• Frontiere(s) is a French horror flick whose history is almost as torturous as its content. It was supposed to be part of the After Dark series last fall, but its NC-17 rating made that impossible due to the contract that the After Dark people had with the theatrical venues. So now it's basically going straight to DVD -- but first it's being deposited in a handful of theaters today in New York, L.A., Denver, Seattle, Philly, Austin, and maybe a few other places. Cinematical's Scott Weinberg gave it a mixed review at Toronto last year.

• The Fall: Remember The Cell, that freaky Jennifer Lopez movie from 2000? I know I do! (I never forget a movie with a vivisected horse.) The director, Tarsem Singh, is back now with The Fall, a visually stunning fable where a man in a hospital tells a little girl a story, and that story is craaaazy. Opens in New York and L.A. today.

Continue reading The (Mostly) Indie Film Calendar: May 9-15

The first series unfolded in the spring of 2000. The quirky, dreamy, black-and-white comedy Judy Berlin, starring a then up-and-coming Edie Falco ("The Sopranos"), came first. It didn't exactly break any box office records, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has a small following today. Next up came Peter Mullan's Orphans, which I didn't see, followed by Such a Long Journey, which was yet another story from India about an old-fashioned father balking at the ways of his modern children, but beautifully realized. (The great character actor Om Puri was on hand for a supporting role.) Southpaw was a snappy little boxing documentary about promising Irish fighter Francis Barrett. The sixth film, from Japan, was Adrenaline Drive, a kind of crime story crossed with a drawing room comedy. It seemed ripe for an American remake, which never came.

Continue reading Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows - Remembering the Shooting Gallery

Continue reading SFIFF Review: Still Life

With Battle for Haditha, British documentarian Nick Broomfield brandishes his verité techniques for a fictional recreation of the November 2005 killing of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines. Aspiring to be a modern Battle of Algiers, the film falls far short of that lofty goal, hawking standard-issue characterizations and leaden cause-effect analysis to humdrum effect.

To be sure, Broomfield generates palpable you-are-there immediacy, especially during the final act, when his camera's close proximity to its subjects (American and Iraqi alike) amplifies the mounting mania and fury that's been simmering for the prior hour. Such intensity, however, doesn't come equipped with matching insightfulness, as the depictions of its various players - marines, everyday citizens, and insurgents - are fashioned after now-familiar, simplistic psychological molds and action-reaction dynamics.

Continue reading Review: Battle for Haditha

Continue reading Indies on DVD: 'I'm Not There,' 'Bella,' 'Teeth,' 'Born,' 'Tre,' 'Delirious,' 'Nominated Shorts'

Continue reading Indie Weekend Box Office: 'Mister Lonely' Not So Lonely

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar, the follow-up to their critically acclaimed Half Nelson, has finally been picked up for distribution. Variety's Mike Jones reports the film has been acquired for theatrical distribution by Sony Pictures Classics, which seems like a good fit for the film. HBO Films, which financed the film, retains television rights.

Sugar, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year, felt at the time like a tough sell after Half Nelson; it still does. The film, which is subtitled, tells the tale of a young baseball star from the Dominican Republic who crashes after getting moved up to the big leagues. It's really very much a coming-of-age kind of tale about this young boy who grew up poor but talented, always believing baseball to be his one ticket out.

Continue reading 'Sugar' Finally Gets Picked Up

Morris' Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival's Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris' war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).

Continue reading SFIFF Review: Standard Operating Procedure

Continue reading Review: Son of Rambow

Continue reading Tribeca Review: Yonkers Joe

• I don't know if famed critic-hater David Mamet still counts as "independent," but I'm including his new film, Redbelt, here just in case. It's a heady drama about a martial-arts instructor who gets tangled up with a Hollywood film shoot, a misfired policeman's gun, and several other things. ME LIKEY. Opens today on a few screens in New York and L.A.

• Son of Rambow was, hands down, the best film I saw at Sundance last year. It was snatched up by Paramount Vantage, which for some reason sat on it until now. It's a funny, creative, and sweet story about two British kids in the mid-'80s who film their own homemade version of First Blood (aka Rambo I). Cinematical's James Rocchi reviewed it at Sundance 2007 and loved it too, in case my word isn't good enough for you. It's in a few theaters today, with more to come.
  

Continue reading The (Mostly) Indie Film Calendar: May 2-8

Life in Flight should prove to any aspiring screenwriter that you don't necessarily have to have an original story in order to get a screenplay made. In the film, which debuted at Tribeca on Sunday, first-time writer / director Tracey Hecht tells the tale of a man who's supposedly living the good life, but it's not the one he wants. And it takes meeting a young, vivacious woman for him to fully realize it.

Heard that story before? Sure you have, probably dozens of times. You've seen it in goofy romantic comedies from The Seven-Year Itch to Joe Versus the Volcano as well as "indie" dramas like Garden State. But good writing and acting always trumps originality of story, and Life in Flight has both, though there's still room for improvement.

Continue reading Tribeca Review: Life in Flight

I told you a couple weeks ago how THINKFilm had picked up the gritty prison thriller The Escapist, and how the film, which stars Brian Cox, was the last thing I saw at Sundance this year. Well, I actually had a double helping of Cox that January night, because right before The Escapist I watched Red, another film boasting a terrific Cox performance -- and now it's headed for theaters, too.

Via The Hollywood Reporter we learn that Magnolia has picked up Red, with plans to release it late this summer. The film (which I reviewed here) is a thriller along the lines of Death Wish, only instead of avenging his wife's murder, the Cox character is going after the punks who killed his dog. (Do not mess with a man's dog!)

Continue reading Magnolia Will Serve Up 'Red,' Cox

The writer/director Harmony Korine might have been -- and might still be -- one of the most audacious and terrifying new American talents in some time. At the age of 19, he wrote the script for Larry Clark's Kids (1995) and made his own directorial debut with Gummo (1997), a film so astonishing that most reviewers panned it simply to get it out of their heads. He then made the first official American Dogme 95 film, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), and cast one of his biggest fans, director Werner Herzog, in a starring role.

All three films conjured up images that inspired the gag reflex. It was hard to look away, though. They were odd and sad and not a little repulsive. From there, he retreated into other art forms, such as photography and music (he directed music videos for Cat Power and Sonic Youth), returning to features only to write Clark's Ken Park (2002), which was so lurid it failed to secure a U.S. distributor. Indeed, like many of the most cutting edge American directors, most of Korine's fans, and financiers, currently reside outside the U.S.

Continue reading Review: Mister Lonely

Continue reading Tribeca Review: Tennessee