INTERVIEW: Ben Wheatley

Reaching back to the collective subconscious to give audiences the willies, the vivid primal intensity of childhood nightmares underpins Kill List and animates its almost primordial sense of creeping dread. Down Terrace director Ben Wheatley's suspense thriller turned black-hearted horror film shows off his knack for a slow burn fed by head-spinning narrative twists. Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley play ex-military specialists, living in an isolated town in northeast Lincolnshire, turned contract killers. Times are hard, so they sign up for a new job, paid for by a mysterious and eccentric client. The story initially emphasizes the everyday boredom of the characters' lives as if they're just another pair of working stiffs, more disturbed by the stress of dealing with their significant others than carrying out murder for hire. But as the story progresses, its irreversible shifts in tone take a downward spiral into a violent abyss, foreshadowed from the opening title sequence, that won't easily be shaken.

I met up with Wheatley during his recent promotional visit to New York, where he started the conversation by noting the film's critical reception, which with a few exceptions has been highly favorable.

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SUNDANCE 2012: Critic's Notebook #2

Exploding gators, swamp water mojo and a lowly wise six-year-old heroine named Hushpuppy seemed to be almost all that anyone really wanted to talk about at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Behn Zeitlin's audacious feature debut Beasts of the Southern Wild, shot on 16mm in a bayou neverland near New Orleans, felt like the cinematic arrival occasions such as Sundance exist to announce. Two weeks after watching it (in a sleep-deprived state, literally fresh off an airport shuttle bus) at its festival premiere, the film resonates with a beguiling mix of hardscrabble folk mythology and jaw-dropping, how-the-frick-did-they-shoot-that imagery, animated by vivid and remarkable performances from an amateur cast and a pint-sized star named Quvenzhané Wallis.

It's too easy to fall into the rave/backlash/backlash-to-the-backlash cycle that often defines the Sundance experience. Suffice to say that the auteur bravado that evoked comparisons to Terrence Malick, Terry Gilliam and Werner Herzog is the real deal, and that there's a fuzzy regard to narrative cohesion that will aggravate some parties who want linear structure with their eye-popping Southern cinematic lyricism. But, as a post-Katrina meditation on the binding and transformative power of magic and community illuminated through the memory-prism of childhood, the film is all heart.

Here are some other winners (and a few losers):

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RETRO ACTIVE: The Sentinel (1977)

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 Ti West's haunted-house tale The Innkeepers, this week it's Michael Winner's 1977 religious-supernatural thriller The Sentinel.

Women's lib leads straight to the gates of Hell in The Sentinel, though trying to read Michael Winner's 1977 film as a thematically and theologically coherent work is futile, since the only thought behind this woman-in-a-haunted-apartment tale is to sponge off the success of Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen. Overflowing with former and future stars, Winner's saga (based on Jeffrey Konvtiz's novel) posits female independence as the first step to trouble for Alison (Cristina Raines), a model introduced via a montage of photo shoots and magazine covers (which present her as simultaneously empowered and objectified) as well as happy-go-lucky snapshots of her frolicking around Manhattan with lawyer boyfriend Michael (Chris Sarandon). Still traumatized by her attempted suicide two years earlier—spurred by the discovery of her gaunt, elderly father (Fred Stuthman) having a three-way (and voraciously eating cake!) in bed with a hefty and slender woman—Alison isn't ready to marry Michael, and thus chooses to move into her own place. That new abode proves to be a Brooklyn Heights apartment fully furnished with creepy old furniture and pictures, in a building notable for its top-floor occupant—a blind priest, Father Halloran (John Carradine), who never stops staring out of his front-facing window.

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Sense and Sensibility

Scottish director David Mackenzie's first feature to see American release was 2003's love triangle/murder drama Young Adam; unfortunately, critical attention dilated not on his strong visual sense but Ewan McGregor's penis. Silly but true: Sony Pictures Classics was about to cut his member out of the film for the sake of an R rating when the actor mocked them, leading to an NC-17 release. The takeaway image wasn't genitalia but one of the first shots, a swan's dirty belly shot from underneath the water’s surface, an arresting/original widescreen composition far more important than debates about sexual graphicness.

It's 2012: Michael Fassbender is displaying his Shame all over America, and Mackenzie and McGregor have reunited for another blend of sex and sadness. The director’s jokingly self-proclaimed "sex trilogy"—Young Adam, Asylum (2005) and Hallam Foe (2007)—is done: depictions of male sexual pathology have been discarded for the moment. Hallam—renamed Mister Foe for American consumption—defused adolescent Jamie Bell's creepily voyeuristic coming-of-age with puckish humor. Mackenzie tried Hollywood next: the result was the stillborn, shot-in-but-not-of Hollywood Ashton Kutcher vehicle Spread, and though casting him as a gigolo for older women was a nicely mean meta-stunt, the film failed to take off.

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SUNDANCE 2012: Critic's Notebook #1

Dudes are fucked up. One of the recurrent themes of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival was the damaged state of young American manhood. Maybe I just happened to pick all the right movies, and tapped into a wellspring of generational critique. But it's hard to argue when films across such a wide generic range leak rancid testosterone as if it were a toxic spill.

The Bro-pocalypse could also signal a kind of counter-insurgency against the archetypal Sundance Event: The It Girl rom-coms, earnest dramas of family dysfunction, and high-concept documentaries about tree-huggers and weirdoes. Yet, in a warped sense, Rick Alverson's The Comedy swallowed all these things whole and vomited them back up, through the PBR-drenched esophagus of Adult Swim favorite Tim Heidecker (and collaborator pal Eric Wareheim in a smaller role; the two have also been making the rounds with Magnolia's Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie). As slacker chump Swanson, the comedic actor is the star of his own urban deadbeat cavalcade of cheap nihilist jollies, riding his beer gut like a chariot through the trustafarian wilds of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His sole purpose in life seems to be cheap antagonism of less-privileged city dwellers (foreign-speaking cab drivers take a lot of psychological abuse), getting drunk with his likewise schlumpen beer buddies in a sophomoric parody of a male-encounter group, and waiting for his invalid father to die—while terrorizing his male nurse with a trench-mouthed interrogation about prolapsed rectums.

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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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