The Assault

Directed by Julien Leclercq
Written by Julien Leclercq & Simon Moutairou
Full credits at IMDb

The Assault (L'Assaut), with its gorgeous black-and-white recreations of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group's 1994 hijacking of an Air France flight, looks like a Tom Ford-directed documentary about terrorism. Director Leclercq suspensefully, sensationalistically cross-cuts between the government's backroom operations, special forces' preparation and the tense mood on the plane between hostages and hostage-takers; that is, he reduces a real-life terrorist event to a stylish Hollywood thriller, set to dramatic swells of Middle Eastern music; he even creates a hero—one of the French commandoes—and carelessly explores his relationship with his wife and impossibly cute daughter. Leclercq also builds to a rousing finale, in which the plot to crash a plane into the Eiffel Tower is foiled by highly trained military personnel. The director seems to want to establish the French's badass, terrorist-battling bona fides—hey, we saved our tower—in the most riveting but trashiest way imaginable, with its beautiful slow-motion deaths. Filtering actual terrorism through Hollywood cliches isn't just distasteful—it's fucking immoral, stripping real tragedy of its heft. Grade: C-


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Beyond the Black Rainbow

Written & Directed by: Panos Cosmatos
Full credits at IMDb

Mescaline-mystical mindfuck Beyond the Black Rainbow could announce a new subgenre: glacial horror. The movie has the booming synths of a John Carpenter score and the primary-color lighting scheme of some Dario Argento classics. But this dystopic, retro-headed science-fiction film—characters in the credits include "mutant" and "sentionaut"—moves at the pace of a mind on powerful hallucinogenics, as though it can't move forward because it's so fascinated by the objects in its field of vision. Like last year's impressionistic Amer, director Panos Cosmatos's feature debut reduces cinema to its basic elements: to the image, the implication, the general feeling. And that feeling is one of tremendous apprehension.

Keep reading this (belated) dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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Blackthorn

Directed by: Mateo Gil
Written by: Miguel Barros
Full credits at IMDb

Nothing strips the romance from a Western quite like Butch Cassidy showing up at a bank to make a withdrawal from his savings account. That's one of the earliest scenes in the weary, melancholic and elegiac Blackthorn, which revisits the Cassidy and Sundance myth and rewrites a new last act for George Roy Hill's classic: instead of meeting their ends at the hands of the Bolivian Army in 1908, the outlaws live on. This movie finds Butch in 1927: grizzled, calling himself by the alias of the title, and raising horses on a ranch in the rugged mountains of Bolivia—the American West's erstwhile wild terrain rediscovered South of the equator.

Blackthorn revises the revisions, embracing many facets of the mythos rejected by most modern, progressive-minded Westerns...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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The Bleeding House

Written & Directed by: Philip Gelatt
Full credits at IMDb

Would-be thriller The Bleeding House centers on a peculiar family, The Smiths, who bear spooky suggestions of bygone infamy: their knife drawer is padlocked; they have a strict, panic-provoking rule against pets; and, when the father sees his wife in an apron splashed with red stains, he freaks. "It's just paint," she assures him. This is a family haunted by its tragedy-marked past—denied, like other American lives, that coveted second act. Too bad this compellingly cryptic imagery is neutralized by writer-director Philip Gelatt's on-the-nose dialogue, delivered by a cast seemingly recruited from a regional theater company in the boondocks in which the movie was shot.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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Grave Encounters

Written & Directed by: The Vicious Brothers
Full credits at IMDb

The abandoned mental institution-compound that provides the setting for Grave Encounters, a haunted hospital horror head-scratcher, is not merely possessed in the traditional sense. Yes, monstrous spirits do eventually appear, terrorizing and picking off our cast of heroes. But the buildings themselves seem alive—the characters become trapped in a living maze, where floor plans adjust by the moment, obeying only nightmare illogic.

The movie takes its name from the fictional television-program-within-the-movie, a reality show vaguely similar to Syfy's Ghost Hunters, in which a crew visits haunted properties around America and films the paranormal happenings therein. They are skeptical showmen who get their comeuppance at the Cropsey-like facility they choose for episode six, where the ghosts are as real as the deaths they cause.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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The Trip

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Full credits at IMDb

Many of director Michael Winterbottom's movies blur the line between the fictional and the real; those that do can be divided into two categories: politically charged, human-scaled dramas about the Middle East (The Road to Guantanamo, In This World, A Mighty Heart) and artsy larks with Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy). Winterbottom's latest, The Trip, adapted from a six-part BBC series, falls firmly into the second camp: regardless of how much of it is "real," it's a conspicuous vanity project for Coogan, highlighting the actor's discontent with his failed personal relationships and hamstrung Hollywood career.

Keep reading at The L Magazine


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Rabies

Written & Directed by: Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado
Full credits at IMDb

The first horror movie out of Israel, Rabies (Kalevet) feels like a typical slasher with one teensy twist—its baddie is neutralized within the first few minutes. That psychokiller, setting traps in the woods to snag his mortal quarry, is shot with a tranquilizer, and spends the rest of the film asleep on the forest floor. While he naps, more mayhem unfolds than he could have wreaked in his wettest dreams, as his would've-been victims accidentally assume his murderous mantle.

Several groups—randy teens; a campground assessor and his dog; a salacious cop and his sad sack partner; a bloodied brother and his kidnapped sister-lover—cross paths in a mine-ridden timberland, with disastrous results for each: if the booby traps don't get them (bear traps!), their fellow citizens will...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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