be outrageously excited for this directorial debut; but gracious, does it fall short. Other than grossly sleek digital cinematography (which could simply be a projection issue unique to CIFF, where the film makes its world premiere), there's nothing wrong with the film; but with its genial look at one man's attempt to quit smoking to keep his girlfriend, a sitcommy exercise distinguished only by its the Tehran backdrops, there's virtually nothing particularly interesting, either. 6/10 (Reviewed here)


Wednesday, 17 October, 2011

3:30 PM-
Rhino Season (Bahman Ghobadi, Iraqi Kurdistan/Turkey)
A factually-inspired story of an Iranian poet jailed for three decades and released to a highly changed world, told largely in impressionistic visuals capturing his emotion and symbol-driven perspective on life - ay, it's a film that tries to find a cinematic equivalent to poetic imagery, and does so, I think, smashingly well. A third-act lurch to an absurdly melodramatic twist hurts the film badly, but in the main it's a visually sublime, excitingly complex art film in the best sense of that oft-mangled phrase. 9/10 (Reviewed here)

8:15 PM-
Sharqiya (Ami Livne, Israel)
The spare, long-take, frequently hand-held aesthetic is more than a little stale, but this story of a Bedouin living in Israel asks some sharp questions about national identity while finding a new twist on the "Israeli filmmakers questioning their country's treatment of non-Jewish populations" subgenre. It takes an awfully long time for the narrative to take shape, but once it does, this is an above-par depiction of the desperation of the disenfranchised and invisible members of society. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

8:20 PM-
Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas, France)
The slow disillusionment of youthful revolutionaries is hardly a new subject for movies, and Assayas's lightly, palpably autobiographical story of teenage radicals in the early '70s has absolutely no new observations to make. But an unexpectedly neutral, even clinical tone, along with an appealling lead performance by Clément Métayer, and just a few moments of really bravura filmmaking are sufficient to make the film, however minor in the context of its director's career, more than just the lukewarm retread of La chinoise that it seems to be at first. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
Meeting Leila (Adel Yaraghi, Iran)
Co-written by Abbas Kiarostami, and starring Leila Hatami, the raging nucleus of A Separation, it's easy to be outrageously excited for this directorial debut; but gracious, does it fall short. Other than grossly sleek digital cinematography (which could simply be a projection issue unique to CIFF, where the film makes its world premiere), there's nothing wrong with the film; but with its genial look at one man's attempt to quit smoking to keep his girlfriend, a sitcommy exercise distinguished only by its the Tehran backdrops, there's virtually nothing particularly interesting, either. 6/10 6/10 (Reviewed here)

10:30 PM-
In Their Skin (Jeremy Power Regimbal, Canada)
It's not a good sign that when the film abruptly transforms into a painfully generic home invasion thriller around the halfway point, that represents a distinct upswing in quality. Prior to that, this clumsy horror indie, starring a stranded Selma Blair, is mired in some of the most disastrously ineffective scene-setting in recent memory, establishing scenarios so faked and clichéd that they don't even rise to the level of "contrivance", and introducing characters whose behavior is so unnatural that derisive laughter, not shivering, is the only plausible response. 3/10 (Reviewed here)


Thursday, 18 October, 2011

3:00 PM-
Otelo Burning (Sara Blecher, South Africa)
In the waning days of apartheid, three black teens are groomed to become champion surfers, breaking into a sport that had previously been strictly whites-only; along the way, lessons are learned, and sexual jealousy between two of the boys leads to tragedy involving the country's paramilitary groups. It's the kind of broadly uplifting but vague story that you assume only got made because it was inspired by a true events; given that no such factual basis exists, the whole thing seems even more wobbly and pointless, however nice. Terrific ending credits, though. 5/10 (Reviewed here)

4:00 PM-
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, USA)
One-half of the directing team behind the extraordinary documentary Sweetgrass returns for an awfully similar exercise in dialogue-free study of men working with animals outdoors: and the techniques that worked so well in that film almost can't help but work well a second time, though Leviathan is if anything even more abstract and experimental in its form. It's also not quite as focused, and although for most of its running time, I was convinced that I was watching the best movie of the year, an arbitrary, overlong final sequence tempered that enthusiasm considerably. 9/10 (Reviewed here)

6:30 PM-
Sharqiya (Ami Livne, Israel)
The spare, long-take, frequently hand-held aesthetic is more than a little stale, but this story of a Bedouin living in Israel asks some sharp questions about national identity while finding a new twist on the "Israeli filmmakers questioning their country's treatment of non-Jewish populations" subgenre. It takes an awfully long time for the narrative to take shape, but once it does, this is an above-par depiction of the desperation of the disenfranchised and invisible members of society. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

8:00 PM-
Fuckload of Scotchtape (Julian Grant, USA)
Don't let the sparkling wit of that title, practically a Restoration comedy in its darting humor, trick you: this is a nasty, grubby little crime-musical hybrid about a protagonist too odious for words. And not grubby in the "dark and bleak but compelling" way; grubby in the "pointlessly mean, even nihilistic" way. The only way I felt like I was really engaging with the movie at all was in my internal debate as to whether its depiction of women or gay men was the more problematic and offensive element. 3/10 (Reviewed here)

8:45 PM-
The World Is Funny (Shemi Zarhin, Israel)
A massive hit in its native country, there's a hell of a lot of cultural specificity - to a considerable degree, the film's effectiveness hinges on one's affection for and knowledge of a massively influential Israeli comedy group that, to my Anglo tastes, is profoundly unfunny - making it tricky for a non-native to capture all of the nuances of a multi-tiered family dramedy. But that dramedy itself is top-drawer: sensitively acted, written for maximum impact and minimal hand-holding and exposition, and resolved with uplift and not a drop of saccharine sentiment. 8/10 (Reviewed here)


Friday, 19 October, 2011

4:00 PM-
The Cleaner (Adrian Saba, Peru)
With a concept straight out of the Post-Apocalypse Indie Handbook - a man, who sanitises apartments after their inhabitants die of a mysterious plague, has to take care of a young boy he finds hiding in one of them - there's no reason to expect the film to make its wholly unexpected swerve into rich humanism: less a story of survival in a dying world than of reconnecting with fellow humanity even in the face of severe hopelessness, it navigates a cunning line between dry black comedy, harrowing apocalypse imagery, and genuinely sweet uplift. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

7:15 PM-
Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, Canada/USA)
For David Cronenberg's son to make his directorial debut with a satiric body horror picture seems both ballsy and conservative; but it's striking how quickly it becomes clear that, however close Cronenberg fils is sticking to the family business, he's not looking to copy his dad's work. A wittily sick look at celebrity-obsessed pop culture, the film wears its themes a bit too broadly, and could lose 20 minutes without a second thought, but it has the twisted energy and conviction of the finest sort of genre movie. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

9:30 PM-
Consuming Spirits (Chris Sullivan, USA)
Fifteen years in the making, this animated epic about the grotesque secrets of a small Appalachian community wins pretty much all the style points: combining unnervingly organic paper puppet animation with crude toy models and pencil on paper, it would be worth looking at solely for its collision of media. It tells a atmospheric, robustly Gothic story, too, full of lies and miseries and heartache; but frequently, the script too happily wallows in its own bleakness, and any way you cut it, 133 minutes of this grim material is a lot, outstanding technique notwithstanding. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

9:45 PM-
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, USA)
This look at several... idosyncratic... interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining, is undeniably amusing, while also playing fair enough with its cluster of enthusiastic amateur scholars that it never comes off as a "laugh at the freaks" parade of smugness. Eventually, however, Ascher's refusal to actually engage with the ideas being discussed, either in support or condemnation, leaves the film without much meaning itself, and his use of film clips from Kubrick's filmography and elsewhere as the backdrop for the audio interviews is often simply arbitrary. 6/10 (Reviewed here)


Saturday, 20 October

12:00 PM-
Meeting Leila (Adel Yaraghi, Iran)
Co-written by Abbas Kiarostami, and starring Leila Hatami, the raging nucleus of A Separation, it's easy to be outrageously excited for this directorial debut; but gracious, does it fall short. Other than grossly sleek digital cinematography (which could simply be a projection issue unique to CIFF, where the film makes its world premiere), there's nothing wrong with the film; but with its genial look at one man's attempt to quit smoking to keep his girlfriend, a sitcommy exercise distinguished only by its the Tehran backdrops, there's virtually nothing particularly interesting, either. 6/10 6/10 (Reviewed here)

1:00 PM-
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, USA)
This look at several... idosyncratic... interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining, is undeniably amusing, while also playing fair enough with its cluster of enthusiastic amateur scholars that it never comes off as a "laugh at the freaks" parade of smugness. Eventually, however, Ascher's refusal to actually engage with the ideas being discussed, either in support or condemnation, leaves the film without much meaning itself, and his use of film clips from Kubrick's filmography and elsewhere as the backdrop for the audio interviews is often simply arbitrary. 6/10 (Reviewed here)

2:15 PM-
Rhino Season (Bahman Ghobadi, Iraqi Kurdistan/Turkey)
A factually-inspired story of an Iranian poet jailed for three decades and released to a highly changed world, told largely in impressionistic visuals capturing his emotion and symbol-driven perspective on life - ay, it's a film that tries to find a cinematic equivalent to poetic imagery, and does so, I think, smashingly well. A third-act lurch to an absurdly melodramatic twist hurts the film badly, but in the main it's a visually sublime, excitingly complex art film in the best sense of that oft-mangled phrase. 9/10 (Reviewed here)

6:30 PM-
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, USA)
One-half of the directing team behind the extraordinary documentary Sweetgrass returns for an awfully similar exercise in dialogue-free study of men working with animals outdoors: and the techniques that worked so well in that film almost can't help but work well a second time, though Leviathan is if anything even more abstract and experimental in its form. It's also not quite as focused, and although for most of its running time, I was convinced that I was watching the best movie of the year, an arbitrary, overlong final sequence tempered that enthusiasm considerably. 9/10 (Reviewed here)

7:45 PM-
The World Is Funny (Shemi Zarhin, Israel)
A massive hit in its native country, there's a hell of a lot of cultural specificity - to a considerable degree, the film's effectiveness hinges on one's affection for and knowledge of a massively influential Israeli comedy group that, to my Anglo tastes, is profoundly unfunny - making it tricky for a non-native to capture all of the nuances of a multi-tiered family dramedy. But that dramedy itself is top-drawer: sensitively acted, written for maximum impact and minimal hand-holding and exposition, and resolved with uplift and not a drop of saccharine sentiment. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

9:30 PM-
Fuckload of Scotchtape (Julian Grant, USA)
Don't let the sparkling wit of that title, practically a Restoration comedy in its darting humor, trick you: this is a nasty, grubby little crime-musical hybrid about a protagonist too odious for words. And not grubby in the "dark and bleak but compelling" way; grubby in the "pointlessly mean, even nihilistic" way. The only way I felt like I was really engaging with the movie at all was in my internal debate as to whether its depiction of women or gay men was the more problematic and offensive element. 3/10 (Reviewed here)

10:30 PM-
Antiviral (Brandon Cronenberg, Canada/USA)
For David Cronenberg's son to make his directorial debut with a satiric body horror picture seems both ballsy and conservative; but it's striking how quickly it becomes clear that, however close Cronenberg fils is sticking to the family business, he's not looking to copy his dad's work. A wittily sick look at celebrity-obsessed pop culture, the film wears its themes a bit too broadly, and could lose 20 minutes without a second thought, but it has the twisted energy and conviction of the finest sort of genre movie. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

11:00 PM-
In Their Skin (Jeremy Power Regimbal, Canada)
It's not a good sign that when the film abruptly transforms into a painfully generic home invasion thriller around the halfway point, that represents a distinct upswing in quality. Prior to that, this clumsy horror indie, starring a stranded Selma Blair, is mired in some of the most disastrously ineffective scene-setting in recent memory, establishing scenarios so faked and clichéd that they don't even rise to the level of "contrivance", and introducing characters whose behavior is so unnatural that derisive laughter, not shivering, is the only plausible response. 3/10 (Reviewed here)


Sunday, 21 October, 2011

4:30 PM-
The Bella Vista (Alicia Caro, Uruguay/Germany)
Invisibly combining interviews and staged re-enactments, and setting itself up to explore a conflict that gets resolved offscreen and dropped without another word, this debut documentary is befuddling, though I'm still undecided whether that befuddlement signifies poetic abstraction or straight-up lousy filmmaking. Let's give the film the benefit of the doubt, and praise it for its success at capturing the spirit of a place; I still wish, desperately, that there was even a smidgen more context that gave the people we meet more identity than what they can put across in a speedy 73 minutes. 6/10 (Reviewed here)


6:15 PM-
Out in the Dark (Michael Mayer, Israel/USA)
After an unpromising opening 10 minutes that suggest a generic Weekend in Tel Aviv, the film suddenly goes someplace entirely different, and much more compelling than my other pithy one-liner, "Gay Israeli/Palestinian Romeo and Juliet". In fact, the film ends up as a reasonably unique and intelligent study of the conflict between national and sexual identities in that region; the only real misstep is the Israeli half of the central couple: he's underwritten to such a degree that it interferes with the smooth functioning of the drama. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

6:15 PM-
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance, USA)
There is, undoubtedly, something unappealingly self-congratulatory of this half-experimental pseudo-autobiographical quasi-documentary about an independent New York filmmaker trying to express his overriding love for a girl who's Just Not That Into Him by using cinema itself as love-letter, aphrodisiac, and confessional. And maybe that aspect of it would be more irritating if the film's blissed-out flow of animation and live-action imagery, mixed with a wonderfully dry, sardonic sense of humor, didn't persistently raise the film above it's "poor hipsters, can't find love" trappings. A great debut. 8/10

7:30 PM-
Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK)
It has absolutely no chance of converting any of the director's naysayers, unlike 2010's Uncle Boonmee; but as a member in good standing of his cheering section, I was never less than enthralled with this nominal documentary (only if we're willing to stretch the definition of that word long past where it breaks) repurposing unfilmed scenes from an abandoned project as the backbone for story about cannibalistic ghosts in a riverfront hotel, mixed with considerations of how a violent history shapes the present, and the nature of real life as filtered through cinema. Gorgeously opaque. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

7:45 PM-
Rhino Season (Bahman Ghobadi, Iraqi Kurdistan/Turkey)
A factually-inspired story of an Iranian poet jailed for three decades and released to a highly changed world, told largely in impressionistic visuals capturing his emotion and symbol-driven perspective on life - ay, it's a film that tries to find a cinematic equivalent to poetic imagery, and does so, I think, smashingly well. A third-act lurch to an absurdly melodramatic twist hurts the film badly, but in the main it's a visually sublime, excitingly complex art film in the best sense of that oft-mangled phrase. 9/10 (Reviewed here)


Monday, 22 October, 2011

3:00 PM-
Consuming Spirits (Chris Sullivan, USA)
Fifteen years in the making, this animated epic about the grotesque secrets of a small Appalachian community wins pretty much all the style points: combining unnervingly organic paper puppet animation with crude toy models and pencil on paper, it would be worth looking at solely for its collision of media. It tells a atmospheric, robustly Gothic story, too, full of lies and miseries and heartache; but frequently, the script too happily wallows in its own bleakness, and any way you cut it, 133 minutes of this grim material is a lot, outstanding technique notwithstanding. 7/10 (Reviewed here)

3:15 PM-
The World Is Funny (Shemi Zarhin, Israel)
A massive hit in its native country, there's a hell of a lot of cultural specificity - to a considerable degree, the film's effectiveness hinges on one's affection for and knowledge of a massively influential Israeli comedy group that, to my Anglo tastes, is profoundly unfunny - making it tricky for a non-native to capture all of the nuances of a multi-tiered family dramedy. But that dramedy itself is top-drawer: sensitively acted, written for maximum impact and minimal hand-holding and exposition, and resolved with uplift and not a drop of saccharine sentiment. 8/10 (Reviewed here)

8:30 PM-
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance, USA)
There is, undoubtedly, something unappealingly self-congratulatory of this half-experimental pseudo-autobiographical quasi-documentary about an independent New York filmmaker trying to express his overriding love for a girl who's Just Not That Into Him by using cinema itself as love-letter, aphrodisiac, and confessional. And maybe that aspect of it would be more irritating if the film's blissed-out flow of animation and live-action imagery, mixed with a wonderfully dry, sardonic sense of humor, didn't persistently raise the film above it's "poor hipsters, can't find love" trappings. A great debut. 8/10


Tuesday, 23 October, 2011

1:00 PM-
Fuckload of Scotchtape (Julian Grant, USA)
Don't let the sparkling wit of that title, practically a Restoration comedy in its darting humor, trick you: this is a nasty, grubby little crime-musical hybrid about a protagonist too odious for words. And not grubby in the "dark and bleak but compelling" way; grubby in the "pointlessly mean, even nihilistic" way. The only way I felt like I was really engaging with the movie at all was in my internal debate as to whether its depiction of women or gay men was the more problematic and offensive element. 3/10 (Reviewed here)

3:15 PM-
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (Terence Nance, USA)
There is, undoubtedly, something unappealingly self-congratulatory of this half-experimental pseudo-autobiographical quasi-documentary about an independent New York filmmaker trying to express his overriding love for a girl who's Just Not That Into Him by using cinema itself as love-letter, aphrodisiac, and confessional. And maybe that aspect of it would be more irritating if the film's blissed-out flow of animation and live-action imagery, mixed with a wonderfully dry, sardonic sense of humor, didn't persistently raise the film above it's "poor hipsters, can't find love" trappings. A great debut. 8/10