Saturday, 2pm

Béla Tarr’s starkest and most minimal feature starts by placing the story in a cryptic historical context. An unnamed narrator recounts a crucial episode in the life of Friedrich Nietzsche: after achieving enlightenment through his philosophy, the 45-year-old writer witnessed a man beating his horse; he was so overwhelmed by the sight that he stopped the man in his action, embraced the horse, and wept. Several days later, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with mental illness; he would return to the care of his mother and sisters and live the remaining ten years of his life in a near-catatonic state.

It’s worth retelling the anecdote at length because it contains more plot than anything that follows in THE TURIN HORSE. The film proceeds as a gradual shutting down, stripping itself of detail and bringing its momentum to a halt; it ends on a note of morbid finality, in silence and darkness. Is this an allegory for Nietzsche’s mental breakdown? Or does Tarr see in his breakdown an allegory for the end of civilization? Or is the film something else entirely? The direction–credited to Tarr and his wife, Ágnes Hranitzky–is careful and poker-faced; like all of Tarr’s films since DAMNATION, it’s rooted in slow, hesitant camera movements that approach every action like it were a 50-foot statue or the stuff of biblical verse.

The movie depicts an old man (possibly the one who beat that poor horse) who lives with his daughter on a small plot of land at the edge of world. They subsist on whatever they make from delivering goods with the horse-drawn cart. After their animal stops eating and refuses to walk, the two are effectively stranded; when a violent dust storm kicks up, they’re effectively shut into their little house. Each day becomes a repetition of simple, necessary acts. Dress, get water from the well, work a bit in the barn, eat a potato, drink some hooch. Over the course of five days they will be visited twice: first by a friend of the old man’s who claims the nearby townspeople have destroyed their own town and that the end of civilization is coming; secondly by a band of gypsies (or is it George Romero-esque scroungers?) who threaten to take all their water. At the end of this time they will exhaust all their resources–even fire–reaching a Job-like state of squalor; but never is the daughter’s commitment to her infirm father in doubt.

The average shot length is around five minutes. Tarr studies the minimal action and decor with exceeding fascination. The black-and-white cinematography is by Fred Kelemen, though the key player seems to be the Steadicam man, Tilman Büttner, the Herculean operator behind RUN LOLA RUN and Aleksander Sokurov’s single-take feature, RUSSIAN ARK. Büttner makes the camera skulk ghostily through the scene or else holds it in place before some elemental detail, such as the wrinkles of an old bed sheet hanging to dry. Some viewers will be hypnotized by the aesthetic; for them, it might feel as though Tarr has stopped time itself. (People who hate the movie will probably feel this way too.) The movie seems to be after an austere and irreproachable  cinematic beauty, comparable to what Robert Bresson was after in his final film, L’ARGENT; tellingly Tarr has claimed he’ll make no more films after THE TURIN HORSE. It’s premature to say whether Tarr has achieved so lofty a goal–just like it’s premature to say definitively what the movie is about. But this is certainly crucial viewing for how it utilizes the resources particular to film art–namely, the malleability of perspective and time’s passage–to create a theatrical experience like very few before it. (2011, 146 min, 35mm)

Thursday (10/13), 6:10pm

Most criticism, both pro and con, of Ceylan’s sixth feature will likely focus on the movie’s first half–a formally sustained 80 minutes that ranks among the more ambitious filmmaking of recent years. This section depicts the long night and weary morning spent looking for a corpse in the countryside of western Turkey, the sort of routine police business that most other movies would acknowledge in a few shots. Ceylan and his writers turn the investigation team’s banter into miniature dramas, drawing out the subtle differences between characters for humor and pathos. (One low-ranking officer–an oafish, walrus-looking type addressed mainly as “The Arab”–emerges as the blank page on which others must articulate their views.) And Ceylan’s camera meditates on the extraordinary hillsides where the action unfolds in super-long shots, often making the investigation seem like the work of insects. On a formal level, these moments are some of the most impressive use of HD video yet seen in movies, with Ceylan adjusting the color so meticulously that each quadrant of the frame seems to have been lit by a different sun. The movie is as sensitive to the subtleties of light as any Vermeer painting, noting the differences in effects of dusk, twilight, moonlight and dawn; indeed, the characters register much like the figures in painting do, as representations of facets of humanity. It’s often hard to think of them in more specific terms; Ceylan’s images seem to spill over into forever.

ANATOLIA is a deeply spiritual work, pondering subjects like murder and forgiveness against the enormity of all existence. Some viewers will reject the movie’s solemnity (in last week’s Chicago Reader J.R. Jones argued–and with full legitimacy–that it may put people to sleep), but in doing so they’ll overlook the warmth that’s no less crucial to Ceylan’s vision. There’s an extraordinary sequence about an hour in, in which the team decides to break from their search and catch some sleep at a village mayor’s home. Shooting in medium shots that create a sharp contrast to what’s come before, Ceylan fills the scene with the minutiae of everyday life: the conversations, conducted in a distinctly Turkish form of communal kibitzing, concern repairs to the village generator and keeping tabs on the young people. It’s a refuge from the eternal perspective that’s shaped the movie till now, and it inspires a feeling of gratitude towards the routine comforts (work, family, hot tea) that keep us from obsessing over our place in the universe.

Just as life is not one long bout of existential dread, neither is it an unbroken chain of simple pleasures; and ultimately one defines his or her humanity by reconciling these two extremes. The final hour of ANATOLIA attempts to do just that, and the movie loses none of its wonder by switching his focus to everyday life. There are no long-shots  here, hardly any intimations of eternity: indeed, the movie ends with an autopsy. But those early sequences still weight heavily on the action, as do the humble musings of Nusrat, the town prosecutor who takes part in the investigation. A handsome man defined a fatherly mustache and unpretentious speech, Nusrat (or “Mr. Prosecutor,” as everyone addresses him) is the movie’s heart and soul, a calming figure to the more hotheaded cops and a spiritual confessor to the intellectual doctor who performs the autopsy. Clearly, he’s devoted years to judging criminal behavior impartially, and his skepticism has been refined into a detached, forgiving beatitude. He may be the closest movie equivalent to Faulkner’s immortal Gavin Stevens, a workaday philosopher trying as practically as he can to serve mankind. (2011, 150 min, 35mm widescreen)

Saturday (10/15), 5pm and Sunday (10/16), 6:20pm

A 15-year-old girl obsessed with masturbation and phone sex has a life-changing year in which she experiments with hitchhiking, smoking hash, and coming on to boys: what’s not to like? Despite the potential prurience of its subject matter, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first feature plays the material for light comedy, presenting kids as inherently curious and capable of learning from their mistakes. In fact, it develops much like any typical coming-of-age movie from the U.S.; what distinguishes it is its sexual candor, which would be impossible in an American film without some punitive moralizing to go along with it. The movie is fairly charming in its depiction of the small-town setting and some of the adult characters (the heroine’s frumpy single mother is particularly well-observed: she has hobbies that have nothing to do with parenting or her job), displaying both affection and adolescent disdain in a manner appropriate to its subject. This will likely please fans of John Hughes. (2011, 76 min)

Friday, 11pm

All the virtues of THE CHASER (2008) are still evident in Na Hong-jin’s second feature, which generally succeeds at recasting them on a larger scale. Na’s editing has a strong, distinctive pulse: his films dart to a new detail every few seconds, but that doesn’t undermine their sense of space. Indeed, it only contributes to the sense of perspective–what would be called “voice” in literature. Na creates bustling underground societies through induction, noting the myriad little bits of business involved in, say, driving a taxi, breaking into a gated apartment, or cutting off a man’s thumb. Nothing comes easily for his characters, a fact that Na emphasizes by drawing out certain scenes to depict things step-by-step: he’s the rare action director who seems to get what it’s like to break your back for a living. (Seldom do actors seem so genuinely exhausted at the end of a foot-chase sequence.) Na’s aesthetic has similarities to Michael Mann’s research-heavy realism, but the results are earthier, less definitive in their observations. Since there were no English subtitles on the digital projection of YELLOW SEA that I attended, I can’t comment much on the nuances of story or character (though it’s worth noting that Na has such a vivid imagination that every character develops a particular way of walking or lighting a cigarette). From what I could gather, the movie concerns a disgraced badass of some sort, estranged from his wife and working as a taxi driver, who’s forced into dangerous activity to pay his debt to a local hood. Kim Yun-seok, the sweet-eyed, large-cheeked star of THE CHASER, plays the hood; Ha Jung-woo, who played the killer in that movie (and acted in some of Kim Ki-duk’s films as well), plays the put-upon antihero. Ha begins the movie in a state of desperation, and things only get worse over the next two hours or so. The poor sucker has to smuggle himself across the titular sea–East Asia’s center of criminality, according to an opening title card–commit an elaborate burglary, even kill to survive. As narrative, the movie represents either a slow drift away from realism or the gradual construction of something more interesting: it culminates with a city-wide knife fight that lasts for more than half-an-hour, maybe the most exquisitely choreographed action sequence to play Chicago since the second half of Miike’s 13 ASSASSINS. Yet even at its most ludicrous, THE YELLOW SEA displays a charged curiosity about how things really work. Try to see it with an electrician. (2011, 140 min) –Ben Sachs

Friday (10/14), 8:30pm and Saturday (10/15), 9:40pm

For all of you who were wondering when Lodge Kerrigan (CLEAN, SHAVEN) would make an Aussie serial-killer tone poem, well, first-time writer-director Justin Kurzel beat him to it. SNOWTOWN is the punishingly bleak story of John Bunting, Australia’s most prolific serial killer, and his friendship with/recruitment of a teenage boy. But there’s bleak and then there’s bleak. The propulsive drone of the score, the almost physically textured photography, the languid cuts combine to create a test of endurance—a drone of despair, abject poverty, and brutality that’s admirable in its single-mindedness. There’s no particular insight offered beyond the old saw that serial killers are scary, and some of them are really charming folks. The emphasis seems to have been on creating a visual and aural tableau in which serial murder is more likely than municipal trash collection. It’s an astoundingly effective, technically brilliant piece, but there’s just no light here. (2011, 120 min.)

Monday (10/10), 6pm

The great Maurice Pialat reportedly claimed to edit his films by removing all the footage that didn’t strike him as true. That might explain the sustained emotional intensity of his work, the jarring transitions between scenes, the way his movies captured so accurately the subjective experience of being alive even when their content departed from strict realism. A similarly cryptic logic—as well as a comparably overwhelming emotion—pervades Mia Hansen-Løve’s third feature, her first since THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN (2009). The movie seems to advance by intuition: you can never predict where it’s going. The story follows Camille (Lola Créton) and Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) from adolescence, when they’re high-school sweethearts who go through a traumatic breakup, to their mid-20s, when they reunite after several years. Nothing happens comfortably or predictably: Hansen-Løve will devote several minutes to a seemingly mundane action, then bring the plot several months into the future with a simple, unassuming edit. (The greatest elisions, usually skipping over a few years at a time, are denoted by elegant fade-outs that suggest the line breaks in a poem.) Likewise, the movie generally seems tied to Camille’s perspective, though it shifts at several critical moments to depict things that happen only to Sullivan. It’s puzzling as to just whom or what is guiding the movie’s attention; perhaps it’s the characters’ passion itself, which has transformed the film’s structure no less radically than it has the characters. Hansen-Løve is playing with aspects of narrative movies we usually take for granted—such a consistent perspective and a clear sense of time’s passage—and turning them inside-out. The result is a movie that seems organized not by events but by their emotional impact.

Though GOODBYE FIRST LOVE is surprising to watch, it’s hard to synopsize the content without making it sound trite. (Both the film’s original title–which translates literally to A LOVE OF/FROM YOUTH–and the English variant are bland but nevertheless accurate descriptors.) Hansen-Løve’s subject is how it feels to love somebody too passionately–the all-consuming romance we must experience but ultimately reject in order to grow up. She’s keen to the exhilaration of first love as well as its dangerous unpredictability: it has a nervous momentum you can’t quite put your finger on, as though something very bad might happen at any time. Yet the film conveys great warmth in its intimacy to the characters, which persists even when the characters resist easy sympathy: Hansen-Løve seems confident that the mistakes of youth (of which the film contains many) can lead to knowledge. It’s indicative of her sensitivity that each time the story moves forward a few years, the characters seem to have learned something in the interim; their faces betray some sad or protective quality they haven’t shown before. Remarkably all of the actors convey a decade worth of emotional development in the film’s 110 minutes. Everyone is extraordinary, but Créton (last seen in Catherine Breillat’s BLUEBEARD) is worth singling out, as she transforms from a child into a fully-formed adult without the aid of obvious make-up or costume choices. (Even more impressive: she was only 17 when this was shot.) Her performance achieves something similar to the CG effects of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, another recent movie eerily fixated on the passage of time. But there’s nothing elegiac about GOODBYE FIRST LOVE. Bittersweetly, but with eyes wide open and mind unclouded, Hansen-Løve conveys the impermanence of youth by playing up another basic fact that movies take for granted: that the images you see in a theater are constantly disappearing before your eyes. I was in tears throughout the film; I missed it well before it was over. (2011, 110 min, 35mm)

Saturday (10/8), 8pm and Monday (10/10), 8:35pm

Gerardo Naranjo’s first feature after the Nouvelle Vague-ish I’M GONNA EXPLODE (2008) is a heart-racing allegory that likens the corruption of contemporary Mexico to a rigged beauty pageant. The title character is a poor 23-year-old from Tijuana who’s accepted into the Miss Baja California beauty contest just when a powerful drug cartel threatens her into running their deadly errands. The juggling of these responsibilities becomes a source of tension as well as dark humor; the movie’s underlying joke is that no matter what Laura does, she’s always representing Mexican society. Naranjo doesn’t force any of his ironies, however: The filmmaking is so virtuosic that you’re always caught up in the rush of events, the implications emerging only gradually. Like his countryman Alfonso Cuarón, Naranjo works in complicated, movement-heavy long takes, particularly during the epic gun battles: It’s three-dimensional filmmaking, with the camera moving nearly as much as the many players in the drama. There are also moments when Naranjo’s camera settles on some stunning widescreen composition, and these flashes of self-contained beauty are no less surprising for seeming to emerge, impossibly, from the general chaos. This will likely spark conversations about the ongoing drug war along the U.S.-Mexico border (as a final title card reminds us, it’s left tens of thousands of casualties in the last five years alone); but first it demands to be experienced as the galvanizing comic nightmare it is. (2011, 113 min, 35mm widescreen) –Ben Sachs

Saturday (10/15), 6:15pm

Listen up, brudder! Chris Sader is the ultimate Hulkamaniac, proven by the veritable temple of autographed Hulk Hogan memorabilia in his parents’ basement. The son of Polish immigrants to Chicago, Sader became obsessed with Hulk Hogan at the tender age of four, and spent the next 26 years slowly transforming into a good friend of the pro-wrestler, but you likely figured that out from the documentary’s title. The truth is, this doc is not very good, in fact, it’s insufferable at times, but none of that is due to the subject matter. Even when SADERMANIA relies on animated comic book panels to illustrate the stories Sader tells, Sader’s obsession is fascinating enough to transcend the mediocrity of the documentary. Either director Adam Gacka doesn’t have enough faith in the material to let Sader tell his story, or else he feels the need to assert his authorial voice for fear of it being subsumed by his subject matter. In either case, it is fortunate that there are moments in the doc like Hulk Hogan’s recounting of the first time he met Chris Sader or the tour of Sader’s basement shrine. One senses that given the treatment it rightly deserves, SADERMANIA could be a fascinating, insightful portrait of an unusual passion. As it is, the passion is there, but the insights are nestled between agonizing groans. (2010, 85m) – Douglas McLaren

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne’s THE KID WITH A BIKE (Belgium)

Saturday (10/8), 5:15pm and Sunday (10/9), 5pm

In their patience, tolerance and political utility, the films of Belgium’s Dardenne brothers evoke the noble practice of social work, and their latest is no exception. The simple story concerns an 11-year-old boy abandoned by his no-good father and living as a ward of the state; as played by an amazing discovery named Thomas Dorset, he is a very real case study, arousing neither pity nor cooing sympathy. Cyril is given to running away and attacking authority figures: clearly he has never benefited from an adult who could teach him right from wrong. Things seem to take a positive turn when he finds a hairdresser (Cécile de France, best known here as the meteorologist in Clint Eastwood’s HEREAFTER) who agrees to be his part-time foster parent; but as this is Dardenne brothers’ film, nothing is so easily resolved. The kid remains a behavioral problem no matter how much attention he’s shown, and, in a shocking turn, a youth gang seduces him into some pretty bad trouble (it would lessen the movie’s impact, however, if you knew what it was going in). The Dardennes continue to practice a hypnotic, verite-inspired realism that’s almost without peer in contemporary movies. Consider the specificity with which they realize Samantha’s hair salon or the kitchen in which Cyril’s father works: in just a few shots they can convey exactly what it involves to earn a day’s wage. (They also continue to display a back-of-the-hand knowledge of Seraing, the working-class town where they’ve made most of their films, evoking a lived-in environment from the very first shot of the picture.) Yet the lasting power of the Dardennes’ work comes not from their documentary detail but their old-school faith in melodrama to humanize abstract social problems. In fact, THE KID WITH A BIKE often feels like a 21st century update of Frank Borzage’s classic YOUNG AMERICA (1932), and its call for more people to take compassion on our planet’s many, many abandoned children is no less stirring than Borzage’s. (2011, 87 min)

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CORPO CELESTE (Italy)

Saturday (10/8), 4:45pm and Sunday (10/9), 1pm

This film’s writer-director, Alice Rohrwacher, likes to discover scenes from the inside out, generally beginning with the camera right next to a character’s head, then following her across a room or moving back to reveal the busy environment that surrounds her. She also likes to withhold key information about characters and conflicts until the drama develops an almost infuriating air opacity. The style–which may be described as an active, poker-faced curiosity–often resembles that of the great Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel; and her story, a sly parable about faith in the modern age, specifically echoes Martel’s THE HOLY GIRL (2004). But it would be unfair to call Rohrwacher a mere copycat: every filmmaker needs role models, especially when she’s starting out; anyway, this is not a style one comes by easily. It requires, for one thing, an ability to imagine any setting down to the square inch, so that the camera can sit anywhere within it and generate the same level of dramatic tension. Rohrwacher is capable of that task: the film’s lower-middle-class family and the lethargic Catholic church they attend are realized acutely; and every character displays her own variation of lumpenprole passive-aggression. One major story line involves the priest’s effort to ascend the ladder of Catholic hierarchy, to which he sets himself as though lobbying his general manager for a raise. Rohrwacher turns his bureaucratic servitude into a running gag: every church service gets interrupted by the ring of his cell phone. The movie is filled with garish juxtapositions of Catholic ritual and information-age banality (in the first scene of Communion class, the teacher quizzes her kids on the catechism to the theme from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire), but the humor really stings because Rohrwacher seems to take faith seriously. How can religion still impact ordinary lives, the movie asks, when they lack the room to accommodate it? Marta, the film’s 13-year-old heroine, spends the film trying to model her life after what she learns in religious school, and her sincere efforts result in one calamity after another. Rohrwacher has a wonderful sympathy for the girl, who’s too introverted and, at times, downright weird to seem cute in standard movie fashion; Rohrwacher is also spot-on in Marta’s strained relationships with her bitchy older sister (who’s turned 18 like many real teenagers do, by acting the petty tyrant whenever she’s around someone younger than her). Like Martel–or, for that matter, Jane Campion or Catherine Breillat–Rohrwacher excels at characterizing a particular form of cruelty that exists mainly between women: the hurtful critical assessment presented under the veneer of advice and delivered at the exact moment it can do the most damage. It’s one of the movie’s many little achievements; among the bigger ones is Hélène Louvart’s 16mm photography. Louvart has worked for Claire Denis, Jacques Doillon, and Agnès Varda; she’s apparently an expert at capturing fleeting light sources and characters in movement. (2011, 95 min)

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FAT, BALD, SHORT MAN (Colombia)

Friday (10/7), 9:10pm and Saturday (10/8), 12:45pm

Another minutely observed comedy-of-manners from South America, which seems to have become the world capital of the genre in the past decade. Like several recent Uruguayan films (WHISKY, GIGANTE, NORBERTO’S DEADLINE), its theme is the disappointment of everyday adulthood and the tone is understated and sympathetic. What distinguishes it from other entries in the genre is that it’s been animated in the neo-Rotoscoping technology developed by Richard Linklater and Bob Sabiston’s WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2005); while it isn’t as ingenious as those examples, it still uses animation to purposeful effect. The movie, set in anonymous modern environments like office buildings and meeting halls, recognizes the way a certain culture turns people into blots. The title character is a terminally shy notary clerk who’s still a bashful virgin at 46; when he’s presented head-on, he’s nothing but an amorphous white canvas with five small dots for eyes, nostrils and mouth. He’s a human doormat, laughed at by his colleagues and conned by his brother into paying him countless “loans.” The plot concerns his first steps towards self-actualization–which the movie realizes, like the character himself, modestly and sweetly–and it proceeds like a good short story, illuminating the generally overlooked moments whose small comfort make life fulfilling. (2011, 97 min)

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MACHETE LANGUAGE (Mexic0)

Tuesday (10/11), 8:40pm and Wednesday (10/12), 7:15pm

Kyzza Terrazas, who wrote the script for Gael Garcia Bernal’s directorial debut, DEFICIT (2007), here directs his own screenplay, about radicals in Mexico City. It’s shot on HD video and mostly in close-up, which seems appropriate for a movie about characters this self-conscious and paranoid. Ramona is the singer and guitarist for a pretty-good punk band; Raymundo is an anarchist photographer or documentarian of some sort. They appear to be in their mid-30s, draped in a certain level of street cred but also seeming to have worn their youth thin. Life needs to take on greater meaning or else it will wither. Should they have a baby or blow something up? Over the course of the movie’s short running time, Terrazas’ aesthetic lays down a real nervy groove; the characters’ desperation becomes quite palpable by the end. In its gritty, somewhat show-offy performances and general pessimism about the fate of the radical Left, the movie feels like an update of the sort of early 70s Hollywood art movie that would have starred Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson. It’s a raw, inside view of counterculture despair; if it looked just a little scrappier it would feel a real dispatch from the void. (2011, 82 min)

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KINYARWANDA (US)

Friday (10/7), 8:45pm, Saturday (10/8), 12:35pm, and Thursday (10/13), 1:45pm

This fictionalized account of the Rwandan civil war of 1994 scrupulously avoids sensationalism in its approach, and it’s commendable for this reason alone. It’s presented in short, titled chapters–some of them as short as only a few minutes–that accumulate like a mosaic. This seems an appropriate way to convey how immense the atrocity of genocide is: every segment suggests another life cut short by the war, and the arbitrariness of the structure implies there are as many stories to tell as there were victims. It’s a distinctly egalitarian work, devoting comparable screen time to both Hutu and Tutsi characters, warriors and peacemakers, children and adults. The director, an American named Alrick Brown, even tries to bring as much celebratory behavior into the movie as he can, so as to remind us just what is lost in the destruction of so much life. Dancing and chanting are major motifs: KINYARWANDA practically begins with a group of teenagers singing along (improbably) to “Islands in the Stream” at a house party, and it goes on to show men chanting, alternately, for the death of their enemies and the reunification of their country. The HD videography is only so-so, but it adequately captures the sunny climate of the movie’s setting. (2011, 100 min)

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JOINT BODY (US)

Wednesday (10/12), 3:40pm, Friday (10/14), 6:30pm, and Saturday (10/15), 9:15pm

If you like the films of James Gray (and we at Cine-File certainly do), then you’ll probably be sympathetic towards Brian Jun’s blue-collar drama; that’s not to say you’ll admire it, however. The movie contains all of Gray’s awkward tendencies–and even a few of his strengths–but little of the ingenious craftsmanship that makes his work so important. As it stands, the movie is commendable for taking regular lives seriously without succumbing to shallow “realism.” Its main characters, a recently paroled felon and the stripper he befriends, speak with improbable eloquence, and Jun presents their downstate Illinois milieu with a careful (some might say too careful) aesthetic that emphasizes its tragic mood. Many shots are composed around narrow rays of overhead light meant to evoke Gordon Willis’ work in the GODFATHER trilogy (though, like quite a few other movies in this year’s festival, the HD video doesn’t live up to the film images it evokes), and they contribute greatly to the general portrait of regret. Jun uses genre movie archetypes much like Gray does, to bring a sense of universality to the story and characters; but he lacks Gray’s sense of nuance, and a lot of his ideas end up sounding like cliches. Still, there’s inherent value in any movie that asks us to sympathize with an ex-con trying to rehabilitate himself, and some of the performances are really something. Alicia Witt, as the stripper, shows a willingness to appear genuinely weary and beaten by life. (2011, 85 min)

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SOUTHWEST (Brazil)

Friday (10/7), 8:15pm, Saturday (10/8), 12:30pm, and Tuesday (10/18), 2:45pm

CORRODE (India)

Saturday (10/8), 8:25pm, Sunday (10/9), 12pm, and Tuesday (10/11), 2:30pm

I remember commiserating one year with my fellow C-F contributor Josephine Ferorelli about having to slog through a number of festival titles we weren’t particularly excited about. The movies that were bringing us down weren’t even bad, necessarily. They were just so dispiritingly alike, regardless of their country of origin; it felt as though national film styles were being subsumed into a generically arty, festival-ready aesthetic. “It’s like the development of World Music,” Josephine observed.

There’s plenty of World Cinema at this year’s International Film Festival, but that’s not meant entirely pejoratively: it’s simply a reflection of the times. As such, it doesn’t seem coincidental that SOUTHWEST (2011, 128 min), from Brazil, and CORRODE (2011, 92 min), from India, should feel so similar. Both are features by first-time filmmakers, shot somewhat arbitrarily in black-and-white widescreen, containing relatively little dialogue and sequences of deliberately dream-like subjectivity. The fact that they’re in black-and-white widescreen is reason enough to see them on a big screen; however, I would recommend seeing only one, as you’re likely to experience a nagging sense of deja vu if you attend them both. Tellingly, each film is at its most interesting when it looks beyond its festival style (predominated by a general impassivity that refuses, for no particular reason, to suggest how you should interpret the material emotionally) to contemplate the location where it was shot. One can only do so much with universal themes: In narrative cinema, they ultimately have to happen in some place and befall somebody.

SOUTHWEST makes fine use of its rural setting, creating supple atmosphere from brambles, small islands, and big, shady trees. Eduardo Nunes, the director, likes to track slowly through this environment as though his camera were an invisible participant in the action. It’s a fitting enough realization of the film’s premise, a Ray Bradbury-like fairy tale about a woman who lives her entire life, from birth to death, in a single day. This raises some interesting questions about what gives life permanence and meaning, particularly in the scenes when the heroine interacts with her own mother. Where Clarice has been unrooted in time, her mother is in the middle of a mid-life rut on the day the story takes place. Who is the unluckier woman? The one who has to live indefinitely with her grief or the one who drifts right over it?

The film is at its least convincing when the characters attempt to discuss their situation: Nunes doesn’t seem particularly interested in dialogue or in giving his actors enough mannerisms to make them seem like fully observed personages. The same can be said of Karan Gour, the writer-director of CORRODE, though Gour’s attention to economic realities makes up for his awkwardness in other areas. Before the movie lapses into another retread of Polanski’s REPULSION, this provides some good insight into the lower-middle-class of Mumbai. The central couple, Chhaya and Avrind, worry constantly about improving their station in a manner that seems borne out of their environment. Avrind’s been employed now and then in the fitfully booming construction industry, but the money hasn’t given them anything to build on; Chhaya pines for motherhood, though doctors have told her she has little chance of conceiving. As Avrind foolishly attempts to start his own business (in cloth, which he knows little about), Chhaya begins to obsess over the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. She thinks Lakshmi will grant all her wishes if she can buy a large, expensive sculpture of the goddess; in the end, the obsession drives her mad. While this turn is utterly implausible (among this type of lumpenproletariat, the desire for advancement is stronger and generally more destructive than madness), it allows Gour to experiment with a lot of effects to suggest Chhaya’s mental state.

Thursday (10/13), 8:00pm

Lo, by what feat of contrivance came this picture to us? Though Ralph Fiennes produced, directed, and stars in the film, “vanity project” is not quite the phrase to describe CORIOLANUS, as a vain man would not willingly debase himself in this manner, covered in his own blood and spittle, eyes wild with rage, and then placed so damn close to the camera’s lens. Nay, this is a Voldemort Project. Fiennes’ penchant for terrifying children is put to use here as an increasingly-crazed general of a fictitious Roman-esque nation. Banished for his disdain of the common people, he returns as the de facto leader of an invading army in a single-minded quest for revenge. Like Kenneth Branagh, Baz Luhrmann and Julie Taymor before, Fiennes manages to make of a modernized Shakespeare play not exactly a good movie, but a curious one. A film in which television news anchors speak in iambic pentameter and Gerard Butler changes accents mid-sentence, his tongue stumbling over antique phrasings. Ignoring for a moment the clear camp factor, Fiennes’ directorial decisions continually surprise: his eye for shot composition is well-developed. Should he be so lucky as to direct another feature, we can only hope that film will follow in CORIOLANUS’ mad footsteps. (2011, 122m) – Douglas McLaren