April 8-14, 2004

cover story

PFF

Week One Shorts

Following are reviews of movies from the first week of the Philadelphia Film Festival, April 8-14. Up to the day of show, advance tickets may be purchased in person at all TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.) and The Bridge (5-11 p.m. only), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9p.m.) and online at www.phillyfests.org (up to 36 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the appropriate venue. Regular ticket prices are $9, $7 for matinees before 4 p.m., with discounts for Philadelphia Film Society members.

THE AGRONOMIST

Jonathan Demme's portrait of Haitian radio journalist and activist Jean Dominique has a sad topicality: The long struggle that cost Dominique his life finds an echo in the recent Bush-abetted coup. The key to the movie is Dominique's irrepressible personality: Even as he narrates an on-air list of government abuses, he fills the air with defiant laughter. Too full of indifferently shot talking heads to be a great doc, it's still a damn sight better than anything Demme's done in a long while. The soundtrack music is, predictably, great. -- Sam Adams (4/10, 7:15 RE; 4/11, noon RE)

ANATOMY OF HELL

For all its provocations, there's nothing in Catherine Breillat's new film as jarring as the opening disclaimer: "A film is an illusion, not reality fiction or a happening." Considering that Breillat's oeuvre is littered with graphic sex, genital close-ups and brutal outbreaks of violence, the statement seems disingenuous, if not absurd. The extent to which illusion neutralizes Breillat's literalist take on sexual relations becomes clear when, as warned, the camera cuts away from actress Amira Casar to a body double for "the most intimate scenes": If that's not Casar's hoo-hah housing that rounded stone invader, then why bother showing it at all? Based on Breillat's novel Pornocratie, Anatomy reportedly began life as a Marguerite Duras adaptation, which explains the flat pretensions masquerading as profundities: When a man asks her why she's slitting her wrists in a nightclub bathroom, Casar answers, "Because I'm a woman." Soon, she's paying the fellow, a gay hustler played by porn star Rocco Siffredi (Breillat's ironically titled Romance) to "watch me where I'm unwatchable," though it's more a matter of listening when she's unlistenable. It's a shame that such tedious provocations win U.S. distribution, while Breillat's far more interesting Sex Is Comedy, a playfully self-referential account of the making of Fat Girl, vanished without a trace. --S.A.(4/13, 7:15 PMT; 4/18, 5:00 TB)

ASSHAK: TALES FROM THE SAHARA

"Scenes from the Sahara" is more like it. Despite shreds of a plot involving the search for a lost camel, this visually stunning travelogue, set among the Saharan Tuareg nomads, that ultimately drags on too long. Less hypnotic than The Story of the Weeping Camel, Asshak, directed by Ulrike Koch (The Saltmen of Tibet) is notable for the Tuareg's ancient aphorisms, of which "A runaway camel is like the wind" is only the first. -- S.A. (4/11, 4:30 TB*; 4/12, 7:30 RE*)

BRIGHT LEAVES

Revisiting not just himself but the people around him, Ross McElwee's documentaries imagine his life as a historical novel in progess. Sherman's March made the connection explicit, and Bright Leaves reiterates it, beginning with the search for McElwee's great-grandfather, a ruined tobacco baron once portrayed by Gary Cooper in a Hollywood melodrama. Plagued with guilt over his family's role in popularizing cancer sticks, and yet ruing the loss of a fortune that could have been his, McElwee returns to his native North Carolina. It's not leaves that concern him so much as roots, particularly the origin of his compulsion to film even unremarkable moments in his life, which home-movie clips trace back to adolescence. The parallel between compulsive filming and smoking addiction is more powerful before McElwee makes it explicit, but the film's mosaic structure, belied by McElwee's folksy narration, provides its own kind of fix. --S.A. (4/9, 7:30 TB*; 4/10, 4:45 RE*)

BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS

Everything is a bore for the characters in Stephen Fry's ensemble comedy, based on Evelyn Waugh's satiric novel Vile Bodies. Whether they're gambling away their money on horses or snorting coke off of an aristocrat's antique table, the bright young things of 1930s London live in a La-la Land of blase privilege. At first, Fry's film seems as flighty and meandering as his coked-out subjects. But just as the droll fun begins to truly grow tedious -- it's particularly painful to watch Dan Ackroyd and Stockard Channing's talents wasted on minor, poorly written characters -- the socialites are confronted with reality, and Fry deftly flips the script from silly to poignant. --Elisa Ludwig (4/13, 5:00 RE; 4/17 8:00 PMT)

Control Room

CONTROL ROOM

Preposterously denounced by Film Comment as "virtually a recruiting film for al-Jazeera," Jehane Noujaim's behind-the-scenes look at the Arab world's most popular news channel is too troubling to ignore. From the Army information officer who inadvertently equates Al-Jazeera with Fox News to the Arab producer who spouts anti-U.S. rhetoric but allows he'd want his kids to go to school in the States, Control Room poses more questions than it answers -- something that can't be said for either the network it profiles or its American counterparts. --S.A. (4/9, 7:00 IH*; 4/13, 5:00 IH*)

THE CORDON

Two recent films from countries living in the aftermath of U.S. intervention begin with riots shot from a cameraman's POV, a familiar cable news-style entree into a more privileged view. Unlike the sequence in Afghanistan's Osama, which ends violently, the opening of Serb director Goran Markovic's Cordon ends with two protestors making love in front of their camera, appropriate given Markovic's concern with personal issues over political. The authorities here are not the omnipresent evil of the Taliban, but exhausted policemen cooped up in a van: overworked, underpaid, beset by bureaucracy and domestic problems. Set during 1997 anti-Milosevic demonstrations, Cordon examines but does not apologize for institutionalized violence, how it flourishes in these hothouse settings, and its impact on the personal lives of those involved. --Shaun Brady (4/12, 7:15 RE; 4/17, 2:30 TB)

THE CORPORATION

Drawing force from accumulation rather than revelation, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott's documentary is a lengthy rap sheet of corporate malfeasance which concludes that if, as the Supreme Court has ruled, corporations are individuals, they're psychopaths. Giving equal time to Milton Friedman and Noam Chomsky, it's an evenhanded but damning and often terrifying map of a corporate-controlled future. --S.A. (4/10, 6:45 RE*)

DEAR PILLOW

Ungainly, horny teenager meets older porn writer in this semi-blue feature about eros, fantasy and the unsexy business of day-to-day life. Wes, a high school student who works at the local grocery store, spends his spare time listening to a phone sex line via police scanner. When he meets his gay neighbor, Dusty, he's eager to study the trade of "letter" writing and whatever new experiences come with the training. Attractive landlady Lorna gets involved, and the scenario has all the makings of a Skinemax movie. But as it turns out, the film's explicit material is completely verbal, with fantasy narratives ironically overlaying mundane visuals. Written and directed by first-timer Bryan Poyser, Dear Pillow has a claustrophobic, neurotic quality that recalls another low-budget tribute to obsessive masturbation and homemade pornography, sex, lies, and videotape. --E.L. (4/11, 9:30 IH*; 4/13, 5:00 PMT*)

DEEP BREATH

In Parviz Shahbazi's third feature, the world ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with petty theft. It's the minor crimes that eat away at the fabric of Shahbani's Iran, and at his main characters, two wayward young men who go on a low-grade crime spree after one is robbed in broad daylight. The depiction of social breakdown is understated but devastating: A hotel clerk's failure to help a seriously ill guest until he's paid his bill comes across with the force of a physical blow. As influenced by the New Wave as his countrymen, Shahbazi makes room for Ayda (Maryam Palyzban), a Godardian motor mouth whose hejab conceals a Walkman blaring alternative music. Opening with a fatal car accident, the film conceals the victims' identities until the end, introducing a hint of morbid ambiguity that's the only false note in an otherwise enthralling movie. --S.A. (4/10, 5:15 TB; 4/12, 2:30 RE)

Distant

DISTANT

Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan cleaned up at Cannes with this hushed, alienated portrait of city-mouse/country-mouse cousins whose inability to connect reflects a deeper social illness. While its predecessor, the undistributed Clouds of May, evoked Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, Distant moves to colder climes, falling somewhere on the border between Tarkovsky and Kieslowski. (The former influence is playfully acknowledged when the city mouse, a director, switches the TV from Andrei Rublev to porn when his cousin leaves the room.) If the switch in style seems like a gambit, it's a successful one, and, like Kazim Oz's Fotograf, a bellwether for the new generation of Turkish filmmakers. --S.A. (4/11, 7:45 RE)

EVERYDAY PEOPLE

Where Stranger Inside successfully mainstreamed Cheryl Dunye, the similarly HBO-produced third feature by Jim McKay (Our Song, Girls Town) merely represents a dilution of McKay's communal style. Despite the fact that McKay conducted dozens of interviews on race relations to come up with Everyday People's multiple storylines, the film's structure isn't radical enough to cope with its diverging plotlines without reducing them to caricature. Oddly enough, McKay got better performances from Our Song's nonactors than he does from Everyday People's pros. --S.A. (4/11, 7:00 GY*; 4/16, 10:00 PMT*)

FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART: AMOS VOGEL AND CINEMA 16

From 1947 to 1963, Amos Vogel's Cinema 16 gave Americans their first exposure to Ozu, Rivette, Resnais, Polanski and John Cassavetes, not to mention critical early support to Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Melvin Van Peebles. Not bad for an Austrian refugee who only intended to stop in New York on his way to Israel. Inspired by European film societies and Eisenstein's theory of montage, Amos Vogel (né Vogelbaum) assembled programs that flouted preconception, breaking out of the art-house ghetto before there was one: a science documentary might follow a German cartoon, or a propaganda short. Paul Cronin (whose Medium Cool doc showed in last year's PFF) has fashioned an affectionate tribute to Vogel which also serves as a bittersweet valentine to American cinephilia. Testimonials from the filmmakers Vogel influenced would have been welcome, but a generous assortment of clips demonstrates the breadth of Cinema 16's programming. Each screening is followed by a different, but equally essential, shorts program curated by International House's Michael Chaiken, including works by Anger, Brakhage, Van Peebles, John Huston, Georges Franju and the only film by legendary photographer Arthur "Weegee" Felling, which Vogel re-edited at his request. --S.A. (4/11, 4:00 IH*; 4/12, 9:30 PMT*)

A GOOD LAWYER'S WIFE

Korea's Im Sang-soo so convincingly separates the halves of a dissolving marriage that you may start to wonder what the lawyer's affair with a young model and the suburban housewife's attempt to seduce the teenager next door have to do with each other. The characters' frankly depicted but unfulfilling sexual exploits recall the hideous congress of L'Avventura and La Notte, but Im doesn't have Antonioni's rigor, or his moral bitterness. An abrupt but effective third-act twist notwithstanding, he views his characters' need to connect as noble, not doomed. --S.A. (4/10, 2:00 RE; 4/11, 9:30 TB; 4/12, 2:30 RE)

GRIMM

A modern-day -- and curiously grown-up -- Hansel and Gretel (Jacob Derwig and Halina Reijn) are rather amusingly abandoned in the Netherlands woods by their parents, and have to strike out on their own. After contending with a vaguely witch-like, sex-starved woman and her husband, the pair hightail it to Spain, at which point writer-director Alex van Warmerdam ditches the fairy-tale premise, as well as much of the entertainment value, in favor of a labored, sub-Jarmusch-y quirkfest at a caddish playboy's Spanish villa, followed by a tacked-on standoff in a ghost town. It doesn't amount to much, certainly not a happily ever after. --Ryan Godfrey (4/9, 6:00 PMT; 4/12, 5:00 TB; 4/20, 9:45 RE)

HAUTE TENSION

Over-the-top gore with a homophobic final twist, Alexandre Aja's mechanistic splatter flick is as debased as it is contrived -- and it doesn't even play by its own rules. Two words: car chase. --S.A. (4/9, 10:30 TB; 4/13, 10:00 RE)

HOME OF THE BRAVE

Academy Award-nominated documentarian Paola di Florio explores the troubled legacy of Viola Liuzzo, a white woman killed in a drive-by shooting during the 1965 voting rights marches in Alabama. While three Ku Klux Klan members were tried for the crime and acquitted, many questions linger, in particular the involvement of the fourth passenger, an FBI informant. Rather than letting the tragedy and its fallout speak for itself -- we learn that son Tony is a member of the Michigan militia, and son Tom has disappeared into backwoods Alabama -- Florio chooses a heavy-handed approach with intrusive narration and music, too often overstating the emotional drama. Home of the Brave is nevertheless a compelling combination of investigation and family portrait that digs up some forgotten, disturbing episodes in American history. --E.L. (4/9, 5:00 IH*; 4/10, 2:30 IH*)

LAST SCENE

Opening with canny self-parody, the latest film from Nakata Hideo (Ring, Dark Water) swiftly switches from horror to melodrama, as aging idol Ken Mihara (Nishijima Hidetoshi) shoots the last in a series of cheesy collaborations with his more famous co-star. Her early retirement effectively means his as well; when the scene shifts from 1965 to 2000, he's a forgotten figure at the studio where he once worked, almost literally exhumed to play a bit part for an arrogant young director. The sappiness that typically floods Nakata's ingenious constructions in the last reel takes hold early here, though it's less invasive for its early appearance. --S.A. (4/10, 12:30 TB; 4/14, 5:00 RE)

LIGHTNING BUG

Emotions gushing like the blood from a character's unexpectedly slit wrist, Lightning Bug feels like writer-director Robert Hall's attempt to cram everything he's ever thought or felt into a single movie. Beginning as the darkly humorous tale of a small-town horror movie buff (Bret Harrison) who dreams of building creatures in Hollywood (Hall's day job), Lightning Bug is by turns coming-of-age tale and emotionally gory melodrama, populated with cracker caricatures who rub up uneasily against the well-defined leads. Better with actors than he is with a word processor, Hall draws fine performances from newcomer Harrison and Laura Prepon, as a gore-obsessed video-store clerk whose dark secret is visible from miles away. As heartfelt as it is disorganized, Lightning Bug is a first novel in search of an editor. -- S.A. (4/9, 8:15 PMT*; 4/10, 5:00 PMT*)

MARTINS' PASSION

João Carlos Martins is Brazil's answer to Glenn Gould, a controversial and tempestuous interpreter of Bach's music whose life story is as compelling as his performances. A child prodigy, Martins suffered a series of injuries which cost him the use of his right hand and now threaten his left as well. Irene Langemann's documentary portrait succeeds chiefly in conveying Martins' joyful enthusiasm; at a Juilliard master class he is a man possessed, his whole body consumed by the music. Langemann is somewhat overwhelmed by her subject, with a resultant lack of outside perspective and a tendency to let scenes play out past their welcome. Martins is a captivating interview, but it's the ample performance footage that tells his story most eloquently. --S.B. (4/9, 5:15 RE; 4/11, 5:15 RE)

MAYOR OF SUNSET STRIP

Rodney Bingenheimer's first brush with fame was as Davy Jones' stand-in on The Monkees, a prophetic beginning for a life lived just outside the glow of the spotlight. Denounced as a "professional groupie," treasured as an invaluable catalyst, Bingenheimer hit his peak during the early years of L.A. punk, booking bands into a succession of short-lived clubs and hosting a radio show which gave bands like the Ramones their first West Coast airplay. An intimate of notorious puppetmaster Kim Fowley, Bingenheimer is easily written off as an opportunist; it's clear he's taken advantage of more than his share of women. Now, though, the tiny, soft-voiced Bingenheimer seems too sad to dislike, a victim of celebrity as much as its exploiter. Director George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness) does some exploiting of his own; it's hard to tell if he even finds Bingenheimer interesting, let alone sympathetic, and the contrived reunion with his estranged mother seems unnaturally staged for the camera. The Angry Samoans' "Get Off the Air" is notably absent from an otherwise fine soundtrack. --S.A. (4/9, 10:15 RE)

METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER

More than the world's most thorough Behind the Music, this all-access look at band dynamics is both a satire of and a testament to the power of therapy. Dogged by flagging inspiration and lineup changes, the heavy metal band enters group therapy, bringing Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost) along for the very bumpy ride. Singer-guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich bicker like Ralph and Alice, while long-suffering lead guitarist Kirk Hammett comes off as the sweet, even-tempered buffer between the two. Even at nearly two and a half hours, Some Kind of Monster doesn't overstay its welcome; despite their million-dollar day gig, the band's problems will be familiar to anyone who's ever played in one -- or, for that matter, worked in an office. --S.A. (4/14, 9:30 PMT)

MIFFO

A newly minted minister, 20-something Tobias takes a job in an impoverished Stockholm neighborhood, hoping to inspire greater attendance in an all-but-defunct church. On one of his proselytizing missions he encounters Carola, a young paraplegic who is alternately angelic and bad-ass, living in near-poverty with her mother and her mother's alcoholic boyfriend. While Tobias is instantly attracted to her, the unemployed, hard-drinking, chain-smoking Carola hardly fits his bourgeois fantasies of love and marriage. Director Daniel Lind LagerlÖf provides an occasionally funny but very touching account of their romantic trials and tribulations while avoiding many of the usual cliches about star-crossed lovers. Miffo offers a rare portrayal of the youngest generation of the cloth, with smart, original commentary on the state of organized religion. --E.L. (4/13, 7:15 RE; 4/18, 1:30 TB)

NINE SOULS

Nine convicts escape from a Japanese prison and hit the road in a stolen camper, looking for a fabled stash of counterfeit money and unsurprisingly, learning more about one another in the process. A dark comedy at first glance, Nine Souls accumulates drama with every mile of the journey. Director Toyoda Toshiaki tells the story with doses of humor and brutal violence, and it's his triumph that the two modes can coexist without trivializing or glorifying the film's difficult subject matter. Even when the men dress in drag to disguise themselves at a roadside restaurant, a growing sense of danger overtakes what should be a classic cross-dressing gag. In the end, its comedy makes Nine Souls all the more haunting. --E.L. (4/10, 7:30 TB; 4/14, 5:15 RE)

THE PARK

Surely one of the rules for survival hard-wired into our genetic soup is this: Don't build an amusement park on top of a cemetery, but if you must, don't also make the principal decorating motif late-period Evil Clown. As a corollary, if someone does happen to build such a park, and something happens to go wrong (surprise!) and the park gets shut down and abandoned, don't decide 10 or 15 years later to explore it at night with several of your attractive but stupid adolescent friends. Shot partially in 3-D, this film by Andrew Lau (the soon-to-be-remade Infernal Affairs) traipses through the tropes of teen-horror films; we know which kids are going to die, which menacing mannequin will come to life; which deformed caretaker is a likely candidate for demonic possession. None of the shocks are particularly shocking. but there's something novel and pleasurable about seeing the genre filtered through and modulated by the conventions of modern Hong Kong cinema. Fear has a new name, and it's subtitled. --R.G. (4/10, 12:15 PMT; 4/11, 7:30 PMT)

S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE

Rithy Panh's riveting documentary finds presence in absence. The titular prison, a converted elementary school, stands empty, the only marker for the 17,000 Cambodians who were murdered there. Panh's documentary provides no exposition, identifying its subjects only at the end: Torturers and the few victims who survived appear as Cambodians first, revealing their history only through their words. Coached or not, the former jailer who goes through his old routine with invisible prisoners recalls his indoctrination with shattering ease, while the torturers' rationalizations spew forth unaltered, even in the face of a man they brutalized. Reconciliation and trials still late in coming are barely mentioned, evidence of a wound that has festered instead of healed. --S.A. (4/12, 7:30 TB; 4/15, 2:45 RE)

THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD

Guy Maddin's first feature since the traumatic Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) is as close to the mainstream as he'll ever get (we hope). That means stars (Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros and The Kids in the Hall's Mark McKinney) and a semblance of plot, but did we mention Rossellini plays a ruthless beer baroness whose prosthetic glass legs are filled with her own suds? The title comes from her scheme to use the world's most melancholy tunes to create a nation of tearful beer-drinkers, a plot endorsed by McKinney's gloriously crass faux Yank. (In Canadian movies, the only thing worse than an American is a Canadian pretending to be one.) Maddin's fans need not fret, but they'd better make room: His oddball aesthetic, channeling Soviet silents, early sound melodrama and a mixture of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol, has been reshaped for something like mass consumption, albeit a fairly petite mass. --S.A. (4/10, 8:00 TB; 4/12, 5:15 RE)

SEXUAL DEPENDENCY

Set in Santa Cruz, Bolivia and New York state, Rodrigo Bellott's percussive film entangles five stories of the joys and betrayals, large and small, of teen and post-teen sex. The narrative unfolds in split-screen, sometimes showing two synched angles of the same scene, but often one frame chirrups ahead or behind, or directs its attention elsewhere. The effect provides a necessary distance from the generally dismaying content, and the rapidly shifting viewpoints play well against the singular focus of most of the young American and Bolivian actors. The film's dramatic payoff is a doozy that it doesn't entirely earn, but the project's a stirring bit of cinema, technically and narratively. --R.G. (4/11, 7:00 TB; 4/12, 5:00 RE)

SHADE

First-time director Damian Nieman has recruited a who's who of B-list stars for this tale of high-stakes Vegas grifters. But the plot never stops twisting stop long enough to let their characters to develop. Gabriel Byrne, Stuart Townsend and Thandie Newton play a trio of con artists aiming to outfox "the Dean" of crooked poker (Sylvester Stallone) while on the run from Mafia hit men. The story is an impersonal pastiche of genre conventions, and Nieman's stylistic gimmicks -- multiple dissolves, jump cuts, freeze frames -- aren't enough to disguise the somnolent pace and disinterested performances. The end result is claustrophobically reliant on other people's films; Shade is at least three generations removed from authentic emotion. --S.B. (4/8, 5:45 & 8:15, PMT*)

SHE'S ONE OF US

A horror movie in a business suit, Siegrid Alnoy's impressively chilly debut sinks its teeth into the bloody world of office politics, with Sasha Andres as a temp who'd literally kill for a full-time job. Less a protest against dehumanization than a clinical dissection of it, She's One of Us creates a world so airlessly artificial that any sense of context is lost (a mistake avoided by the superior Time Out). The pressure-cooker atmosphere builds impressively for the movie's first third, culminating in a act of savage but offhand brutality. The Dostoevsky pastiche which follows is considerably less inspired, but as a short film, She's One of Us would be a corker. -- S.A. (4/10, noon RE; 4/12, 7:15 TB)

THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL

Inspired by Flaherty's Man of Aran, Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni's breathtaking travelogue is, indeed, the story of a camel, a white calf who is rejected by its mother and must fend for itself. Less picturesque than Asshak: Tales of the Sahara, the film encompasses the hard facts of desert life as well as its beauties. --S.A. (4/14, 7:15 PMT, 4/17, 5:15 RE)

SUPER SIZE ME

Mugging like he's auditioning for a spot on Dateline NBC, Morgan Spurlock is host, subject, and audience for his own network special: I Ate McDonalds for 30 Days! On the one hand, Spurlock's gambit is an inspired one, the equivalent of leaving a tooth in a glass of Coke overnight: nothing but McD's morning, noon and night for a full month, while he travels around the country interviewing experts about the nation's abysmal eating habits. On the other, the white, well-off Spurlock (his workspace seems to indicate a career in advertising or graphic design) is hardly the poster child for fast-food addiction, a fact that's barely acknowledged in the course of the film. (Eating disorders barely rate a mention, just an overweight 14-year-old girl's haunting admission that when she tried to lose weight, "I hurt myself.") With its eye-catching graphics and punched-up statistics, Super Size Me is effective agitprop -- effective enough that McDonald's announced it was discontinuing the Super-Size option shortly after its Sundance premiere. (No doubt Ronald could smell the shitstorm a-brewing.) Still, there's something grating about the faux populism of Spurlock's man-on-the-street interviews. What hath Michael Moore wrought? The April 10 screening is sold out. --S.A. (4/10, 9:30 IH*; 4/11, 2:30 PMT*)

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE

Appreciation of Tobe Hooper's proto-slasher movie, now enjoying its 30th anniversary, has dwindled into camp over the years. (My introduction came by way of the 1987 teen comedy Summer School.) If you haven't seen it in a while, here's a reminder: It's really fucking scary. Horror movies long ago had the horror taken out of them, but the gritty physicality of Texas Chainsaw is all too terrifyingly real. Shot through with Watergate-era malaise, it's a chilling portrait of a nation with nowhere to hide, where selfish hippies are preyed upon by maniac rednecks in a world devoid of order. Hysterical, excessive and, oh yes, a masterpiece. --S.A. (4/11, 9:45 RE)

TOOLBOX MURDERS

Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Tobe Hooper goes back to the hardware store with an extremely loose "remake" of the 1978 original in which residents of a dilapidated Los Angeles apartment complex are picked off by an assortment of contractor's tools. The tightly wound, near-wordless opening leaves no doubt that you're in a master's hands, but once the dialogue kicks in, the contrived and cliched script immediately sinks the ship, and the arbitary turn to the supernatural is death to a director whose strength has always been his realism. There's a truly unsettling moment where the killer shivers with erotic glee, but not enough else to hold on to. --S.A. (4/10, 10:15 PMT*; 4/11, 2:00 TB*)

UNIFORM

Screenwriter Diao Yinan (Shower) makes his directorial debut with this poignant, minimalist work, whose pristine video images lodge a passionate protest against social dissolution in modern China. The main character, an unemployed factory laborer picking up work in his family's laundry, puts on a policeman's shirt after he's drenched in a sudden downpour, and the newfound power it gives him quickly becomes intoxicating. He's good enough to extort bribes from careless drivers and seduce a local shopgirl, but his failure to emulate the callous attitudes of the cops who harass him when he's not in costume comes to seem like something of a triumph. --S.A. (4/10, 4:45 IH; 4/15, 7:15 IH)

THE WOODEN CAMERA

To shoot, or to shoot? When a dead man is thrown from a train as they walk near the tracks, young Madiba winds up with his video camera, the older, tougher Sipho with his gun. Life in their Cape Town shanty is tough to navigate, and both escape into fantasies: Madiba into the world of his camera, and Sipho into the idea that having a gun makes him invulnerable, rather than a bigger target. Director Ntshaveni Wa Luruli etches the conflict between the boys without caricaturing either, though Madiba's friendship with wealthy white girl Estelle and her kindly cello teacher begins to smack of afterschool special-dom. But like the wooden shell that covers Madiba's Handycam, the film hides sophistication within its rough-hewn surface. -- S.A. (4/10, 2:30 RE; 4/11, 7:30 TB)

VIBRATOR

Like Deep Breath, Hiroki Ryuichi's delicate, haunting film breathes life into a familiar story. A freelance writer and a long-haul trucker meet and strike up a brief but intense sexual relationship, which quickly becomes more intimate than either is prepared for. Adrift physically and spiritually, they speed down Japan's highways, looking for and running away from themselves at the same time. Interspersing carefully constructed shots with silent intertitles which provide a voiceless voiceover, Vibrator takes hold of your emotions without grabbing for them. --S.A. (4/9, 5:45 TB; 4/10, 9:30 RE)