Screen Picks

Jason Liebrecht in Home.

by Sam Adams

Trenton Film Festival (Fri., April 29-Sun., May 1) We know, we know: Going to Trenton for movies seems like going to Baltimore for cheesesteaks. But if you'd attended last year's Trenton Film Festival, you might have seen the Chinese neorealist noir Blind Shaft, which would have been one of the best movies to play Philadelphia in 2004 if it had played here at all. Packed into a single weekend, this year's lineup features a number of promising-sounding entries, like the documentary Seoul Train, which depicts the "underground railroad" smuggling North Koreans out of the country, and the closing-night portrait of Native American poet/songwriter John Trudell. Repertory screenings include Raging Bull (apparently as close as the 25th-anniversary re-release will get to Philadelphia), Rififi, Fantasia and the Trenton-shot Baby It's You, whose place in film history is ignoble but assured: It's the movie whose studio tampering led John Sayles to declare his career-long independence.

To be honest, Matt Zoller Seitz's Home, which screens Saturday at 2 p.m., is the only movie that arrived before deadline, but it's a safe bet it would be a highlight of the festival even if we'd seen the lot. The feature debut of the film critic for the New York Press, Home is the kind of modestly scaled, unflashy ensemble piece Seitz often scolds other critics for overlooking: witty, sharply observed, sweet but not treacly. Shot on digital video for the cost of a new sedan, Home takes place at an all-night party in a Brooklyn brownstone where characters mix and mingle like atoms looking to re-combine. Chances are you've seen, and lived, this before, and Seitz doesn't knock himself out convincing you otherwise, but he captures the way a good party seems to go on for years, each new encounter bleeding into the next. Inventively mixing camera angles and positions, Home finds a soundstage's worth of space in two floors and a patio, living up to one character's description of the party as "a meeting place — many rooms, many colors."

Kicking against adulthood, Home's characters (two of whom give their age as 29) might be enjoying their last youthful indiscretions, or clinging to a carefree lifestyle when they'd rather have someone to care for. The performances are uniformly strong, especially from winsome leads Jason Liebrecht and Nicol Zanzarella, although we could do without the cookie-cutter nerd who's inevitably revealed as more than he seems. One quibble: the scene where Liebrecht's spike-haired playwright converses with Pavol Liska's novelist, who advises him, "Don't make your main character a writer — it's such a cliche." It plays like an apology in a movie that has nothing to apologize for.

MadCat Film Festival (Fri., April 29, 9 p.m., $5, Black Floor Gallery, 319 N. 11th St.) One of 12 programs in the annual women's film road show, "The Truth of the Matter" gathers experimental shorts for a Small Change screening. Curated by San Francisco-based MadCat, too many of the shorts rely on art-world obfuscation: Only at the end credits do you learn that the live-action footage in Claudia Herbst's collage Which Way was shot in Dachau, and Kelly Reichardt's Travis never bothers to identify the source of its fragmented soundtrack as an NPR interview with the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq. Combined with a swirling score by Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan, Reichardt's defocused, churning imagery is matched to ambiguous, repeated snippets like "You wait, and you wait, and you realize … ," whose uncertainty Travis obviously seeks to duplicate. But the comfortable presumption that Reichert's audience is both anti-war and in on the joke casts a smug spell that lingers over much of the program, from Diane Nerwen's The Thief of Baghdad, a found-footage collage which plucks Orientalist references from Hollywood dross, to Lori Hiris' The Invisible Hand, an animation history of recent corporate scandals. (Hiris' Cross Examination, which marries audio from the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings to a single shot of a black woman's teary eyes, might have served a polemical purpose when it was made in 1994, but it seems woefully one-note now.) The program's highlight, worth the modest admission, is Julia Meltzer and David Thorne's It's Not My Memory of It, which pieces together shredded CIA files and constructs a secret history of U.S. espionage in the Middle East.

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Sun., May 1, 7:30 p.m., $23-32, Irvine Auditorium, 3401 Spruce St., 215-893-1999) Some historians say Carl Theodor Dreyer invented the close-up with this austere, rapturous 1928 masterpiece; it's a cinch no one has used it better since. Although Richard Einhorn's 1994 composition Voices of Light, which will be performed live by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia to accompany Sunday's screening, has become the movie's established score, Passion is the rare silent film that was designed to be shown silent, and in truth, Maria Falconetti's incandescent suffering needs no accompaniment, let alone 120 voices' worth. But there are moments when Einhorn's medieval intervals perfectly complement Dreyer's frescolike imagery, and the score respectfully drops to a single violin at the movie's climax.

The Last Letter (Tue., May 3, 10 p.m.; Sun., May 8, midnight, WHYY-TV) Speaking of austere, this 2002 film will surprise audiences used to the sprawl of Frederick Wiseman's documentaries. Lasting just over an hour, shot on a bare stage in high-contrast black-and-white, The Last Letter turns a chapter from Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate into a one-woman showcase for Comédie Française actress Catherine Samie. In a string of tightly choreographed segments, Samie enacts with powerful simplicity a Ukrainian mother's last letter from a Jewish ghetto to her son in unoccupied territory, an imaginary missive inspired by the disappearance of Grossman's own mother. In a sense, Wiseman is merely documenting his own stage production, stretching his fascination with dialogue to feature length. But The Last Letter's monochrome visuals are an intriguing contrast to the teeming vibrancy of Wiseman's nonfiction films, a captivating codicil to an already fascinating career.