DIFF ’04: Kontroll

Control****/****starring Sándor Csányi, Zoltán Mucsi, Csaba Pindroch, Sándor Badárscreenplay by Jim Adler & Nimród Antaldirected by Nimród Antal by Walter Chaw A cross between Chris Noth and Clancy Brown's The Kurgan from Highlander, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll. A ticket-taker and a rent-a-cop, he's assigned to a misfit crew at odds with every other misfit crew in their Orwellian transit agency. The film, a surprisingly violent and kinetic slapstick comedy reminiscent of Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train," begins with one character aping Harpo Marx's blowtorch lighter bit…

DIFF ’04: Sonny Boy

***/****directed by Soleil Moon Frye by Walter Chaw At times deeply affecting, erstwhile "Punky Brewster" Soleil Moon Frye's second film is a personal memoir of a two-week trip taken by Soleil and her father, actor Virgil Frye, across the physical landmarks of the latter's life, with Virgil's Alzheimer's-afflicted mind disintegrating in chunks of recollection as the film progresses. At its best, Sonny Boy captures the troubled emptiness of the rural United States' back roads, expanding its personal story into an almost metaphysical statement about being lost in America; as it happens, Virgil even worked on the production of friend and…

DIFF ’04: Being Julia

*½/****starring Annette Bening, Catherine Charlton, Jeremy Irons, Michael Gambonscreenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel Theatre by W. Somerset Maughamdirected by István Szabó by Walter Chaw Shrill and unlikeable, Being Julia is reasonably assessed as an at least thematically faithful adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's soulless novel Theatre, just as it's fair to compare it to the acclaimed Mephisto, director István Szabó's other condemnation of the stage. But that doesn't mean it's any good. Annette Bening plays Julia Lambert, a grand dame of London's West End accurately labelled a cold, evil bitch by her emotionally-unavailable actor husband, Michael (Jeremy…

DIFF ’04: Rick

***½/****starring Bill Pullman, Aaron Stanford, Agnes Bruckner, Sandra Ohscreenplay by Daniel Handlerdirected by Curtiss Clayton by Walter Chaw Priestly black in its absolute stentorian corruption, Curtiss Clayton's brilliantly twisted Rick is an essay on the cancerous progression of machismo, on the dehumanizing influence of power structures--on the ultimate, ironic strength and futility of family bonds. Written by Daniel Handler, better known for his Lemony Snicket novels, the film's veneer of misanthropy and nihilism hides a strong sense of moral certitude in decay: the affirmation--even if it offers neither succour nor shield--that despite the pervasive rot of the day-to-day, there remains…

DIFF ’04: Monster Road

**½/****directed by Brett Ingram by Walter Chaw Monster Road details the life and process of underground claymation hero Bruce Bickford, best known for a pair of collaborations with underground music hero Frank Zappa. Knowing that the work itself is the best entrée into the mind of the artist, director Brett Ingram uses a great deal of invaluable footage from Bickford's archives to lend balance to his subject's obsessive, somewhat dismal existence in his cramped basement studios. The tragic fate of Bickford's brother and the failing capacities of his father (who lives in an even more obsessive-compulsive environment than Bruce's, if…

DIFF ’04: Tradition of Killing Lovers

Rasm-e ashegh-koshiTradition of Lover Killing***/****starring Hossein Mahjoub, Hossein Abedini, Gohar Kheir-Andish, Arman Nikzadwritten and directed by Khosro Masumi by Walter Chaw An Iranian film of surpassing simplicity and beauty, Khosro Masumi's debut Tradition of Killing Lovers involves a man sent to prison for smuggling lumber. While interred, his young son Jallal tries to pay off the family's debts by running the remote region's lone chainsaw to scattered smuggling camps. Shots of Jallal, impossibly dwarfed by the chainsaw blade poking straight up from a knapsack on his back, framed against a bleak Iranian winter, conjure innumerable visual references from as varied…

Bride of the Woodsman: FFC Interviews Kyra Sedgwick

KsedgwickinterviewtitleOctober 17, 2004|Taller than you'd think and luminescent on a drizzly autumn day in Denver, Kyra Sedgwick has a smile that lights up a room, even this cavernous warehouse space rented out for the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival in LoDo. Best known for playing prettier versions of the down-to-earth romantic interests in which Amy Madigan used to specialize, Ms. Sedgwick is approachable and engaged in person, holding a cup of hot tea between her hands for warmth as she talks about the importance of hope in her films, even as her work of late has tended towards a darker hue. This is no doubt the influence of her husband Kevin Bacon's recent forays into the territory of the haunted, spotlighted by the fact that the couple have three collaborative projects out or in the works. Their latest, The Woodsman, finds Ms. Sedgwick cast opposite Mr. Bacon as the girlfriend of a recently-released child molester, a character reminiscent in her sexual liberation of the one she played in Personal Velocity. Ms. Sedgwick has never struck me as the type looking for fame–there is a quality to her work that suggests something as indefinable and inadequate as "carefree." It wasn't that much of a surprise for me to learn that Carole Lombard is one of her idols.

DIFF ’04: The Woodsman

**/****starring Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Eve, Mos Defscreenplay by Steven Fechter and Nicole Kasselldirected by Nicole Kassell by Walter Chaw An impossibly-conflicted film about the impossibly complicated issue of child sex offenders (that is, their recovery, recidivism, and release), Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman retreats, perhaps understandably, into the refuge of allegory. Before it does, though, Kevin Bacon's hollowed-out, haunted performance as a man released from prison with an indelible human stain moors the picture in a strong, melancholy reality. He moves in across the street from an elementary school, gets a job in a lumber yard, and befriends a woman…

DIFF ’04: Stage Beauty

**/****starring Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Tom Wilkinson, Rupert Everettscreenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher, based on his play "Compleat Female Stage Beauty"directed by Richard Eyre by Walter Chaw A Samuel Pepys quotation opens Stage Beauty, something about how in the seventeenth century, Ned Kynaston was the most beautiful woman on a stage that forbade women from strutting and fretting their hours. Playing Desdemona in a mannered production of "Othello", Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is king of the roost, oblivious to the crush of his ahistorical assistant, Mrs. Margaret "Maria" Hughes (a sort of well-cast Claire Danes), the first lady of the theatre, who…

DIFF ’04: Imaginary Crimes

**/****starring Sigourney Weaver, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, Michelle Williamswritten and directed by Dan Harris by Walter Chaw Another installment in the ongoing Ice Storm chronicles, screenwriter-turned-hyphenate Dan Harris's Imaginary Heroes also incorporates elements of stuff like A Home at the End of the World and Moonlight Mile. The picture shows its hand early and often, with a star swimmer (Kip Pardue) killing himself before the main titles have finished, thus leaving his already-dysfunctional family to pick up the suburban, Ordinary People pieces. Mom is Sigourney Weaver, sis is Michelle Williams, Pa is Jeff Daniels, and the star of the show…

DIFF ’04: À Tout de Suite

**/****starring Isild Le Besco, Ouassini Embarek, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Laurence Cordierwritten and directed by Benoît Jacquot by Walter Chaw Benoît Jacquot's homage to the Nouvelle Vague has a weird, emotionally-detached feeling to it, something to do with the fact that paying tribute to the French New Wave is, at its essence, paying tribute to a tribute. (Something to do, too, with the nihilism that has infected world cinema in the new millennium.) The story proper concerns a young girl in the Anna Karina mold (Isild Le Besco) who, fashioning herself a bohemian, rebels against her bourgeois parents, beds down with a…

DIFF ’04: Kinsey

***/****starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaardwritten and directed by Bill Condon by Walter Chaw Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde…

DIFF ’04: Unknown Soldier

*½/****starring Carl Louis, Postell Pringle, Carl Garrison, Layla Edwardswritten and directed by Ferenc Tóth by Walter Chaw With Unknown Soldier, a film that militarizes the terminology for the plight of inner-city youth, debuting writer-director Ferenc Tóth demonstrates a nice touch behind the camera but an anvil's touch at the typewriter. The story of a young man (Ellison (Carl Louis)) who loses his father--then his mooring, then his home, then his girl--before being shamed back into respectability takes on all the tedious trappings of the new urban template for coming-of-age dramas. The digital video looks a touch over-sharp, even as the rest…

Ray (2004)

***/****
starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell
screenplay by James L. White
directed by Taylor Hackford

Rayby Walter Chaw Jamie Foxx is so mesmerizing as Ray Charles in Ray, Taylor Hackford's biopic of the legendary performer, that the typical Hackford-isms threatening to weigh down the piece don't seem as heavy as they usually do. At its heart, the film is really just another faux epic from Hackford: another glimpse at the rise and fall (and rise) of a uniquely American persona (Everybody's All-American, An Officer and a Gentleman), another recent-historical essay, and another picture that begins to feel a little repetitive in the hermetic rises and falls in action that comprise such things. But then there's Foxx. He's the real deal, I think, and between this and Michael Mann's Collateral, 2004 is the year that Foxx becomes a top of the line, bona fide superstar. He's going to win the Oscar in a couple of months–and as the third African-American to claim the Best Actor prize, he's going to deserve it more than Denzel Washington did for Training Day.

TIFF ’04: Saw

**/****starring Leigh Whannell, Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Monica Potterscreenplay by Leigh Whannelldirected by James Wan by Bill Chambers Saw is ready and rarin' to be analyzed, opening as it does with the scholar-baiting tableau of a man (Leigh Whannell, also the film's screenwriter) waking in a bathtub, baptized or reborn. (It just so happens that his name is Adam.) And I swear to God the bad guy lives on "Stygian Street." Everything about Saw points to Whannell putting the cart before the horse: symbolism before context; set-pieces before bridges; revelations before mysteries... The movie's logic is at once unassailable and…

TIFF ’04: Palindromes

*½/****starring Ellen Barkin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Richard Masurwritten and directed by Todd Solondz by Bill Chambers Preceded by the snarkiest, if also funniest, on-screen dedication since The War Zone's "For my father" ("In loving memory of Dawn Wiener"--Dawn being the pre-teen heroine of Todd Solondz's breakthrough feature Welcome to the Dollhouse), Solondz's fifth film, Palindromes, is a virtual sprinkler head oscillating back and forth to spritz everything in the director's purview with venom. (It's his idea of moral ambivalence.) A "palindrome" is something that reads the same forwards and backwards, and by casting several different actresses to…

TIFF ’04: Keane

***½/****starring Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryanwritten and directed by Lodge Kerrigan by Bill Chambers It may seem as though Lodge Kerrigan is spinning his wheels by revisiting the territory of his directorial debut two pictures later, but this actually provides a means by which to judge Kerrigan's maturation as an auteur. Only slightly more prolific than Terrence Malick, Kerrigan quietly penetrated the indie scene with 1994's Clean, Shaven, which cast Peter Greene--in a role that brilliantly exploited the actor's own mercurial nature--as Peter Winter, a paranoid schizophrenic scoping out his only child and her new parents; the film furnishes…

TIFF ’04: p.s.

P.S.**½/****starring Laura Linney, Topher Grace, Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Hardenscreenplay by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd, based on the novel by Helen Schulmandirected by Dylan Kidd by Bill Chambers Curious that Dylan Kidd, the mind behind the revelatory Roger Dodger, felt compelled to include a "director's statement" in the pressbook for his sophomore feature, p.s., but it's nonetheless an essential read in that it gives the lie to artist intentionality. "From Aristotle to Joseph Campbell to Robert McKee," Kidd writes, "everyone's in agreement: you can't have drama without obstacles...The idea behind p.s. was to tell a story where nothing stands…

TIFF ’04: Sideways

***/****starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Ohscreenplay by Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickettdirected by Alexander Payne by Bill Chambers Alexander Payne has a gift for wry humour, of course, and in Sideways, there's a nice, sardonic hold on a bathroom door's sign--"MEN"--after Jack (Thomas Haden Church), having learned nothing from a sour indiscretion that netted him a broken nose, starts hitting on a waitress. By the same token, the curlicue noted above is typical of the level of organization, for lack of a better word, in Payne's work, which always…

TIFF ’04: I ♥ Huckabees

i ♥ huckabeesI Heart Huckabees**/****starring Dustin Hoffman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzmanscreenplay by David O. Russell & Jeff Baenadirected by David O. Russell by Bill Chambers David O. Russell's debut feature Spanking the Monkey now bears the mark of Kane. (Citizen, that is.) A funny, caustic mood-piece that heralded the Second Coming of Hal Ashby, it was also an impossible thing to live up to--or down, for that matter, Spanking the Monkey's mother-son incest plot in some ways a modern correlative to Citizen Kane's taboo-shattering demystification of William Randolph Hearst. Russell's work since (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings) has…