Films rated on a 4-star scale: **** (A+), *** 3/4 (A), *** 1/2 (A-), *** 1/4 (B+), *** (B), ** 3/4 (B-), ** 1/2 (C+), ** 1/4 ( C), ** (C-) , * 3/4 (D+), * 1/2 (D), * 1/4 (D-), * (F), W/O=walk-out

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Unless they've changed the titles (which happens), I've watched 22 feature films that are playing at SIFF this year.

THE KINGS OF SUMMER (d. Jordan Vogt-Roberts)
Three misfit teenage boys run away from varied family problems by escaping into the local woods and attempting to go feral.  That's the set-up for this wonderfully lively and inventive coming-of-age story that is in turns funny, poignant and insightful.  There's also a little wish-fulfillment fantasy going on, particularly about their competence in building a structure and escaping the authorities for so long.  But I was willing to suspend disbelief since the actors were so on-point and the innovative director kept surprising us with amusing  montages (one that made effective use of slo-mo simply blew me away.)  *** 1/2

PUTZEL  (d. Jason Chaet)
In this indie comedy, Walter (nicknamed Putzel since he's something of a schlemiel) is the grandson of the founder of a famous lox emporium on New York's West Side.  He wants to take over the store from his uncle; but he's sort of inept and neurotic.  The film is a farce about his bumbling through life, and really isn't worth the effort of describing the mechanics of the plot.  It's reasonably well acted; but the film is tedious and not inventive enough in its situations to merit attention. * 3/4

STUCK IN LOVE  (d. Josh Boone)
First time writer/director Josh Boone has struck gold with this well crafted romantic drama about a family of compulsive writers. It's a smart film about smart people with a strong cast and three compelling love stories which parallel each other and avoid clichés. This is territory that Noah Baumbach has mined successfully in such family dramas as The Squid and the Whale; and director Boone is an equal talent to watch develop and hopefully blossom.  *** 1/2

OUR CHILDREN (À perdre la raison)  (d. Joachim Lafosse, Belgium)
A Belgian-Moroccan man marries a French-Belgian woman.  An elderly Belgian doctor (played by War Horse and A Prophet veteran actor Niels Arestrup) has befriended the Moroccan family and helps with immigration and employment.  Over time, the couple has four children; but the marriage is strained by extrinsic troubles.  This based-on-a-true-story film goes about as far as it can into the psyche of a disturbed woman (Émilie Dequenne).  It is a well done drama, grasping to understand the psychology of its characters, but for me only partially succeeding.  Such a depressing film.   ***

CHILDREN OF SARAJEVO (d. Aida Begic, Bosnia & Herzegovina)
A young woman takes over the care of her orphaned teenage brother.  She struggles to make ends meet as a cook, while also dealing with her conversion to practicing Islam and the problems which arise when her brother gets into serious trouble.  This is a rather rambling film which doesn't really have a point other than to illustrate the lifestyle of its characters.  It's well shot and well acted; but I couldn't find a reason to care. **

LAURENCE ANYWAYS  (d. Xavier Dolan)
Laurence is a young college professor who one day in the late 1980s announces to his girlfriend that he's never been comfortable as a female in a man's body.  That is the start of this excitingly directed and acted 164 minute examination of  the 10-year progression of a relationship where gender assignment is just one aspect of the story.  23-year old Dolan's third film continues his progression as Wunderkind auteur.  His frenetic hand-held camera and remarkable control over all aspects of filmmaking (script, editing, costumes, music all carry his personal stamp) remain his signature virtues.  But this time he chose to not act in his film, instead using the remarkable actor Melvil Poupaud as his transgendered avatar.  Poupaud is fabulous...one of the few times that a totally masculine man has tried this sort of role, and he nails it in every aspect.  He is matched by the equally remarkable Suzanne Clément as the girlfriend who struggles to accept her fated lover's transformation.  Nobody will ever accuse Dolan of timidity in his concepts and execution.  The film constantly seems on the verge of exploding into excess...and then pulls back just enough.  I wouldn't call this film a total success, some flights of fantasy scenes didn't work for me; but there is no other filmmaker in the world who is pushing the boundaries of film the way that Dolan is.  *** 1/4

UNA NOCHE (d. Lucy Mulloy)
A trio of Cuban teenagers, boy and girl twins and their sexy male friend embark on an attempt to escape to Florida on a makeshift inner-tube raft.  That's the bare bones description of an involving film which gets into the mind-set of the teenage protagonists and gives one of the best depictions of modern day Havana I've ever seen.  *** 1/4

IN THE SHADOW (Ve stínu) (d. David Ondncek, Czech Republic)
The time is 1953 and a police captain (Ivan Trojan, an actor of particularly stolid and dignified mien) faces a tough case of robbery & murder while the Communist government is contemplating monetary reform which would wipe out the value of currency.  He discovers sinister forces and an anti-Semitic conspiracy at the highest level. The film is shot in a washed-out color palette which brings the dismal post-war era to life.  This is a fine example of policier noir...with the added suspense of a cop in danger as he comes in conflict with the dreaded state security apparatus.  *** 1/4

A HIJACKING (d. Tobias Lindholm)
The eponymous hijacking, refers to a Danish freighter sailing in the Indian ocean which is boarded (off camera) by a rag-tag group of Somali pirates.  The film centers on the plight of the ship's cook, sympathetic husband and father.  But it also concentrates on the steely CEO of the company, who is in charge of dealing with the pirates and is accustomed to financial dickering that doesn't involve lives.  This is one high-tension film, which skillfully plays out a typical kidnapping situation and keeps the audience in suspense while also accurately transmitting the feelings of terror and frustration that the characters experienced.   Somali pirate hijackings are a fact which makes news; and this film, shot semi-documentary style, has a ring of authenticity (even though there was no particular title saying it was based on an actual true event.) *** 1/2

THE HUNT (d. Thomas Vinterberg)
Mads Mikkelsen is quietly convincing playing a 40-something elementary school teacher who is accused by his best friend's 6-year old daughter of inappropriate sexual behavior.  The film should really have been called The Witchhunt, since it illustrated the same sort of public hysteria that occurred in the infamous McMartin preschool abuse case here in Los Angeles.  The screenplay is especially realistic and empathetic depicting the various characters' dilemmas, especially the young child actress who is at the center of the controversy.  *** 1/2

MARIE KROYER (Bille August)
Sometimes a film can both be a fascinating story and a true revelation of something one never knew, but ought to have.  P. S. Kroyer was a Danish impressionist painter.  I pretend to know a bit about art history; but I had never heard of him.  Turns out his work so appeals to me that I will one day travel to Denmark just to see his paintings for myself.  But I digress.  Coincidentally, like the previously seen at this festival Renoir, this is the story of a painter in old age, one who had frequent bouts of madness.  Or, more to the point, of his wife, Marie, great beauty and a painter in her own right...and the troubles she had as a woman and mother with few legal rights who embarks on an affair with a composer ten years her junior.  Bille August is a director who pours everything into glorious images which accurately re-create the past, in this case the 1900's in Skagan, a seaside artists colony.  His cast is ideal, the script shockingly psychologically insightful to modern sensibility.  The only flaw is that the film is so narrowly centered on one small part of a larger continuum of fascinating lives...I was left wanting to know more, couldn't wait to Google everything about Kroyer, Marie and her lover Hugo Alfven, also famous but unknown to me prior to this film.  One can't ask much more of a historical romantic drama.  *** 1/2

IN THE FOG (d. Sergei Loznitsa)
This is a moral fable which took place in the realistic setting behind German lines in 1942 Belarus.  Shushenya was a railroad worker whose fellow workers committed an act of sabotage against the Germans.  They were hanged; and he was mysteriously set free.  But freedom led to Shushenya's being shunned by his neighbors as an outcast and collaborator.  The film wanders with Shushenya and two other Russian resistance fighters through the forests as their back stories were gradually told.  This isn't an easy film to watch, it's shot at a maddeningly leisurely pace and has very sparse explanatory dialogue.  But the issues it raises in the minds of the audience are profound.  As I left the theater, many people were grumbling about "worst movie ever" etc.  But one has to admire the audacious, formalized screenplay and how well the actors played their roles.  ***

TWO LIVES  (d. Georg Maas) 
This is a complex story of a Norwegian family of four generations.  Great-grandmother (Liv Ulmann) had a child by a Nazi soldier in the 1940s; and the child was forcefully taken to Germany to be raised as an Aryan...one of the famed Lebensborn experiment children.  These children were raised in orphanages in East Germany; and eventually, the girl was repatriated with her mother in the 1970s.  She then married, had a daughter and finally a granddaughter.  Or was it all an invention of the East German Stasi to infiltrate a spy into Norway?  The film takes place just after the Wall fell in 1990; and involves an investigation into the German liability for war crimes involving the Lebensborn.  What ensues is a gripping family story combined with a spy thriller.  It is adapted from a novel, not really based on an individual story, only conjecture.  The script maybe depends too much on coincidence; but this is another fascinating view of an entirely novel facet of the horrors of WWII, and the perfidy of the post-war East German apparatus.  *** 1/4

JUST THE WIND (d. Benedek Fliegauf, Hungary)
Based on true events in 2009, this is the fictional story of a day in the life of a Romany family in a rural Hungarian village where vigilante home invaders are systematically murdering whole Gypsy families.  The film intercuts scenes of the mother, her two children and the grandfather through their quotidian lives, much of it without dialog with long tracking shots of family members just walking around.  The film plays like an unfocused Dardennes Bros. film, building tension by the slow accumulation of detail.  It's not exactly boring, at least for this viewer...mostly because it's so realistically achieved, like an impressionistic documentary, and beautifully photographed.  Still, it's a slog to get through.  ** 3/4

DEEP, THE (d. Baltasar Kormákur, Iceland)
A fishing boat in freezing waters off of Iceland capsizes when a net snags.  What ensues is an epic of human endurance based on true events...and the most intriguing film about surviving a sinking boat since, well, Life of Pi.  Portly Ólafur Darri Ólafsson was born to play Gulli, one of the seafarers who set out that fateful morning.   This is an amazing true story, extremely well told.  *** 1/2

KEY OF LIFE (d. Kenji Uchida)
This is a comedy about a amnesiac hit-man and the slacker who assumes his identity by a series of mischances.  It's very Japanese in the way its characters interact.  The script has many twists and turns, most of them novel and unexpected.  It's an entertaining trifle, ultimately satisfying but empty calories. ** 1/2

AFTER LUCIA (d. Michel Franco, Mexico)
A teenage girl and her father, newly resettled in Mexico City after a tragedy, are the subject of this disturbing film.  He's a chef at a new restaurant, she's a new student at an upscale high school.  What follows is a tale of grieving and bullying.  The teen story is especially difficult to watch: the out-of-control and unsupervised kids are portrayed with vicious realism and unsentimentality.  This is no Heathers, it's very much more serious stuff, with the boys and girls equally involved in the bullying and ostracism.  I was reminded of Michael Haneke's filmmaking style in such films as Funny Games...banal evil disguised as the ordinary.  And like Haneke, going too far is the entire point even as the film challenges the audience to watch.  *** 1/2

WHEN I SAW YOU (d. Annemarie Jacir, Palestinian territories)
Tarek is an 11-year old Palestinian boy, who has been uprooted from his home along with his mother (his father is missing) and sent to a temporary refugee camp in Jorden during the 1967 Six-Day War.  As played by Mahmoud Asfa, he's cute and energetic, and totally naive about the geopolitical situation.  He runs away from the camp, and somehow gets involved with a bunch of freedom fighters/terrorists, depending on one's point of view.  The film really isn't about politics (except for some random Marxism on the part of the fedayeen leader).  It's more a boy's adventure story, and almost manages to overcome its cliched concept.  ** 3/4

PIETA (d. Kim Ki-duk, South Korea)
Kim's 18th film (prominently and amusingly noted in the opening credits) is a weird psychological drama involving a sadistic loan shark, thwarted maternal love, and an unlikely revenge scenario.  The film focuses on the pathological psychology of characters out-of-control.  The story has some awkward holes in narrative logic; but it never fails to impart stunning, if constantly disturbing, imagery.  It's hard to love a film where the acting goes so over the top and the whole thing is a complicated metaphor the nature of which is never clear (at least to me, although the very title brings a Mary/baby Jesus connection to the fore).  Slick, and sick, and never boring...this is decidedly not a film for the squeamish.  ***

THE LAST SENTENCE (d. Jan Troell)
Torgny Segerstedt was a former Christian theology professor turned newspaper editor for a major Swedish daily.  Along with Maja and Axel Forssman (Jewish owners of the paper), Segerstedt was from the early 1930's and throughout the WWII, an enemy of Hitler whose outspoken anti-Nazi editorials were an important part of setting Swedish opinion.  This film is a beautifully achieved re-creation of the times, shot in stark black & white which melds seamlessly into newsreel footage of the rise of the Nazis and the war.  It is also a rather shocking story of Segerstedt's torrid affair with Maja, the wife of his boss:  a strange menage à trois fully acknowledged by all the parties involved.   Jesper Christensen plays the real-life Segerstedt with an almost Biblical patriarchal mien, elderly but strong and outspoken.  This was an impressive film, long and complex.  It was intellectually stimulating in that austere Nordic way, rather than the kind of film which emotionally involved me.  *** 1/4

GOLTZIUS AND THE PELICAN COMPANY (d. Peter Greenaway)
I can't even discuss this film rationally, since I didn't understand it.  It's supposed to be about a troupe of actors who appear at the court of the Margrave of Alsace in the 1500s, and perform a series of six Biblical tableaux illustrating sins of the flesh.  As with all Greenaway films, it is visually ravishing...even more so than usual.  And there's no lack of frontal nudity, that's for damn sure.  But it all seemed even more over-the-top than Greenaway's usual fare.  Even the presence of F. Murray Abraham as the Margrave, didn't spare me from feeling that this was a spectacular waste of time.  **

ZAYTOUN  (d. Eran Riklis)
Stephen Dorff has never been more sympathetic and magnetic as he is here, playing an Israeli fighter pilot whose plane goes down over strife-torn Lebanon in 1982.  He's captured by PLO extremists; and with the grudging aid of a Palestinian youth (gap-toothed charmer Abdallah El Akal) manages to escape his captors only to find both protagonists in even greater danger.  The film is a charming, suspenseful road trip through war-torn Lebanon.  Riklis is an Israeli director who makes films sensitive to the Palestinian cause.  This film is particularly positive about the possibility of reconciliation between opponents.  I liked everything about this film.  *** 1/2

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