Movie review by Greg Carlson

Mark Hartley’s “Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films” sprays viewers with an Uzi-like barrage of film clips, trailers, promo reels, and talking heads to spin the tale of 1980s powerhouse schlock heavyweights – and cousins – Manahem Golan and Yoram Globus. A competitor and companion to Hila Medalia’s “The Go-Go Boys,” which, Hartley notes with some glee, beat “Electric Boogaloo” to market by three months, the feature documentary captures the high-stakes, low-taste atmosphere of Cannon’s anything goes approach to cinematic glory. Admirers of the company seal won’t need any coaxing to revisit the tripped-out visions of “Ninja III: The Domination,” “Invasion U.S.A.” and “Lifeforce,” but Hartley’s efforts are sure to mint new fans for one of exploitation cinema’s most prolific standard bearers.

Emerging as a filmmaker in his native Israel after an adolescence spent obsessively attending the cinema several times a week, Golan produced Boaz Davidson’s wildly successful and influential “Lemon Popsicle,” the 1978 comedy-drama later remade as “The Last American Virgin” in the United States. Even though “Virgin” wasn’t a complete smash, in many ways it set the tone for Cannon’s more-is-more model, and Hartley makes an effort to touch on several subsequent productions that came to define the fast, cheap, and out of control ethos of Golan/Globus. The substantial return-on-investment hit “Breakin’” and its sequel “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” were released within eight months of each other.

With a few notable exceptions, it’s difficult to keep the interview subjects straight, since most of them pepper their recollections with impressions of Golan’s thick accent and bull-in-china-shop demeanor (one aspect of “Electric Boogaloo” that gets old). The resulting descriptions paint a Jekyll/Hyde mix of admiration and revulsion in the portrait of the garrulous Golan, whose outsize personality overshadows the more reserved and business-oriented Globus. Many attempt but few succeed in satisfactorily accounting for Golan’s wild miscalculations – obviously the man was not stupid, even if he had a tin ear for quality. Former MGM chief executive Frank Yablans might come the closest, shaking his head at Golan’s you-gotta-be-kidding-me Oscar hopes for the disastrous flop “Sahara.”

Despite the occasional stab at respectability – via unlikely partnerships with Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, and Franco Zeffirelli – Cannon’s bread was buttered by the twin obsessions of exploitation cinema: sex and violence. Hartley does not skimp on either, exploring the softcore sensations of Sylvia Kristel in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Mata Hari” and Bo Derek in “Bolero.” Several Cannon collaborators, including Derek, puzzle over Golan’s inexplicable, two-faced attitude with regard to films featuring significant sexuality and nudity, but that specific subject is never resolved in any detail. Neither is the period’s grim and casual predilection toward onscreen rape, a staple of Cannon director Michael Winner’s repugnant worldview as seen in the “Death Wish” sequels.

Hartley deserves credit for organizing what could so easily be a chaotic mess (several Cannon movies could sustain feature-length documentaries of their own) and for coherently communicating the hubris and overreach that led to the downfall of the company and the Golan/Globus split. The latter is summarized in a section that delivers the one-two punch of costly – for Cannon – movies that looked cheap: “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” and “Masters of the Universe.” But even those failures have found a strange place in the pantheon of bad movies (some) people love, a category to which Cannon contributed an impressive share.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The meticulous Todd Haynes shares another engrossing 1950s tale of forbidden romance with “Carol,” a thematic sibling to the director’s career high point “Far from Heaven.” Adapted by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s bracing novel “The Price of Salt,” “Carol” is every bit as feverish as the legendary anecdote describing the book’s origin. In the title role, Cate Blanchett is a well-to-do woman who might possibly be pursuing the distractions of Therese, Rooney Mara’s young salesgirl, just as much as the custody of her daughter during a difficult divorce. Filled with the loaded communication of the glance and the gaze, “Carol” is a lush and aching love story.

The movie may be called “Carol,” but the point of view belongs equally to Therese. Blanchett and Mara are good enough to expect more award nominations headed their way, and Haynes deftly balances the performances, constructing with the actors a careful pas de deux that accesses the hearts of both characters. Whether or not Carol uses her power, experience, and social status to seduce Therese, the drama clearly carves out room to examine how women in post-World War II America found themselves, regardless of sexual orientation, confined to customs determined by repressive norms.

Admirers of Haynes will find an embarrassment of riches in the lines of Carol’s stunning gray 1949 Packard Super Deluxe 8, the exterior of the Spare-Time diner, and the sight and sound of the Teddy Wilson/Billie Holiday microgroove long player featuring “Easy Living.” Anthony Lane writes of the necessity of retaining the novel’s period setting: “If Haynes had updated ‘The Price of Salt’ to the present, our response would have been: big deal. Trade your straight marriage for a same-sex relationship, these days, and you will be hailed for your emotional honesty, whereas Highsmith, steeped in crime fiction, needed the creak of danger and the hiss of social disdain.” Lane’s assertion is worth considering, even though “Carol,” with its sumptuous costumes and production design, centralizes and fetishizes the cool of the mid-twentieth century.

Over time, the novel’s open-ended and hopeful conclusion has remained one of its most frequently cited talking points. Because Highsmith resisted prevailing attitudes and expectations about the ways in which homosexual characters could or should be portrayed in fiction, interest in the book has continued (even though it was for a time out of print). Just as astonishing is the novel’s influence on Nabokov. As Terry Castle has long maintained, the tingly road trip centerpiece – a throbbing fantasy of anticipation – “must have [been] stolen” for “Lolita.”

“Carol” has already emerged, deservedly so, as a critical darling, but the film is not without its minor shortcomings. In significant ways, Highsmith depicted nervous confusion and sexual heat with an edge that Haynes blunts in favor of a more tasteful and highbrow rendering of Carol and Therese’s affair. Additionally, the age and class difference between the two women merits only scant notice within the film narrative, despite providing a potentially rich vein for deeper exploration. Minor quibbles aside, however, “Carol” is an absolutely ravishing feast for the senses. Lovers of classic Hollywood glamour will swear Mr. Haynes and his crew found a functional time machine.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

With “The Look of Silence,” filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer and his dedicated collaborators have constructed a harrowing companion piece to the unforgettable chronicle of genocide in Indonesia depicted in “The Act of Killing.” In one sense answering critics who wondered why the prior film concentrated on the perpetrators of murder and not on the victims, “The Look of Silence” follows the stygian odyssey of Adi Rukun, whose brother was brutally dispatched by locals so completely deaf to their crimes they enthusiastically recount the grisly details on camera without any sense of guilt or remorse.

The 44-year-old Adi is an optometrist by profession, and several of the movie’s interactions unfold during eye examinations performed on the anti-communist constituents of the movement that eventually replaced the Sukarno presidency with the Suharto regime. Both of Oppenheimer’s projects feature the surreal, dispassionate spectacle of men willing to share the grotesque nuts and bolts of their personal experiences as vigilante participants, and some of the most painful and moving scenes in “The Look of Silence” show Adi as he impassively processes firsthand accounts of disembowelment, genital mutilation, and even the ingestion of the blood of the condemned.

Several of the discussions on the ethical responsibilities of documentarians begun when “The Act of Killing” was released are being revisited by cinephiles eager to process the extremely difficult intellectual terrain explored by Oppenheimer. Unflinching and unapologetic as ever, Oppenheimer’s practice of getting close to the guilty can result in some queasy confrontations when Adi shines light on his brother’s murder in the presence of the complicit. Additionally, Oppenheimer uses Adi’s century old, skeletal father – mostly blind and deaf – as a kind of emblem of vulnerability. In one scene, the terrified, disoriented elder crawls around his room, convinced he has somehow ended up in a stranger’s house.

Like “The Act of Killing,” this film raises questions about the safety of its participants, and one almost immediately begins to worry for Adi as he and Oppenheimer record conversations with people who have, in a stranger-than-fiction set of circumstances, benefited and profited from their roles as executioners. Adi’s willingness to face these butchers could be many things – brave, dangerous, possibly foolish – but to him it is clearly necessary. The various responses we hear are the stuff of nightmare, and yet another film could be made from the extent to which the United States directly and indirectly supported the death squads.

The most rewarding dimension of “The Look of Silence” can be discovered in Adi’s quiet patience and external placidity. One would expect that Adi would on some level be seeking a measure of revenge or retribution for the evil perpetrated against his family, but Oppenheimer makes clear the monumental denial that places something resembling justice far out of the reach of the Indonesians persecuted by their own fellow citizens. The 1965-1966 timeframe of the massacres is not that long ago, and by far the most frightening realization embedded in both “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence” is the possibility that something like this could so easily happen again, and happen anywhere.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Fans and admirers of Marlon Brando won’t require any coaxing to see Stevan Riley’s hugely entertaining documentary “Listen to Me Marlon,” but the film is compelling enough to transcend its status as “mere” Hollywood biography. A visual and aural odyssey that explores the actor’s well-known career highlights as well as intimacies selected from hundreds of hours of previously private personal recordings narrated by Brando, the movie delights in showcasing a wealth of photographs, television appearances, and movie clips. Almost entirely narrated by Brando himself, “Listen to Me Marlon” covers all the expected bases – the emotionally complex relationship to his parents, the New York years with Stella Adler, the love affair with Tahiti, the social and civil rights activism – without the use of interviews with friends, collaborators, and experts.

Instead, it’s all Brando, including an eerie, illuminated 3D floating head. A few critics have dismissed the glowing avatar that Riley uses to initiate the film, but the effect, built from work Brando commissioned in the 1980s, implies a great deal about the actor’s depth of curiosity regarding the future of film and the lengths to which we may go to achieve some kind of life after death. Brando’s original intention for digitizing as much of himself as was possible via the now antiquated Cyberware purportedly involved some kind of obviously incomplete multimedia project, but the man was nothing if not forward thinking.

The least effective narrative strands in the film concern the 1990 death of Dag Drollet at the hands of Brando’s son Christian and the 1995 suicide of Brando’s daughter Cheyenne, who had been Drollet’s partner. Riley periodically returns to the media circus that set up tents in the aftermath of the Drollet shooting, but the lurid frenzy accompanying the trial isn’t given enough context to pursue the question of whether Brando’s responses on the stand and for the cameras were carefully calibrated “performances” or heartfelt expressions of genuine emotion. They could have been both.

As Brando speaks for himself, the viewer comes to understand how an individual so gifted could lose his religion, transforming the freedom, joy, and exhilaration that once accompanied his acting into the misery and contempt that clouded and shadowed the most unsavory aspects of studio filmmaking and its accompanying public relations game. Riley doesn’t hold back, peppering the viewer with scenes from several of Brando’s most embarrassing paydays (sometimes accompanied by the use of cue cards). But he also reminds us that Brando was as committed to Don Vito Corleone, Paul, and Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in maturity as he was to Lt. Ken, Stanley Kowalski, and Terry Malloy at the beginning.

Riley masterfully indulges the many unresolvable contradictions that “made” Marlon Brando without compromising viewer patience. And while his greatest onscreen achievements tend toward pretty heavy drama, Brando’s expansive and mischievous sense of humor unlocks an indispensable part of his persona (in one hysterical moment, Brando dismisses Connie Chung’s flattery with a perfectly timed explanation of his dog’s superiority as an actor). Brando shares some genuine insight into the acting process, and his bracing, practical input is one of the best things about “Listen to Me Marlon” – a reminder that we can sometimes discover the truth by telling lies.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Global treasure Guy Maddin detonates a cinematic depth charge in “The Forbidden Room,” a stunning cascade of images so gorgeous you might think you’ve stumbled upon some long lost Yma Sumac record sleeve photo shoot leftovers as lensed by Willy Hameister. Bearing all the filmmaker’s signature stylistic fetishes and then some, “The Forbidden Room” was co-directed by Evan Johnson, who also co-scripted along with Maddin and Robert Kotyk. Additional, hilarious “How to Take a Bath” material was provided by legendary surrealist poet John Ashbery. Multiple critics have already compared the movie’s interlocking chain of wild tales to a set of matryoshka nesting dolls, but the effect is most akin to the ways we experience dreams, vaulting from one inexplicable set of circumstances to the next.

Design aficionados will drool at the film’s meticulously crafted intertitles and production design by Evan’s brother Galen Johnson. Johnson’s stunning cards are routinely inserted to introduce character names/cast members, helpfully supplying informational updates because so many actors inhabit multiple roles. In one delightful example, Caroline Dhavernas’ Gong is introduced with “Young & beautiful – like many of her kind, thirsty for more than her share of the world’s breathing gas – out gulping some down now!” Also quoting poetry and providing emotional interjections (Bones! Bones! Bones!), the titles and their dazzling typography are every bit as essential as the humans who appear in “The Forbidden Room.”

Following the less successful “Keyhole,” “The Forbidden Room” makes use of several Maddin regulars, including Louis Negin and Udo Kier. High profile performers like Charlotte Rampling and Mathieu Amalric also join the Maddin circus, along with a tremendous Clara Furey in the crucial role(s) of mysterious Margot. Many of the filmmaker’s longstanding obsessions swirl and churn: dead fathers, posterior preoccupations, sibling-linked love triangles, and an alarming rate of amnesiacs compete for attention. Bizarre contests of mettle and fortitude, another Maddin treat, arrive in a riotous showdown that sees a “saplingjack” prove himself by offal piling and bladder slapping.

Maddin admirers old and new will have a field day selecting their favorite vignettes from a practically bottomless supply of cranial confectionery. Negin’s quips and come-ons regarding the virtues of bathing will have you reaching for the Mr. Bubble. Life-giving oxygenated flapjacks sustain a quartet of submariners caught in the ultimate bind: if they surface, their cargo of blasting jelly will explode; if they remain underwater, the air supply will run out. A volcanic virgin sacrifice is interrupted by an unexpected parachutist. Undulating women skeletons double as insurance defrauders. And under no circumstances should the Aswang bananas, a pair of herbaceous vampires, be overlooked.

In his essay on “Brand upon the Brain!” Dennis Lim wrote, “Increasingly [Maddin] comes across less as a fusty antiquarian than a mad scientist, applying shock paddles to dead cinematic languages.” That observation is as true as ever applied to the filmmaker’s current work, which includes the eagerly anticipated “Seances” project. For now, “The Forbidden Room” is as beautiful as anything Maddin has ever shared. The film’s relentlessly inventive combination of old and new techniques stimulates the senses by suggesting a rediscovery of some mothballed nitrate, catching fire before our eyes.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Following the honorary Oscar he received last month at the Governors Awards (along with the blistering truth-to-power acceptance speech he made), Spike Lee doesn’t seem likely to pick up many competitive Academy Award nominations for “Chi-Raq,” even though he should. Co-written with Kevin Willmott, whose diabolically good “C.S.A.: Confederate States of America” is an inspiration to every college professor who dreams of making it in the movies, “Chi-Raq” bears all the hallmarks of Lee’s signature, inimitable style. And to everyone praising “Chi-Raq” as the filmmaker’s best work since “Do the Right Thing,” let’s not discount all the brilliant movies Lee has made between 1989 and today.

The audaciousness of “Chi-Raq” begins with a symbolically potent retelling of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” (by way of Leymah Gbowee) that uses the culture of contemporary American gun violence – and especially its toll on innocent victims and children – as the impetus for women to withhold sex from their partners until a commitment to peace is made. That adventurous spirit continues with the choice to deliver much of the movie’s spoken dialogue in rhyming couplets and poetic meter. The incorporation of and reliance upon music is reminiscent of “School Daze,” but “Chi-Raq” is packed with overt and covert references to all kinds of movies as well as several entries from Lee’s own filmography.

Many of Lee’s veteran ensemble members show up in roles of various shapes and sizes. Samuel L. Jackson glues it all together as dapper narrator Dolmedes, even reprising Mister Senor Love Daddy’s “Wake up!” admonition. Wesley Snipes gets loose as gang leader Cyclops, and Angela Bassett commands attention and wields power as historian and advocate Miss Helen. Harry Lennix, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Roger Guenveur Smith, and other reliable faces are joined by Nick Cannon, Jennifer Hudson, and John Cusack, whose dedicated clergyman is loosely based on Michael Pfleger of Chicago’s Saint Sabina church.

The performance of the film, however, is owned by Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata, a young woman with “a mind like Einstein and a truly luscious behind.” Parris was strong in “Dear White People” but she is genuinely great in “Chi-Raq.” No matter how outrageous the scene – in one jaw-dropper she seduces wicked David Patrick Kelly’s General King Kong, a seriously messed-up sex fiend in Confederate flag underpants – Parris delivers from a place of total commitment. In essence, Lysistrata has to match every move made by Cannon’s tough title character, except – to paraphrase a famous line – backwards and in hot pants and a tank top.

Like so many of Lee’s finest, “Chi-Raq” can turn on a dime, swerving from scenes of painful, gut-punching grief to sequences filled with wild and ridiculous gags. Lee also drops plenty of knowledge by having characters share sobering statistics in conversation and deliver speeches directly into the camera. Even though there is nothing shy, retiring or inconsequential about the focus of “Chi-Raq” on gang-instigated death, experiencing the film causes one to imagine what movies Lee might cook up if he doubled down on firearm-related injustices and targeted the steady supply of stories in which white police officers kill unarmed black citizens.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

John Crowley’s film of Colm Toibin’s popular novel “Brooklyn” features a tremendous Saoirse Ronan – whose thoughtful and inviting presence is more than enough to recommend the movie, despite some of its easy calculations. As Eilis Lacey, a young woman who leaves her home and family in Enniscorthy, Ireland for the promise of a bigger life in America, Ronan adds another noteworthy performance to her already impressive filmography. Set in the early 1950s, “Brooklyn” trades to a significant degree on a kind of highly filtered, golden nostalgia, and opinions are divided on the success of this tactic.

Nick Hornby’s screenplay retains the soul of Toibin’s book: Eilis’ painful homesickness and heartsickness, the old-fashioned benevolence of the Catholic Church, and Eilis’ disequilibrium over her national identity – especially when she returns to the country of her birth. The movie does, however, differ from the novel in several notable aspects. The opening is more streamlined, the strange scene between Eilis and Miss Fortini in the dressing room is altered, and the film makes only the tiniest nod to the African American customers of Bartocci’s department store.

The biggest change, however, is Crowley’s decision to conclude with a definitive resolution concerning the state of Eilis’ relationship with first love Tony (Emory Cohen), scuttling the more open-ended final scene as rendered by Toibin in the novel. While the trope of a character pursued by more than one suitor ranks high on the scale of storytelling familiarity, the employment of the love triangle in “Brooklyn” functions better as a symbolic choice between the two countries Eilis has inhabited. Tony equals America while Domhnall Gleeson’s Jim Farrell stands in for all the comforts of Ireland.

In his vicious review, Richard Brody destroys the film for what he perceives as unforgivable “simplifications and sanitizations,” attacking it for misrepresenting and misunderstanding the fullness of New York City (no surprise) and for apparently promoting something like banality. Brody claims that the film “isn’t so much a bad movie as it is a virtual self-parody of a genre – that of the minor, dignified, clean-hands art-house preciosity.” While the venerable Brody is squarely in the minority with regard to “Brooklyn,” his arguments serve as a reminder of criticism’s subjectivity. Where Brody sees costar Cohen’s “comically chewy stage accent,” Michael Sragow writing for “Film Comment” remarks that “Cohen’s Tony riffs beautifully on Brando’s gallant street courtship of Eva Marie Saint.”

What Brody might be missing is the possibility that the very essence of Crowley’s cinematic interpretation of “Brooklyn” depends on the construction of a world experienced through the unreliable eyes of Eilis, whose innocence and inexperience color everything. Eilis is our guide and navigator, and her journey toward the kind of maturity that results in self-actualization in only the most vivid characters is the film’s central agenda item. Brody observes that “Eilis expects nothing, imagines nothing, knows nothing, sees nothing, does nothing,” frustrated at the perceived lack of conflict on display. Yet for Eilis, a series of tangible and frightening challenges presents her with enough conflict for a lifetime, and many viewers will come away certain that Eilis saw and imagined much, learned and did a lot.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Belinda Sallin’s documentary “Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World” captures the Swiss artist near the end of his interesting life. Giger, who rocketed to international fame and Oscar glory for the iconic designs he contributed to Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” died in 2014 at the age of 74. Sallin, given full access to her subject, capitalizes on the privilege to prowl through the cluttered rooms of Giger’s home, a shabby heap teeming with macabre curiosities and enough specialized volumes to rival the finest libraries. The dwelling immediately emerges as a central character in its own right, competing directly with Giger’s artwork as the movie’s primary visual attraction.

The filmmaker is less successful communicating any substantive analysis of Giger’s imagery, content to let a handful of associates repeat simple explanations of Giger’s thematic concerns familiar to anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the man’s eroticized “biomechanical” hybridizations of the organic and the industrial. An affable, quiet Giger, operating with the full awareness that his post-stroke physical health has slowed him considerably, doesn’t say much. Sallin supplements several scenes with archival footage of Giger from his most active years, chasing the man’s quicksilver talent for locating the intersection between dream and nightmare.

While Sallin includes some of Giger’s most famous images, few meaningful stories accompany them. For example, a tantalizing reference by Giger’s mother in law to the use of “Penis Landscape/Work 219: Landscape XX” by the Dead Kennedys as a poster insert in “Frankenchrist” reads only as a confusing throwaway. While the American obscenity trial involving Jello Biafra and Alternative Tentacles should open the door to an essential chapter in the Giger biography, Sallin ignores it and all the other historical collaborations and/or relationships between Giger and recording artists like Debbie Harry and ELP.

As expected, Sallin covers the “Alien” experience, but opts for period interviews – including a brief clip of Scott acknowledging Giger’s gifts – rather than any newly collected content. Prior to that section of the film, a short episode on Li Tobler, the actor who would become Giger’s life partner, model and artistic muse, leaves viewers hungry for a deeper examination of arguably the most important single figure in Giger’s career. Giger, choked with emotion, confirms that speaking about Tobler (who committed suicide in 1975) is still difficult decades later. The two appeared together in Fredi Murer’s 1972 television documentary “Passagen,” and it is not difficult to imagine their alliance as the subject of an entire feature.

Sallin’s cameras follow Giger to a few public appearances, observing a number of moments in which the most devoted members of the Giger cult tremble and break down in the presence of their deity. “Dark Star” misses yet another opportunity to place its subject into proper perspective, largely skipping over the fan/artist relationship. At least Celtic Frost’s Tom Gabriel Fischer, one admirer who creatively channeled his dedication to Giger’s vision, attests to the peculiar levels of hero worship offered to Giger. Fischer, who parlayed his fandom into a stint as one of Giger’s professional assistants, enjoys a rare and unusual connection few disciples know. Interest in Giger is not likely to wane, and “Dark Star” is not going to be the last word on the spellbinding surrealist.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like hapless novelty salesmen Jonathan (Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nisse Vestblom), filmmaker Roy Andersson clearly just wants to help people have fun. Completing his “Living” trilogy – which also contains the brilliant pair “Songs from the Second Floor” (2000) and “You, the Living” (2007) – “A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence” is the set’s piece de resistance and one of the best films of the year. Revisiting Andersson’s ambitious themes, which include observations on class, colonialism, lust, greed, and war, Andersson’s colossal achievement is a memento mori made surprisingly warm by the filmmaker’s desire to laugh with his fellow human beings and not at them.

Better witnessed than described, Andersson’s work nevertheless draws favorable comparisons to Edward Hopper and Samuel Beckett, and cinematic grand masters like Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, and Woody Allen, with strong kinship to the traffic jam insanity of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” and the pinball connections of Richard Linklater’s “Slacker.” Andrew O’Hehir even suggests that “if Wes Anderson and Lars von Trier tried to write a sitcom together,” it might be something like “Pigeon.” Truly, as has so often been repeated, there is nobody out there making movies quite like Andersson.

Marked by painstakingly composed tableaux, uninterrupted takes with no cut-ins or close-ups, and jet-black comedy alternating with tender poignancy, Andersson’s universe is vast and wondrous. His approach to production is the antithesis of the assembly line factory churning out Hollywood studio fare: almost unbelievably, Andersson designs his sets (which typically heighten and exaggerate the illusion of depth) and then collects dozens of takes of mostly non-professional performers until he sees something he likes. The scenes that end up in the movies are human-scale dioramas – moving and breathing paintings that merit multiple viewings.

Andersson, whose sharp-eyed existentialism complements the anything goes atmospherics contained within his movie world, is so comfortable and in command, viewers readily accept the methodological madness that includes musical numbers, fourth-wall violations, genre assassinations, and time-bending disequilibrium that blurs all borders between dream and reality. Quotidian moments – lovers looking out from a window, two little girls blowing bubbles – share space with mind-melting fantasias like the nightmare showstopper in which wealthy, formally dressed senior citizens are entertained by the music produced from the torture of slaves being cooked in a gigantic, rotating copper cylinder.

Beyond the Laurel and Hardy hijinks of Jonathan and Sam trying to unload their pathetic stock of plastic vampire teeth and cheap rubber “Uncle One-Tooth” masks – a structural thread not too far removed from the misadventures of Kalle the arsonist in “Songs from the Second Floor” – Andersson sticks to his hallmark vignettes. Fans will cite their favorites, and there are no wrong answers in that respect. Memorable contenders include opening bit “Three meetings with death,” the ghoulishly fascinating musical torture chamber, and the anachronistic campaign of King Charles XII (Viktor Gyllenberg). The last, partially glimpsed through windows and in the background, like the business-suited flagellants and the ambulatory apartment of rock and roll newlyweds in the earlier films, confirms Andersson as one of cinema’s irreplaceable treasures.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Celebrating the 30^th anniversary of “Back to the Future,” Jason Aron’s crowdfunded documentary “Back in Time” tries unsuccessfully to capitalize on the blockbuster’s enduring appeal. Released online for “Back to the Future Day,” October 21, 2015 – the date selected in the sequel by Marty McFly to go and save his yet-to-be-born children – “Back in Time” is earnest to a fault. While the movie intends to be the last word on the highest grossing film of 1985, “Back in Time” is ultimately too broad and scattershot to transcend its status as a curio by the fan, about the fan, and for the fan.

Before the torpor fully sets in, Aron lines up an impressive gallery of talking heads to gush, fawn, and deploy much hyperbole – some of it merited – on the magic of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s practically perfect summer entertainment. In one exquisitely packaged bite, Steven Spielberg claims that “Back to the Future” “defines the taste of buttered popcorn.” Along with Gale, Zemeckis, and Spielberg, cast members Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Claudia Wells, Donald Fullilove, James Tolkan, and others appear to reminisce about their experiences. The verdict: Aron should have cut Wells and Fullilove playing minigolf for charity in favor of more Fox and Lloyd.

In addition to the actors, Huey Lewis, Alan Silvestri, Dean Cundey, Frank Price, and others turn up to share their memories. As inspirational grab bag, “Back in Time” happily tanks up on scene after scene of warm and fuzzy adulation coming from both the people who made the movie and the most devoted and obsessed audience members. From DeLorean DMC-12 “Time Machine” collectors and restorers, who appear in a section so protracted you start to think it will take up the rest of the feature-length running time, to detours on the science behind hoverboards and flying cars, the movie’s exasperating inclusivity will cause plenty of viewers to locate the fast forward button.

For all the stuff it crams in, “Back in Time” toothlessly squanders real opportunities to deal directly with legitimate arguments concerning the shortcomings of the two sequels. While the story of the firing of Eric Stoltz on the original production is handled with more tact and detail than you might expect from what sometimes comes across as a glorified DVD behind the scenes bonus feature, the exit of disgruntled not-so-secret weapon Crispin Glover is conspicuously ignored. To his credit, Aron keeps Dan Harmon’s admonishment that “Everybody knows II and III suck,” but then pretty much leaves it at that.

You’ll also wonder why Aron feels the need to include so much footage from stuff like “The Goldbergs” and “American Dad,” even if Adam F. Goldberg’s thoughts on mother-son incest humorously address the original film’s most durable and potent subtext. A much more satisfying critical examination of “Back to the Future” can be found in Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate’s 2010 British Film Institute monograph, which unpacks ideas about filmmaking, teen culture, nuclear energy, 1950s nostalgia, and time travel cinema in ways frustratingly untouched by Aron’s documentary.