Ben Russell, one half of experimental shorts programme We Can Not Exist in This World Alone (in collaboration with Ben Rivers), chats to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM about challenging the grammar of cinema.

Sardonic comedy springs surprises in the midst of a medieval Belgian city. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

THE BELGIAN city of Bruges is not the first place that springs to mind when one thinks of hitmen comedies, so it comes as some surprise that this gorgeous medieval city plays such an integral role in the success of this film. Seasoned playwright Martin McDonagh’s debut feature is a slyly humorous quasi-fable with several layers of moral subtext and a canny eye for the latent tragedy and sadness lurking beneath many comic situations.

An engaging and though-provoking story of how humanity gets by in the wake of misplaced 9/11 bureaucracy. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

THE IMAGE of a balding white middle-class economics professor drumming African beats in the New York subway could seem trite, but in the warm, capable hands of writer/director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent), it is a heartbreaking expression of futility, powerful and true. Humanity provides the only glimmer of hope in this present-day America, where paranoia renders the very paragon of democracy an unyielding, inscrutable façade reminiscent of a fascist or communist regime.

Two dog-eared genres are given a turning over. By JACOB POWELL.

TALES of time travel naturally inspire musings about the possibilities of the future – usually including some sort of fitting silvery garb or the like – as well as fanciful adventures in the past where our foreknowledge and technological superiority often come into play. From the H. G. Wells classic The Time Machine, to Terry Gilliam’s absurdist Time Bandits, through to Robert Zemeckis’ 80s blockbuster Back to the Future trilogy, much of the time travel genre tends to cover large scale stories full of spectacular events and famous people. Not Timecrimes! Despite its somewhat misleading – though at the same time, perfectly apt – title, Nacho Vigalondo’s debut feature focuses in on the microcosm of small rural neighbourhood and one man, Hector (Karra Elejalde), who finds his life thrown into a surreal whirlwind one sunny afternoon. With his pair of binoculars and a lack of common sense on board, and not a famous person to be seen, Hector wanders into the woods in search of a topless lady he spied loitering within only to find that strange things are afoot at the Circle-K. Fleeing a violent attack he soon finds himself mixed up in a tangled web of... of... well, bizarreness.

ADJACENT to the New Zealand International Film Festivals, the Melbourne International Film Festival has unveiled an impressive, corresponding line-up for 2008, which The Lumière Reader will be covering through its second week (it opened last night with Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary survey of ‘Ozploitation’ cinema). So far, of the new titles, I have only seen the highly recommended films An Island Calling and Persepolis. Fiji Red Cross chief John Scott (a hero during George Speight’s ugly coup) and his partner Greg Scrivener were brutally murdered in 2001. Annie Goldson tells their story My Architect-style in An Island Calling, employing John’s returning brother Owen as narrator. In this intelligent, thorough, gripping and moving documentary, Goldson conveys this tragedy alongside the broader tragedy of lovely, troubled Fiji. Persepolis captures Iran through one appealing girl’s experience. Like a Jafar Panahi film, it’s critical of the destructive theocrats, but conveys the country’s plangent progressive element. The delicate, whimsical animation is refreshingly restrained and appealing in contrast to the steriod-pumped, on 11 excess of Shreks. Other programme highlights include sections Africa! Africa!, with seven films conveying the richesse of Mother Africa, and Altered States, a promising selection of commercially marginalised American indie cinema. Classics are out in force with the dearly departed Edward Yang’s Tribute (already in progress at the NZIFF) and Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight Tribute. Favourites from Cannes’ splendifirous wagamama, now 40 year strong, include Bresson’s provocative The Devil Probably, Herzog’s archetypal Fata Morgana and Sayles’ Matewan. Starring greats Chris Cooper and David Strathairn, Matewan looks at a salient 1920s labour show of unity in the Matewan, West Virginia. “You want to be treated like men? You want to be treated fair? Well, you ain’t men to the coal company, you’re equipment.”—Alexander Bisley

The latest – and apparently last – film from the master of the ‘Tree of Wooden Clogs’. By JOE SHEPPARD.

ERMANNO OLMI poses some big existential questions in One Hundred Nails, an intellectual whodunnit that unravels into nostalgic musing on the idyllic Italian countryside. Like Shakespeare’s wizard Prospero, a dashing but disillusioned professorino dramatically abjures his books, hammering a huge, heavy nail through each ancient tome. Initially this symbolic and rather laborious gesture in the University of Bologna is interpreted as the ‘massacre’ of a fanatic psychopath – no less than an act of betrayal against the ‘faithful friends’ of the scholarly, nearly blind priest in residence there. Soon the police are onto our protagonist, and he abandons the comfortable life and worldly possessions of the urban academic for the rustic pleasures of a derelict cobblestone hut on the banks of the fertile river Po.

An effortlessly charming coming-of-age-drama. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

YAMASHITA NOBUHIRO is possibly the most astute and interesting director working in Japan today. Following the international success of Linda Linda Linda he defied expectations by fashioning the off-kilter black comedy Matsugane Potshot Affair. Despite critical praise the film received scant attention. With his latest output, A Gentle Breeze in the Village, he returns with a wryly observant and perfectly pitched coming-of-age drama.

Stephen Chow delivers warm fuzzies in his extra-terrestrial new film. By JOE SHEPPARD.

IT’S A SHAME that kids generally don’t dig reading subtitles, otherwise the latest ingenious romp from Hong Kong jester Stephen Chow – complete with free stuffed toy! – would have been just the ticket to enliven a dreary Saturday morning. To be sure there were children at the Paramount, but I’ll wager the majority of the audience paid the full ticket price, and I caught a few of them wiping their eyes after enjoying a very funny and clever little tale with a surprisingly touching final act.

Steve McQueen’s devastating depiction of martyrdom. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

I REELED when I clambered onto the sunlit Wellington streets after watching Steve McQueen’s version of the Bobby Sands’ hunger strike. It’s rare to see a film so visceral or gruelling, it felt like the film had wrung me dry. Hunger was immersive filmmaking, a piece of formal brilliance: the hypnotic sound design, the sets which veered from staid to horrifying, the camerawork, everything. The astonishing thing was such an assured piece of work was done by a first time director, although McQueen has a Turner Prize and a feted art career already behind him.

Warning: may cause female audience members to leave with a dangerous sense of empowerment. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

IF THERE’s one lesson to be learned from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s black-comedy-horror Teeth, it’s that deep down all men are pigs. If evolution, toxin-induced mutation, or indeed intelligent design were to equip a girl with the means to combat this unfortunate fact of life, then, like the rattle snake, she should be able to take the advantage and run with it. Set in the kind of all-American town that censors the vagina page (but not the penis page) of high school anatomy textbooks, this is a squirmy coming-of-age fable from feminist heaven (or hell, if you’re not into the whole cautionary castration thing).

Dany Boon reconciles the North/South divide in this French box-office success. By KATE BLACKHURST.

SOMETIMES the short film that precedes the main feature can give you a clue what to expect. Noise Control is a charming animated documentary based upon the true story of a rooster at Raumati South kindergarten who fell foul (sorry!) of his neighbours due to the noise he made. It is a light-hearted look at how we could all just get along better if we recognised our differences, told through cartoon characters and ending with a song: ‘Rock-a-doodle-do’.

The 37th Wellington Film Festival began with a bang last Friday and the first day took no prisoners. By JOE SHEPPARD.

HAVING won the coveted Oscar for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film, The Counterfeiters was the first of the heavy hitters at the Festival and certainly did not disappoint. The opening scenes of heady decadence in 1930s Berlin and outrageous affluence at Monte Carlo contrast sharply with the dark backdrop looming heavily over the film’s story: the famine and filth of the concentration camps and the attempted annihilation of Europe’s Jews. When war breaks out, convicted Jewish forger Salamon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch manages to walk a middle path, first as unofficial camp portraitist and propaganda artist, and then as the ringleader of the largest counterfeiting operation ever. (Apparently Himmler very nearly pulled off this radical plan to flood the Allied economies into collapse.)

One part comedy, two parts horror as Nicky Hager’s controversial expose takes to the big screen. By NINA FOWLER.

BLENDING an astonishing array of archived footage with excerpts from leaked emails and reports, The Hollow Men follows Don Brash and his campaign team as they seduce and are in turn seduced by big business, big money and big political marketing guns from Australia and the US. Viewers who have developed an allergy to the political documentary genre in recent years need not fear: veteran documentary maker Alister Barry (Someone Else’s Country, In a Land of Plenty) has created a visually stimulating adaptation of Hager’s book without lapsing into sensationalism a la Michael Moore. Less happily, the political deception uncovered in the film is not safely ensconced in Washington but lurking around the corridors of our very own Beehive.

An epic contest between good and evil. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

I DOUBT IF there has ever been a more electric group gathered at a Festival documentary. The potpourri of freaks and geeks, scene kids, television people and curious others were congregated to watch arcade game exposé The King of Kong. The premise might sound bewildering, but as the torrents of laughter and applause would attest, this crowd-pleasing film has universal appeal.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks cough medicine and making movies for thousands with Adam Wingard, the resourceful, sure-to-be-prolific director of Pop Skull.

Yung Chang’s documentary Up the Yangtze, on two young cruise staff recruits in the shadow of the Three Gorges Dam, humanises an ever-expanding sub-genre on the effects of China’s industrial and commercial growth. He discusses with BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM the cost of change, river metaphors, and Renoir’s Rules of the Game.

A sack of presents for the eye, covering a wide range of techniques and narrative structures. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

HAND-MADE animation is the purest form of cinema when it comes to the auteur. When you make things frame by frame without any dilution from actors, crew, or production executives, the result can be astonishingly, remarkably, and sometimes disturbingly unique. Innovation within a traditional framework is alive and well in this year’s selection, with everything from blue painted blobs to an extraordinary live action/puppet hybrid used to sublime effect in this year’s Oscar-nominated finale piece, Madame Tutli-Putli.

History and hilarity in Guy Maddin’s tales from ‘The Peg’. By DAVID LEVINSON.

RIFFING phantasmic in My Winnipeg – a delirious paean to his lifelong place-of-residence, commissioned by The Documentary Channel – Guy Maddin ponders: “What’s a city without its ghosts?” The answer arrives when – after two reels spent subsumed in a flickering underworld – the film jolts into the near-present, allowing Maddin to commiserate the loss of a lost totem of his youth, the Winnipeg Arena. As it turns out though, even the garish stratum of archival footage isn’t enough to vanquish the film of Maddin’s catalogue of hang-ups, by now firmly secured across the body of his work; in the case of the hockey rink, Maddin boldly – and creepily – asserts that, growing up, it was “like a father to him”. His biological father, meanwhile, takes shape as a mound of dirt – stranded in a mock-up of his family living room, and granted physiognomy by an adorning rug – constituting the one demand made by his mother (played by B-movie hangover, Ann Savage) in return for her appearance in reconstructed scenes from his childhood. More than mere pomo chicanery, the movie draws its sense-of-purpose from Maddin’s untiring love affair with the genre tropes of yesteryear: Conjuring the arch hysteria of early melodrama, he turns Winnepeg into a shadowy limbo, whose triumvirate of keepers (a forked-river, the bison population, and the female lap...) exert an indefinable hold over him. Meanwhile, Maddin himself appears as a hostage on a train – forever falling victim to the city’s blanket spell of narcolepsy (as he dubiously attests, Winnipeg is home to the world’s highest sleepwalking rate), while offering a hilarious, literate commentary that dances between paranoiac ranting, autobiographical reminisce, and the frank unearthing of historical skeletons. In creating a world where fact freely colludes with folklore, and time itself seems like a distant entity, Maddin confirms that home is – in the most meaningful way possible – a state-of-mind.

Engaging and poetic observations about the effect of progress on human lives. By ROSEANNE LIANG.

GIVEN the Great Wall and the more recent Olympics, it’s hard not to see that China likes to deal in superlatives. The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydro-electric project in the world, designed to harness the unpredictable Yangtze River for the good of the estimated 440 million people who live on its banks. The forced relocation of 2 million people seems a small price to pay for such progress, especially as the government is committed to compensating them with payouts and shiny-new accommodation – according to the government sanctioned tourist guides, anyway.

Steve McQueen directs a prison movie far from escapist. By DAVID LEVINSON.

LENDING a savage intimacy to the spirit of Bobby Sands – the IRA radical who spearheaded the Irish prison-strikes of 1981 – Hunger is a no-holds-barred immersion in human suffering. Directed by Steve McQueen, and winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the film confines itself to the Maze prison in County Down, where Sands (Michael Fassbender) is being held for the possession of firearms; upon greeting a newly-appointed cellmate, he bitterly reveals that he’s been sentenced to 12 years imprisonment. But any recourse to the comfort of time (no matter how slight) is cut short by the permanence of the two men’s surroundings – a sterile, baby-yellow lockup, the walls of which have been smeared in shit. Even the panacea of religion offers no comfort, as seen during a scene where Sands meets with a visiting priest (played by Liam Cunningham), who engages him in a theological debate over the merits of a proposed hunger-strike; curtly rejecting the priest’s qualms, Sands confirms that McQueen’s aim – beyond political and religious descant – is to restore to the abstract tide of history a physical sense of suffering. Thus, as openly fetishistic as any Cremaster movie, Hunger exploits the body as a medium: Prisoners spill urine into the hallway in protest, watching as lone puddles magnetically seep together; men outfitted in riot gear violently bear down on naked flesh; food, abandoned for days, writhes with maggots.

The vampire movie comes out of the dark. By JACOB POWELL. (contains spoilers)

COULD THIS be the best vampire movie since Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) or Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of the classic Noseferatu? Directed by Sweden’s Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In defies simple genre description, combing vampire horror with strong elements of social realist drama, coming-of-age romance, and psychological thriller to create a film that is complex, layered, and broader in range than its “vampire movie” trappings might at first suggest.

Extolling her punk highness, the ferocious Patti Smith. By THOMASIN SLEIGH.

THIS DOCUMENTARY is refreshingly un-documentary like. In the first couple of minutes Patti Smith recites all of the standard biographical detail of her life – where and when she was born, where she lived, who she married, how many kids she had – all of the information that is supposed to describe and explain a person’s life. After this narrative, Patti Smith: Dream of Life drifts off into a non-linear collection of moments, relationships and footage of Smith’s performances. This eclectic assemblage of events gradually reveals more about Smith’s life and music than a usual chronological portrayal often does.

Recalling Philippe Petit’s outrageous, death-defying ‘heist’. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

WELLINGTON’s opening night film, Man on Wire, got the gala treatment the night before, and it’s easy to see why the story would be a crowd-pleasing one: an eccentric Frenchman decides to pull the middle finger at a conformist and regulated society and walk across a wire. Four hundred metres above the ground, suspended between the obviously now gone Twin Towers in New York. Without telling the authorities. With a slack cable. If you’ve got a fear of heights, this is probably not the film for you.

Mardi Gras meets apartheid in Mobile, Alabama. By JOE SHEPPARD.

FOLLOWING the excellent documentary on Nashville minstrel Townes van Zandt (Be Here To Love Me), US filmmaker Margaret Brown headed further south to her ancestral home in Mobile, Alabama, for the 2007 Mardi Gras. Established in 1703 – before the city of New Orleans was even founded – Mobile’s fortnight of spectacular rituals differs from her more famous Louisiana counterpart in one key way: all the parades, debutante balls, and ‘Mystic Societies’ are racially segregated, culminating in dual carnivals and twin coronations. (The sole integrated society, the Conde Explorers, has only one white member.) Brown manages to capture an historic moment when the white regents get down and party at the Comrades’ Ball for the first time ever.

Thirty-six auteurs add their two cents. By JACOB POWELL.

AS YOU WOULD expect from a film made up of discrete three minute shorts by more than 30 different directors, To Each His Own Cinema makes you, in its turn, laugh, muse, shake your head, cringe, nod knowingly, reminisce, tear up, and laugh again. What I did not expect, is how moving the overall experience would be. There is something deeply stirring in this series of very different reflections on the cinematic experience which is difficult for me to explain. I’m not sure why I didn’t think that it would be so affecting considering the weight of talent, intellect, and craft brought to bear on the project; perhaps it was because I felt it would be overtly manufactured. The idea of the Cannes governing body (??) asking a bunch of their favourite auteurs to make short films about movie going just didn’t strike me as likely to produce anything cohesive or as inspired as these directors would generate from their own creative impulses. Luckily for me, I was proved very wrong. Although it isn’t all top notch work, the overall viewing experience is so rich that I think any movie watcher would likely get a high level of satisfaction from watching this film.

A compelling exercise in humiliation-comedy. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

WHEN OUT OF WORK independent filmmaker Chris Waitt is dumped with no explanation, he decides to track down and interview his cavalcade of former girlfriends to learn why his romantic-life is so spectacularly unsuccessful. More importantly, he’d like to discover why it’s been several years since his last erection. This supposed documentary is too staged to ring entirely true; yet Waitt is such an endearingly self-effacing character it ultimately doesn't matter.

Alex Holdridge’s disarming, low-fi romance. By JACOB POWELL.

A ROMANTIC COMEDY light on production gloss and heavy on naturalistic dialogue, writer/director Alex Holdridge’s third feature, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, pushes most of the right buttons. First we meet Wilson (Scoot McNairy), a regular late 20s guy; he’s lonely and had a bad year of it, in terms of work, and a bad half decade of it, in terms of his love life. We are introduced to him as a video store employee who is in synch with his clientele; preferring to mull over some morose romantic movie than actually venture out into the wild and seek it off-screen. The amusing (just post) opening scene finds him caught in a compromising situation when his flatmates return unexpectedly from a trip and from this we learn about the unfortunate stage of life he is in and the friendships he has with these flatmates, Jacob & Min (Brian McGuire & Kathleen Luong) – the apparent picture of a happy couple with – whom he lives.

Out of Switzerland, a stop-motion delight. By DARREN BEVAN.

ANIMATION these days is sometimes overlooked if it doesn’t offer the smart, slick feel of the majority of output from the Pixar fold. Max & Co is a simple tale, aimed squarely at children, and is solid musical fun from beginning to end. It’s the tale of Max, a stop-motion animated fox (voiced by Lorent Deutsch) who sets out to find his father, a famous troubador by the name of Jonny Bigoude (bad pun) and winds up in Saint Hilare, a town which is renowned for creating and manufacturing fly swatters. However, Bzzz & Co (run by the frog playboy industrialist Rodolfo) is losing money hand over fly swatter, and despite the chairman’s pleas to liquidate it, an audit takes place. A manic wheelbound scientist by the name of Martin has other ideas on how to turn it around and put the profit back into it. As ever, his diabolical and fiendish scheming only spells trouble for the town, and Max and his new band of friends (including a sizzling turn by Virginie Efira as the cat cabaret crooner, who rivals Jessica Rabbit for sexiness) set out to save the day. Max & Co won’t win awards for its unoriginal storyline, but it has won audience accolades in Belgium for its enthusiastic and infectious humour, music, as well as the inventive quality of its animation. In fact, in a very short time, you come to care about all the animal characters – the majority of whom have been laid off – which is truly a coup d’etat from these relatively new filmmakers. Directors Frederic and Samuel Guillaume (who’ve previously only released an eight minute short) have really brought this fable of greed and identity alive with the puppetry of all the main characters – there is a Gothic feel to this and at times, it truly is stunning to watch – while the details of the background are intricate and beautifully capture the raison d’etre of so many French towns and villages.

Son of a Lion looks beyond the hostilities of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, giving voice to the region’s unfairly maligned people. Its visiting director, Benjamin Gilmour, speaks of his guerrilla filmmaking experience to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

A cinematic tour of the City of Lights. By CALEB STARRENBURG.

A SORT OF cinematic tourist brochure, Cédric Klapisch’s Paris is the film the uneven Paris, je t’aime should have been. The director of The Spanish Apartment crafts a heart-warming exploration of the lives, loves and neighbourhoods of the City of Lights. Or, more appropriately, that romantic Paris of our imagination. Opening with a head-spinning montage of its main players, we meet Romain Duris in the role of a cabaret dancer awaiting heart surgery. Juliette Binoche is his social-worker sister who moves in to care for him. There is the ageing and cynical history professor, played by Fabrice Luchini, who falls in love with a tempestuous student, and an assortment of working-class Parisians falling in and out of amour.