Trishna

Written & Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Full credits at IMDb

Is modern India as repressive as Victorian England? That's what Michael Winterbottom suggests in his latest, Trishna; how else could he locate Tess of the d'Urbervilles there and make the fit between story and setting seem so natural? Freida Pinto stars as the title character, and she's great, starting off as a bashful and kind country girl who slowly opens herself up to the possibilities of the big city, only to be shut down again by circumstance—the double standards and rigid moral codes of the countryside. Winterbottom shows the timelessness of Hardy's melodramatic plots about social strictures and sexual exploitation, depicting an India of polarized classes—one inhabiting a fantasy world of luxury, the other a hardscrabble reality—where fusty traditions butt heads with modernity's looser values. The movie breathes life into Hardy's timeless themes with fresh settings.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

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Death of a Superhero

Directed by: Ian Fitzgibbon
Written by: Anthony McCarten
Full credits at IMDb

The only thing moodier than a teenager is a dying teenager. "Life is a sexually transmitted disease," says Donald (Thomas Sangster), the cancer-stricken, attitudinizing 15-year-old hero of Death of a Superhero who broods, misbehaves, and expresses himself through the Sin City-like characters that fill his sketchbooks (and which he occasionally graffitis); director Ian Fitzgibbon intersperses animations throughout the film featuring the characters Donald creates: a troubled superhero (a version of himself), a twisted villain (his disease), and a voluptuous femme (who embodies his pubescent fantasies).

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

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Death Row Portraits

Written & Directed by: Werner Herzog
Full credits at IMDb

Werner Herzog is against the death penalty. He begins every episode of his Death Row Portraits, a four-part miniseries made for Investigation Discovery, by admitting as much; as a German, how could you not be? But his approach is morally demanding. Unlike, say, David Grann's "Trial By Fire," in which the New Yorker reporter uncovers evidence that suggests the state of Texas executed an innocent man, Herzog doesn't focus on the guilt of his subjects; he doesn't like many of them, and doesn't ask you to, either—he invites you to despise them, even—nor does he shy away from the gruesomeness of their crimes. They're not saints or heroes or victims. Still, he asks, does that mean the state should judge them so definitively—that we should kill them?

Keep reading my review at The L Magazine

Rubberneck

Directed by: Alex Karpovsky
Written by: Alex Karpovsky and Garth Donovan
Full credits at IMDb

Is this a masterwork of emotional suppression, or just emotionless? Alex Karpovsky, best known as a favorite supporting player of popular young indie directors, directs this, his third film, a slow-boil character study that flirts with genre. Is it a psychological thriller? Well, until it finally (finally!) boils over, it's more like an anti-thriller, a workaday portrait of a scientist who drunkenly hooks up once with a coworker and, months later, is still secretly obsessing over her. Karpovsky stars, too, as this psychopath; usually the comically smug and shaggy friend in films by directors like Lena Dunham or Andrew Bujalski (you guys, he's in Girls!), here he casts himself against type—clean cut and bespectacled, unsmiling, his social awkwardness not a quirk but actually a symptom of severe mental illness.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

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Sleepless Night

Directed by: Frédéric Jardin
Written by: Frédéric Jardin & Olivier Douyère
Full credits at IMDb

Sleepless Night is a French action movie, which means that it follows the formula set by its American counterparts—there are plenty of speeding cars, shootouts, and injured bodies; there's lots of running, shouting, and punching—but also makes the time to let its hero (Tomer Sisley) stop running, sit down, and weep in an empty stairwell between set pieces. It's his haggard emotional credibility driving the plot—not just director Frédéric Jardin's exciting pacing and twisty storytelling—that makes the movie so effective.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

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The Cabin in the Woods

Directed by: Drew Goddard
Written by: Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard
Full credits at IMDb

In The Cabin in the Woods, writer-director Drew Goddard and writer-producer Joss Whedon unpack, then dismantle, and finally unbind the horror movie, liberating all its archetypes from the punishing confines (and confining punishments!) of the genre. It's not unlike Funny Games in that it strips the characters of their characterhood, eventually making them instead more like real people battling against imposed archetypes; thus, the filmmakers burden the audience with a greater moral responsibility for the violence done to them. People disdain Michael Haneke for that movie's lecturing; Goddard and Whedon get away with it here because they're careful not to wag their fingers, even though they prove strong critics of genre and viewer. Instead, they laugh a lot—not at horror's clichés but with them, all while remaining aware of their problematic subtexts.

Keep reading my review at The L Magazine

Also read "How I Lost My Respect for Rex Reed," about his review of the movie in the New York Observer.

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Event: Kenneth Lonergan Q&A on Margaret

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is based on a true story. The incident that sets the film's story in motion—the distraction of a bus driver about a cowboy hat that ends in an accident—happened to a high-school classmate of the writer-director. She told him the story during a lunch date in the 11th grade, and the whole time all he could think about was how he wanted to sleep with her.

Lonergan tells this story often, as he did during a Q&A following a screening on Saturday night at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, but now it has a new twist: he was telling it again at a recent Q&A when he saw a hand waving from the audience. And there was Jill Breslauer, the girl herself, whom he hadn't seen in 30 years, at the movies with her husband—and wearing a cowboy hat!

Keep reading this dispatch from the Film Society at Lincoln Center at The L Magazine