Able Danger.

"Able Danger's various generic elements and ambitions, while successful on their own, resist melding into a successful pastiche; perhaps the invocation of September 11 for the vaguely satirical purpose of tweaking conspiracy crap like that found in Zeitgeist: The Movie (an Internet film that, like [director Paul] Krik's recent 'Be Kanye' ads, went mega-viral last year) proves too preoccupying for such a winking, if well-made, film." Michelle Orange in the Voice.

"Krik references film noir, rustling up some heavies and hardboiled patter here and there," notes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Ironically, the connection is intriguing, given the wartime stew of anxieties that originally fostered the movies that came to be known as noir; Krik's two main riffstones come from either end of the lineage, The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Able Danger isn't our equivalent, nor is it nearly as engrossing, but it does have a snazzy credit sequence fashioned out of a quotation from the neocon Project for a New American Century."

Updated through 9/13.

"Krik would prefer if we all compared his feature-length debut to the practically minimalist The Parallax View, but Able Danger is really a hipster version of Soderbergh's inane The Good German - all talk and effusive style," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

"Taking its title from a secret Pentagon program, Able Danger toggles between murky digital video and even murkier fake surveillance film," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "And though like-minded theorists may ascend from their basements to rally round its muddled premise, this debut feature from the writer and director Paul Krik (who also goes by the name Dave Herman) is a classic example of too much foot-in-mouth and not nearly enough tongue-in-cheek."

Earlier: Krik lists his favorite conspiracy movies at Filmmaker.

Update, 9/13: "The cynicism this movie taps into is as old as Watergate and as new as Sarah Palin, but so too are the stylistic influences Kirk draws on to fashion this rather straightforward conspiracy tale," writes Brandon Harris at Hammer to Nail. "While he's primarily drawing on the the aesthetic qualities of post-war B-cinema, he also owes a significant debt to the Darren Aronofsky of Pi here, with his harsh, low-budget black-and-white New York being traversed by an increasingly unhinged, physically threatened outlaw intellectual.... Krik's thriller is clearly a product of our unsettled age."

Posted by dwhudson at September 11, 2008 12:35 AM