This is Not a Film

Directed by: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi
Written by: Jafar Panahi
Full credits at IMDb

This is Not a Film is a documentary about not making a movie. Jafar Panahi, after all, was barred by the Iranian government from directing movies following a recent arrest for "colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." He's appealing his case but could face six years in prison; for now, he's under house arrest. So, in his latest movie, shot over the course of a day, he invites over his friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb to video record him while he reads, acts, and goes about his daily life—including fielding phone calls about his case and dog-sitting for 20 seconds—thus circumventing the 20-year ban on directing. (At one point Panahi tells Mirtahmasb to cut but he playfully refuses, noting that Panahi cannot direct the movie.)

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

Written & Directed by: Sean Durkin
Full credits at IMDb

Sean Durkin's exceptionally well-made but emotionally distant debut offers a subjective view of contemporary culthood—the initial seduction, the blind-eyed devotion, the gradual disillusionment, the post-membership paranoia, the lingering appeal. Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister to Mary-Kate and Ashley, stars as the title character—that's her Christian name, her cult name, and her cult alias—and hers is a breakthrough as striking as Durkin's: as the title suggests, she's a multifaceted character, and Olsen not only embodies those divergent personalities—amiable idealist, nerve-wracked coper—but does so simultaneously, hopping organically between them within single scenes.

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The Loneliest Planet

Written & Directed by: Julia Loktev
Full credits at IMDb


One thing happens in The Loneliest Planet, a single incident that divides the film in half and unbalances the relationships of its central characters. Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg play an engaged couple pre-honeymooning through the wilderness of Georgia (the former Soviet satellite); non-professional Bidzina Gujabidze is their guide across the grassy valleys and hillsides. (Director Loktev shoots the landscape with a weirdly abstracting telephoto lens, flattening the space to reflect the intimacy of the storytelling.) A vague menace hovers around our characters as they tromp down trails (their status as hikers unfavorably reminding me of those Americans who walked into Iran). Music on the soundtrack quickly cuts out, snapping the audience out of its lull like violence does to the characters: trouble finally comes in the form of a few local hunters, who provoke Bernal to commit either an act of instinctual self-preservation or of revealing cowardice. Either way, it's shaming—and unsettling thereafter to all who were present.

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Melancholia

Written & Directed by: Lars von Trier
Full credits at IMDb

Lars von Trier is depressed. He said as much while promoting his last film, Antichrist, and he has said as much in his latest, Melancholia, in which a big ball of doldrums takes the literalized form of a big blue planet from which the movie takes its title, which was hidden behind the sun but is now on a crash course for Earth. Get it? It's a metaphor—for depression's volatile nature, its unpredictable effects, its inescapability, its enormity, and the way it tears apart families because depressed people are so fucking difficult to deal with.

But the film is in two parts, with this epic allegory saved for last. First, von Trier looks at depression straight: Kirsten Dunst, in a role that won her an award at Cannes, plays Justine, who spends the first act celebrating—or not—her wedding to True Blood's Eric. It's Dogme-founder von Trier's turn at a Celebration, and he handles it with comic aplomb (Udo Keir nearly steals the movie as the wedding planner), crafting a haphazardly filmed farce that's jovial and funny until it isn't—like life for everyone else, Justine ruins her wedding.

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Carnage

Directed by: Roman Polanski
Written by: Yasmina Reza and Roman Polanski
Full credits at IMDb

Roman Polanski's terrific screwball adaptation of a Yasmina Reza play begins with four adults trying peaceably to settle a problem between their sons; it ends with four creatures drunk, exhausted and reverted to a primal state of hostility. Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play dippy liberals, the parents of a boy who got two teeth knocked out in a fight at Brooklyn Bridge Park (they're also residents of an apartment, with a working fireplace, too large and lovely for their income level); Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz are well-dressed professionals, parents of the skirmish's stick-swinging aggressor. They spend most of the movie with their coats on, motioning to go but never making it farther than the hallway, the souring summit a kind of no-exit nightmare as all four slowly shed the put-on signifiers of maturity and indulge instead puerile impulses, effectively adopting their kids' conflict and de-evolving into children.

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