Movie review by Greg Carlson

Ji-woon Kim’s “I Saw the Devil” has been likened to so-called “torture porn” titles including “Saw” and “Hostel,” but the appellation unfairly equates a thought-provoking police procedural/revenge thriller with an inferior set of mostly empty-vessel peers. Unquestionably, “I Saw the Devil” embraces explicit depictions of pain and suffering with a gruesome level of exacting detail common to the contemporary Korean horror cinema, but Kim’s genre-expanding duet between a remorseless serial killer and the government officer tracking him is strong stuff for anyone willing to gaze into twin hearts of darkness.

Min-sik Choi, whose international cult status was established by his memorable performance in “Oldboy,” plays the sadistic Kyung-chul, a nightmarish bogeyman whose “kidnap and kill” modus operandi recalls Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb in “The Silence of the Lambs.” When one of Kyung-chul’s victims turns out to be the daughter of a retired police chief and the fiancée of special agent Soo-hyun (Byung-hun Lee), the latter embarks on an odyssey of meticulously plotted retribution that Kim uses as a means to question the cost of payback on the one seeking satisfaction.

“I Saw the Devil” represents Kim’s most technically assured effort to date, and despite the extra weight of a 144-minute running time, the director establishes a rhythm and pace that invites the viewer to consider the purposefully outrageous, logic-defying series of choices made by the protagonist. Kim laces the film’s many physical encounters with the sinewy, visceral immediacy of close-quarters struggle (one bravura sequence is surely an homage to the elaborate in-car choreography designed by Alfonso Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki in “Children of Men”), and the faint of heart will recoil at the relentless close-up shots of blunt force trauma resulting in pulsating arcs of hemoglobin.

Along with phenomenal cinematographer Mo-gae Lee, Kim endeavors to bring the ugly and the beautiful into proximity, and “I Saw the Devil” is a clinic on image-making expertise. The stylized production design, particularly as evidenced in the lairs of Kyung-chul and his grim, cannibal-butcher acquaintance, showcases rainbow hues that glow with an acidic awareness of ironic discrepancy. Kim also capitalizes on his growing confidence in spatial dynamics and arresting compositions, a significant pair of assets in a movie so dependent on cat-and-mouse combat.

Despite Michael Atkinson’s accusation that Kim is both “uber-hack” and no good with nuance, what separates the filmmaker from many other practitioners of gore is Kim’s ability to humanize victims in such a way as to prevent the viewer’s purely prurient, guilt-free pleasure at the spectacle of their abject humiliation. Instead, our voyeuristic complicity stirs up a great deal of aching discomfort. Like fellow South Koreans Joon-ho Bong and Chan-wook Park, as well as Japanese mischief-maker Takashi Miike, Kim approaches genre-derived storytelling with a sense of elasticity that makes room for big stretches and leaps of the imagination. While the old concept “it takes a madman to catch a madman” has been tested countless times in noir cinema, Kim’s “I Saw the Devil” finds success in its management of startling, even risky, strategies, including a disturbing level of identification with the murderer. Once experienced, “I Saw the Devil” is hard to forget.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Cult filmmaker Monte Hellman, now approaching eighty years of age, returns to features following a two decade absence with “Road to Nowhere,” an atmospheric noir more interested in the line between illusion and reality than any half-baked crime employed to turn the gears of plot. From the opening title sequence, which credits the fictional characters populating the movie, to the deliberately cryptic snippets of information doled out to maintain interest, “Road to Nowhere” won’t generate the rabid following enjoyed by Hellman’s fantastic, career-defining “Two-Lane Blacktop.”

“Road to Nowhere” mostly tracks the progress of Hollywood-based Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan), a laid back artist whose iceberg indifference suggests an unlikely degree of dispassionate aloofness for a feature filmmaker, during the production of an account of a North Carolina-set felony that involves enough murder, financial malfeasance, identity switching, record doctoring, and double-crossing to make even Phyllis Dietrichson’s head spin. Haven’s own faculties are seriously impaired by his infatuation with initially reluctant ingénue Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon), the actress who may or may not be the very person whose misdeeds inspired the fictionalized script adaptation.

This farfetched concept sounds like a device straight from David Lynch’s playbook, but “Road to Nowhere” ultimately lacks the ambition, imagination, and audacity of films like “Lost Highway,” “Mulholland Drive,” and “Inland Empire.” Hellman’s interest in the gimmick also waxes and wanes throughout the unhurried collection of chronologically jumbled scenes that connect some of the dots, and the presence of a snoopy insurance investigator (Waylon Payne) and a local blogger (Dominique Swain) fails to add much spark or urgency to the resolution of the mystery.

Many viewers are likely to become impatient with Hellman’s creeping pace, and the director’s trick of pulling back to reveal a camera crew shooting a scene that we have been led to believe has unfolded outside the devilishly opaque drama is used so often that a “boy who cried wolf” weariness settles over the whole enterprise. Independent and student moviemakers will relate to several of Hellman’s on-set asides about the challenges of a life spent shooting pictures, and the director’s supply of battle scars lends zesty verisimilitude to the depiction of cinema as a dream factory.

The movie’s unfortunately apt title teases at Hellman’s endgame, a heady brew of cinephilia that trots out a steady parade of inside jokes and references to movie stars then (Louise Brooks) and now (Scarlett Johansson). Hellman’s friend and collaborator Steven Gaydos, who provided the screenplay, is the executive editor for “Variety,” and industry fixture Peter Bart appears as himself in a cameo weirdly evocative of “Entourage.” The low-key Mitch Haven, as he makes the movie within the movie, unwinds with “The Lady Eve,” “The Spirit of the Beehive,” and “The Seventh Seal,” schooling his femme fatale muse with bromides on the indescribable genius of shining lights like Preston Sturges, Victor Erice, and Ingmar Bergman. When Haven croaks that Bergman’s masterpiece has “never looked better” following some iconic clips of Antonius Block challenging Death to a game of chess, you can’t be sure if the joke is on the fatuous character or the trusting viewer.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Saying that “Transfomers: Dark of the Moon” improves upon or redeems the catastrophic hellishness of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is like suggesting it is preferable to drown than to be eaten alive by a Great White. Sure, you don’t suffer the horror of being torn limb from limb, but you still end up dead. Michael Bay’s third overlong toy/car commercial and military recruitment exercise is unsurprisingly ugly, strident, and stupid. It is also thoroughly repetitive and almost never fun for more than a few seconds at a time. Shia LaBeouf returns as Autobot pal Sam Witwicky, although the movie’s insensible plot conspires to keep him away from Bumblebee and company until the government really needs him.

A goofy prologue suggesting that the Apollo program was Transformers-related would be amusing if Bay wasn’t so humorless and serious in his presentation. “Dark of the Moon” is the second summer movie to revise a major aspect of Kennedy-era history, but at least in “X-Men: First Class,” Matthew Vaughn had the sense to stick to archival footage of JFK. Bay can’t resist staging shots that require much digital hocus pocus and a Kennedy lookalike, and the result is a walk through the uncanny valley of the shadow of death.

Is there anything to recommend “Dark of the Moon” to wary viewers? In a word, no, but the joint presence of Frances McDormand and John Turturro makes a giant sucking sound as Coen Brothers fans are reminded of movies with wit and intelligence. Impervious to embarrassment, Bay also rushes headlong into a series of visuals that mine national tragedies for jacked-up CG thrills. The tasteless homage to the Challenger disaster takes the blue ribbon, as a space shuttle carrying banished Autobots explodes just after liftoff while a tearful Sam watches.

By the time the metal-on-metal carnage of the big final battle begins to unfold in downtown Chicago, impatient viewers will mistakenly breathe a sigh of relief that the end is nigh. Fat chance. Bay drags out the climactic fight until it has taken the shape of a separate feature-length movie divorced from its interminable preamble. When it comes to Mr. Bay and his Transformers, more is always more. Why have only Optimus Prime when you can have Sentinel Prime?

There are plenty of writers who have called out Bay’s weak anti-critical thought arguments that the franchise is about having a good time, but Paul Brunick’s brutal, sarcastic “Revenge of the Fallen” review in “Film Comment” applies to “Dark of the Moon” with just as much force. Simply “Mad Lib” swap the titles and exchange Megan Fox for Rosie Huntington-Whitely and most of the 2009 essay could be republished today. Brunick identifies Bay’s willingness to “graft the Transformers’ intergalactic mythology onto a noxiously reactionary, weirdly neoconservative worldview,” and questions the director’s overt misogyny. Brunick’s piece, focused on the jingoism of Bay’s worldview, skipped a discussion of the filmmaker’s talent for racist stereotypes, a hat trick Bay completes in “Dark of the Moon” with ease.

Never mind the silly much ado about nothing over the claim that Bay literally recycled footage from “The Island,” since first frame to last of “Dark of the Moon” feels, looks, and sounds identical to the previous pair of “Transformers” along with most everything Bay orchestrates. The only real surprise would be to discover that Bay hadn’t reused material, since his ideas and stylistic flourishes have played on an endless loop for years.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s nearly four-decades gestating cinematic poem, bears much fruit for admirers of the director’s (by turns) meditative, solemn, inscrutable, and prismatic approach to the craft of moviemaking as religious devotion. A two-hour and twenty minute skyscraper of thoughts, dreams, visions, and questions with no answers, the film is an achievement of mad-scientist ambition that will perplex and confound its most ardent supporters and its most vituperative detractors. Impossible for cinephiles to ignore, the Palme d’Or winner is surely the film of the year (or film for the ages?), despite – or perhaps, in part, because of – the widespread reports of mid-screening walkouts and refund demands.

Comparisons between “The Tree of Life” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” are as inevitable as they are apt, given Malick’s recruitment of long-retired Kubrick collaborator/special effects guru Douglas Trumbull and the shared contemplation of the metaphysical preoccupying both movies. Consider the following quotation: “…a film in which infinite care, intelligence, patience, imagination and Cinerama have been devoted to what looks like the apotheosis of the fantasy of a precocious, early nineteen-fifties city boy.”

Or this one: “The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that it is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.”

And finally: “…unreconciled plot lines… are simply left there like a Rorschach, with murky implications of theology.”

All three of the preceding notes belong to Renata Adler’s April 4, 1968 “New York Times” review of “2001,” but could as readily be applied by several current writers to “The Tree of Life,” especially if one substitutes “IMAX resolution” for “Cinerama” and “Texas boy” for “city boy” in the first sentence. Time will tell if “The Tree of Life” deserves to touch shoulders with Kubrick’s “epic drama of adventure and exploration,” and whether it will be as discussed as passionately forty years from now, but I for one am ready to take that bet.

Like the film’s pretty one-sheet, “The Tree of Life” presents a mosaic of images, many of which pivot around Malick’s structural design suggesting “two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace.” Most reviewers and many viewers will come to terms with “The Tree of Life” by suggesting there are two ways through the movie: the way of patience-testing frustration and the way of awestruck appreciation of one artist’s singular self-expression.

While mainstream critical response leans heavily toward the positive, Robert Koehler’s must-read “Film Journey” essay lays out a strongly argued and well-reasoned dismantling of “The Tree of Life.” Koehler spends considerable energy deconstructing the “cosmic creation” sequence, and also attacks what he sees as weaknesses in Malick’s “naïve romanticism,” “bullet point dialogue” and complete misunderstanding and application of the nature vs. grace dialectic that the filmmaker uses to distinguish Mr. O’Brien’s (Brad Pitt) fierce and willful disciplinarian from Mrs. O’Brien’s (Jessica Chastain) permissive and tenderhearted soul.

Koehler’s claims that Malick doesn’t know his vocabulary are misleading and unfair, particularly because the director is under no obligation to adhere to traditional applications of terms as broad as “nature” and “grace,” which individually claim dozens of definitions and synonyms. Additionally, the brief nature/grace speech, heard in voiceover and understood to be the words of Mrs. O’Brien to her son or sons, is filtered through the perception of the young Jack O’Brien (Hunter McKracken), whose subjective interpretation of his parents’ behavior never contradicts Malick’s symbolic Old Testament/New Testament dichotomy.

Koehler and the others who hated the surprise inclusion of several dinosaurs in the creation sequence mistakenly assume deliberate anthropomorphism in Malick’s Cretaceous Period shots, notably one moment in which a natural predator passes on an easy kill. Koehler sees it as “the birth of love, or, at least, pity,” but my own reading was exactly the opposite. Keith Uhlich, whose “The Space Between Spaces” is one of five essays on “The Tree of Life” in “Reverse Shot,” also disagrees with Koehler, and persuasively claims that any “flicker of humanity” we might see in the dinosaur is “our own projection,” and that to “gaze at instinct is to stare into the void, and not just the one evoked by the film’s opening epigraph from the Book of Job.”

Along the same thread of what Uhlich calls “narrative through reverie,” Mike Flanagan argues that “complaints about [“The Tree of Life”] lacking a standard plot structure are more about the expectations of the viewer, not a fault of the film” and therein lies the heart of the movie’s stubborn resistance to those who see failure or deficiency in Malick’s abandonment of typical cinematic syntax – including the movie’s non-chronological organization, its unorthodox rhythm and pace, and its exclusion of developed and sustained exchanges of dialogue that “drive” toward an objective. “The Tree of Life” is not for everyone, but it should be. Some will snooze, some will leave, and the rest of us will stare up at the screen, electrified and transported.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Spanish director Jose Luis Guerin’s “In the City of Sylvia” encourages, even demands, the close attention of its viewers. With its meticulous framing, unhurried long takes, patient rhythm, and absence of dialogue, the movie rewards only those who concentrate on the talented filmmaker’s painstaking attention to detail. Photographed from the point of view of a young, unnamed man (Xavier Lafitte) visiting Strasbourg, France – presumably hoping to find the Sylvia of the title – Guerin’s poetic daydream can shimmer like a mirage one moment and startle with recognizable human experience the next. Undiluted, crystalline, visual storytelling, “In the City of Sylvia” applies real time chronology in most of its acutely realized sequences, and the result is a romantic meditation pregnant with Bressonian contemplativeness.

Built around a three-night structure, even though nearly all the action occurs outdoors in bright daylight, “In the City of Sylvia” stages several forceful scenes, including a voyeur’s banquet of people-watching at a café, a dizzying low speed pursuit, an enigmatic conversation containing the film’s only sustained spoken dialogue, and an Orphic descent into the erotically charged Les Aviateurs nightclub where the story began six years before the events of the film. Each of Guerin’s set pieces unveils another facet of the director’s dazzling technical virtuosity. Cinematographer Natasha Braier’s command of light layers the space in front of and behind windows and reflective surfaces with almost unbelievable expertise and the film’s team of production managers and assistants orchestrates a small army of extras indispensable to the movie’s success.

The café scene takes up roughly one quarter of the total running time and is in many ways the film’s tour de force. As Lafitte’s artist sips his drink and pencils (mostly faceless) miniature portraits of the customers seated around him, Guerin and Braier work wonders with composition, shifting focus through planes of tables while a babbling brook of overlapping conversations blends and buzzes together. One immediately senses the intensity of the main character’s highly individualized perceptions of space and sound, and we shift our eyes along with his, wondering who – if any – of these people will emerge from anonymity. Finally, a woman (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) gets up to leave and our previously passive watcher follows her.

Guerin’s knowledge of movies haunts “In the City of Sylvia” like the ghost of Carlotta Valdes, and the movie’s central, wordless cat-and-mouse through winding streets pays spiritual homage to Scottie Ferguson’s discreet surveillance of Madeleine Elster in “Vertigo.” When the protagonist finally confronts the young woman in the car of a public tram, the movie’s only significant spoken exchange ruptures the hypnotic interiority carefully constructed during the first half of the film. Guerin’s decision to allow his characters speech initially contradicts the discipline of silence, but the filmmaker’s dialogue does not disappoint, alluding to another cinema classic, Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad.”

The number of virtual goddesses inhabiting Strasbourg is as unlikely as the ratio of sylphs shopping in Sean Ellis’s otherwise quotidian “Cashback” supermarket. Guerin’s employ of the male gaze directed toward an endless parade of almost impossibly beautiful women and the story’s stalking/hunting motif invite the scrutiny of those wishing to parse and interpret sexual politics, but the movie’s subjectively filtered view of the feminine becomes deliberately metonymic by film’s end. The title suggests that Strasbourg’s female inhabitants are each and every one a potential “Sylvia” as far as the protagonist is concerned, a suggestion that for any of us, infinite outcomes exist.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In one of the best jokes in “Midnight in Paris,” time-traveling romantic Gil (Owen Wilson) suggests a future plot to budding filmmaker Luis Bunuel decades before “The Exterminating Angel.” Confused by the premise, Bunuel repeatedly claims he does not understand why the dinner guests can’t just leave. Speaking slyly to one of the central thematic concerns of “Midnight in Paris,” the exchange is a moment for movie lovers by a movie lover, beautifully gift-wrapped by writer-director Woody Allen. The septuagenarian auteur, whose famous list of things that make life worth living in “Manhattan” name-checks musical, artistic, and cinematic heroes with heartfelt sincerity, conjures another set of cultural heavyweights this time, and the result is a sweet, wistful valentine to the City of Light.

A successful Hollywood screenwriter who dreams of deeper artistic fulfillment, Gil has come to France with fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents Helen (Mimi Kennedy) and John (Kurt Fuller), hopelessly uncultured xenophobes whose intolerance of their hosts reeks of superiority and entitlement. The ugly Americans browbeat affable Gil with mockery and disdain, affording Allen the opportunity to ridicule their materialism and regressive politics. A chance encounter with charismatic academic Paul (Michael Sheen, buttery and smug) sets up a series of social interactions for which Gil has no stomach. Taking leave of the group, Gil wanders the streets, and at the stroke of twelve, accepts a ride in a ghostly, vintage Peugeot that whisks him back in time.

Answering the old parlor game requiring participants to share their dream dinner companions, “Midnight in Paris” sets loose a nostalgist in the eye of the Jazz Age hurricane. Interacting with the likes of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Salvador Dali, Gil wanders through his mind-bending evenings in a slack-jawed state of wonderment. Falling hard for Pablo Picasso’s current muse Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Gil begins to question whether or not he belongs in the 21st century, and Allen uses the complication to consider the flaws and fallacies of longing for a “better” past. The filmmaker has regularly applied a scalpel to the foolishness that results from “grass is greener” temptation, and few directors are as consistently proficient when blending misery and fortuity.

The visual contrast between the blindingly illuminated modern day scenes and the lush, golden-hued past highlights Gil’s increasing vexation with Inez, and if “Midnight in Paris” has a flaw, it is the way that McAdams is confined to a supercilious, easily dismissed character. Focusing instead on Gil’s great fortune, Allen smartly avoids any explanation of the “magic” that allows his protagonist to stroll between the years, a strategy that diverts viewer attention from any genuine issues that are bound to arise from canceling a marital engagement.

While Gil idolizes the Lost Generation, Adriana cites the Belle Epoque as her ideal, and when she and Gil find themselves in the 1890s hobnobbing with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin, Adriana confesses her own desire to remain in the vibrant fin de siècle time frame. Gil’s disappointment as he tries to convince Adriana that the Roaring Twenties can’t be topped initiates a realization – at least for the audience – that no matter the era in which we live, we pine for a past we cannot have.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A calculated effort to rejuvenate and rethink a once hot franchise for Marvel, 20th Century Fox, and their partners, “X-Men: First Class” embraces the Silver Age origins of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s misunderstood mutants via its smoothly designed period setting. Rewinding the clock to JFK’s 1962 Camelot nightmare, a revisionist Cuban Missile Crisis places the emergent superheroes at the heart of historical destiny. In addition to the throwback threads and cheeky slang, director Matthew Vaughn efficiently communicates a number of origin yarns with a verve that puts Kenneth Branagh’s leaden, wooden, barren “Thor” to shame.

In a tableau that has gained the status of a collective memory among comic readers, the 1944 concentration camp odyssey of Erik Lehnsherr is shared again, this time embellished with the welcome appearance of perfectly sinister Nazi doctor Kevin Bacon, whose very namesake – along with a resume of wonderfully over the top performances – suggests a level of ham that helps constitute an equilibrium with some of the movie’s straighter, more humorless character renderings. Despite drooling web chatter to the contrary, it is Bacon who makes January Jones look good and not the other way around. Pureeing all kinds of X-Men history, Bacon is a dandy Sebastian Shaw, even if he doesn’t have a ponytail or, as Bacon himself describes it, dress like Benjamin Franklin.

While Lehnsherr suffers unspeakable horrors in Europe, young Charles Xavier is raised in wealth and privilege in the Westchester County, New York mansion that will later house his school for “gifted youngsters.” Like Bryan Singer, who returns to the series with co-story and producing credits, Vaughn grasps the inherently dynamic contrasts between the future Magneto and Professor X and sets to work mortaring the foundation of Xavier’s MLK-like advocacy for non-violence and Magneto’s Malcolm X-esque embrace of mutant self-empowerment and resistance “by any means necessary.” James McAvoy’s pre-paralysis telepath gets stuck with the usual pedantic speeches urging tolerance and responsibility, while Michael Fassbender lights up Magneto’s more fiery and charismatic calls for insurrection.

Caught between the two men is the young Raven/Mystique, the blue-skinned shape-shifter played by Rebecca Romijn in the first set of “X” movies. Embodied here by an appealing Jennifer Lawrence, Mystique dials up another of the comic’s central themes: the pain of the outsider accompanied by an almost desperate desire to fit in and be “normal,” no matter the cost. On the page, the teen angst of the X-Men has occasionally ventured into the psychologically complex territory of sexual desire. In this movie, Mystique’s unrequited feelings for Charles define one of the most striking of the film’s soap opera subplots. Later, a table-turning seduction allows Magneto to encourage Mystique to let her freak flag fly, and the scene features one of two cameo appearances (the other a seconds-long meeting in which a perfectly placed F-bomb detonates to much applause) engineered for fanboys and fangirls.

X-Geeks grumble about re-writes to comic canon, but the cinematic variation on the formation of the original team’s line-up strongly suggests that some of the other founding figures will join the Beast in the second and third installments of a planned trilogy. Movie continuity in the X-Men universe hews to its own logic, however, and given the out-of-chronology introductions of Angel and Iceman in the previous films, the constitution of the team in upcoming episodes is anyone’s guess. Several of the mutants inevitably fade into the background, turning up principally to do battle in action sequences. Old-schoolers might enjoy the realization of Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), an X-Man adversary who joined the team in the successful Giant-Size X-Men #1 in 1975. The rest can enjoy the finely tuned emotional melodrama that defines the fantastic world of genetically uncanny men and women.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The logical extension of fast food fable “Super Size Me,” Morgan Spurlock’s “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” – or more precisely, “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” – affably, jokingly, and breezily follows the moviemaker/media personality on a manufactured meta-quest to create a “documentary” about product placement entirely and transparently sponsored and funded by corporate partners. The idea is almost fiendishly attractive but the execution is vanilla; Spurlock goes out of his way to avoid, sidestep, and omit anything resembling argument, confrontation, or the impulse for critical thinking.

Instead, the moviemaker relies on his likable on-screen persona and a cascade of punch lines and gags to skim the surface of one of Hollywood’s worst kept secrets. Are we numb to the clutter generated by millions of “media impressions” or have the movie and culture industries become synonymous with the product-driven directive that suggests we can buy our way to happiness and fulfillment? Spurlock never grapples with these questions, opting instead to spend a significant amount of the movie’s running time chasing down meetings with the companies that don’t reject him immediately. Volkswagen, for example, says no way, and Spurlock scores one of the film’s biggest laughs at the expense of the German automaker.

When Spurlock isn’t walking and talking on camera, “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” colorfully integrates the requisite amount of stock footage and film and television clips assiduously chosen for maximum giggles and guffaws. Additionally, the moviemaker enlists a parade of predominantly male talking heads to supply the sound bites, but the sheer number of academics paraded before Spurlock’s camera means that thinkers like Noam Chomsky only appear on screen for a few seconds, hardly enough time to say much of substance. Ralph Nader, tongue perhaps in cheek, accepts a pair of Merrells as self-described payola.

Contrasted with the academic scolds and critics, several Hollywood directors shrug their shoulders at the illusion of artistic autonomy and integrity when working for studios owned by massive multinationals. Quentin Tarantino, amusingly discusses being turned down by Denny’s for “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction.” “Rush Hour 3” director Brett Ratner, a man smart enough to know what he is selling despite the lingering aroma of rotting fish, seems unfazed by Spurlock’s softballs. Peter Berg name-checks Radiohead and Paul Thomas Anderson as exceptions to the rule while his own office clutter reminds us that one of his upcoming projects is a movie based on the board game “Battleship.”

Like Michael Moore, Spurlock is in and of himself a “brand,” another overworked point somewhat condescendingly beaten into the audience ad nauseam. Despite the movie’s dearth of penetrating insights, a visit to Sao Paulo, Brazil – a city whose elected officials initiated an almost complete prohibition on outdoor advertising – offers startling, science fiction-like visuals of a billboard-free landscape. Other moments, including integrated commercials for Spurlock’s sponsors and a time-warping visit with Jimmy Kimmel during which the talk show host quips that “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” is like the “Inception” of documentaries, are on the mark if a little exhausting: it’s tough to judge and evaluate the insidiousness of marketing by making a feature-length advertisement.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Francois Ozon’s broad – miles-wide broad – “Potiche” showcases the considerable talents of the treasured Catherine Deneuve. The iconic actress, whose career stretches back to the 1950s, has appeared in more than 100 movies, and has been directed by auteurs like Roman Polanski, Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, and Lars von Trier. At the age of 67, Deneuve is as photogenic as ever, but the slight, flirtatious “Potiche” is unlikely to rank with Deneuve’s most memorable films. Pivoting on themes of empowerment and awakening while mired in stock plot devices orbiting around marital infidelities and soap opera-worthy questions of paternity, “Potiche” never explores very far beneath the surface of its cheery, colorful, stage-bound origins.

Ozon has adapted Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy’s 1980 play as a late-70s period piece to both accommodate the movie’s exaggerated sense of class divisions and to make room for the putty-like stretch of numerous farcical complications. The filmmaker, whose wide-ranging style includes several films that deal with psychologically and physically intricate considerations of sexuality (see Tim Palmer’s “Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body” for more), only flirts with some of the ideas that have juiced his better films, including “Swimming Pool” and “5×2.” “Potiche” is much closer to the director’s “8 Women,” the overburdened musical-comedy-murder-mystery featuring Deneuve alongside a veritable constellation of performers representing multiple generations of French movie royalty.

“Potiche” is also nowhere near the league of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” in spite of Ozon’s heartfelt visual homage to the Jacques Demy classic. “Potiche” was made once before in 1983 for broadcast on French television, and Ozon’s updates and additions, including the lead character’s political campaign, don’t alter its essential flakiness in the least. As a study of the personal and professional renaissance of Suzanne Pujol, a “trophy” housewife whose knack for business blossoms when she takes managerial control of the family-owned umbrella factory led by her philandering husband, “Potiche” works best as evidence (albeit slight) that decent roles occasionally exist for women past ingenue age.

In contrast to Ozon’s more serious-minded films, “Potiche” launches a volley of subplots that pad the running time without adding a soupcon of substance. Very little earnest consideration is given to whether Mrs. Pujol loves and respects her condescending husband, an omission that mitigates the potency of old flame Maurice Babin (Gerard Depardieu, as blustery and bearish as ever). Mrs. Pujol’s adult children belong in another story entirely. Daughter Joelle (Judith Godreche) is responsible for a half-baked, nonsensical betrayal of her mother that exists merely as an excuse for a parent-child reconciliation conversation. Ambiguous sexual orientation is son Laurent’s (Jeremie Renier) raison d’etre, but the content of his scenes is handled so much like an afterthought that one longs for Ozon’s usually frank treatment of homosexuality.

Most of “Potiche” is played for easy laughs, and enjoyment of the film depends largely on tolerance levels for caricature and stereotype. The period vibe is effectively accomplished via hairstyles (Godreche’s feathered Farrah Fawcett coiffure is particularly well-engineered), clothing, and pop music, and one scene gamely places Deneuve and Depardieu on a light-up disco floor. Ozon also cannot resist one musical number for good measure, and although the moment is as artificial as everything else in “Potiche,” it is pleasurable to see Deneuve, who has recorded with Serge Gainsbourg, Malcolm McLaren, and Bjork, sing “C’est beau la vie” as the movie’s curtain call.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The most memorable scene in Xavier Beauvois’s “Of Gods and Men,” a symbolic “Last Supper” during which a group of doomed monks sips wine and listens to “Swan Lake” as tears well in their eyes, is representative of the polarizing qualities of the movie. The painfully earnest tableau, as protracted as the numerous depictions of quotidian existence inside the monastery, will strike some as an audacious emotional crescendo and others as a laughable explosion of bathos. Filmmaker Beauvois clearly makes no apologies for his unsubtle approach, but “Of Gods and Men” could use a lighter touch, particularly when it comes to the weighty matter of exploring questions of good and evil.

A fictionalized account loosely based on the 1996 murder of seven Trappist monks from the monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria, “Of Gods and Men” focuses less on the historical details of the event – and its subsequent political controversy – than it does on the devoted daily chores and ministrations of the monks. Assuming a relentlessly one-sided point of view, Beauvois focuses entirely on the stubborn and dedicated constancy of the Catholic brotherhood without providing more than a tiny sliver of identification with the violent rebels (presumably meant to represent the Armed Islamic Group). Only a brief Christmas confrontation, during which the Muslim militiamen demand supplies from the monks and are refused, suggests reluctant mutual respect and understanding between the prior and the Islamist ringleader.

The Muslims in the film are nearly without exception divided into two categories: bloodthirsty, anti-government warmongers who terrorize the friars and socially moderate, impoverished villagers who rely on the Cistercians for medical care. Beauvois includes glimpses of representatives of the Algerian government, but the movie retreats from any civic or legislative lessons regarding the failures of French colonialism. Despite offers of protection, the monks refuse any help from the armed forces on religious grounds, revealing a conundrum that exposes the precariousness of their long-term presence in a violently contested Islamic realm.

Beauvois attempts to seed some internal conflict from the question of whether the monks will leave the monastery for the sake of personal safety, and at least two scenes are assigned to deliberations in which each padre speaks on behalf of either staying of going. In a film prone to interludes of windy sermonizing, the considered arguments and subsequent votes of the brotherhood momentarily furnish the viewer with tangible, human familiarity instead of impossible saintliness. Even though we know the decision and its outcome, the palpable fear of several of the monks intensifies the drama.

Lambert Wilson, as the leader of the monks, and Michael Lonsdale, as the monastery’s ailing medic, are the only two group members privileged with detailed individuation, although the wizened Amedee, played by Jacques Herlin, looks as though he stepped out of a Renaissance painting. The remaining members of the fraternity disappointingly blend together for much of the film, and some viewers will long for greater personalization. As a tale of martyrdom, “Of Gods and Men” won’t likely change many minds, no matter how one interprets Pascal’s thought (quoted in the film by Lonsdale’s Brother Luc) that “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious conviction.”