DIVINE INTERVENTION  **1/2
A deadpan comedy on Palestinian indignation and anger from Elia Suleiman, it resembles SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR except with less formal rigor and ingenuity and more liveliness.  Opening with a gift-packing Santa Claus chased to his doom to the ending with a pressure cooker, the symbolism (disdain for help from the Christian West and pent-up rage, respectively) is occasionally heavy-handed.  It has its funny moments (the kid with the soccer ball, the garbage dispute), but overall the hit-to-miss ratio of the jokes could be higher.  Scenes of a Palestinian ninja’s vengeance and an Israeli checkpoint guard flipping out become tiresome in their excess and the movie as a whole finally feels simply like a Suleiman overindulgence.

FRIDAY NIGHT  ***

LOVE AND DIANE  ***
The title plays on the word, Love, which is the name of Diane’s daughter.  Director Jennifer Dworkin followed Diane and Love for several years as they struggled to get by in New York City.  Diane’s own mother abandoned her children early in their lives, and when Diane became a crack addict, her children were also separated from her for many years.  When the documentary begins, Diane is 42, and Love, Diane’s middle child among five, is 17 and has just given birth to a little boy, Donyaeh.  History repeats itself as Diane had her first child (a son who later committed suicide) at age 16.   Now, Love, who suffers from suicidal tendencies and bouts of ferocious rage, has Donyaeh removed from her care by social workers.  The gist of the documentary follows Diane and Love’s deteriorating relationship and Love’s attempt to get her son back.  Despite covering familiar territory in the lives of the welfare poor, the film captures many poignant moments like the family’s ambivalent reliance on Christian faith for sustenance, Diane’s children making fun of her New Year’s resolutions, the quiet frustration of Love’s attorney when Love fails to go to therapy, and the pain of Donyaeh's foster mother when she has to give him up after a year of her care.  The difficulty of getting ahead – trying to find self discipline, dealing with minimal education, and finding a job (how many people, after all, will hire a former crack addict?) – is well documented.

THE MAGDALENE SISTERS  **1/2
Actor-director Peter Mullan’s controversial film about women oppressed by Catholic nuns starts off with a bravura opening introducing Margaret, her rape, and its aftermath solely with images and contrasting music.  But from there on out, the movie is just a variation of the grade-Z women-in-prison genre where the audience undergoes a sadomasochistic viewing experience as we watch the women get predictably and relentlessly tortured physically and psychologically.  The only reason the repetitiveness of all this does not get tiring is the absorbing performances by the female leads.  Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is the level-headed moral center, Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is the provocative firebrand, Rose (Dorothy Duffy) is the passive believer, and Crispina (Eileen Walsh) the dim bulb who keeps getting into trouble.  If Crispina is Private Pyle from FULL METAL JACKET, head nun Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) is Sergeant Hartman except her caricatured malevolence makes the drill sergeant look like Santa Claus.  The movie is emotionally powerful (Mullan gets a lot out of his use of close-ups), but it’s all piled on a bit thick and obvious.  The film gets at how maltreatment in turn causes callousness in the victim, but the movie unfortunately also gives that disposition to the audience, some of whom take all too much delight in the brief moments when the girls’ get some payback.  Getting bloodlust in your audience is a questionable achievement.

THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST  **1/2
Typical and average Kaurismäki about a man (Markku Peltola) who is mugged, beaten literally to death, but still makes a recovery albeit with a bout of amnesia.  He makes a place for himself in an eccentric (of course) community as he courts a Salvation Army worker (Kati Outinen), tries to turn a Salvation Army band who sings homilies into a rock group, adopts a “monstrous” dog, and gets involved in a bank robbery.  Kaurismäki may have beaten Tsai Ming-Liang to the deadpan absurdist comic style, but he lacks Tsai’s formalist rigor and ability to reach greater depths of humanity.  Here, Kaurismäki is mostly just cute.

MONDAY MORNING  *1/2
Glacially-paced, nearly non-narrative, unfunny comedy about a town of eccentrics and more specifically a welder/painter and his isolation.  Writer-director Otar Iosseliani pitches the tone at such a non-existent level, it’s like listening to Bach with the volume turned one notch above inaudible, except Iosseliani is not Bach.  Like the recent PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE, this film could be described as Tati-esque, but whereas P.T. Anderson’s film is stylistically over-the-top, this is below-the-bottom.  Only for those with a hefty love of minimalism.

MY MOTHER'S SMILE  ***
Sergio Castellitto is just as marvelous here as he was in VA SAVOIR, though the roles are very dissimilar.  He plays successful painter and atheist Ernesto Picciafuocco, who is surprised to find a movement to canonize his mother as a saint.  The film then delves into his struggles with his family’s crass and greedy utilitarian motives.  Castellitto shows an amazing rapport with young Alberto Mondini who plays his son (who finds God omnipresence oppressive) and Chiara Conti is delightful as a woman trying to seduce Ernesto (a chase through his studio is unexpectedly playful).  Writer-director Marco Bellocchio tries too hard to put moments of spirituality into the film and Riccardo Giagni’s music is on the annoying side, but MY MOTHER’S SMILE is the rare movie to give the atheist perspective on religious hypocrisy.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE  **  (opens theatrically October 11)

RUSSIAN ARK  *1/2  (opens theatrically in December)

THE SON  ***1/2  (opens in 2003)
As much as Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers specialize in working class movies.  Given their documentary background, theirs comes with a more cinema verite feel.  Here, they keep their usual handheld camera hovering intimately over their protagonist, dour hard-ass Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), a carpentry teacher who takes on a new student whom he knows killed his son some years ago.  The deliberate pace and gradual unfolding of narrative avoid any hint of maudlin melodrama, an easy pitfall given the subject matter.  Gourmet’s performance in unwavering and masterful and contrasts with roles typical for his face and body type (think middle-aged Ned Beatty).  The camera work, all medium shots to extreme close-ups, is initially annoying, but it slowly starts to pay off.  With all the movement within the frame, constant focus pulling would be fruitless, and so the Dardennes allow people and objects to spring in and out of focus with surprising effectiveness.

SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN  **
Tian Zhuangzhuang returns with his first feature since his censorship troubles with 1993’s THE BLUE KITE.  Tian plays it relatively safe with this uncontroversial remake of Fei Mu’s 1948 classic.  However, the tired love triangle melodrama (think Merchant and Ivory material) and the minimalist style (think Hou Hsiao-Hsien in FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI mode) do little for each other.  The Hou factor is enhanced by his usual cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bing, lensing the proceedings and bringing his usual high-contrast glow.   Indeed the movie looks gorgeous, but there is little emotion to go along with it.  The actors come across as overly theatrical rather than naturalistic, and the whole story goes nowhere fast.  Advice to new Chinese art film directors:  please find some style other than the distant long take?  Please?

TALK TO HER  ****  (opens theatrically November 22)

10  *1/2  (opens theatrically in Spring 2003)
Abbas Kiarostami’s movie is about ten conversations all held in a car between a female driver and various passengers on the other side; among them are her tantrum-throwing son, her sister, women coming or going from prayer, and a prostitute.  Unlike the similar TASTE OF CHERRY, it is every bit as boring as it sounds.  The conversations are utterly banal, sometimes pointing to the poor treatment of women in Iran (not exactly a revelation), sometimes about the driver’s family dynamic after her divorce (nothing a million movies haven’t dealt with before).  There are two camera angles, the movie is shot in blurry, ugly digital video, it occasionally goes out of focus, some shots occur at night when you can barely see anything, the background is often washed out so you can’t even escape the talk by appreciating the Iranian cityscape, there’s some trouble with the sound, and when the car stops, you’re stuck staring at a character waiting for the driver to come back.  You know, they could at least pick their nose or do something interesting aside from just sitting there.

TO BE AND TO HAVE  ***  (opens theatrically in 2003)
Nicolas Philibert’s look at the students of Saint-Etienne-sur-Usson and their soon-to-be-retired teacher, Georges Lopez, captures some perceptive moments in how a child’s mind works.  But Philibert also overly milks the children’s cuteness and naiveté, and occasionally his camera feels uncomfortably invasive in altering the dynamics of the teacher-child interaction.  Still, affecting in its simplicity, it is one of the most beautiful documentaries in recent times.  Gorgeous landscape shots of the school’s pastoral backdrop permeate the movie.  The movie and the school year ends on an extremely touching note.

TURNING GATE  ***
Korean auteur Hong Sang-Soo deliberates on the difficulties of social interaction as out-of-work actor Gyung-Soo (Kim Sang-Kyung) romances two beautiful women.  In the movie’s first section, he gets involved with Myung-Sook (Yeh Ji-Won), a dancer who is a neurotic when it comes to love.  It doesn’t help Gyung-Soo that the friend who introduces her to him is also attracted to her.  In the second section, Gyung-Soo meets the married Sunyoung (Chu Sang-Mi), who has trouble reading Gyung-Soo as to whether he wants a fling or something more.  Along with the surprisingly vivid sex scenes, Hong delivers some observant character interactions that get across their social awkwardness, but at other times, the effect feels labored.  The movie meanders a bit as if Hong doesn’t know exactly what effects he wants.

UNKNOWN PLEASURES  ***1/2  (opens theatrically in 2003)
Basically, this is like Jia Zhang Ke’s previous XIAO WU except with an ensemble instead of a single protagonist and with a superior control of tone.  Two young men and two young women, all between 18-20 years old, look for love and seek out a future, failing to find much of either in their small, desolate Chinese town.  While news events like Beijing getting to host the 2008 Olympics and the Fulan Gong crackdown feel utterly remote to the disengaged youth, they take glee from things American – a can of Coke, a dollar bill, the movie PULP FICTION.  The town’s gaudy entertainment aspires to and fails to emulate American pop culture, and that contrasts with the characters’ struggles to find an identity while preserving any remaining dignity.  Living in squalor causes insecurity which in turn results in false bravado, shown when one character does not even know how to turn on the water in a modern tub.   Jia vividly captures the textures of life and the emotions of the characters without the actors ever overacting or looking like they are acting at all, partly because Jia’s masterful use of space does their acting for them.  UNKNOWN PLEASURES is not a movie about what happens, but about what does it all mean.

THE TOP 10 SHORTS (as usual with the NYFF selections, quality drops quickly):

#1 The Projectionist (Michael Bates) ***1/2
#2 Exceed (Julian M. Kheel) ***
#3 Lifeline (Victor Erice) ***
#4 Two Hundred Dirhams (Laila Marrakchi) ***
#5 Hyper (Michael Canzoniero, Marco Ricci) **1/2
#6 Play With Me (Esther Rots) **1/2
#7 We Wuz Robbed (Spike Lee) **1/2
#8 Tick (Rebecca Hobbes) **1/2
#9 Lamb (Emma Freeman) **
#10 Don't Have, Don't Give (David Turner) **