RETRO ACTIVE: The Naked Prey (1966)

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Joe Carnahan's Liam Neeson-vs.-wolf actioner The Grey, this week it's Cornel Wilde's seminal 1966 stranded-man saga The Naked Prey.

No tears, no pity, no mercy—Cornel Wilde imagines a world of desperate violence and frenzied anxiety in The Naked Prey, in the process not simply inventing the “man in the wilderness” cinematic subgenre but, more powerfully, delivering an enduringly caustic vision of life as hard, inflexible, and painful. Working from an apparent true story, director/star Wilde—the dashing leading man who, beginning with this film, became an auteur of idiosyncratic masculine fables—does away with all but the bare necessities for his tale about a safari guide known only as Man (Wilde) leading an arrogant, boozy fat cat (Patrick Mynhardt) through Africa. Encountering a local tribe, Man's employer refuses to pay the minor levy that the locals demand for passage through their land, a mistake which leads to the white interlopers' capture at the hands of a cheetah pelt-adorned chieftain, who in a prolonged sequence tortures his captors and their African employees. Wilde shoots this episode with stunningly stark, nonjudgmental brutality that immediately conveys his work's unsympathetic worldview—images of an African caked in mud and then roasted on a spit, of Mynhardt's European tied belly-down to the ground in front of a cobra slithering about a circle of fire, and of another man chased and stabbed to death by a mob of screaming, cheering women all express the filmmaker's blistering opinion of the wild as a kill-or-be-killed battleground.

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FILM OF THE WEEK: Come Back, Africa

Come Back, Africa's primary intent is explicitly polemical: to depict apartheid in action and show the world what it was condoning through inaction. After premiering at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, director Lionel Rogosin couldn't find a distributor and opened his own theater in New York* in 1960. By the time the film opened there, the Sharpeville massacre—in which South African police opened fire on a crowd and killed 69 Africans—had taken place, so his message came through amplified.

When evaluating revivals of socially important documents, a standard critical fallback is "flawed but powerful," a grudging assessment inadvertently implying worthy intentions trump bad filmmaking; such caveats don't help anyone and wouldn't get at what makes Come Back, Africa interesting. A few years ago, Film Forum's revival of Rogosin's 1954 On the Bowery unexpectedly drew sell-out crowds eager to soak up his non-judgmental, flavorful portrait of the long-gone bars and bums of Bowery St.; the film's easy flow—everyday homeless tragedy between binge-drinking—is comparatively relaxed alongside Africa's urgency. The opening shots show Johannesburg as a human-free monstrous metropolis: the script specifies "steel girders of new construction indirectly suggesting a crucifixion." The soundtrack is full of shrill whistles and pounding of doors, sounds of work and police persecution that are ambient constants for South Africa's black labor force.

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INTERVIEW: Gerardo Naranjo

With his bold visual style and intimate, if volatile, narratives, Gerardo Naranjo has been one of the most exciting independent directors to emerge from Mexico in the decade after filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón put the nation's cinema back on the international radar. While Naranjo, 40, always seemed keenly appreciative of the Godardian dictum, "All you need for a film is a gun and a girl," the phrase has never been more appropriate than for his new movie, Miss Bala. The narcotics thriller jacks up the stakes with pyrotechnics and gun battles in the real-life story of a would-be beauty queen (the sensational Stephanie Sigman) who becomes the pawn of a drug gang. The director shared his thoughts about this dramatic leap in a chat during the 2011 New York Film Festival, where Miss Bala had its American premiere.

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RETRO ACTIVE: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971)

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the latest beast-vs.-bloodsucker saga Underworld: Awakening, this week it's León Klimovsky's Spanish monster-mash-up The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman.

Largely unknown stateside except in die-hard horror circles, Paul Naschy was for decades the undisputed maestro of Spanish horror cinema, and few of his many monstrous efforts were ever quite as memorable—or as financially successful—as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, aka Werewolf Shadow, one of the leading man's dozen films in which he assumed the role of lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. A dashing stud tormented by his beastly curse, Daninsky finds himself forced to face off against an evil bloodsucker in León Klimovsky's rollicking B-movie, which—after an intro in which two doctors debate the possibility of Daninsky being a werewolf, while his silver bullet-riddled corpse lies on a stone slab—places its initial focus on fetching blonde Elvira (Gaby Fuchs). With friend Genevieve (Bárbara Capell) by her side, Elvira travels to the French countryside in search of the tomb of Countess Wandesa (Patty Shepard), a vampiric witch killed during the Inquisition about whom Elvira plans to write an article. That journalistic motivation, however, is as quickly disregarded as is any trace of logic or coherence, beginning with her friend Marcel (Andrés Resino) randomly remarking about a forthcoming trip to Istanbul, "I've seen so many James Bond pictures, by now I know all the tricks."

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DVD OF THE WEEK: The Ides of March

Beau Willimon's play Farragut North was completed in 2004, drawing from anecdotal dirt overheard working for the abortive campaign of brief Democratic great white hope Howard Dean. No theater bit until 2008, when a momentarily less apathetic liberal electorate ate it up. In co-writer and director George Clooney's version—now portentously titled The Ides of March—candidate Mike Morris (Clooney) has his face displayed on a Obama-modeled Shepherd Fairey backdrop, but the film isn't really plugged into the current moment so much as a recurring character in Democratic politics; Morris' strength is his uncompromising, articulate liberalism, his weakness a compromised personal life.

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INTERVIEW: Joe Berlinger

Rarely has a documentary made such an impact on its subject as the series of Paradise Lost films, tracking the long and strange saga of the West Memphis Three. Over the last two decades, filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have become part of the case, which began in 1993 with the shocking and mystifying murders of three eight-year-old Cub Scouts in West Memphis, Arkansas. Amid allegations of devil worship and a highly dubious confession leaked to the press, three high school boys—Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin—were convicted, despite no physical evidence that linked them to the crime. On Aug. 19 last year, Echols—who had been on death row—and the other two men, now in their mid-30s, were freed after entering so-called Alford pleas, a mixed bag that allowed them to profess their innocence while pleading guilty. The deal came four months before a hearing to consider new DNA findings that were expected to force a new trial.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which is airing now on HBO, details the astoundingly tangled legal, political and human drama behind the 18 year saga of the WM3, in which the filmmakers found themselves intricately involved. Berlinger, who also has won acclaim for projects like the Metallica meltdown doc Some Kind of Monster and taken on the American oil industry in Crude, talked about the documentaries' role in the case and how it changed both the filmmakers and the community that was its focus.

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RETRO ACTIVE: Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Lynne Ramsay's creepy-kid drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, this week it's Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's cult classic Who Can Kill a Child?

Violence is a dangerous inheritance in Who Can Kill a Child?, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's haunting 1976 horror story about childhood malice and adults' compromised response to it. Based on Juan José Plans' novel, and spiritually emulated a year later by Stephen King's Children of the Corn, Serrador's film opens with a grim newsreel-montage credit sequence of atrocities from WWII, the India-Pakistan and Nigerian civil wars, and Korea and Vietnam, with a narrator and onscreen text taking great pains to lay out the hundreds of thousands of kid casualties in each conflict. That downbeat intro provides underlined thematic context for the ensuing story, which turns to happily married English couple Tom (Lewis Flander) and pregnant Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), who, on vacation in Spain without their two children, decide to visit the remote island of Almanzora where Tom had once travelled 12 years earlier. Tom and Evelyn are outsiders—Evelyn cornily keeps asking Tom to define Spanish words like "piñata" and "gracias"—but, more to the point, they're adults, and their early discussion of a La Dolce Vita character's belief in killing children to spare them from their parents' mistakes not so subtly foreshadows the ethical dilemma they'll soon face.

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DVD OF THE WEEK: Night and Day

Hong Sang-soo's films riff off of and build upon each other, which makes it unfortunate that 2008's Night and Day is one of only four Hong films to see an American DVD release. A key shift took place in 2005's A Tale of Cinema, which introduced voiceover and zoom lenses to his work, elements which he's wielded with increasing aggression since. Before 2005, it's safe to generalize that his films dealt in semi-tragic depictions of men callously taking sexual advantage of women without much agency or say in the matter. 2006's Woman on the Beach ends with said female pushing her stalled car over the sand (a physical, non-precious metaphor for Doing It Herself), and subsequent films have been bolder at both reusing the same basic plot ingredients—a confused film director, a love triangle/quadrangle, no real resolution, overlapping cast members—and giving women the final say. The tone's veered closer to overt comedy in recent years, and Night and Day's meandering 146 minutes are shaggy-dog humor, defusing potentially painful situations and playing them for counter-intuitively genial laughs.

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Occupy This!

One thing documentary filmmakers have to be good at is knowing to jump when a story's hot. Occupy Wall Street bubbled under the radar for a while before it became a media lighting rod. On Oct. 1 last year, Audrey Ewell was hanging out at home in Brooklyn, working on her current film project, with the laptop streaming a live video of the march onto the Brooklyn Bridge that became the first flashpoint in the movement. "Arrests were happening and people were chanting and a giant scene was going on," she recalls, "and the guy who was filming it said his batteries were running out and all of a sudden the screen cut out. At this point I was completely addicted. I switched on the news and there was nothing happening. A black out."

Ewell's last film, the 2008 documentary Until the Light Takes Us [listen to our podcast], delved into the Norwegian black metal scene. The Occupy movement was a vastly different cultural eruption, and the filmmaker was far from alone in her compulsion to get as much of committed to video as she could. Within a few days, Ewell had organized a network of shooters across the country that now includes more than 75 participants, all capturing footage at various Occupy Wall Street actions around the country. Tonight, Ewell and co-producer Aaron Aites and Williams Cole will host a sneak preview of submitted footage via the online exhibitor Constellation with the modest $3.99 viewing fee going towards the group's already successful Kickstarter campaign.

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RETRO ACTIVE: The Antichrist (1974)

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the demonic-possession horror film The Devil Inside, this week it's Alberto De Martino's 1974 Italian Exorcist rip-off The Antichrist.

Part of the wave of cheap copycats that flooded international cinemas in the wake of William Friedkin's 1973 classic The Exorcist, Alberto De Martino's The Antichrist (a/k/a L'anticristo, though released domestically in 1974 under the lamer moniker The Tempter) makes no bones about its plagiaristic inclinations. Yet before it can get to its eventual derivative mayhem, this overheated Italian B-movie first feels compelled to spend an inordinate amount of time spinning its supernatural wheels. Paralyzed from the waist down by a childhood car accident that took her mother and was caused by her father not properly watching the road (look out for that dog!), Ippolita (Carla Gravina) goes to visit a Virgin Mary statue where the masses seek healing—a site where one crazy bugger goes insane and, fleeing outside into the rain, deliberately plummets to his death in one of director De Martino's many amusingly goofy rear-projection effects shots. Back at home, Ippolita expresses fury at her father Massimo (Mel Ferrer) for planning to marry Greta (Anita Strindberg), less because Greta will replace her mother than because Ippolita herself seems to have a not-so-subtle oedipal longing for dear old daddy. Aside from being angry, Ippolita doesn't believe in God, a problem that greatly concerns her uncle Bishop Ascanio (Arthur Kennedy), given that apparently "sexed-up devil worshipers are springing up everywhere" to prey on non-believers.

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FILM OF THE WEEK: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Time's up, cinema aesthetes. Ring out the old, ring in the new. Stop looking at those 10 best lists and get on with your lives. The calendar has flipped over into 2012 and... I've already got a new #1. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which opens today in New York, will have plenty of competition throughout the coming year. Guaranteed, though, you will see very few films as masterfully designed and executed, or so heavy with thought that the extended silences that suspend the characters in time and space make even the most seemingly mundane interludes of dialogue (and there's a ton of dialogue by Ceylan's minimalist standard) feel loaded with quietly devastating significance. Imagine, for the sake of cultural transliteration, the banal, jocular nature of—say, a traveling salesman joke—shared between two gruff men, strangers yoked together by professional duty, breaking the boredom of a marathon overnight detail that threatens not to end with the dawn. On one level, it's just a little rough humor to pass time, break ice. But in this scenario, lines that might be throwaway someplace else turn resonant, the lure of hidden meanings plunged like an anchor against the elliptical drift.

Ceylan proposes a mystery, even though the crime has been solved. Much as in his 2008 Three Monkeys, there's a dead body to kick the story into motion. In that earlier film, a tragic accident and a cover-up set the stage for a domestic meltdown. Here, the corpse is the focus of an arduous search. As the film opens, a tiny caravan of cars winds slowly along an isolated road that curves through the Anatolian steppes. Dusk settles into night, the yellow glare of headlights illuminating a tall tree that divides the purple horizon, limbs rustling in the breeze. The stationary camera sits far enough away from the action that the entire scene unfolds against a painterly tableaux, the dialogue and slamming car doors close-miked so that you hear the terse, impatient voices before matching them to any faces.

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