Ben Wheatley first gained attention with a nine-second video clip that went viral in the pre-YouTube era. In “Cunning Stunt,” a man successfully jumps over a moving car, celebrates, and is instantly wiped out by an unseen oncoming vehicle. It’s a funny, jolting gag restaged in Wheatley’s 2009 feature debut Down Terrace (a sick-funny look at a homicidal low-tier-criminal family bumping off everyone in their immediate circle). Death by vehicular homicide again makes for the first death in his latest film Sightseers. Chris (Steve Oram) just wants to take his girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) on a relaxing rural trip through […]

Ron Morales’ nifty second feature Graceland centers on Marlon Villar (Arnold Reyes), driver to corrupt senator Manuel Chango (Menggie Cobarrubias). The senator’s a pedophile with a penchant for underage hookers; Marlon — struggling to raise funds for an organ transplant for his ill wife — turns a blind eye. The two men’s daughters are friends, but when Marlon’s child is mistaken for the senator’s during a kidnapping, he has to lie his way into making sure the senator puts up the ransom funds. Running around Manila at the child-snatchers’ behest, Marlon and Morales take in a broad swath of pungent […]

Founded in 1972, the Philadelphia-founded black liberation group MOVE Organization (the capitals break down into an acronym) preached a return to nature, annoying their neighbors by having bullhorns broadcast their beliefs all night and letting garbage fester in their yard. On May 13, 1985, Wilson Goode — the city’s first black mayor — approved dropping a bomb on their house as part of an eviction effort. 11 MOVE members died, including 5 children, and destroyed 61 houses. Jason Osder’s documentary feature debut Let The Fire Burn resurrects the incident almost exclusively through archival footage of TV broadcasts, home movies and […]

Banker White’s first feature, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, followed the titular group of musicians from a refugee camp in Guinea to their home and back again; his second feature, The Genius of Marian, is much closer to home. After his mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, White came back home to help with caretaking. In 2009 he began shooting conversations with his mother for therapeutic purposes, eventually realizing he was working on his next project. Shot over three years, the resulting film was co-directed by White’s wife (then-girlfriend) Anna Fitch. Arriving in New York in advance of the […]

Many musicians have dabbled with movies, but few have stuck it out and become as well known separately for their film work as director/d.p./editor Quentin Dupieux. Formerly best known as electronica artist Mr. Oizo, Dupieux began making short films at age 15. His first two features — 2002’s Nonfilm and Steak — didn’t attract attention outside of France, but 2010’s Rubber introduced him to a wider audience. The film follows killer tire Robert’s deadly road trip across California, beginning with a direct-to-the-audience monologue from actor Stephen Spinella explaining Dupieux’s philosophy of narrative and his bizarre sense of humor. “In the […]

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Touba was seven years in the making: five of shooting, two of post-production. It grew out of her second documentary — 2008’s Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love — which followed the legendary Senegalese musician before and after 2004’s Egypt album, whose religious themes raised the ire of the country’s religious argument. Her newest film began life on vibrantly grainy 16mm, following an annual Senegal trek undertaken by hundreds to the city of Touba to visit the home of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Brotherhood. Like her last film, Vasarhelyi’s newest focuses on Islam […]

Bryan Poyser has been a fixture of Austin’s film scene for a decade, even as it’s remained in flux. As a director, he made his feature debut with 2004’s Dear Pillow, in which a teen struggling with sex gets mentored by a fiftysomething ex-porn director. 2010’s follow-up Lovers Of Hate (half shot in Austin) was a perversely comic sexual rondelay in which a demented ex skulks in the mansion where his former partner and her new lover are taking a vacation, spying on both while trying to keep his presence a secret. Poyser’s third feature, The Bounceback, is his first […]

Making its North American premiere at True/False, Eliane Raheb’s Sleepless Nights is ostensibly about the Lebanese Civil War’s fallout. The opening title cards recap the conflict’s history in a bewilderingly quick synopsis, and if you’re not already informed on the subject (I went in shamefully ignorant), it’ll take a while to get your bearings. The principal subjects are Assaad Shaftari, a former Christian militia senior intelligence official, credited with approving some 500 deaths; and Maryam Saiidi, whose son vanished following one skirmish — the “battle of the science building” — out of a long, complicated history (the War lasted 15 […]

Banner news first: two days into the 10th annual True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s immensely likable documentary/hybrid-friendly showcase, the marquee title of the six films I’ve seen so far from the slate (three of which I saw before arriving) is Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s These Birds Walk. The starting point is Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani humanitarian and founder of a number of shelters, rehab centers and other faculties for the dispossessed. As he washes naked runaway children, some pitifully scrawny, he says his philanthropic reputation and prominence mean nothing; to understand his work you have to understand common […]