The mixed-martial arts documentary Like Water, which follows a few months in the life of Ultimate Fighting champ Anderson Silva, was one of my big surprises at the just-wrapped Tribeca Film Festival.  Not being an MMA fan, I knew very little about Silva going in but came away with an appreciation for the amount of work he puts in to being the best there is at what he does.  I interviewed Silva and the doc’s director Pablo Croce for the new lifestyle and culture site, Life + Times.  Check out the Q&A here.

The 10th Annual Tribeca Film Festival screened its last set of films today.  Here are quick reviews of some of the films I had the chance to see during the festival’s week-and-a-half long run.

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest
Directed by Michael Rapaport
***
I can’t claim to have been a big fan of A Tribe Called Quest back when the seminal rap group dropped their first album in 1990.  Back then my 12-year-old self primarily listened to his Paul Simon audiocassettes, occasionally taking the time out to give The Simpsons Sing the Blues a spin.  But I was vaguely aware of Tribe and liked the few songs of theirs that I heard.  Still, because I didn’t follow them closely, I didn’t learn until long after the fact that they went through an acrimonious break-up in the late ‘90s.  Beats, Rhymes & Life, the directorial debut of actor Michael Rapaport, covers the group’s history against the backdrop of their trouble-ridden reunion tour in 2008.  Granted full access to all four members of the group, including frontman Q-Tip and his friend/rival Phife Dawg, Rapaport gets them to open up about their various highs and lows and also captures some surprisingly candid behind-the-scenes moments.  As a piece of filmmaking though, the documentary is somewhat rough around the edges; Rapaport occasionally loses track of the group’s chronology and he leaves a few potentially interesting lines of questioning unexplored.  Still, full credit to the director for pulling off a rock doc that’s meatier than your average “Behind the Music” episode.

Beyond the Black Rainbow
Directed by Panos Cosmatos
***1/2
A sure-fire midnight movie in the making, Beyond the Black Rainbow is a stylish synthesis of vintage science-fiction films from the ‘70s and early ‘80s, movies with titles like Zardoz, Silent Running and Logan’s Run.  Despite its bizarre trappings, the film’s story is actually quite straightforward: born and raised in a secret laboratory, a teenage girl uses her unique psychic powers to mount an escape from her captor, a scientist that bears a surely intentional resemblance to Michael York.  But plot decidedly takes a backseat to mood here, as director Panos Cosmatos (who I interviewed earlier in the week) creates a dreamlike atmosphere through unconventional pacing, strange imagery and cinematography and shot composition that renders familiar environments entirely alien.  Like the best cult headtrips, Beyond the Black Rainbow is occasionally frustrating, but always fascinating.

Bombay Beach
Directed by Alma Har’el
***
Back in the swinging ‘60s, Bombay Beach was one of several up-and-coming towns located around California’s Salton Sea, a place where happy families could live in modest, but comfortable middle-class surroundings.  Flash forward four decades later and the entire area has largely gone to seed, dotted with crowded houses in desperate need of repair and trailer parks populated by drug addicts and people with no other place to go.  Israeli director Alma Har’el took her camera to present-day Bombay Beach and followed a handful of the town’s residents, including a high-school football player with dreams of turning pro, an elderly man with health problems (he suffers a stroke during the course of filming) and the youngest son of lower-income family who has been diagnosed as bipolar.  The resulting film is more of an impressionistic take on life in this town than a straightforward documentary portrait, with Har’el incorporating several flights of fancy into the film, including an odd dance number between the football star and his girlfriend and a final sequence that sends the young boy riding through the dusty streets on a fire engine.  Though these added flourishes don’t always work, the setting and these individuals do capture the viewer’s imagination.  We hope for some of them to find a way out of Bombay Beach, even though it’s not clear that they will.

Catching Hell
Directed by Alex Gibney
***1/2
Back when ESPN first announced the line-up of documentaries in their ambitious 30 for 30 series, one of the film’s I was most looking forward to was Alex Gibney’s look back at the infamous Steve Bartman incident that defined the 2003 National League playoff series between the Chicago Cubs and the Florida Marlins.  For those of you with short memories, Bartman was a die-hard Cubs fan who may have cost his beloved team a shot at the World Series by reaching for a foul ball that otherwise may have been caught by right fielder Moises Alou.  That play didn’t specifically decide the game, but it did appear to spook the curse-ridden team enough that they immediately gave up 8 runs to their opponents, forcing another game that they also lost.  Despite the fact that the Cubs themselves were responsible for the loss rather than the poor guy sitting in the stands, Bartman became Public Enemy #1 in the Windy City and briefly had to go into hiding to avoid the media not to mention irate fans.  To this day, he refuses to discuss the incident, even with a pedigreed filmmaker like Gibney.  As it turns out, Bartman’s absence from the documentary feels appropriate—after all, the movie is less about him than it is about the public’s reaction to him.  In true journalistic fashion, Gibney reconstructs the events of that fateful night in minute detail, showing exactly how the mood of the stadium turned from euphoric to murderous in the span of a single half-inning.  This section is reason enough to see Catching Hell, but the movie also effectively incorporates the tale of another scapegoat, Bill Buckner, the Boston Red Sox player that famously let a crucial ball slip through his glove at the 1986 World Series.  Unlike Bartman, Buckner did agree to be interviewed on camera and he has some interesting things to say about his time as the most hated man in Beantown.  Catching Hell does falter somewhat in the homestretch as Gibney strains to push these twin narratives to an unnecessarily redemptive conclusion.  But hopefully its compelling presentation of the ugly side of fan loyalty will inspire more people to abide by that age-old mantra—“It’s only a game.”

Fire in Babylon
Directed by Stevan Riley
**1/2
Soccer (or, if you insist, football) is generally regarded as this country’s most significant sports-related blind spot, but the game of cricket enjoys an even lower profile on these shores.  So it’s up to British documentary filmmaker Stevan Riley to fill us in on a significant chapter in the sport’s long history, namely the nearly two-decade dominance of the West Indies cricket team, which led the world in wins from roughly the late ‘70s to the mid-‘90s.  They key to the squad’s success was their skill at “fast bowling” a style of play where the cricket ball is pitched at speeds that effectively turn it into a kind of weapon.  The West Indies squad didn’t invent fast bowling, but they employed it better than just about anyone else, which made them a source of pride back at home and a pack of troublemakers everywhere else.  Fire in Babylon attempts to function as both a sports documentary and a social history, connecting the rise of West Indies cricket to the improving fortunes of the former colonies in the wake of their newly won independence from the British.  Riley’s attempts to link these two narratives sometimes fall short though and he rushes through events—like the decision of some West Indian players to accept an invitation from the South African government to play a test match on their soil, a move some saw as an endorsement of apartheid—that cry out for more context.  If nothing else though, non-cricket fans will at least come away from Fire in Babylon knowing the difference between a bowler and a batsman.

Like Water
Directed by Pablo Croce
***
In the run-up to the 2010 title bout between mixed-martial arts champion Anderson Silva and his latest challenger Chael Sonnen, Pablo Croce spent several months embedded in Silva’s camp to observe what made this fighter tick.  Despite his best efforts, the director never really gets to the heart of that question largely because Silva—a man of few words, but lots of rambunctious energy—is the kind of person that seems to avoid self-reflection, at least when the camera is turned on.  Having invited the film crew into his circle, he keeps them decidedly at arm’s length.  If the movie doesn’t exactly work as a probing psychological profile, it does make for an entertaining real-life Rocky story complete with training montages and a tense climactic fight that even had this MMA neophyte caught up in the action.

Magic Valley
Directed by Jaffe Zinn
**1/2
The shadow of Gus Van Sant looms large over this slice-of-life small-town drama, which employs a number of that director’s familiar formal touches (including Paranoid Park’s impressionistic narrative and those famous Steadicam shots from Elephant where the camera is perched directly behind a character’s head) as it unspools its four interconnected story threads set over the course of a seemingly ordinary day.  In one, a teenage boy wanders around in a daze, clearly haunted by some recent event.  In another, the town sheriff goes for a ride-along with a fresh-faced rookie officer that doesn’t particularly seem pleased to have him riding shotgun.  Elsewhere, a fish farmer makes an unwelcome discovery about his harvest while his wife goes through her mundane routine—taking the dog to the vet, buying groceries—until she realizes that her daughter is missing.  Finally, two young brothers find a dead body in a field by their house and decide to give it a proper burial.  First-time writer/director Jaffe Zinn demonstrates a strong eye for the Midwestern landscape and allows the proceedings to unfold at an unhurried, but never slack, pace.  Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Van Sant would have dug a little deeper into this intriguing, but thin scenario, posing more intriguing and potentially profound questions than “What happened?” and “Who dunnit?”

The Trip
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
***
The third collaboration between director Michael Winterbottom and British comics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon was originally filmed as a six-episode series for British television, but is being released stateside in a shorter theatrical cut.  To be honest, it’s hard to imagine that much was lost on the cutting room floor.  That’s not to imply that The Trip isn’t enjoyable—Coogan and Brydon are too skilled a comic team to let five minutes pass without at least one solid laugh—but it is the slightest of their efforts with Winterbottom, lacking the zip and energy of 24 Hour Party People and the high-wire meta brilliance of Tristram Shandy, one of the best comedies of the past decade.  The premise is simple: having been assigned to tour some of northern England’s finest restaurants for a London paper, Steve Coogan (played by, of course, Coogan) reluctantly brings along his colleague and competitor Rob Brydon (Brydon) as his traveling companion.  As the duo eats their way across the British countryside, they wrestle with various problems (including Coogan’s frustration with his stalled career, not to mention his envy of Brydon’s success) and bicker over such minutia as which of them does the best Michael Caine impression.  (For the record, I’d have to hand the title to Coogan.)  It’s a pleasure to listen to these two pros riff off each other over plates of delectable-looking food and there’s something compelling about Coogan’s achingly self-aware portrayal of an actor haunted by professional and personal failures.  But the movie’s meandering nature eventually grows somewhat tiresome and the end of the journey lacks any real comic or emotional heft.  All in all, it’s a pleasant trip to a disappointing destination.   

Now entering its 40^th year, the annual New Directors/New Films festival teams the Film Society of Lincoln Center with the Museum of Modern Art’s cinema division to curate a line-up of new movies from up-and-coming directors.  Some of ND/NF’s past discoveries include George Miller’s The Road Warrior, Christopher Nolan’s Following and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy.  This year’s festival kicked off yesterday with the premiere of the buzzed-about Sundance title Margin Call and continues until April 3 at both Lincoln Center and MoMA.  The line-up features 28 feature-length titles from around the world along with a handful of shorts.  You can read quick reviews of four of the movies being shown at ND/NF below.  Visit the official site to read more about the rest of the films being shown and to buy tickets.

El Velador
Directed by Natalia Almada
***
This timely documentary, the third from Mexican filmmaker Natalia Almada, is an impressionistic look at the casualties wrought by her native country’s ongoing drug war.  Filmed almost entirely in and around an increasingly crowded cemetery in the northern town of Culiacan, El Velador (which translates to The Night Watchman) lacks the usual elements one typically expects from social-issue oriented non-fiction features, including talking head interviews, narration and lists of relevant facts and figures. And yet, the movie also doesn’t entirely fit into the no-frills verite tradition of a director like Frederick Wiseman.  Almada observes her subjects—particularly the titular watchman who keeps an eye on the cemetery where groups of mourners arrive daily to bury victims of drug related violence—but she also occasionally interacts with them; at one point we hear her addressing a builder she’s filming from off camera.  The rhythm of the film is deliberately languid and, to be honest, I found myself zoning out at several points.  (I wasn’t alone—I heard more than a few snores from seats around me during the screening.)  At the same time though, Almada’s approach lends her film a vivid sense of place that a more conventional documentary might not have captured.  In that way, its closest relative is probably Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town, the three-hour portrait of daily life in a remote Chinese village that was released here last year.  That was another documentary that occasionally tested the viewer’s patience but also rewarded those willing to stick with it with a detailed presentation of a way of life few of us will ever experience first-hand.
Screening: Sunday, March 27 @ 7pm; Tuesday, March 29 @ 8:30pm

————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Some Days Are Better Than Others
Directed by Matt McCormick
**1/2
Portland, Oregon is the appropriately scruffy setting for Matt McCormick’s low-key dramedy about the lives of various twenty and thirty-somethings (and one middle-aged woman) wrestling with such typically twenty and thirty-something problems as bad break-ups, prolonged unemployment and a general lack of life direction.  Indie music sensations Carrie Brownstein (formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney) and James Mercer (lead singer of The Shins) are the nominal stars of this ensemble piece and deliver entirely adequate performances as, respectively, Katrina—a reality-TV obsessed oddball who can’t stop checking her ex-boyfriend’s email—and Eli, a perpetually downbeat college grad attempting to pay off several thousand dollars in student loan fees.  The film’s tone is perhaps best described as Daniel Clowes with less satiric bite.  McCormick wrings some nice observations and laughs out of his character’s unhappiness, but ultimately sympathizes with them and even romanticizes their self-involvement in a way that Clowes notably avoids.  Some Days are Better Than Others does function as an effective advertisement for Portland’s rugged beauty, but if these characters are typical of the city’s residents than I’d just as soon stay here in New York.
Screening: Tuesday, March 29 @ 6pm; Wednesday, March 30 @ 8:30pm

————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Tyrannosaur
Directed by Paddy Considine
***
In many ways, the feature filmmaking debut of excellent English actor Paddy Considine (best known here for his roles in The Bourne Ultimatum and In America) resembles a dramatic version of the offbeat Paul Thomas Anderson/Adam Sandler comedy Punch-Drunk Love.  In that movie, Sandler plays a man prone to irrational rages who falls in love with a fellow eccentric (Emily Watson) that’s one of the few people to actually like him when he’s angry.  Considine’s far more serious tale casts Peter Mullan as a widower with a pronounced mean streak who kicks his dog to death in the movie’s very first scene.  It’s hard for any character to bounce back from an act like that, but the movie is committed to rehabilitating this guy, if not exactly absolving him of his many sins.  After another one of his blow-ups, he seeks refuge in a second-hand shop and is treated with unexpected kindness by the store’s proprietor, a gentle and devoutly religious woman (Olivia Colman).  Turns out that she has some experience dealing with angry men—her husband (Eddie Marsan) is a serial abuser that subjects her to regular physical and emotional torment and uses their shared faith as a way to keep her around.  Eventually, she finds the courage to leave him and moves in with Mullan, bringing his life a stability he hasn’t experienced in years.  Though Tyrannosaur’s subject matter is deeply unpleasant and its characterizations are at times questionable, the film does boast terrific performances from its lead actors, particularly Mullan who keeps the audience invested in his character’s plight without begging for our sympathy.  Still, Considine doesn’t appear to entirely trust his star and occasionally goes out of his way to stack the deck in the character’s favor.  For example, a melodramatic subplot involving a next-door neighbor—a young boy who is repeatedly terrorized by his mom’s new boyfriend—seems to exist solely so that Mullan can appear like less of an asshole.  (He may have killed his dog, but at least he doesn’t pick on kids!)  Elements like that are among the many reasons why I doubt I’ll be revisiting Tyrannosaur as often as I check back on Punch-Drunk Love, but Mullan’s performance, at least, is a keeper.                
Screening: Wednesday, March 30 @ 6pm; Thursday, March 31 @ 9pm

————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Octubre
Directed by Daniel and Diego Vega
**1/2
A prize-winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Peruvian drama Octubre is a well-acted, but otherwise unremarkable slice-of-life story about a moneylender (Bruno Odar) that unexpectedly acquires a new job: father.  It seems that one of the prostitutes he visits on a regular basis gave birth to his daughter, who she leaves on his doorstep before vanishing to parts unknown.  For whatever reason—guilt, laziness the sudden stirrings of fatherly affection—he decides against turning her over to the authorities and instead employs the services of one of his customers, a sweet, but irritatingly proper single woman of a certain age (Gabriela Velasquez) to act as the child’s nanny.  The three become an odd kind of family unit, so much so that Velasquez begins to make romantic overtures to Odar, which end up having the opposite effect that she intends.  Octubre is relatively engaging while you’re watching it, but it’s also awfully slight–a short film dressed up in feature-length clothing.
Screening: Saturday, April 2 @ 9pm; Sunday, April 3 @ 4pm

Closing out coverage of the 48th New York Film Festival with a final batch of capsules.  Look for longer reviews of three more movies–Mike Leigh’s Another Year, Julie Taymor’s The Tempest and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter–closer to their theatrical release dates in December.


Mysteries of Lisbon
Directed by Raul Ruiz
**1/2
A four-and-a-half hour distillation of a six-hour miniseries made for Portuguese television, Mysteries of Lisbon is an immaculately produced historical epic that plays like a cross between Charles Dickens and Alexander Dumas.  (The movie is actually based on a 19^th century novel by Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco, who was a contemporary of both those men.)  The labyrinthine plot revolves around a young orphan who has grown up under the watchful eye of a devoted priest, but has finally grown old enough to learn the truth of his origins.  We in the audience are treated to his full history—and a whole lot more besides—through an extensive series of flashbacks, as virtually every character that enters the frame comes prepared with his or her own lengthy story to tell.  While the repetitive nature with which these flashbacks are introduced is almost laughable at times, it’s hard not to get swept up in the narrative’s broad mix of melodrama, coincidence and sheer luck.  That is, at least, until the second half when the orphan morphs into a grown man overnight and the events of his life grow increasingly less compelling.  By the time the film winds down to its overdue conclusion, my interest in its titular mysteries had long since worn off.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Black Venus
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
***
Black Venus is a film about exploitation that many might accuse of being exploitative itself.  Those critics do have a point—certainly director Abdellatif Kechiche lingers for inordinately long periods of time on scenes depicting the physical and emotional abuse of the film’s central character, Sarah “Saartjie”Baartman, a South African woman who performed for European audiences in the early 19^th century as the Hottentot Venus.  The act devised by her male employer was pure freak-show stuff; dressed up in tribal garb, she grunted and stamped about for audiences while he ordered her to perform various menial tasks, before inviting audiences to step up and touch her enormous buttocks.  One of these shows is presented in its entirely early on and while it’s difficult to watch, it’s also far from the worst of the humiliations she’ll suffer during the course of the film.  Later on, she’ll be poked and prodded by scientists eager to examine her unique physical attributes (and use them as evidence in their research into the “inferiority” of African people), fondled and violated at erotically-charged elite parties and, finally, sold into prostitution, the job that led to her eventual death from syphilis at the age of 25.  Kechiche presents these encounters in lengthy, unbroken sequences that punish the audience as much as the performer playing Baartman, first-time actor Yahima Torres.  And yet, perhaps that punishment is necessary if we’re to truly understand the horror Baartman experienced in her short, sad life.  (That said, two-and-a-half hours is an awfully long time to witness this kind of sustained abuse—the movie might have been easier to defend against exploitation charges if it were at least thirty minutes shorter.)  If Black Venus upsets you, perhaps that’s a sign that Kechiche has done his job.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Robinson in Ruins
Directed by Patrick Keiller
**1/2
I generally like my British humor dry, but Patrick Keiller’s essay film Robinson in Ruins is too dry even for me.  Perhaps part of the problem is that I haven’t seen the two previous entries in this apparently ongoing franchise, while purports to be the work of a man named Robinson, a fictional researcher who travels around England making various observations about domestic and international events.  These observations are imparted to us in narration read by a supposed friend and colleague of Robinson—in this case a role voiced by actress Vanessa Redgrave—which is layered over postcard-perfect (and noticeably depopulated) shots of rural countryside, bustling cities and an occasional bit of action (like a lengthy sequence depicting a spider spinning its web).  Keiller demonstrates such a strong eye for composition, it’s easy to tune out Redgrave’s droning narration and just enjoy Robinson in Ruins as a slideshow of beautiful images, which is essentially what I wound up doing.  I’m sure I missed out on some great dry wit—to say nothing of the overarching point of the film—as a result, but that’s a loss I’ll just have to deal with.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Film Socialisme
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Your enjoyment (and, to a certain extent, comprehension) of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest provocation depends heavily on whether you’ve kept up with his recent output or still primarily associate him with the groundbreaking movies he made in the ‘60s, from Breathless to Week End.  Because if you view Breathless and Film Socialisme back-to-back, you’d probably never guess that the same guy made them.  Personally, I’m not as familiar with contemporary Godard as I should be—prior to this one, the most recent film of his I had seen was 2001’s In Praise of Love, which, while challenging, was still slightly more conventional than Film Socialisme.  Divided into two distinct parts, Godard’s new film spends its first half on a cruise ship where a gallery of faces—it would be a stretch to call them characters—wanders about staring out at the ocean and occasionally speaking to each other.  (Their conversations are just barely translated for our benefit—Godard only chooses to subtitle two or three words per sentence.)  In Part Two, the action shifts to dry land and features, among other things, the repeated image of a donkey tied up to a gas pump.  What does it all mean?  Damned if I know, but then I’m not certain that Godard expects viewers to be able to offer a cogent explanation of everything they’re seeing onscreen.  The images seem to be what matter to him, not necessarily their meaning.  As you may notice, I’ve declined to give Film Socialisme a rating; that’s because it’s difficult to offer an conventional grade of a movie that seeks to defy convention at every turn.  Perhaps a better to summarize my time spent watching it is listing the range of emotions I experienced throughout, from boredom and irritation to fascination and even enjoyment.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

We Are What We Are
Directed by Jorge Michel Grau
**
This Mexican horror drama reminded me in some ways of the Greek movie Dogtooth, released here earlier this year.  Both films revolve around families that have removed themselves from mainstream society to pursue their own distinct beliefs.  The mother and father in Dogtooth taught their children a unique vocabulary and an odd set of moral lessons.  In We Are What We Are, Mom and Dad have instructed their offspring in the fine art of cannibalism.  But when daddy dearest kicks the bucket in the beginning of the movie, it’s up to his two sons to carry on the family tradition.  Making his feature film debut, writer/director Jorge Michel Grau has hit upon a terrific premise for a film, but doesn’t execute it with the precision and imagination it deserves.  The movie is sloppy and slapdash when it should be frightening and darkly comic.  In that way, it’s nothing like Dogtooth, which succeeded in all the ways this film fails.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Revolucion
Directed by Various
***
An omnibus collection of ten short films that offer contemporary observations on the Mexican Revolution (which celebrates its centenary this year), Revolucion contains two great movies, two fairly bad ones and another six that range from mediocre to pretty good.  The standouts for me include Carlos Reygadas’ haunting semi-documentary entry depicting a party commemorating the Revolution that turns destructive and Rodrigo Pla’s mournful film about a descendent of Pancho Villa who is unwittingly used as propaganda for an ambitious politician.  Interesting, the project’s highest-profile directors (actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, who also produced the film) wind up contributing the weakest segments; Bernal’s in particular feels scattered and unfinished, as if he never completed the screenplay before he began shooting.  The rest of the movies all have something interesting to offer even when they’re not entirely successful.  There has yet to be an omnibus movie where every individual segment is a winner, but the best entries in Revolucion make the entire picture worth seeing.

Boxing Gym
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
***1/2

In a year dominated by documentaries that play more like fiction—think Catfish and I’m Still Here—thank goodness we still have Frederick Wiseman around to show us how old-school cinema verite is done.  A titan in the documentary world (in influence if not necessarily box office), Wiseman has been making observational portraits of American life and institutions since the late 1960s, with movies like High School, Public Housing and Domestic Violence.  His latest, Boxing Gym, is one of his less weighty films—at least when compared to something like Domestic Violence and its sequel—but it’s still a terrific example of his aesthetic.  For several months, Wiseman and his camera crew set up shop at an Austin, Texas-based boxing gym and documented the facility’s daily workings, filming sparring sessions, individual workouts, off-the-cuff, shoot-the-shit kind-of conversations and even registration sessions where the gym’s owner and chief trainer signs up new members.  As is typical in a Wiseman film, there’s no narration, no lower-third ID’s telling us a person’s name, no outside information beyond what we see on the screen.  The style is so different from contemporary documentaries—to say nothing of reality television—it can be difficult to adjust to at first.  But as the film goes on, you find yourself falling into the rhythm of this gym, recognizing faces and growing familiar with the surroundings.  It helps that the gym itself is such a visually interesting place.  This ain’t a ritzy Crunch or New York Sports Club facility, it’s a small, grungy, lived-in space with memorabilia lining the walls and well-used equipment covering every bare bit of floor.  In other words, it’s a serious place and the cliental take their workouts seriously, but never to the point where they can’t share a laugh with or lend a hand to a fellow gym-goer.  As excited as I am by the new narrative and formal possibilities that contemporary documentaries are experimenting with, it’s a shame that fewer directors are making beautifully observed slice-of-life movies like Boxing Gym.

Boxing Gym opens at the IFC Center in New York on October 22.

Inside Job
Directed by Charles Ferguson
***1/2

Charles Ferguson follows up his stellar Iraq War documentary No End in Sight with an equally detailed look at the recent global financial crisis that started in 2008 and—despite some reports to the contrary—certainly appears to be ongoing.  Much of the information is familiar, but Ferguson’s great gift as a non-fiction filmmaker is his ability to streamline and synthesize complex events into a clear, yet far from simple narrative.  Inside Job burns with the same anger that fueled Michael Moore’s similarly themed Capitalism: A Love Story, but this film is more focused and thoughtful, an unwise (but fortunately brief) detour into exploring the titillating peccadilloes of Wall Street types—you know, drugs, prostitutes and other vices—notwithstanding.  For me, the most compelling part of the film was Ferguson’s investigation into some of the country’s biggest business schools, where the teaching staff consists of many of the same economists that advanced the theories and policies that led us into our current mess and who still do consulting work for major corporations.  (Interestingly, though they are granted the title of “professor,” few of them are actually part of the faculty, which frees them up to pursue big paychecks in the corporate world in between school semesters.)  The knowledge that these are the people who are training the next generation of stockbrokers, CEOs, and economic theorists—thus ensuring that their harmful policies will continue for at least another generation and beyond—is more frightening that any of the horror films that will be coming out around Halloween.

Inside Job opened in limited release on October 8 and will expand to more cities in the upcoming weeks.

Meek’s Cutoff
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
***1/2

With Meek’s Cutoff, writer/director Kelly Reichardt takes the skills she’s honed over the course of her two-decade career as an independent filmmaker—among them, extensive location shooting, minimalist storytelling and quiet, contemplative pacing—and applies them to what’s easily her biggest production to date both in terms of budget and scope.  Granted, the film is still less than half the cost of the catering budget for the next Transformers movie, but period productions don’t come cheap.  Set in the American West in 1845, Meek’s Cutoff could fatuously, but not entirely inaccurately, be referred to as Oregon Trail: The Movie.  Like that iconic computer game, the film follows a three-family wagon team journeying along the Oregon Trail or, to be more precise, a branch of the Oregon Trail.  The cast of characters includes an older widower (Will Patton) and his new bride (Michelle Williams, re-teaming with Reichardt after her stellar turn in Wendy and Lucy), a young married couple (Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano, who are joined at the hip in real life as well) and a pregnant woman (Shirley Henderson) making the arduous trek with her deeply religious husband (William White) and pre-teen son.  Leading the pack is Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), a brash, quarrelsome guide whose navigation skills aren’t quite as sharp as advertised.  Reichardt and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond drop you right down in the middle of the pioneers’ journey and waste little time with exposition or backstory.  Instead, the characters’ personalities and relationships to each other emerge from their actions or small bits of business—a glance, a terse word, a gesture.  Reichardt does a terrific job keeping the film’s point of view fluid; no one character dominates the proceedings, instead the focus subtly shifts between (and sometimes within) each scene.  The result is an intimate version of a classic Western epic, still incorporating the stunning vistas and thrilling moments we expect from the genre, but never losing sight of the people at the center of the story.  Some clunky dialogue and on-the-nose thematic parallels (the film’s “lost in a desert” scenario has clearly been designed to read as an Iraq War metaphor) mars the viewing experience at times, but overall Meek’s Cutoff is a genuinely exciting next chapter in the evolution of a major directing talent.

Directed by Olivier Assayas
***1/2

Since its premiere at Cannes last summer, Olivier Assayas’ five-and-a-half hour chronicle of the career of Carlos the Jackal has frequently been compared to Steven Soderbergh’s Che, another lengthy, multi-part film about an iconic political figure who, depending on who you ask, is either a terrorist or a freedom fighter.

While the two movies do have a number of things in common, I find Che to be a far more radical film in terms of its execution, specifically Soderbergh’s decision to essentially eliminate any mention of Che Guevera’s private life.  In both halves of Che, the movie’s subject is never granted any quiet moments away from the revolution to express his thoughts and feelings about other things—live, love and the like.  Not everyone was pleased with Soderbergh’s approach, but it happened to be one of my favorite things about his film.  After all, those are precisely the kind of scenes that often get biopics into trouble, as writers and directors feel compelled to overdramatize personal matters like addiction and marital strain (see Ray, Walk the Line and virtually any biopic about out-of-control musicians) or reduce pivotal moments in the subject’s life—say the death of a loved one or the birth of an idea—to a few lines of dialogue or a single, silly “Eureka!” moment.

It’s no coincidence that those kinds of scenes are also the weakest parts of Carlos; early on, for example, there’s a strained sequence where Ilich Ramirez Sanchez a.k.a. Carlos (played by Edgar Ramirez) debates his goals with his lover and fellow revolutionary, which is followed by an equally on-the-nose bit where he officially adopts his world-famous moniker.  Fortunately, there are relatively few of these scenes in the movie’s 319-minute runtime.  Instead, much like Soderbergh, Assayas is primarily interested in the process by which Carlos organizes and executes his various missions.  If Che offers a remarkably detailed presentation of guerilla warfare, Carlos provides an equally comprehensive depiction of urban terrorism.  The highlight of the film is Carlos’ famous 1975 OPEC raid, when he took hostage some sixty dignitaries and their assistants.  Lasting almost 90 minutes, this set-piece is a brauva bit of filmmaking that ranks up there with the best action sequences of the past few years.

The OPEC raid also functions as a natural narrative midpoint for the film, showing us just how far Carlos has come while also laying the seeds for his eventual destruction.  Where Che remained largely unchanged in both parts of Soderbergh’s movie—his circumstances in Cuba and Bolivia were different, but his ideals and fighting spirit never dimmed—Assayas shows just how much Carlos changed over the course of his career.  The first half of the film presents him as a dashing, daring revolutionary firmly committed to the revolution.  But in the aftermath of the OPEC raid—which ended with him accepting a $20 million ransom instead of following his orders to kill the hostages if his original terms were not met—Carlos’ ideals ran up against the desire to profit from his ventures.  Slowly, but surely he became a terrorist-for-hire, marketing his skills to various governments, all of whom would later turn their backs on him when he became a liability.  By the end of the film, he’s an overweight, drunken has-been who spends much of his time chasing after women in bars.  Ramirez’s physical transformation over the course of the movie’s decade-spanning narrative is nothing short of astonishing; it’s almost hard to believe the same actor is portraying the older, not-so-wiser Carlos.  In the end, Che is the story of one man’s revolution, while Carlos is the story of one man’s life.

Carlos opens in New York on October 15 in both the 319-minute version and a 165-minute version.  In addition, it will air in three parts on the Sundance Channel starting October 11.

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
****
It isn’t often that I immediately want to watch a film again after the credits roll, but that’s how I felt at the conclusion of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy.  This tricky hall-of-mirrors story revolves around a man and a woman (William Shimell and Juliette Binoche) that spend one long day in each other’s company wandering around the Tuscan countryside.  He’s a scholar that specializes in art reproductions, she’s the owner of a small antiques shop and they have supposedly never met before.  Over the course of the day though, their relationship undergoes pronounced shifts and, by the end, they have taken on the appearance and attitude of an actual married couple.  But are they?  Or are they simply a reproduction of the other couples they have encountered during their excursion?  In the end, the movie isn’t concerned with providing a definitive answer, which is as it should be.  The joy of the film emerges from observing the subtle way the nature of their relationship changes over time.  Shimell and Binoche—who deservedly won the Best Actress prize at Cannes—deliver marvelous performances that demonstrate exceptional range, putting them (and us) through the emotional wringer.  Certified Copy is the kind of movie that can be watched again and again because each time you’ll undoubtedly discover something—be it a glance, a bit of body language or a line of dialogue—that makes it into a new film each time.

Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
***
It’s not easy to prepare someone for the experience of watching his or her first Apichatpong Weerasethakul film.  I’ve only seen two of the Thai filmmaker’s movies myself—2004’s’s Tropical Malady and his latest effort, the Cannes-awards winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Control His Past Lives—and both times I’ve found the viewing experience to be both enthralling and baffling.  Enthralling because his movies are unlike anything else out there right now in the way they mix mysticism and realism and completely depart from a typical narrative structure.  Baffling because they are so removed from current American conventions—both in Hollywood and the independent world—that one spends a lot of the movie (perhaps too much) trying to make logical sense of something that isn’t necessarily supposed to be logical at all.  Personally, my big stumbling block with Weerasethakul has always been the way he directs his performers, most of whom are non-actors.  He doesn’t seem all that interested in tasking them to deliver performances that create fully-rounded characters; in individual scenes, their delivery and facial expressions almost run counter to the material they’ve been given to play.  For example, the title character in Uncle Boonmee is a dying man who is visited by various spirits—including his dead wife and their lost son, who wandered into the jungle and re-emerged as a monkey—as the end approaches and also revisits some of his past lives.  But Boonmee doesn’t express much in the way of surprise or emotion as these mystical events occur; he merely goes on with what little he has left of his life.  At the same time though, the movie’s casual approach to blending fantasy and reality is one of its chief selling points.  This isn’t the aggressive, in-your-face fantasy offered by 3D spectacles like Alice in Wonderland and Avatar—it’s relaxed and almost comically strange.  (The film’s odd comic streak is best exemplified by a did-that-just-happen? sequence where a horny catfish seduces a human princess.)  Perhaps the best way to experience Uncle Boonmee or really any Weerasethakul film is to let his odd vision of the world sweep over your and not sweat the details too much.