| By Armond White

“Ever hear of Plato’s allegory of the cave?” one teenager asks another in Chronicle. This philosophy quiz was unexpected in the midst of a thrill ride movie, but Chronicle is so surprisingly interesting I wondered if its makers ever saw The Conformist (1970), where Bernardo Bertolucci visualized Plato’s allegory. When it’s good, Chronicle is less a thrill ride than a deliberation on movie thrills and contemporary youth market tastes.

In Chronicle, debut director Josh Trank uses all of the high school adolescent clichés polished into queer angst, Obama stargazing and hunk sensitivity.

It’s commercial formula with a brash spin; Andrew’s (Dane DeHaan) snooping camera represents a poor kid’s attempt at both the self-consciousness of the social media age and Hollywood’s latest cheap trend: using subjective realism as a premise for the horror and supernatural genres. This goes back to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, trite exploitations of the hand-held, real-time camera gimmick, but Trank distances himself from both with state-of-the-art panache.

Videography by Matthew Jensen makes spectacle the movie’s real subject. Chronicle’s sharp, ultra-clear, subtle imagery is more compelling than what happens to Andrew, Steve (Michael B. Jordan) and cousin Matt’s (Alex Russell) friendship after they develop telekinetic superpowers upon encountering a meteorite.

Chronicle alludes to the metaphoric hormonal urges of DePalma’s classics Carrie and The Fury—in fact, it’s loaded with pop references. Screenwriter Max Landis throws in plot concepts and gimmicks without ever achieving the concentration on moral quandary and mythology that distinguished last year’s TrollHunter, the Scandinavian upgrade of the witness-to-horror stunt premise.

Landis and Trank only play around with that potential. But when the three friends discover an ability to fly and play football in the sky, the metaphor for prowess and transcendence blends digital video effects and genuine cinematic spectacle into the damnedest thing since the skydiving scenes in Point Break.

Beyond its gimmicky premise, Chronicle’s visual excitement raises the important issue of how we use and respond to media. When the camera appears to follow Andrew’s P.O.V. or capture his different adventures and humiliations—from spelunking to flying to sex—Trank seems to be exercising cinematic form.

The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity movies have degraded cinematic form, but when the hand-held, real-time stunt isn’t trite, the matter of aesthetic purpose and artistic responsibility must be pondered, as here.

Masterpieces like Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, Bertolucci’s The Conformist, DePalma’s The Fury and Spielberg’s War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin make aesthetic issues part of their stories—the Blair Witch hoaxes don’t. Trank’s fumbling allegory questions responsibility: The boys realize that their ability to move things and do damage carries an onus (their noses bleed) and cousin Matt comes up with rules that Andrew defies when enraged. Lacking consistent follow-through, Chronicle deteriorates into a destruction-of-Seattle finale, eventually trashing Trank’s subtle references to Nirvana’s cheerleaders-in-hell music video “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

That Plato question is smart-assed. Chronicle superficially touches on philosophy as it superficially questions violence while exploiting Hollywood’s violent trends. Chronicle’s frustrating misuse of dazzling cinematic technique raises the question of the era: Do youth audiences know what cinematic form is for?

Follow Armond White on Twitter @3xchair.

By Armond White

George Lucas’ sales tactics for Red Tails, his $93 million production about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American pilots in the armed forces, make a bigger bang than the film itself.

On the publicity rounds, Lucas has talked about the dearth of movies with African-American heroes, promising that Red Tails will give black teens the kinds of on-screen heroes and patriotic good feeling they’ve been denied. Apparently, Lucas has missed all blaxpoitation, post-blaxploitation and post-hip-hop cinema, not to mention the 1995 TV film The Tuskegee Airmen. Lucas’ ignorance condemns Red Tails to be irredeemably condescending.

It’s also one poor piece of filmmaking. Red Tails’ 332nd Fighter Group are a bunch of superficial GI stereotypes, black only in the brown-skinned Obama sense, displaying superficial personal traits. Their captain, Easy (Nate Parker), drinks for courage, and pilot Lightning (David Oyewolo) is a brash daredevil.

Their commanders, Col. A.J. Bullard (Terrence Howard) and Maj. Emmanuel Stone (Cuba Gooding Jr.) are shallow lifers given to speeches about perseverance. All are cartoon figures; visually, the film also resembles a cartoon: postcard colors that make the squadron’s base at the Ramitelli Airfield in Italy look like it was shot in Southern California (oops!).
Cartoonishness defines Lucas’ approach to Hollywood revisionism; he doesn’t take World War II any more seriously than he took the Galactic Empire, and the Tuskegee Airmen mean no more to him than the Jedi knights.

The pilots, who due to military segregation were denied the right to fly combat missions but were used as escorts and decoys for white fighter pilots, perform selflessly to unspecific codes of conduct, as if they were uninvolved in history (their war chant: “To the last plane, to the last bullet, to the last man, we fight, we fight, we fight!”). This is goofball heroism, though totally without a sense of humor—less, even, than Snoopy’s fantasy dogfights with The Red Baron, which Red Tails frequently evokes.

Why comic strip artist Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks) participated in co-writing the screenplay is mystifying given the film’s total lack of his usual sarcasm. McGruder, too, must believe in The Force, which has infantilized American cinema since Star Wars, and so answered Lucas’ call to sign up. That meant signing on to the notion that moviegoers wouldn’t respond to a serious depiction of young men who fulfilled the intellectual requirements of aviation or comprehend the complexity of young black people who felt duty-bound to fight for the country that denied them basic civil rights.

Director Anthony Hemingway—recruited from TV’s overrated The Wire—must only be comfortable with ghetto stereotypes and urban miscreant clichés. His images of principled military men and the 1940s era are unconvincing, and the post-synch dialogue has the same laughable impact as a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie. Nothing in Red Tails shows serious artistic commitment.

By promoting Red Tails (named for the Airmen’s customized new P-51 Mustang aircraft) as a correction of Hollywood bigotry, Lucas shows that he knows nothing about how popular culture works. In a New York Times magazine puff piece, Lucas explained his wish for cultural crossover: “…which is what you get with sports. Which is what you get with music. I wanted to do it with just being an American citizen.” He ignores how black moviegoers have often identified with white movie heroes and enjoyed cinematic patriotism—and not vicariously. When Red Tails’ Airmen fraternize with white officers, they never so much as ask which states they came from. This isn’t American culture; it’s beer commercial bonhomie.

Red Tails not only insults the experiences of the Tuskegee Airmen, it is disconnected from the figures of black male dignity that audiences embraced when forged by Rex Ingram, Paul Robeson, Juano Hernandez, James Douglas, Canada Lee, Woody Strode, Ivan Dixon and others that George Lucas forgets. He’s Jar Jar Binked us again.

“I’d done Miners’ with Jóhann [Jóhannsson, who composed the score],” Morrison said, “and I heard of it being a live concert with film [at Winter Garden]. As I started talking to [curator] John Schaefer, he said he was thinking of a weeklong event that included my films. At the same time, Film Forum was contacting me about showing the films there, and you don’t want to have a film showing two places at once because people get proprietary. But as it worked out, both parties could work together and make a unified event—or at least a co-supported event.”

Morrison’s presence at both institutions certainly makes sense: He’s made a career out of resurrecting fading films, turning old silent film into experimental tours de force. Decasia is a compilation of decaying celluloid set to a score by Michael Gordon, called “the greatest movie ever made” by Errol Morris. When it comes to telling a story, Morrison is a firm believer in repurposing.

“With any one of these projects, you have to figure out what the skeleton is that you can hang the footage on,” he said.

“Just talking about the Winter Garden series, The Great Flood is an historical-based footage film dealing with the 1927 Mississippi flood. We used the chronology of the event to sort of frame the events of the film but also to look at the minor things that were happening that would inform life in 1927. So there’s a sequence that’s just the 1927 Sears catalog for that season. Took every page and scanned it.”

And for The Miners’ Hymns, Morrison looked to the BFI and BBC archives, where he discovered restored archival footage of what amounted to a history of coal mining in North England during the 20th century.

Perhaps even more integral to Morrison’s films than the perfect image are their scores, which makes the Winter Garden series essential viewing for fans—The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble will perform Gordon’s score to Decasia, while The Wordless Orchestra brings to life Jóhannsson’s score for The Miners’ Hymns.

“Most of these projects, the composer and I start at the same time and talk about what the project should be and then go our own ways,” Morrison said when asked about his collaborative process. “But at the end of the day, they deliver a finished score. And there’s an integrity to the score that way, where I create something that makes sense in musical terms.”

That his films rely so heavily on their scores leaves Morrison slightly stymied as to why they are so consistently referred to as “silent” films. “There’s been a lot of emphasis, promoting the Winter Garden show, on these being silent films,” he said. “But I don’t think of them that way because they come with enormous soundtracks.

“More than some narrative films, they’re edited to these soundtracks for the most part, so the sound is part and parcel with the finished product—it’s not just laid on top,” he said. “But it’s also just talking about that tradition of films with live music, where the live music is a big part of the event.”

As to how he would describe his films, Morrison pauses. “I guess the thing that bonds all these films together is that they’re using archival footage and edited to a contemporary score,” he said. “It’s almost the opposite of what the old silent filmmakers were doing.”

For more information and schedules, visit www.worldfinancialcenter.com and www.filmforum.org.

What a wide-eyed girl his protagonist starts off as. The film opens in the bedroom of Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), where magazine cutouts, pinups and glam shots of friends have been optimistically hung on crumbling walls. Laura’s hopes for escaping the squalor are pinned on winning the Miss Baja California pageant. “What does the winner get?” Laura’s friend Suzu asks. “To sleep with one of those old, rich guys,” Laura says.

The opening scenes show what several pageant contestants later fatuously point out, that Mexico’s beauty, in particular that of Baja California, has been unfairly overshadowed by recent drug wars. This doesn’t last. In celebration of a callback, Suzu takes Laura to the Millennium Club, which is little more than a derelict warehouse whose patrons are brutish policemen and whose bouncers fail at what should be Bouncing 101: Disallow mass murder.

An unlikely survivor of a shooting spree at the club, Laura’s prolonged stay of execution at the hands of gang leader Lino (Noe Hernandez) reveals her to be incredibly lucky. Lino shanghais her services, and what follows is a series of poorly executed drug jobs followed by poorly timed escape attempts followed by forgiveness, more drug jobs and more escape attempts. It’s an unrelenting portrait of impressed bovinity, and realism hedges our inevitable frustration. Laura is a teenage girl. Can we really expect criminal cunning?

Lino’s character, however, is trickier. Why, for instance, does a supposedly capable gang leader repeatedly trust an untrustworthy girl? And why, in between drug deals and firefights, does he rig Miss Baja California in her favor? Publicity for his new pawn can’t be a good idea.

In the end, we overlook these potential implausibilities because we’re preoccupied by the plot twists and the anticipation of gunsmoke. Miss Bala is an action movie with a feel of documentary realism. “We’re fearless,” say Lino’s battle-ready men, and the line is repeated with such authenticity that Naranjo may well have plucked it from the streets.

An epilogue tells us cartels in the country have committed over 36,000 murders since 2006, and you sympathize with how helpless some Mexicans must feel. When Lino first lets Laura go, it’s night in the desert and, for no apparent reason, she soon returns. In daylight you see why. She was on the ocean’s edge. There was nowhere else to go.

—John Blahnik

By  Cullen Gallagher

A new Frederick Wiseman documentary is usually cause for celebration. Since his 1967 debut, Titticut Follies, he has made a name for himself as one of the most distinctive, innovative and consistently revealing nonfiction filmmakers.

His fly-on-the-wall style is unmistakable. Foregoing traditional narration and interview techniques, Wiseman’s films are characteristically distinguished by his patience and insight, allowing situations to unfold in front of the camera without his interjection. But with Crazy Horse, now playing at Film Forum, the very qualities that have pushed Wiseman’s films to the forefront of his field and revolutionized the art of documentary filmmaking seem to hold him back.

The subject of his film is Paris’ famously chic nude revue, Crazy Horse. With his first shot of a shadow puppeteer contorting his hands into a devil’s face, Wiseman clearly announces one of the major themes of his film: desire and temptation are a performance, an illusion created by light, shadow and the creative contortion of the human body. The rest of the film is devoted to alternating between the backstage and onstage life at Crazy Horse.

Exquisitely composed, Crazy Horse gives viewers a front-row seat to the theater’s show, Désir, one better than any audience member in the club would ever be privy to.

There’s no holding back as Wiseman films the almost entirely nude dancers performing onstage. His camera captures not only the dramatic allure of their performances but the intricate interplay between the colored lights and other decorative veils that contribute to the aura of erotic majesty. Between the swirling of colored lights, the chest- and rump-thrusting choreography and the blasting music, Crazy Horse is a shoe-in for the most colorful and musical documentary of the year.
The majority of the film, however, takes place behind the scenes, with Wiseman unobtrusively observing the rigorous—and decidedly un-erotic—rehearsal process.

Unlike most backstage stories, which emphasize jealousy and competition, Crazy Horse reveals an intricate and finely tuned collaborative mechanism at work—a recurring theme in Wiseman’s films. From the educational system in High School to military procedures in Basic Training, and from the small-town story of Belfast, Maine to the grand and theatrical La Danse (about another French cultural institution, the Paris Opera Ballet), Wiseman is fascinated by the nitty-gritty details of how groups function.

Wiseman’s stars are the organizations themselves. In this sense, he’s a highly democratic storyteller; as such, Crazy Horse is as much about the behind-the-scenes technicians as the more attention-grabbing directors and performers.
Longtime fans of Wiseman’s work will find these themes familiar. In a sense, it is comforting and admirable to see Wiseman sticking to his guns and his aesthetic. In another, however, Crazy Horse seems less complete than his other films. In particular, the backstage/onstage dynamic was better explored in La Danse.

Wiseman’s ear for conversation, which proved so revealing in High School, seems unfocused here in Crazy Horse. We only hear shades of the club’s fabled history, from its creation in 1951 to its new owners and the internal controversy surrounding its latest revue, Désir.

With the exception of a few brief exterior shots of Paris, Crazy Horse takes place entirely inside the theater. Wiseman creates an insular world in which real time doesn’t exist—only showtime. There’s no linear timeline to the narrative, just an ebb and flow between the stage and the dressing room, forever repeating. But at 135 minutes, much of the footage quickly grows repetitive, and the ideas contained within the film cease to develop.

The technical artistry of Crazy Horse certainly distinguish it as one of the more spectacular documentaries we’re likely to see on the big screen this year. But without history or context, the onstage magic loses part of its luster.

When done well, documentary film has the rare ability to transcend the confines of the silver screen to effect real change in the lives of its subjects. Like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost trilogy about the West Memphis Three helped free three wrongly convicted men. With their third installment in the series, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which premieres on HBO Jan. 12, the duo has closed the book on a story they have chronicled for almost 20 years—one that has left an indelible mark on them as filmmakers.

The story entered their lives by chance. In 1993, Sinofsky said, he and Berlinger were working on a film about the funeral industry when Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films, sent them a small piece from the New York Times’ wire service. The brief described how three teens—Damien Echols, 18, Jason Baldwin, 16, and Jessie Misskelley, 17—were alleged to have killed three 8-year-old boys in a creek in West Memphis, Ark. The article, which was biased against the teens, inspired Berlinger and Sinofsky to travel to the South, pursuing a story about children killing children.

“[We started filming] right as the guys were arrested. The trials were a long way off…Our original impulse was to tell the bad-guy story, which makes for good cinema,” Berlinger recalled. “But halfway through, we realized they were innocent. I wouldn’t say a lightbulb went off, but we started to seriously doubt the state’s version of events.”

Over the course of the trials, state prosecutors posited that the teenaged trio killed the young boys in a satanic ritual. With the trial kicking up a media frenzy, Berlinger said those involved stopped asking basic questions surrounding the teenagers’ assumed guilt, like about the lack of physical evidence at the crime scene or DNA evidence linking the teens to the site. Misskelley and Baldwin were eventually sentenced to life imprisonment, while Echols was put on death row.

After the first film, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which documented the trials and those involved in the case, was released in 1996, both Berlinger and Sinofsky thought the film would lead to outrage and the reopening of the case. While it was met with critical acclaim and sparked a grassroots campaign to free the teens, dubbed the West Memphis Three, it did little to speed up the cogs of justice.

It was at that point that Berlinger’s view of filmmaking as advocacy work began to change. Early in his career, Berlinger said he thought of himself as a storyteller first; the advocacy element wasn’t much of a factor in his work.
“The first film was a strange experience…It did everything a filmmaker could want a film to do: It won an Emmy and a Peabody, received great reviews, had a nice theatrical run and was HBO’s highest recorded broadcast at the time,” Berlinger said. “But it felt strange to be handed a statue while the people whose story you are telling were still in a little cell living in misery.”

After Paradise Lost 2: Revelations was released in 2000, Baldwin says that even his the guards began to believe his innocence and treated him better. While not technically allowed to watch the films in prison, certain guards helped Baldwin see them.

“They came to see me as a person and that what happened to me was wrong,” Baldwin said in an interview.
Almost 10 years later, in the midst of preparing to release the third documentary on Aug. 19, 2011, it was announced that Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley had accepted the rarely used Alford plea, in which they were freed while the state maintained their guilt. Backed by a cadre of celebrity supporters, like Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines, and a team of experts, the trio were preparing an appeal when the plea was negotiated. While Baldwin has said he would have stayed in jail until his record was exonerated, Echols’ delicate health due to prolonged stints in solitary confinement on death row and the looming possibility of his execution spurred the three men to agree to the deal.

While Berlinger described the plea as a bittersweet conclusion, he and Sinofsky were faced with a different challenge: creating an alternative ending for their film, which was set to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. With Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Berlinger and Sinofsky sought to make two films: one that appealed to those who had avidly watched the story and one for those unfamiliar with the case. The pair culled never-used footage from the shoot of the original film and looked at previously overlooked themes, like the stepfather of one of the murdered boys emerging as a possible suspect. The film has been shortlisted for an Academy Award.

While it appears the story has reached its conclusion and the men are moving on with their lives—Baldwin reported receiving his driver’s license and getting his first job—the experience of documenting this extraordinary story has stayed with Berlinger and Sinofsky. While watching days upon days’ worth of footage for Paradise Lost 3, Sinofsky was struck by the feeling that “after 18 years, it was still fresh in our minds. The experience was so acute it was as if it had never really disappeared.”

Since opening in 2005, the IFC Center at 323 Sixth Ave., at West Third Street, has become a cinema hub for the city. Harris Dew, director of programming and promotions, talks about the role of IFC in the community and the community’s role in IFC.

How long have you been at IFC?
I’ve been at IFC since the summer of 2005, just about the time it opened. Before that I was at Film Forum doing publicity and repertory programming. And before that I was at MoMA doing PR.

What exactly do you do as director of programming and promotions?
I program films with my boss, which means viewing a lot of films, going to festivals and watching screeners [films submitted by filmmakers]. About half of the films that we show at IFC were picked up at festivals and the other half were chosen from submissions. My boss and I have very different sensibilities, so the two of us can really cover the waterfront together.

How would you categorize the films that make it to the IFC screens?
It’s tough to do that. We’re not just an art house cinema and we don’t just screen documentaries. We’ve got highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the good, the bad and the ugly, but it’s quite a range.

What do you love most about your job?
I love discovering something great and then sharing it with people; it’s a pretty lucky position to be in. And I love working at an institution that is able to serve such a broad audience, not in a “lowest common denominator” sort of way but because we do lots of things in lots of ways. It’s tough to pigeonhole IFC. I love that.

What’s the most disappointing element of your job?
Getting it wrong. Just because you love a film and believe it to be great doesn’t mean other people will agree. I guess I hate not being able to find the right audience for a film. Other than that, I dislike the things that everybody dislikes about their jobs, right? The last-minute things that don’t come through…little things. But at the end of the day, there’s very little that I don’t enjoy.

How does being Downtown shape IFC as a cinema?
Well, it makes us as diverse as Downtown New York is. That’s really it. For one thing, it makes us a filmmaker’s theater. We never lose sight of the fact that screening films isn’t enough. We hold lots of Q&As and filmmakers screenings. We also have some pretty hardcore art house patrons from NYU and other academic institutions, as well as an international crowd.
The great thing is that we have programming to meet the needs of our diverse Downtown audiences. We’ve got Queer/Art/Film, a really fun weekly series in which a member of the New York gay arts community picks out an influential film for screening. We have the New York International Children’s Film Festival, in which we screen films for kids every weekend. We have our Midnight Movies series that attracts a very different crowd. So, yeah, I would say being Downtown shapes IFC tremendously.

Do you think IFC could exist uptown?
Not in the same way. We’re very much a Downtown theater in our sensibility. We take energy from this neighborhood and we give it back. It’s lucky to be on top of the West Fourth Street station because it’s so convenient and folks from uptown can easily access us. I guess if we existed uptown, we’d have a slightly different audience profile, and over the years of screenings you’d probably see a change in what we screened.

So what’s next at IFC?
We just opened a film called Urbanized, by Gary Hustwit; it’s a feature-length documentary about the design of cities that looks at the strategies and issues behind urban design. Gary will be at IFC with lots of city planners and designers for Q&A sessions discussing sustainability, climate change and how to urbanize better.
We also have the DOC NYC festival Nov. 2-10 in collaboration with NYU. It’s our second year and we’ve already expanded significantly. So that should be a pretty exciting festival.
In addition, we’ve just opened a Weekend Retrospective Series featuring the works of Aki Kaurismäki. Every weekend, a different film of his will be screened through Dec. 18. So there’s a lot going on.

And down the road at IFC?
The DOC NYC festival will continue to expand. And we’ll continue our collaborations with filmmakers and organizations in New York. We opened in 2005 and were HD from the beginning. We added two new screens in 2009, so hopefully in the future we’ll add more screens, more space. I want us to be idiosyncratic in the long run. It’s an exciting place to see what’s coming next. One thing’s for sure, you’re not going to get bored. There’ll be something.

PHOTO BY PENNY GRAY

By Mark Peikert

Some film performances manage to be so memorable, so unexpected, that they render the less imaginative framework of the movie negligible. That’s certainly the case with Elizabeth Olsen and Martha Marcy May Marlene, a sexy movie about violence, group sex, commune cults and yuppie ambition.

All of those are apart from Elizabeth’s Martha, though. Escaping from an upstate New York farm where groups of young men and women are practically enslaved by the charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes, reprising his role from Winter’s Bone in a smilier key) to the tranquility of her estranged sister’s Connecticut vacation home, Martha finds the difference between memory and dreams beginning to dissolve. Her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and new brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy) try to be supportive, but they are ultimately so disinterested in this feral young woman that their questions feel like cocktail conversation prompters. Neither of them wants to know the truth about the two years Martha was away, because neither of them wants to confront the possibility that she might have been in real danger. Far better to simply assume she was in a bad relationship for that period of time.

Of course, Martha was in a bad relationship, to some extent. Working and living in an environment where “cleansing” means being drugged and raped and women aren’t allowed to eat until men have, Martha—dubbed Marcy May by Patrick—begins to find the place where she belongs. Eventually, her sense of serenity is shattered when violence abruptly erupts (writer-director Sam Durkin is unable to confidently yoke the minor-key emotions of an indie film with the psychological suspense of a thriller),and she ends up at Lucy and Ted’s, walking around naked, crawling into bed with them while they have sex and generally acting like a neurasthenic.

Olsen makes every twitch, every sudden screaming fit seem both natural and inevitable; the world has become a dangerous place for Martha now and terror lurks around every corner. She knows what Patrick is capable of convincing his “family” to do (anyone who has ever read Helter Skelter will remain unsurprised by Durkin’s twists), and Lucy and Ted’s massive glass house offers slim protection.

Somehow, Olsen’s performance almost erases the massive leaps of faith that Durkin’s screenplay requires of the viewer. Would an 18-year-old girl, even one who has been subtly brainwashed for two years, ever forget that it’s inappropriate to climb into bed next to her fornicating sister? Would Martha really be so incapable of caring for herself that she hides her urine-stained dress under her mattress? Just months before she was caring for babies and hanging laundry out to dry on a farm, between working in the garden and learning how to shoot. And Durkin’s finale, a combination of the closing shot from Michael Clayton and the gotcha climax of every horror film of the last 40 years, cheapens what was, until that point, a slightly ludicrous but nonetheless absorbing look at returning to civilization from a cult and finding that civilization is little better as an option.

Elizabeth Olsen and Sarah Paulson are sisters in Martha Marcy May Marlene.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX SEARCHLIGHT

50/50
The buddy comedy genre faces cancer. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is helped through crisis by Seth Rogen. Decent emotions get cheated of depth by blithe, nonspiritual approach. Dir. Jonathan Levine.

Colombiana
Striking entertainment but also an emotional action movie. As a sexy, damaged assassin hunting down drug dealers to avenge her parents, Zoe Saldana gives the movie star performance of the year—a soulful, modern-day Irma Vep. Dir. Olivier Megaton.

The Debt
Shameless-bordering-on-ludicrous Holocaust exploitation, as a Mossad trio brings a Nazi war criminal to justice. In flashbacks, Jessica Chastain plays the same rueful agent as Helen Mirren—a cipher out of a spy novel. Dir. John Madden.

Drive
Fake toughness, fake sentimentality, fake style infected by Michael Mann. Brooding existential stuntman and petty criminal Ryan Gosling is so laconic and cool he’s inadvertently comic. This second-rate actor occasionally drops his Steve McQueen impersonation and lets slip Mickey Rourke’s old smile. Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn.

Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
An inventive political, cultural, ethnic defense of France’s 50s pop icon and rebel Serge Gainsbourg shows a caricaturist’s whimsy—especially in the subtext of Jewish self-consciousness, psycho-political anime effects and Eric Elmosnino’s lead performance. Laetitia Casta does a worthy, knockout Brigitte Bardot impersonation. Dir. Joann Sfar.

The Help
America’s Jim Crow history reduced to sisterhood entertainment about servants and masters. Still, the white actresses (Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard) take center screen, squeezing out the black actresses (Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer). Dir. Tate Taylor.

Midnight in Paris
Name-dropping 1920 American expatriots in Paris (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, etc.), Woody Allen takes another story about the cheating, narcissistic bourgeois (Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams) evading responsibility to each other. Don’t be fooled by the mock surrealism, this is obnoxious. Dir. Woody Allen.

Moneyball
A glum and smug look at professional sports martydom (Brad Pitt as Oakland As GM Billy Beane), this may be the least enjoyable baseball movie ever made. The Social Network for jocks. Dir. Bennett Miller.

Real Steel
Hugh Jackman’s lost father and estranged son (Dakota Goyo) come together in the near future of robot boxing—a metaphor for mankind’s displaced emotions in the digital age. This surprisingly touching footnote to producer Steven Spielberg’s A.I. is a fairytale of archetypes. Dir. Shawn Levy.

Take Shelter
Midwest laborer (Michael Shannon) becomes unstable, sensing apocalypse in the changed wind (as Bob Dylan would put it). Political paranoia takes elemental, eschatological form driving wife (Jessica Chastain) and blue-collar buddy (Shea Whigam) to the edge. Tipping into horror movie cliché, the political tension gets unbearably overwrought. Dir. Jeff Nichols.

Weekend (2011)
Rather precious but not unaffecting love story about two young gay British men (Tom Cullen as Russell and Chris New as Glen) facing the limits of attraction and commitment. An indie take on the ’70s classic Sunday Bloody Sunday. Dir. Andrew Haigh.

Week End (1967)
Capping the first phase of his career, Godard imagines the end of the bourgeois world, taking a greedy French couple (Mirelle Darc, Jean Yanne) to their logical end: cultural cannibalism. Funny, powerful, unforgettable. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard.