Reviews

Beneath the opening credits, a photocopier copies IDs, one after another.

We open to a courtroom. A beautiful married couple, Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) have obtained coveted visas to leave Iran for the United States, where Simin hopes to offer a better future to their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (the director's daughter, Sarina Farhadi). Simin has red hair and determined eyes; Nader has an honest face. They address the camera as if we are the judge.

"You don't have good reasons for a divorce." Their hard-won visa expires in a month or two; Nader will not leave, Simin must, with Termeh. The problem, Nader is devoted to his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who has Alzheimer disease and is totally dependent on his son and his family. And so the couple embark on a trial separation.

An upper middle-class household, a stable home, parents who value education and security for their daughter perhaps above all.

Simi has found a caretaker, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a pregnant, deeply religious woman with a young daughter who takes the job unbeknownst to her husband (Shahab Hosseini), an out-of-work cobbler. A devout woman with a young daughter (Kimia Hosseini), to mind his father while he is at work.

Negotiations - she lives far away, the pay is not good, her husband does not know. The first day, grandpa pees his pants. Modesty. Razieh asks him to clean himself up; he can only ask for Simin. She makes a call to her imam for religious advice. She can clean the old man. Her daughter watches through frosted glass, ever curious.

In the meantime, Nader teaches his daughter to be assertive, first with the gas station attendant.

The caretaker quits. It's heavy work for a pregnant woman and a little girl. We know she's pregnant, but does Nader? It's a big problem. Who else? Razieh comes back. My husband. He cannot know you hired me. But maybe he can come.

Here begins the disaster. Class war. Breakdown of families and society.

The two daughters are at the heart of the story.

Truth, guilt, the bitter disappointment of a child in her parents.

Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging, flawlessly crafted, brilliantly performed and intimately photographed, A Separation premiered at Berlinale, where it won the Golden Bear for Best Film as well as the top prizes for Best Actor and Actress for its male and female ensembles.

"The idea for the film came to when I was sitting in the kitchen of my friend's flat in Berlin nearly one year ago. I was here preparing another film, but I decided to do this one instead. I was smoking a cigarette in the kitchen, listening to some Iranian music and then I decided to make it. The film is influenced by my personal experiences and the situation in Iran and also some abstract pictures I had in my mind. It was like a puzzle. The story was in my mind for some time but when I decided to make it it happened quickly." - Farhadi

It began with picture of a man with Alzheimer's.

"I found the button and made a suit."

Do not miss this movie.

When I saw Ninja Kids!!! at a sold-out screening at NYC's Japan Society, I was surrounded by a cluster of viewers that was about 25% 10 years old or younger (including a couple as young as 5), about 50% 20 years old to 30 years old, and about 25% 40 and older (including a couple approaching 60 years old).

I can tell you every one of us was completely enthralled from beginning to end. Children and adults alike were howling at the abundant scatological humor, gasping with amazement at the feats of dexterity, and cheering the heroes on to victory.

Pure cinema, with something for everybody and excluding no one.

Is there nothing Takashi Miike can't do?

Man chu | Late Autumn Director: Kim Tae-Yong Republic of Korea (South Korea), Hong Kong, China, USA 2010 English, Korean, Mandarin Cast includes Tang Wei (Anna), Hyun Bin (Hoon).

A young woman waits in an empty diner outside a lonely bus stop. Pie and a cup of coffee. She touches neither. Every sound of footsteps, she turns. She smiles. "Hi. It's been a long time."

Man chu opens with Anna staggering down a suburban street, bloodied, face bruised, clothes torn. We learn that she has killed her abusive husband. Seven years later, serving out the sentence for her crime, Anna is given two days' compassionate leave to attend her mother's funeral in Seattle, tied to prison by a cell phone that rings periodically and which she must answer, giving her location.

As Anna's bus pulls out of a station, Hoon, a young dandy and rent boy, jumps aboard. He doesn't have enough money to pay for his ticket and asks to borrow money from Anna. He is Korean, Anna is Chinese – he seems to assume a bond? Deciding whether to give a stranger 30 bucks.

Thus two unlikely misfits meet and fall in love, despite all odds.

Man chu, a remake of a 1966 Korean film of the same name, is ravishingly filmed with a RED camera transferred to D-Cinema Cinemascope, featuring deeply affecting lead performances by the Chinese actress Tang Wei and South Korean actor Hyun Bin and strong supporting performances, including two white dancers who silently act out a beautifully composed break-up scene choreographed by Dayna Hanson and dubbed by Anna and Hoon in a brilliant sequence filmed in a derelict amusement park.

Anna and Hoon speak to each other in English, when Anna decides to speak at all. (Tang Wei achieves the lion's share of her unforgettable performance in silence.) In one emotionally devastating scene, Anna tells Hoon her story step by step in Chinese. He interprets by her face and responds to each sentence "Hao" (good) or "Huai" (bad). Though it is evident he does not understand, his responses reveal deep empathy, which Anna recognizes in an extended sequence of acting without words – one among many in this profoundly actorly film.

One slow dissolve on Anna's beautiful face is destined for the annals of film history, I think.

Folge mir (Follow Me)

Director: Johannes Hammel Austria 2010

Cast: Daniela Holtz (Frau Blumenthal), Roland Jaeger (Herr Blumenthal), Charlotte Ullrich (die andere Frau Blumenthal), Simon Jung (Pius), Karl Fischer (Religionslehrer Denoth), Oskar Fischer (Roman). Forum

A beautiful woman, smoking a cigarette, looks at a peeling building. The camera stays with her, she is smiling.

A film about the way a leaking broken ceiling and cheap light fixture can break your heart. A family lives in a crummy flat overlooking an ugly waterfront. Everything from evening meals to weekend trips is agony. Everything is strange, a little off.

Crystal-clear black-and-white Cinemascope images of an unhappy family are composed in a post-narrative structure, juxtaposed with cheerful low-res Super 8 home movies of a better life.

"You can't believe how suddenly things can subtly change."

In one world, a kind waitress serves Frau Blumenthal a latte machiatto; in another, a sour waiter throws her out onto the street, a madwoman.

In one world, she's riding her bike in her summer dress in the sun, with the sound of surf and seagulls. In another, she's trying to learn to ride on a dismal street, constantly looking to see who is watching her.

And religion is a sad affair, through which children are indoctrinated to a life of disappointment and failure by a sadistic teacher. Folge mir is the textbook.

As Frau Blumenthal, Daniela Holtz and Charlotte Ullrich are radiant and unforgettable.

Folge mir is Johannes Hammel's debut as director of a feature film. He works in Vienna as a freelance filmmaker, cameraman, and producer.

Heaven's Story Director: Zeze Takahisa Japan 2010 Cast: Tsuruoka Moeki (Sato), Hasegawa Tomoharu (Tomoki), Oshinari Shugo (Mitsuo), Murakami Jun (Kajima), Yamasaki Hako (Kyoko)

Nine episodes, a running time of four and a half hours, a dozen main characters, a plot spanning nine years.

A survival story, of those who have lost everybody. The agony of bereavement by murder. "The man I wanted killed died before I had the chance."

Lives connected by murder and loss. "There are events in life that are quickly forgotten by those who aren't involved, but for those involved they never come to an end."

"Eight-year-old Sato, whose family was wiped out by a psychopath who then went on to kill himself, learns by chance of a man who has sworn to take revenge on the man who murdered his wife and daughter. For eight long years she waits in vain for him to keep his promise, then takes the initiative herself, setting in motion a chain of tragic events that gradually plunges everyone involved into misery."

A policeman who becomes a contract killer to support the family of a man whom he killed in self-defense; a partially deaf girl in a rock band; a woman with early-onset Alzheimer's who adopts a murderer who ends up loving her past death.

"I want to be remembered by the unborn." The loss of memory, of one's self.

"When your family is murdered, aren't you entitled to happiness?"

Tears and pee. The dead keep watch.

Utopians Director: Zbigniew Bzymek

USA 2011

Cast includes Jim Fletcher (Roger), Courtney Webster (Zoe), Lauren Hind (Maya), Arthur French (Morris), Jessica Jelliffe (Deborah), and Sacha Yanow (Agnes)

Roger is arguably the worst yoga teacher in the world, and your home-renovation contractor from hell. But he's a good egg. A single dad after the death of his wife, Roger's life suddenly gets complicated when his daughter Zoe returns home from military service, on a mission to rescue her certified schizophrenic girlfriend Maya from institutionalization.

Roger's increasingly frustrated students start to abandon him as he comes to class later and later, retreats into his own head for rambling, free-associative patter that takes the place of actual yoga instruction, and starts bringing a stray pit bull to class.

Tension grows as Maya is released from institutional care and comes to live/camp with Roger and Zoe. Roger's friend Morris offers a live-in renovation job in his well-furnished house, and the newly formed family move in and promptly begin to decompensate, as the psychiatrists say, or perhaps just begin to find their way.

A perfect cast is led by Jim Fletcher (recently starring as Gatsby in the Elevator Repair Service's marathon performance of Gatz), Courtney Webster, and Lauren Hind, with strong support by Arthur French, Jessica Jelliffe, and Sacha Yanow. Courtney Webster and Lauren Hind pulled double duty as producers.

Shot on location in Brooklyn in HDCam, with credits to Woodhull Hospital as well as to key artwork, including one fantastic painting of the fall of Nelson at Trafalgar.

The score is by Harvey Valdes, capturing the cold sounds of madness in one of the "longest-lasting guitar improvisations since Dead Man."

A feature debut for director Zbigniew Bzymek, who is an associate artist at The Wooster Group, where he makes short doc videos and develops video design for productions, including the space vampire opera La Didone.

Myriam Aziza's first feature is like one of PJ Harvey's jealousy/murder ballads brought to life. Except the protagonist isn't an adult, but a sweet 12-year-old girl. Intelligent, studious, a bit shy, Juliette (Alba Gaïa Kraghede Bellugi) lives an average life with her over-worked mother and two brothers in a boring suburban complex.

Juliette develops a hard crush on her beautiful grammar teacher Hélène Solenska (the Belgian-Portuguese singer Lio). Which is understandable. In and out of the classroom, Madame Solenska controls her image in a perfect storm of education, seduction, and power that equates mastery of French grammar with sexual maturity. The entire class has a crush on her.

But during an unfortunate series of events, Juliette spins out of control, her perceptions uncannily accurate even if delusional.

A beautiful film of solitude – Juliette's, her mother's (a bravura performance by Sophie Mounicot), and Solenska.

Shot with a Red camera, which despite its reputation for difficulty is rapidly gaining acceptance as a means to Cinemascope effects on a video budget, the film has striking photography throughout and scenes of translucent beauty. See it for the phenomenal Alba Gaïa Kraghede Bellugi, and stay for a memorable experience.

A family drama, an absurdist comedy, a spot-on critique of capitalism. All of these and more.

Caught between a typically rough-and-ready film crew, supercilious ad agency reps, creepy client, and her self-absorbed parents – starting her period, during an historic heat wave, forced to drink ever-growing quantities of an increasingly vile "fruit drink" while endlessly reciting an inane script as afternoon light decays into night – 18-year-old Delia Fratila is the new-found star of the latest commercial for a worthless product in newly capitalist Romania.

For his feature-film debut, Radu Jude drew from a story from one of his first commercial shootings, in which a teen-age girl from a poor village was supposed to look happily at the camera and tell the world how she sent in three juice bottle labels and won a car. He saw the girl was not happy at all, and finally asked her if something was wrong. An inspired film emerged.

Andrea Bosneag is a breakthrough discovery as Delia. In a seemingly effortless, perfect performance, she captures the beauty, ugliness, wisdom, and foolishness of adolescence while shifting expertly between 18-year-old Delia and Delia-as-emerging-actress.

Three women's lives converge on a bus heading to a men's prison, through the Lebanese desert. The women have each come to this place because of their men, but for very different reasons.

A random, shattering event propels them out into this terrible place alone, with only each other to rely on. A deadly world of hot sun, distant artillery fire, and mute packs of refugees, always leaving.

In her first feature film, Dima El-Horr composes scenes of acute intimacy against an epic vision of desolation, punctuated with sequences of hyper-realistic symbolism. Hiam Abbass, Manal Khader and Raïa Haïdar are each fascinating to watch, and deeply eloquent as they inhabit three unforgettable characters.

Omori Tatsushi's second feature casts Love Exposure's Ando Sakura as Kayo, a lonely girl who encounters two dim-witted orphans on the eve of a final attempt to break out of their miserable lives (Kenta and Jun, played with raw authenticity by Matsuda Shota and Kora Kengo).

Kenta and Jun have a vague plan to trash their boss's office and head north to Hokkaido, where Kenta's pedophile brother is serving a long prison term. In one moment of happiness, as they take sledgehammers to their boss's Lexus, Kenta and Jun exult, "Smashing things is what we do!", which aptly sums up the many acts of pathetic cruelty that follow.

Kayo, picked up randomly by Jun, joins them only to be insulted continuously and eventually robbed and abandoned, the contents of her handbag dumped out on a parking lot.

An important story with brilliant performances by the actors, highly effective sound, and wonderful photography – particularly one incredible picture of Kenta and Jun with a caged junkyard dog between them, surrounded by rusted-out ironworks.

Credits roll over a plaintive lyric – "What we want is not the grief in life, what we want is the joy in life…"

After five years, five jobs, and five boyfriends, Sawako (Mitsushima Hikari) still has not fully arrived in Tokyo. Her favorite phrases are "can't be helped" and "working class is why." On breaks from her humiliating job at a toy company, Sawako listens to two co-workers discuss men, climate change, and the global financial crisis with the same hilarious apathy. They pursue Sawako everywhere, even chiding her about her middling boyfriend while she sits on the toilet.

Kenichi (Endo Masashi), a toy designer at the toy company, has determined to live an "eco lifestyle." Sawako spends evenings with him and his daughter Kayoko (Ahira Kira), while he clumsily knits a sweater vest, baby blue like his own, intended for Sawako. Instead of a good-night kiss at her door, Kenichi asks Sawako for her empty cans to recycle.

When his latest design – a plastic Ma on wheels – fails miserably in focus group, Kenichi decides he and Sawako should return to her home town and run her seriously ill father's clam-packing business. Considered an ungrateful daughter by the factory women, however, Sawako doesn't seem to stand a chance against their verbal abuse and general uncooperativeness.

But in Sawako Decides (literal translation of the Japanese title is "Hello From the River Bed"), we learn the power of a "lower-middling woman" – chu no ge no on-na. After a long, painful recovery from the most comically literal rendition of a "painful memory" I've seen, Sawako decides that since she's nothing special, she'll just have to tough it out.

With this newly defiant mediocrity, Sawako confronts the factory women and starts to re-invent the family business, beginning with a rewrite of the Kimura Shellfisheries workers' morning pep song into a surly "Internationale" for the modern worker.

Director Ishii Yuya may have hit on the trope of the decade with his observation that "the image of small shellfish squirming in the riverbed also contains a hopeless gravity that was a perfect fit." He says his influences are musical even more than cinematic, and I believe him; Sawako Decides is wonderfully paced. And Mitsushima Hikari is an expressive, physically precise comic genius.

Director So Sang-min studied religion before taking up film directing, which shows in his attention to character and the virtues of faith, love, and loyalty.

In his first feature-length film, So Sang-min explores the lives of young professionals and office workers in Seoul through the misadventures of a vulnerable man stuck between poetry and the law exam.

At one point, the constantly drunk Sun-woo walks around naked in the unisex section of a rest house, until an attendant rushes to cover him. This mediocre event fairly sums up his relationships. After a street altercation, a cabbie pegs him pretty well - "A well educated man like you shouldn't act like that." And yet when real chaos hits, Sun-woo responds with true courage, both physical and moral.

In The Oath, American director Laura Poitras tells Salim Hamdan's story largely from the perspective of his friend Nasser al-Bahri, a.k.a. Abu Jandal. A taxi driver in Yemen's capital city of Sana'a, Jandal is a former member of al Qaeda, chief bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, and "guesthouse emir" in charge of new arrivals to bin Laden's camp in Afghanistan. It was Hamdan's fateful association with Jandal that set him on the course that eventually placed him in the middle of America's War on Terror.

Abu Jandal was dedicated to the protection of Osama bin Laden and to the reliability of new arrivals to bin Laden's Afghanistan training camp, including many if not all of the 9/11 highjackers. On the day of the 9/11 attacks, Jandal was in a Yemeni prison where he was in dialogue with a state-sponsored religious committee formed to engage with extremist fundamentalists.

After the 9/11 attacks, Jandal identified many of the hijackers to FBI agent Ali Soufan and became a significant source to link the attacks to al Qaeda. He was later freed from custody, and found work as a taxi driver.

For The Oath, Poitras interviewed Jandal, followed him to meetings with Yemeni youths, and joined him in quality time with his young son. She placed a video camera on the dashboard of his taxi to record his observations and encounters with passengers during his work day.

The Oath grants us an extraordinary perspective on al Qaeda's management and leadership. Most importantly, the film introduces us to the human beings who are our enemies and the unfortunate souls who get caught in the undertow of conflict.

Salim Hamdan is the silent protagonist at the heart of the film, represented by a voice-over reading from his letters home while captive in Guantánamo, a grainy video of his first interrogation, a recording taken by ABC's John Miller while Hamdan drove Miller to an interview with bin Laden, and a report from Hamdan's military trial.

The Oath is the second documentary in a trilogy Poitras is developing about post-9/11 America. The first, My Country, My Country, tells the story of the U.S. occupation of Iraq from the perspective of an Iraqi doctor. A planned third film will focus on the 9/11 trials.