AFI FEST Los Angeles International Film Festival 2009

This taut, involving drama, centered around the mysterious disappearance of a young woman, confirms director Asghar Farhadi as a major talent, with an unrivaled ability to chronicle the malaise of middle-class Iranian society. Working in a highly controlled film industry that has progressively shut down the most innovative directors over the past three years, Farhadi has miraculously sidestepped the censors in earlier work like FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY. In his new film, a joyful party of friends—three married couples with kids plus the newly divorced Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) and young kindergarten teacher Elly (Taraneh Alidousti)—drive to the Caspian Sea for a three-day holiday. The plan, masterminded by Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), is to introduce Elly to Ahmad, who’s looking for a new wife. Sepideh tells the elderly lady who rents them a big beach house the first lie: that Ahmad and Elly are newlyweds. Given Iranian social conventions, this is understandable, but it begins a chain that will have dire consequences. –Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter

When are the dead in fact dead? In its pleasure at simultaneously embracing and sending up horror genre conventions, AFTER.LIFE suggests that the line between the living and the dead is thin indeed. Christina Ricci and Justin Long (fast earning a reputation as the busiest man in American movies) play a sophisticated couple on the emotional razor’s edge: Paul wants to tie the knot, while Anna is hardly ready for the leap. What neither count on is the sudden presence in their lives of Liam Neeson’s undertaker, Eliot, who claims to have a gift of talking with the dead. The truth of the matter is something that first-time feature director Agnieska Wojtowicz-Vosloo—fresh off her acclaimed short, PATE—enjoys toying with. But the most fun is watching Neeson discovering fresh variations on a ghoulish role of the kind that was once the province of Vincent Price. –Robert Koehler

It is difficult to find metaphors that capture the complex essence of the greater Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or of Israel’s internal Jewish-Arab clash. The impasse seems existential in nature. This is why, of the many films about the situation, Scandar Copti’s and Yaron Shani’s AJAMI is so remarkable. This muscular, intensely realistic depiction of urban battles on the streets of Ajami, a city marbled with cultural and religious divisions, echoes the larger regional tensions. The story follows a moment of bloodletting that sends ripples through a rainbow of characters, and the film marks a notable development in Israeli cinema, with documentary and fiction meshing (co-directors Copti (a Palestinian) and Shani (an Israeli) cast from a pool of local amateurs). Their dizzying, time-shifting narrative creates a destabilizing atmosphere that’s both literary and somehow precisely apt for a world of sustained, macho-fueled chaos. –Robert Koehler

Immersing the viewer in magnificent Swedish landscapes, this sober and meditative film reveals the beauty of nature and the beings that co-exist in harmony there: a Rousseauesque vision of a relationship between a human being and her environment. Ulla, the central character, relates in voiceover how it will be when it snows, but her expectations are disturbed with the arrival of a hunter, whose flashily colored clothing is out of place amidst the island’s greens and browns. Shot with a minimal crew, CalArts graduate C. W. Winter’s and photographer Anders Edström’s first fiction feature unobtrusively combines silence and the sounds of nature in contemplative sequences, sometimes adding snatches of songs about local folklore. Ultimately, the film—winner of Locarno’s Golden Leopard for Filmmaker of the Present—serves as an ode to a woman whose strength and grace are in perfect harmony with nature. –Locarno Film Festival

What is art’s relationship to the public at large, and who decides who gets to see it? Rarely has the City of Brotherly Love seemed so rancorous as in Don Argott’s fascinating, thoroughly researched documentary on the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. The foundation, established by Dr. Albert Barnes in 1922, boasts one of the world’s largest collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modern paintings—works that Barnes wished to make accessible to serious students and everyday people. But since his death in 1951, lawyers, elected officials, and businesspeople have sought to exploit the Foundation, ignoring the express wishes of Barnes never to turn his collection into an enormous tourist attraction—and never to move it to Philadelphia, a city he despised. THE ART OF THE STEAL is filled with intrigue, conflicting reports, enormous egos, and provocative questions about money, culture and art. –New York Film Festival

After RESCUE DAWN, Werner Herzog returns to American genre cinema, this time taking on the mythic, audience-friendly framework of the gritty urban cop film. Working from William Finkelstein’s tightly compelling script, Herzog sets the plot in New Orleans, which allows for a few surreal Herzogian touches—decaying buildings, men communing with alligators. But this dark, shockingly funny drama keeps the focus on the title character, Detective McDonough, who scarfs down narcotics to cope with his back pain—making bets his body can’t cover—while neck-deep in a murder investigation. Nicolas Cage, in one of his strongest performances, invests McDonough with urgency and compassion, and gets terrific support by Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Vondee Curtis-Hall and Brad Dourif. Having positioned himself, in deed and word, as the ultimate Hollywood outsider, Herzog suddenly earns comparison with masters including Don Siegel, Nicholas Ray and Sidney Lumet. –Larry Gross

Far more fascinating than any entomology lesson, American filmmaker Jessica Oreck’s debut captures the essence of a centuries-old Japanese subculture that has an acute enthusiasm for insects. Her unconventional approach to science education is never dull, unearthing a surprising national love affair with bugs. Oreck sets her documentary to the rhythm of traditional Japanese culture, with its attention to detail, appreciation of harmony and search for revelation in what to others might seem mundane. The philosophies of revered author and anatomist Dr. Takeshi Yoro’s are woven in, too, as the viewer is encouraged, as Oreck tell us, to “observe the world from an uncommon perspective on nature, beauty, that will shift the familiar to the fantastic. It just might change not only the way we think about bugs, but the way we think about life.” –Stacey Marbrey

Inspired by novelist Georges Simenon’s beloved Jules Maigret character, master French New Wave director Claude Chabrol has his first collaboration with Gérard Depardieu. In the film, police investigator Bellamy (Depardieu, in one of his finest roles) is on holiday with his loving wife Francoise (Marie Bunel), who may or may not have stumbled onto a murder mystery case. The reluctant yet curious Bellamy can’t resist investigating Noel Gentil (Jacques Gamblin), who claims to have “sort of” killed a man for an insurance scam, just as he can’t help but be infuriated by the sudden arrival of his alcoholic, gambling mess of a half-brother, Jacques (Clovis Cornillac). As usual, Chabrol is less interested in the whodunit as in exploring his characters’ hypocrisies and motivations, and—as a W.H. Auden poem at the end of the film reminds us—appearances that deceive. Though posing as a crime thriller, Chabrol’s film is actually a sharp-witted study of unresolved familial jealousy and anger. –Rose Kuo

“Bad books are bad, bad food is bad, but bad movies… aren’t always bad.” So says one of the fans of TROLL 2, a film adored by devotees as the worst film ever made. In BEST WORST MOVIE, director Michael Paul Stephenson investigates the improbable rise of a critically panned horror flick of the early ’90s to a pop-culture touchstone. Stephenson, who starred in TROLL 2 nearly 20 years ago, chooses to focus on his on-screen father, the amicable George Hardy, as he comes to terms with his strange, newly found celebrity and the crushing demands of being a cult icon. Equal parts side-splitting and heartbreaking, this is more than a movie about a movie; it’s a film about that powerful bond forged between cinema—even bad cinema—and the people who love it. –Matt Bolish