CineFest/Philadelphia Film Festival Shorts

Week Two Reviews

Following are reviews of movies premièring in the first week of the CineFest/Philadelphia Film Festival, March 26-April 1. Up to the day of the show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9 p.m.), and online at phillyfests.com (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Single-ticket prices are $9-$10; $7-$8 for matinees until 4 p.m.; and $7 for children 12 and under. Service fees may apply.

Denotes a movie recommended by City Paper critics.

Denotes a highly recommended movie.

American Violet | The Burning Plain | God's Forgotten Town | Il Divo | I'm Going to Explode | Julia | Lymelife | My Dear Enemy | Of Time and The City | Sita Sings the Blues | Summer Hours | Surveillance | Training Rules | Treeless Mountain | Tulpan | White Night Wedding | Youssou N'dour: I Bring What I Love | Zift

On the list of accolades that have been applied to the Disney family over the years, nuance doesn't land anywhere near the top. Director Tim Disney, Walt's great-nephew, carries on the family tradition in American Violet, the true story of a woman battling racial injustice in a small Texas town. With an opening sequence that cuts between a mother lovingly preparing breakfast for her children and a team of police cocking weapons in prep for a raid accompanied by foreboding, militaristic music, there's obviously no room for subtlety. Disney's intentions are just, but as compelling as the actual courtroom drama can be, the film often feels like a brochure for the ACLU, complete with dramatically recited statistics. And apparently feeling that he hadn't quite made his political points literal enough, Disney repeatedly uses footage from the 2000 election and its aftermath to hammer them that much harder. —Shaun Brady (4/4, 6:30 p.m., PMT; 4/5, 2:30 p.m., PMT)

Like so many screenwriters-turned-directors, Guillermo Arriaga, freed from the tether of another helmer's editorial restraints, overindulges in the writerly pretensions and gimmicks for which he's known. The intertwining strands of narrative that characterized Arriaga's scripts for Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel) are here, accompanied by stiflingly pretty images and dialogue so ponderous and laden with meaning that it wouldn't be surprising to find the entire script was typed with caps lock engaged. Arriaga gradually teases out the relationships between a uniformly grim-faced cast of damaged white folks (two generations of glamorously disheveled women played by Kim Basinger and Charlize Theron) and excruciatingly noble Mexican-American men, all of whom are of course Deeply Connected in ways that resonate little beyond proving their writer's self-satisfied cleverness. —S.B. (4/2, 7:00 p.m., PMT; 4/4, 2:30 p.m., R5)

Juan Carlos Claver's thriller/ghost movie, God's Forgotten Town, is nothing more than a poor man's The Sixth Sense, with a Lifetime Channel sensibility. At first, the film seems promising: A seemingly psychotic woman who has had enough of hearing whispering ghosts dives out her apartment window with her daughter in tow. That's where the film also takes a nose dive; the scenes that follow only grow progressively more predictable, pointless and drab. Cut to Julia (Bélen López), an investigative reporter who witnesses the mother's suicide. She, too, conveniently begins to hear whispering voices before going on a ghost-hunting mission with her documentary cronies. The team, upon arriving at their spooky destination, begin to see dead people, hear creepy screams in their audio recorders and experience some ghost brutality, which is almost as brutal as sitting through this movie. Almost. —Lauren Fleming (4/3, 2:45 p.m., RE; 4/5, 9:15 p.m., RE)

Il Divo

Viewers without a solid understanding of modern Italian politics are bound to be lost in Paolo Sorrentino's abundantly stylish but impenetrably elliptical examination of the corrupt seven-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. Despite a crucial pre-screening Wikipedia cram session (recommended), I quickly gave up on following the web of assassinations and scandals which reportedly make this film a revelatory bombshell for Italian audiences. Even missing 90 percent of its political ramifications, though, the film is still phenomenally enjoyable on multiple levels. The gorgeous, inventive camera-work recalls the decadent grandeur of Francis Ford Coppola (not-so-incidentally, Andreotti inspired a character from The Godfather, Part III), spliced with the playful energy and wit of more eye-popping recent crime thrillers. Toni Servillo's embodiment of Andreotti makes him at once chillingly diabolical, grimly stoic, wryly perceptive and ultimately, tragic. It's a performance nuanced and compelling enough on its own to make following the plot's finer points seem almost superfluous. —K. Ross Hoffman (4/3, 7 p.m., R5; 4/5, 5 p.m., PMT)

I'm Going to Explode

An explicit homage to Pierrot le fou, Gerardo Naranjo's teenage outlaw romance weaves its referentiality into the plot in true Godardian fashion. The son of a diplomat (Juan Pablo de Santiago) and a moody working-class girl (Maria Deschamps) come together in rebellion and strike out on a lovers' odyssey, but they get no further than the roof of his well-appointed house. Their acting-out is scripted, redundant; their iconoclasm an echo of what's gone before. Naranjo lends a sweaty poetry to his Mexican tableau, where the colors overload until they threaten to bleed off the screen. —Sam Adams (4/3, 9:30 p.m., R5; 4/5, 7:15 p.m., TB)

Tilda Swinton gives a helluva performance as the title character in Érick Zonca's exasperating character study. Throwing herself headlong into the role of an alcoholic kidnapper, Swinton — with her unruly mane of red hair, tough American accent, shoddy clothes and don't-fuck-with-me swagger — makes perpetually hungover Julia's sweaty desperation both compelling and palpable. Yet her astonishing speeches — motormouth diarrhea trying to coerce a friend to abet her crime, or off-the-cuff monologues used to convince everyone (especially herself) that she knows what she's doing — seem wasted. As Julia makes a series of very bad/foolish decisions (many of them straining credibility) Zonca's film becomes an endurance test not only for the actress, but also for those watching. —Gary M. Kramer (4/4, 9:15 p.m., RE; 4/5, 2:15 p.m., RE)

Lymelife

Set on Long Island during a Lyme disease scare in the late '70s, Derick and Steven Martini's film falls somewhere between the wry melancholy of The Ice Storm and the glib satire of American Beauty. As a teenage boy whose mother wraps him in long sleeves and duct tape to ward off hazardous ticks, Rory Culkin brings a vulnerable curiosity that shades into brittle disillusion as the fissures in his parents' marriage begin to show. Drawing on their own childhood, the Martinis recreate the children's perspectives more successfully than their thinly conceived parents', although Timothy Hutton stirs both fear and pathos as a dad whose diseased blood seems to be spilling out of him drop by drop. The film's command of tone is uncertain, and its ending both pat and arbitrary, but it has moments of real feeling. —S.A. (4/6, 7:15 p.m., PMT)

My Dear Enemy

Lee Yoon-ki (This Charming Girl) returns with a barbed and wistful maybe-romance between a deadbeat charmer (Ha Jung-woo) and the furious, frazzled woman (Jeon Do-yeon) whose debt he skipped out on a year past. As they drive around town, picking up pieces of her money here and there, their past relationship starts to slip into focus, and their initial stances start to soften; his devil-may-care approach is tied up in a broad acceptance of life's vicissitudes, while her firm disapproval covers a reservoir of hurt and anxiety. Briskly shot and leisurely paced, the film starts off as a romantic comedy and ends up somewhere else, unexpected but still pleasing. —S.A. (4/4, 7 p.m., R5; 4/5, noon, R5)

Of Time and The City

"We love the place we hate, then hate the place we love. We leave the place we love, then spend a lifetime trying to regain it." As Terence Davies describes his shifting relationship with Liverpool, his hometown, the images are transitional — the camera travels over streets and down alleys, into tunnels and out again, stretching over generations from black and white to color and back again. At once generic and specific, in motion, his memories resist limits of time and place. Sort of. Davies' brilliantly impressionistic and meditative documentary reveals the influential art and rituals of his childhood, from movie stars he loved (Dirk Bogarde, in whose figure he "discovered something entirely different") to the crucified Jesus gazing on him in church. The film combines archival footage and photos, personal laments and public excoriations. "Come closer now, and see your dreams," he urges. "Come closer now and see mine." —Cindy Fuchs (4/2, 9:30 p.m., RE; 4/5, 5 p.m., TB)

Retelling the Ramayana in animated musical form via the songs of an obscure '20s jazz singer sounds like a cutesy gimmick that would easily wear out its welcome over 80-plus minutes. But Nina Paley's whimsical exploration of the Indian epic is as irresistibly catchy as the songbook standards performed by Annette Hanshaw and mouthed by the character of Sita. Created on Paley's laptop over five years, the film juggles a variety of animation styles, from collages of Indian iconography to the Fleischers-meet-Jay Ward musical numbers. The tale itself is refracted through the half-remembered retelling of three Indian-American narrators and the autobiographical depiction of Paley's own breakup, adding up to a delightfully charming tract about how both mythology and pop culture resonate with our personal lives. —Shaun Brady (4/3, 7 p.m., PMT; 4/5, 5 p.m., RE)

Summer Hours

Sidelining the gutter-trawling of Boarding Gate and the sour futurism of demonlover, Olivier Assayas hoes a more naturalist row with the story of a bourgeois extended family whose summer home becomes the site of conflict and change. Edith Scob plays the materfamilias, who takes son Charles Berling aside on her 75th birthday to plan the postmortem disposition of her objets d'art, which become the repository of the family's history after her death. With a daughter (Juliette Binoche) involved in design and a son (Jérémie Renier) in manufacturing, the family's future revolves around objects, which makes the film something of an extended essay on materialism, although Assayas carefully buries his themes beneath the elaborately textured surface of their interactions. —S.A. (4/2, 7:15 p.m., R5)

Surveillance

Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David, returns after a long hiatus from filmmaking with a disturbing twist on the crime procedural. Two FBI agents (Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman) show up at small-town police station to interrogate three suspects — a young girl, a junky and a cop — who witness brutal killings perpetrated by two masked crazies. Each is placed in a room and asked to retell their version of the events while they are videotaped. We watch them, as do the interrogators. Lynch plays with temporality and flashback; the suspects' stories all differ from the truth the audience sees. She shoots the seedy police station in darker tones, while keeping the flashbacks stark and bright, but keeps the stylistic flourishes mostly to a minimum. The twist at the end isn't particularly mind-blowing and the film takes it's time getting there, but Ormond and Pullman commit to their performances in a way that's scary. —Molly Eichel (4/4, 9:30 p.m., PMT; 4/5, 2:30 p.m., R5)

Training Rules

You wouldn't know it from its unpolished cut-and-paste opening montage (including a too-obvious shot of a locker-room sign reading "No Drinking, No Drugs, No Lesbians"), but Training Rules is as shocking as it is absorbing. Co-directed by Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker, the women's college hoops doc shines a light on Penn State coach Rene Portland and her longstanding, longer-hushed discriminatory practices. Portland, who brought unparalleled success to the Lady Lions and won herself two Coach of the Year awards, also banned homosexuality on her teams — explicitly and on record. But it wasn't until 2005 — when rising star Jennifer Harris was unfairly removed from the team, lost her scholarship, suffered psychological trauma and, with the help of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, filed a lawsuit against Portland — that the "Mommy Coach," who devastated so many young women's careers and self-worth, saw any consequences to her hateful, homophobic actions. —Carolyn Huckabay (4/4, 7 p.m., RE; 4/5, 12:15 p.m., TB)

Treeless Mountain

The big doleful eyes of 6-year-old Jin (Hee-Yeon Kim) and the cookie face of 4-year-old Bin (Song-Hee Kim) drive director So Yong Kim's story of two Korean sisters left with their aunt — but essentially to fend for themselves — when their mother goes off to find their estranged father. The action, such as it is, is slow as the small girls (played amazingly maturely) fumble through the big world, devising tricks (selling roasted grasshoppers, changing large coins for small) to earn money for a toy piggy bank, the filling of which their mother said would signal her return. While the pace is glacial, the film has its captivating moments, even if it's more a story about resilience than a story with something to say about resilience. —Brian Howard (4/4, 5 p.m., RE; April 5, 2:45 p.m., RE)

Tulpan

Climaxing, so to speak, with a real-time lamb birthing, documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoy's first feature dwells on the harsh textures of life on the Kazakh steppes, where would-be herder Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov) attempts to court what seems to be the only available bride in sight. The landscape is as stunning as it is formidable, with slate-gray skies hung low above cracked yellow earth, but the movie doesn't wallow unduly in scenery. There's cultural and generation conflict as well, which makes itself felt in subtle and overt ways, and a sense that the openhearted if somewhat hapless protagonist is struggling to master a way of life that many would just as soon abandon. —S.A. (4/3, 7:15 p.m., TB; 4/5, noon, RE)

White Night Wedding

Baltasar Kormákur's newest feature opens with John, a middle-aged professor, about to marry a former student 18 years his junior. The action — mostly on a picturesque Icelandic island — alternates between the impending wedding and John's unraveling life with his mentally unstable first wife. The quirky island residents provide moments of levity and raucousness, and the endless Scandinavian daylight complements Kormákur's surrealist mise-en-scène: a piano played on a moving flatbed, a table set for dinner in the middle of a windswept field. While Kormákur sometimes gets a little heavy-handed with the symbolism — birds signal portent, water means cleansing, we get it — the story moves quickly toward its over-the-top climax and existentialist-approved dénouement. "If you are completely happy for more than 10 minutes," John says to his class, "you must be an idiot." —Lauren F. Friedman (4/2, 7 p.m., RE; 4/4, 2:30 p.m., RE)

Youssou N'dour: I Bring What I Love

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's documentary follows the Senegalese pop singer during the fascinating period surrounding the recording and release of his album Egypt, an attempt to promulgate his moderate brand of Sufi Islam in the face of growing global extremism. Even within his band, there are conflicts; at a New York show, Egyptian musicians refuse to take the stage until alcohol is cleared from the room. But N'Dour picks up the griot tradition of his mother and grandmother, using song to instruct as well as transport. It's hard to know if lyrics like, "If someone wrongs you, don't slander back" are as plainspoken before they're subtitled, but it's fascinating to explore the philosophy behind N'Dour's thrilling and rapturous songs. —S.A. (4/3, 9:30 p.m., RE; 4/4, 2:45 p.m., RE)

Zift

Flitting between the past and present, Zift tells the story of Moth, who's just been released from a medieval-looking Bulgarian prison for his role in the botched robbery of a precious jewel. The story slowly builds around the actual circumstances of the robbery — and the present location of that jewel — accumulating enough subtle hints that the ending makes you want to start all over. Besides being a good mystery, Zift is cinematically beautiful: The movie is shot in black and white, and its crumbling urban Bulgarian landscape makes for the kind of decadent decay that any Philadelphian should appreciate. The film is philosophical without taking itself too seriously, and the moments of comedy come in bizarre, unexpected bursts. Zift also manages to be a thriller without resorting to cheap graphic violence — itself an achievement. —Isaiah Thompson (4/2, 9:30 p.m., RE; 4/4, 5:30 p.m., TB)