Bruno Bettati

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Ti West's haunted-house tale The Innkeepers, this week it's Michael Winner's 1977 religious-supernatural thriller The Sentinel.

Women's lib leads straight to the gates of Hell in The Sentinel, though trying to read Michael Winner's 1977 film as a thematically and theologically coherent work is futile, since the only thought behind this woman-in-a-haunted-apartment tale is to sponge off the success of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen. Overflowing with former and future stars, Winner's saga (based on Jeffrey Konvtiz's novel) posits female independence as the first step to trouble for Alison (Cristina Raines), a model introduced via a montage of photo shoots and magazine covers (which present her as simultaneously empowered and objectified) as well as happy-go-lucky snapshots of her frolicking around Manhattan with lawyer boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon). Still traumatized by her attempted suicide two years earlierâ??spurred by the discovery of her gaunt, elderly father (Fred Stuthman) having a three-way (and voraciously eating cake!) in bed with a hefty and slender womanâ??Alison isn't ready to marry Michael, and thus chooses to move into her own place. That new abode proves to be a Brooklyn Heights apartment fully furnished with creepy old furniture and pictures, in a building notable for its top-floor occupantâ??a blind priest, Father Halloran (John Carradine), who never stops staring out of his front-facing window.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Sentinel (1977)...

Scottish director David Mackenzie's first feature to see American release was 2003's love triangle/murder drama Young Adam; unfortunately, critical attention dilated not on his strong visual sense but Ewan McGregor's penis. Silly but true: Sony Pictures Classics was about to cut his member out of the film for the sake of an R rating when the actor mocked them, leading to an NC-17 release. The takeaway image wasn't genitalia but one of the first shots, a swan's dirty belly shot from underneath the waterâ??s surface, an arresting/original widescreen composition far more important than debates about sexual graphicness.

It's 2012: Michael Fassbender is displaying his Shame all over America, and Mackenzie and McGregor have reunited for another blend of sex and sadness. The directorâ??s jokingly self-proclaimed "sex trilogy"â??Young Adam, Asylum (2005) and Hallam Foe (2007)â??is done: depictions of male sexual pathology have been discarded for the moment. Hallamâ??renamed Mister Foe for American consumptionâ??defused adolescent Jamie Bell's creepily voyeuristic coming-of-age with puckish humor. Mackenzie tried Hollywood next: the result was the stillborn, shot-in-but-not-of Hollywood Ashton Kutcher vehicle Spread, and though casting him as a gigolo for older women was a nicely mean meta-stunt, the film failed to take off.

Continued reading Sense and Sensibility...

Dudes are fucked up. One of the recurrent themes of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival was the damaged state of young American manhood. Maybe I just happened to pick all the right movies, and tapped into a wellspring of generational critique. But it's hard to argue when films across such a wide generic range leak rancid testosterone as if it were a toxic spill.

The Bro-pocalypse could also signal a kind of counter-insurgency against the archetypal Sundance Event: The It Girl rom-coms, earnest dramas of family dysfunction, and high-concept documentaries about tree-huggers and weirdoes. Yet, in a warped sense, Rick Alverson's The Comedy swallowed all these things whole and vomited them back up, through the PBR-drenched esophagus of Adult Swim favorite Tim Heidecker (and collaborator pal Eric Wareheim in a smaller role; the two have also been making the rounds with Magnolia's Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie). As slacker chump Swanson, the comedic actor is the star of his own urban deadbeat cavalcade of cheap nihilist jollies, riding his beer gut like a chariot through the trustafarian wilds of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His sole purpose in life seems to be cheap antagonism of less-privileged city dwellers (foreign-speaking cab drivers take a lot of psychological abuse), getting drunk with his likewise schlumpen beer buddies in a sophomoric parody of a male-encounter group, and waiting for his invalid father to dieâ??while terrorizing his male nurse with a trench-mouthed interrogation about prolapsed rectums.

Continued reading SUNDANCE 2012: Critic's Notebook #1...

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Joe Carnahan's Liam Neeson-vs.-wolf actioner The Grey, this week it's Cornel Wilde's seminal 1966 stranded-man saga The Naked Prey.

No tears, no pity, no mercyâ??Cornel Wilde imagines a world of desperate violence and frenzied anxiety in The Naked Prey, in the process not simply inventing the â??man in the wildernessâ? cinematic subgenre but, more powerfully, delivering an enduringly caustic vision of life as hard, inflexible, and painful. Working from an apparent true story, director/star Wildeâ??the dashing leading man who, beginning with this film, became an auteur of idiosyncratic masculine fablesâ??does away with all but the bare necessities for his tale about a safari guide known only as Man (Wilde) leading an arrogant, boozy fat cat (Patrick Mynhardt) through Africa. Encountering a local tribe, Man's employer refuses to pay the minor levy that the locals demand for passage through their land, a mistake which leads to the white interlopers' capture at the hands of a cheetah pelt-adorned chieftain, who in a prolonged sequence tortures his captors and their African employees. Wilde shoots this episode with stunningly stark, nonjudgmental brutality that immediately conveys his work's unsympathetic worldviewâ??images of an African caked in mud and then roasted on a spit, of Mynhardt's European tied belly-down to the ground in front of a cobra slithering about a circle of fire, and of another man chased and stabbed to death by a mob of screaming, cheering women all express the filmmaker's blistering opinion of the wild as a kill-or-be-killed battleground.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Naked Prey (1966)...

Come Back, Africa's primary intent is explicitly polemical: to depict apartheid in action and show the world what it was condoning through inaction. After premiering at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, director Lionel Rogosin couldn't find a distributor and opened his own theater in New York* in 1960. By the time the film opened there, the Sharpeville massacreâ??in which South African police opened fire on a crowd and killed 69 Africansâ??had taken place, so his message came through amplified.

When evaluating revivals of socially important documents, a standard critical fallback is "flawed but powerful," a grudging assessment inadvertently implying worthy intentions trump bad filmmaking; such caveats don't help anyone and wouldn't get at what makes Come Back, Africa interesting. A few years ago, Film Forum's revival of Rogosin's 1954 On the Bowery unexpectedly drew sell-out crowds eager to soak up his non-judgmental, flavorful portrait of the long-gone bars and bums of Bowery St.; the film's easy flowâ??everyday homeless tragedy between binge-drinkingâ??is comparatively relaxed alongside Africa's urgency. The opening shots show Johannesburg as a human-free monstrous metropolis: the script specifies "steel girders of new construction indirectly suggesting a crucifixion." The soundtrack is full of shrill whistles and pounding of doors, sounds of work and police persecution that are ambient constants for South Africa's black labor force.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Come Back, Africa...

With his bold visual style and intimate, if volatile, narratives, Gerardo Naranjo has been one of the most exciting independent directors to emerge from Mexico in the decade after filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón put the nation's cinema back on the international radar. While Naranjo, 40, always seemed keenly appreciative of the Godardian dictum, "All you need for a film is a gun and a girl," the phrase has never been more appropriate than for his new movie, Miss Bala. The narcotics thriller jacks up the stakes with pyrotechnics and gun battles in the real-life story of a would-be beauty queen (the sensational Stephanie Sigman) who becomes the pawn of a drug gang. The director shared his thoughts about this dramatic leap in a chat during the 2011 New York Film Festival, where Miss Bala had its American premiere.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Gerardo Naranjo...

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the latest beast-vs.-bloodsucker saga Underworld: Awakening, this week it's León Klimovsky's Spanish monster-mash-up The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman.

Largely unknown stateside except in die-hard horror circles, Paul Naschy was for decades the undisputed maestro of Spanish horror cinema, and few of his many monstrous efforts were ever quite as memorableâ??or as financially successfulâ??as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, aka Werewolf Shadow, one of the leading man's dozen films in which he assumed the role of lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. A dashing stud tormented by his beastly curse, Daninsky finds himself forced to face off against an evil bloodsucker in León Klimovsky's rollicking B-movie, whichâ??after an intro in which two doctors debate the possibility of Daninsky being a werewolf, while his silver bullet-riddled corpse lies on a stone slabâ??places its initial focus on fetching blonde Elvira (Gaby Fuchs). With friend Genevieve (Bárbara Capell) by her side, Elvira travels to the French countryside in search of the tomb of Countess Wandesa (Patty Shepard), a vampiric witch killed during the Inquisition about whom Elvira plans to write an article. That journalistic motivation, however, is as quickly disregarded as is any trace of logic or coherence, beginning with her friend Marcel (Andrés Resino) randomly remarking about a forthcoming trip to Istanbul, "I've seen so many James Bond pictures, by now I know all the tricks."

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971)...

Beau Willimon's play Farragut North was completed in 2004, drawing from anecdotal dirt overheard working for the abortive campaign of brief Democratic great white hope Howard Dean. No theater bit until 2008, when a momentarily less apathetic liberal electorate ate it up. In co-writer and director George Clooney's versionâ??now portentously titled The Ides of Marchâ??candidate Mike Morris (Clooney) has his face displayed on a Obama-modeled Shepherd Fairey backdrop, but the film isn't really plugged into the current moment so much as a recurring character in Democratic politics; Morris' strength is his uncompromising, articulate liberalism, his weakness a compromised personal life.

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: The Ides of March...

Rarely has a documentary made such an impact on its subject as the series of Paradise Lost films, tracking the long and strange saga of the West Memphis Three. Over the last two decades, filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have become part of the case, which began in 1993 with the shocking and mystifying murders of three eight-year-old Cub Scouts in West Memphis, Arkansas. Amid allegations of devil worship and a highly dubious confession leaked to the press, three high school boysâ??Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwinâ??were convicted, despite no physical evidence that linked them to the crime. On Aug. 19 last year, Echolsâ??who had been on death rowâ??and the other two men, now in their mid-30s, were freed after entering so-called Alford pleas, a mixed bag that allowed them to profess their innocence while pleading guilty. The deal came four months before a hearing to consider new DNA findings that were expected to force a new trial.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which is airing now on HBO, details the astoundingly tangled legal, political and human drama behind the 18 year saga of the WM3, in which the filmmakers found themselves intricately involved. Berlinger, who also has won acclaim for projects like the Metallica meltdown doc Some Kind of Monster and taken on the American oil industry in Crude, talked about the documentaries' role in the case and how it changed both the filmmakers and the community that was its focus.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Joe Berlinger...

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Lynne Ramsay's creepy-kid drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, this week it's Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's cult classic Who Can Kill a Child?

Violence is a dangerous inheritance in Who Can Kill a Child?, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's haunting 1976 horror story about childhood malice and adults' compromised response to it. Based on Juan José Plans' novel, and spiritually emulated a year later by Stephen King's Children of the Corn, Serrador's film opens with a grim newsreel-montage credit sequence of atrocities from WWII, the India-Pakistan and Nigerian civil wars, and Korea and Vietnam, with a narrator and onscreen text taking great pains to lay out the hundreds of thousands of kid casualties in each conflict. That downbeat intro provides underlined thematic context for the ensuing story, which turns to happily married English couple Tom (Lewis Flander) and pregnant Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), who, on vacation in Spain without their two children, decide to visit the remote island of Almanzora where Tom had once travelled 12 years earlier. Tom and Evelyn are outsidersâ??Evelyn cornily keeps asking Tom to define Spanish words like "piñata" and "gracias"â??but, more to the point, they're adults, and their early discussion of a La Dolce Vita character's belief in killing children to spare them from their parents' mistakes not so subtly foreshadows the ethical dilemma they'll soon face.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)...