A roundup of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, The Beat My Heart Skipped, Avenge But One Of My Two Eyes + Towards Mathilde (French Documentary Month), Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Brick.

Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (Roadshow, $39.95)
“MCs get a little bit of love and think they hot/Talkin’ ‘bout how much money they got/Nigga all y’all records sound the same/I sick of that fake thug, R & B Rap scenario all day on the radio/Same scenes in the video, monotonous material,” Dead Prez’s anthem sums up Block Party’s ethos, celebrating a more progressive hip-hop vision. As Dead Prez’s scorching anthem puts it, “It’s still bigger than hip-hop.” Block Party, best viewed with a lively group, should have wide appeal. Block Party’s centre, from delirious jokes to inspired barbs, is Dave Chappelle, a radiant, uplifting force. I wish this brother could have directed Rize instead of David La Chappelle. Chappelle coaxed Kanye West, Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Mos Def, The Fugees and Talib Kweli into performing in a free concert in Brooklyn, New York. How exciting is that? The comic colossus Chappelle (why is his work unavailable in New Zealand?) shares a warm, intuitive rapport with these musical icons at this block party and the organising lead-up to it. Block Party mounts a case for a joyous, exuberant, inspiring, inclusive America. New to DVD. (Deleted & Extended Music Performances; Making-Of Documentary).—Alexander Bisley

The Beat My Heart Skipped (Roadshow, $19.95)
Effortlessly cool yet harrowing, highly accessible and entertaining, Beat grounds its hardboiled agony in moments of imaginative ecstasy. Easily better than James Toback’s 1978 Fingers, The Beat My Heart Skipped is about the double life of Thomas (Romain Duris), a petty real estate thug in the footsteps of his yellowing father (Niels Arestrup), who yearns to be a concert pianist like his late mother. The matchless Emmanuelle Devos, Kings and Queen and Jacques Audiard’s superb Read My Lips, plays Papa’s girlfriend. From the opening scene where Thomas unleashes a bag of rats on a motley of squatting immigrants in a fetid Paris apartment building, Beat is edgy and explosive. Audiard plumbs the duality of classical music, with more heart and soul than Michael Haneke’s razor cynical The Piano Teacher. Other relationships — the ties that bind and the ties that tear apart, beauty and squalor, civilisation and barbarism — are given visceral, intelligent, layered examination. Beat gets in Thomas’ head, and in your head. Lit, like the characters, with shades of grey, Beat is lustrously shot in long, fluid takes. Whether it’s his insistent practise of a Bach piece for his Vietnamese piano teacher or his romancing of women (such as the impossibly gorgeous girlfriend of a Russian gangster nemesis), Beat is a blast. New to DVD. (French language with optional English subtitles; trailer; filmographies; photo gallery).—Alexander Bisley

Avenge But One Of My Two Eyes, Towards Mathilde
Avi Mograbi’s tightly-wound documentary has an emotional centre so frustratingly unfocussed and bitter. Avenge But One Of My Two Eyes is described as “an inflammatory critique of his own nation,” and it’s hard not to be interested with the ongoing issue of Israel on the world-stage. And Mograbi has certainly captured some stunning footage, heartbreaking shots of an old woman admitting directly to tape that she’d rather die than live this life. But his polemic is not structured or even vaguely arranged – instead it sits on the screen like a giant spit-ball of anger and frustration. Of less antagonistic variety, Claire Denis met Mathilde Monnier, the head of the Centre Choréographique de Montpellier, at a dance festival in Montpellier. Denis’ films can be described as choreographic, and not only in select moments like the wonderful ending to Beau Travail. It was Denis’ curiosity to view the work of Mathilde during her preparation for a new performance that forms the basis of Towards Mathilde. Shot in Super-8 and Super-16, the film is always in close proximity to the dancers, establishing a presence of the human body that is seldom seen on screen. It’s this fascination with movement and the human form that gives the film its heart. If you’re expecting to see a documentary about how one of France’s greatest choreographers is working today, you may be disappointed; yet to watch Mathilde working – or rather, dancing – is beautiful, and something to behold. Screening as part of the French Documentary Month in November.—Simon Sweetman/Achim Ploschke [amended from Lumière’s NZIFF 2006/Berlin 2005 coverage]

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Framed around a pair of teeth, this adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s 18th Century novel is bawdy. The cock of the subtitle is not a rooster; Rob Brydon’s teeth and the male organ are a thematic duo. With Steve Coogan headlining in the title role, the film overbrims with the finest comedic talent Britain has to offer (Extra’s Ashley Jensen, Little Britain’s David Walliams, Black Book's Dylan Moran, and even Stephen Fry), and the laughs are many. Actors play both themselves and the characters from the novel, sending up the film world with its egotistical rivalries, weeping wardrobe ladies, boredom and drinking, sour financial backers, intense assistants who like Fassbinder and Bresson (maybe it’s the sibilance), and sycophantic journalists. Musical, textual and visual quotations of other films abound. However, as Tristram Shandy is a film about the making of a film of a book which is not filmable, it does not begin or follow any conventional narrative structure. All the digressions would give an anal scriptwriting book following writer hemmaroids if not an aneurism. Where is the third act climax!!!! Winterbotton clearly needs remedial Film 101. While brimming with witty lines and lustrous performances, its digressive approach occasionally peters out. Coogan’s persona may be inflated, but it’s hard to keep it up for 94 minutes. A “post modern classic before there was any modern to be post about,” just as the novel digresses to the point of never being written, so too does the film. In Theatres Now.—Catherine Bisley [Full Review]

Brick
A hard and fast film-noir set in the context of a contemporary Californian high school – think The Maltese Falcon meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets The O.C. – this is an accomplished mystery-thriller that is more than just cheap gimmickry or a widescreen rehash of Veronica Mars. On a comparatively diminutive budget, writer-director Rian Johnson has fashioned an accomplished mystery-thriller. It works because dares to take its premise seriously, entertaining with a fiercely independent spirit, and without a hint of pretension. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as the film’s hardboiled detective – and occasional antagonist – doesn’t just carry the film. He owns it. The remainder of Brick’s ensemble cast also performs admirably. Nora Zehetner, as the femmme fatale, channels Bacall, and even Emilie de Ravin, the slightly annoying and somewhat pointless character on Lost, turns in a memorable performance. Loaded with a rapid-fire discourse of neo-noir teen jargon and a perpetually twisting plot, it evokes the spirit of Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep, yet never loses its own unique identity. In Theatres Now.—Caleb Starrenburg [Read More]