Timer

I love a romantic comedy. Throw in some magic realism–even better. Jac Schaeffer's Timer ticks both of those boxes, but, unfortunately for a film that explores people’s fears about missed opportunities, this film missed a few opportunities itself, and lost me as a fan in the process. (It bills itself as sci-fi but I say magic realism–there is new technology, but it’s never fully explained. I call that magic.

Brilliantlove

Manchester is taking a photograph of his girlfriend Noon. She’s asleep. He develops the film while she naps and goes outside to lay on a dingy blanket on the gravel driveway that leads to their makeshift garage-turned-apartment. Did she consent to being documented? No one seems to care. When Noon wakes up, she goes outside naked and has sex with Manchester in broad daylight. A seemingly enviable hipster couple sequestered from the world in their own squalid little space, it doesn’t take long for things to go south.

Adrift (Choi Voi)

At last year's Venice Film Festival, Adrift won the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Prize. With its lush scenery, layered characters, and startling soundtrack, it’s not hard to see why the film stood out to an international panel of jurors. The film is in Vietnamese with English subtitles and is set in various Vietnamese locales, including Hanoi, Quang Ninh, and Hoi An. Jam-packed streets filled with tiny tuk-tuks and motorcycles are juxtaposed with lonely, gorgeous beach campfires at sunset.

Atomic Mom

I was born in 1952 and, although I don't remember public service announcements about the atom bomb like the ones M.T. Silvia includes in her feature-length documentary Atomic Mom, I do remember "bomb drills" when I was in elementary school. At least we didn't just crawl under our desks like some PSAs recommended; we went down to the sub-basement and hunkered down in the dark. I don't remember being scared, but then I don't think I had a very good idea of what the hell we were doing. I'm not sure anyone did.

Dinner for Schmucks

In the formulaic plots that have developed in mainstream comedies over the last several years the re-occurring theme seems to be male idiocy. The Will Ferrells and Steve Carrells of the comedy world have delighted in creating man-children characters who don’t exist on the normal plane of human intelligence. They come equipped with stock sex jokes, like not understanding the female anatomy, or overconfidence that their incorrect knowledge of basic vocabulary is accurate.

A l’Est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton

Chantal Ackerman’s projects over the past forty years have secured her place in the international vanguard of film directors both male and female. Her films are widely known for experimenting with time and images while questioning their relationship to a film’s narrative. It’s no surprise that her film A l’Est avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton showed at the Barcelona International Woman’s Film Festival in June. In fifty-one minutes Ackerman attempts to show the power of music and the passion of the musician through images.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

In the previous millennium when I was an idealistic young thing attending Barnard College, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, there was a lot of talk about who before us had walked the hallowed halls: anthropologist Margaret Mead; writers Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zora Neale Thurston, Francine du Plessix Gray, Patricia Highsmith and Ntozake Shange; recent United States ambassador to the U.N. Jeanne Kirkpatrick; musicians Laurie Anderson and Suzanne Vega (whose song “Luka” was then on all the airwaves); NPR’s Susan Stamberg; nationally syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen; choreographer Twyla Tharp; and a pre-Omnimedia Martha Stewart, whose daughter had also recently attended.

Soul Kitchen

Soul Kitchen is a lot like cotton candy—sweet but, ultimately, not very satisfying. Like many festival favorites, the plot of this independent German film revolves around a cast of lovably quirky characters who get themselves eye-deep into trouble. Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), a German of Greek descent, has a lot of stuff on his plate. He’s the proprietor of Soul Kitchen, a struggling eatery in a rundown section of Hamburg. The tax people, led by Frau Schuster (Catrin Striebeck), are knocking at his door.

The Kids Are All Right

In an attempt to beat the glorious heat last week, I ducked in to the cool air conditioned walls of The Archlight theater in Hollywood to catch an afternoon showing of Lisa Cholodenko's new high femme film, The Kids Are All Right.

Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County

Orange County, California is known for both wealth and political conservatism. In fact, the most recent American Community Survey reports that the largely Caucasian locale boasts a median household income of $81,260. But as filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi’s latest documentary, Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County, demonstrates, more than ten percent of OC residents live below the poverty line.

Sons of Perdition

Exiled boys from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) have been making news and showing up on the pop culture radar for a while.

Despicable Me

A few years ago my eleven year old sister was writing an essay on violence in schools. During our discussion of different types of violence, she astutely pointed out that not all violence is physical, and that a mean comment can be just as violent as a punch in the face. This led to an involved conversation about bullies in which, at one point, my sister looked at me and said, “I think bullies are mean to the kids at school because no one is nice to them at home.

Leading Ladies

It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story.

Winter’s Bone

In my review of 2009’s Oscar-nominated film Precious I stated that it was incredibly difficult to objectively review the film because the realism that is presented is so detached from my own circumstances.