Read my profile of Solier at indieWIRE.

(Personally, I preferred Altiplano‘s flight into irrational mysticism and audiovisual splendor to The Milk of Sorrow‘s dry symbolic realism, but The Milk of Sorrow won the Golden Bear and an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. So what do I know?)

(What do I know? Glad you asked–Altiplano has been unfairly skewered in the press because it was written and directed by a Belgian/American filmmaking team (Brosens and Woodworth) whose pretentious statements about their filmmaking style don’t help. Especially since Babel and Crash, critics are hyper-sensitive to Western guilt being exorcised through so-called “network narratives,” and Altiplano appears, on the surface, to be just such an offender. The Milk of Sorrow, on the other hand, bears the stamp of “authenticity,” because it’s director is part Peruvian, even though she lives and works from Spain. Its symbolism is much easier to read and interpret in comparison to the purposefully obscure Altiplano. I still don’t entirely know what Altiplano is trying to say–and judging by their statements about their approach, neither do Brosens and Woodworth–but I know its striking visuals and haunting score will linger with me long after I’ve forgotten The Milk of Sorrow.)

Is this scene from the Warsaw Ghetto real or staged? A Film Unfinished raises questions about truth, history and documentation.

I recently interviewed the director of A Film Unfinished for indieWIRE. This essay is my opportunity to explore in more depth some of the issues with the film and its portrayal in the media that had been gnawing at me.

In A Film Unfinished, young Israeli documentarian Yael Hersonski painstakingly details the history of “The Ghetto,” a collection of Nazi footage from the Warsaw Ghetto that has served as the basis for much of our visual understanding of that wretched waystation on the road to the Final Solution. Few laymen have seen the entire four reels of “The Ghetto” before. But it has been commonly known to Holocaust historians, and pieces of the footage have been widely redeployed in other Holocaust documentaries. Indeed, Hersonski, upon first seeing the footage four years ago, immediately recognized a number of images from other Holocaust documentaries.

But in 1998, 30 minutes of additional footage from the “documentary” came to light. These outtakes revealed that some (much?) of the imagery from “The Ghetto” was staged by Nazi propagandists in an attempt to portray Jews in an unsavory and stereotypical light. The avowedly secular head of the Judenrat (the ghetto’s Jewish government) was forced to take down pictures from his office and replace them with photos of rabbis and place a giant candelabra on his desk for a staged meeting with religious elders. Fully bearded, yarmulke-wearing Jews were ordered to recreate Jewish rituals, perhaps to provide a visual record once the race was wiped out. Most despicably of all, the Nazis gathered up the best-dressed and best-fed Jews in the ghetto and made them act out vignettes that would demonstrate the disparity between the rich and the poor in the ghetto and the rich Jews’ callousness to their impoverished neighbors. In one outtake, well-dressed waitresses in the ghetto’s nicest restaurant are shown repeatedly walking by the outstretched hands of ragged, emaciated beggar children. In A Film Unfinished, Hersonski reveals that what was assumed to be a documentary was really the raw material for a vilely anti-Semitic propaganda film. (As if one would expect anything better from the Nazis…)

In many reviews and stories on the film, the revelation of the new footage in 1998 and its implications on the earlier footage is treated as a moment of significant historical import. Lisa Schwarzbaum, of Entertainment Weekly, writes:

…as director Yael Hersonski explains with dignified authority in her profound and vital documentary, those scenes of ”real life,” once prized by historians, weren’t so real. A missing reel, discovered in 1998, demonstrates the degree to which the Nazis manipulated the ”nonfiction” they photographed.

In Time Out New York, Keith Uhlich writes:

For years, images and sequences from the film were drawn on as infallible glimpses of history. But as shown by Yael Hersonski’s wrenching documentary, the truth is much more muddled and horrifying.

And in her essay Truth Lies Somewhere Between, about the murky relationship between truth and fiction in A Film Unfinished, Catfish and Exit Through the Gift Shop, Manohla Dargis writes:

Over the decades excerpts from this and other similar ghetto movies have been used in well-intended documentaries about the Holocaust, which invests them with a level of factuality they cannot support. These images don’t reveal the whole reality of Jewish life in the ghetto during the war; they show how the Nazi propaganda machine wanted Jewish life to be immortalized. …

Ms. Hersonski’s documentary demolishes the truth claims of those Nazi images. To an extent, it is the ineluctable weight of the Holocaust that allows her to engage such questions at all. The issue of truth, unless Michael Moore is in the vicinity, is often left off the table when it comes to discussions about documentary cinema, perhaps because critics don’t have the time, resources or inclination for the requisite fact-checking or because the issue is at odds with our postmodern age, in which the truth is said to be conditional. Part of what is so gratifying about “A Film Unfinished,” which is often painful to watch, is its ethical insistence that there are true things in the world, and that it is necessary for us to know them.

But these critics’ claims don’t hold up to scrutiny. The most familiar-looking scenes from “The Ghetto” are not the ones Hersonski deconstructs. Few of us have seen images of smiling, fit young ghetto Jews sunning themselves, or of nattily dressed bourgeois Jews dining over smoked fish and pastries. Instead, our memories are of the presumably unstaged scenes: dead bodies lining the crowded streets, children caught in the act of smuggling vegetables, the deadened eyes of impossibly thin adults dressed in rags. The uncovering of the new footage in 1998 is scarcely earth-shattering—it only serves to alter the understanding of footage that few had seen in the first place, not of footage that was embedded in the global collective consciousness.

The fact that audiences have been shown one type of footage but not the other raises its own set of politically sensitive questions about the selectivity of historiography. If, as Hersonski seems to claim, historians took the original film at more or less face value, why were the scenes that were shared with the wider world strictly depictions of poverty, hunger and death? Presumably, if historians assumed the original footage was not staged, the scenes of Jewish luxury should have been just as valuable a part of the historical record. But those images didn’t make it into Night and Fog and the countless Holocaust docs that followed. Most charitably, we can understand the rarity of these scenes as evidence that historians and documentarians understood that they were highly anomalous or staged—making Hersonski’s warnings about the ethical dangers of taking “The Ghetto” at face value redundant, if not unnecessary. Less charitably, we might see the non-dissemination of the scenes as evidence of a political-historiographic orthodoxy on the Holocaust that insisted that Jewish suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto was universal. (A point that the liquidation of the ghetto in 1943 appears to bear out—but which doesn’t address how its prisoners lived for the two-and-a-half previous years.) Seen in this light, the cinematic historiography of the Holocaust is shown to be a process of selectively choosing the evidence that best fits a pre-existing narrative, rather than a sharing of all the evidence, no matter whether it alters our notion of the Holocaust as the ultimate, absolute and universal horror.

While Hersonski never addresses this particular issue directly, the format of her film brilliantly foregrounds the difficulty of extracting truth from incomplete historical records—as all records necessarily are. Hersonski weaves together excerpts from diaries of ghetto residents, transcripts from the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi bureaucratic records, additional personal footage shot by Nazi cameramen and most powerfully, contemporary real-time commentaries from ghetto survivors watching the Nazi footage in front of Hersonski’s camera. As they view the footage, they critique and connect with the scenes, providing personal and emotional detailing to terrible images that threaten to become rote. Their emotional responses to the suffering are most moving—when they shield their eyes from the scenes of piled dead bodies, there is a painful psychological immediacy—but the most historically interesting bits of their commentary are their responses to the scenes of Jewish wealth. They don’t deny that there were wealthier Jews in the ghetto; in fact, several of the survivors affirm that they existed. They point out how few of them there were (one says maybe 20 people in the ghetto’s population of 400,000 could afford to go to the restaurant seen in the footage), but they acknowledge their existence. This testimony offers a more nuanced portrait of ghetto society while not denying that life for the overwhelming majority of ghetto residents was utterly wretched. Just as importantly, their testimony highlights how all historiography is necessarily a process of selective accounting, and always bears a volatile relationship to the truth. While Dargis is right about Hersonski’s “ethical insistence that there are true things in the world, and that it is necessary for us to know them,” Hersonski is also insistent that there can never be a one-to-one correspondence between history and truth. As she told me in an interview, “Certainly the film is about the nature of documentation itself and the inability to capture reality as such. … Always capturing one aspect, or more than one aspect, but never the thing itself. … It’s something beyond language and image.”

A Film Unfinished is less important for correcting a historical misconception, as a number of critics claim, than it is for its attention to the problems of historiography. Professional historians understand these problems well, but untrained consumers of popular history have a much dimmer understanding. On the one hand, a historian must make decisions on what evidence to share, and those decisions are inevitably partially motivated by ideology. On the other hand, it is possible to arrive at a “best version” of the truth by judiciously and objectively piecing together all the available evidence. A Film Unfinished is a reminder that every historical account is, by its nature, unfinished.

Buzz (L) and Woody, a paean to gay marriage? You decide.

“It’s pretty much a perfect film,” was my friend’s judgment after we saw Toy Story 3. I’m inclined to agree. The crazy thing about her statement? Nobody is the least bit surprised.

After 15 years and 11 films, Pixar has established such an exceptional standard of excellence that anything less than perfection is disappointing. In every aspect—animation, story construction, dialogue, character development, emotional depth, unobtrusive 3D effects—Toy Story 3 is unimpeachable. Toy Story 3 is a demonstration of what can happen when a gifted, driven group of people is as motivated by aesthetic excellence as it is by making money. Imagine what other Hollywood blockbusters would be like if their producers had even a quarter of Pixar’s perfectionism.

But you probably know all that. What I’d like to explore instead are the somewhat odd character psychologies and psychosexual dynamics of Toy Story 3. Take these characters out of the playpen and put them in a live-action film, and you wouldn’t find an odder collection of emotionally tilted, sexually ambiguous characters this side of Pedro Almodovar.

Chief among the oddballs is Andy. In the original Toy Story, Andy was a 6-year-old obsessed with his toys. In Toy Story 2, Andy was a 7-year-old obsessed with his toys. In Toy Story 3, Andy is a 17-year-old no longer obsessed with his toys, but he still shows a remarkable level of interest in them. He keeps them in a trunk in his room and plans on taking one of them (Woody) with him to college. Now, I loved toys when I was a kid. I had an army of G.I. Joe characters and vehicles and I could easily pack Castle Greyskull to the turrets with various Masters of the Universe. But I barely gave a thought to them after age 11 (indeed, a friend and I set fire to a bunch of them during a half-day in high school. But we didn’t come here to talk about my mental issues.). That Andy would still feel enough attachment to his toys at 17 that he insists on storing them in the attic makes Andy a little bit, well, weird. What about friends? A girlfriend? A boyfriend? There’s not the vaguest suggestion that any of these exist in his life (if they did, he probably wouldn’t still keep a trunk full of toys in his room). Perhaps his attachment to his toys has something to do with his cute but obsessively spring-cleaning mother who demands that his entire room be emptied before he leaves for college. She seems loving, but it’s a cold parent who neither desires nor allows her child to keep any accoutrements of his upbringing in his childhood room. Perhaps his excessive attachment to his toys is part of his process of differentiation from his excessively unattached mother. Or perhaps his retreats into a highly masculinized fantasy world (beautifully depicted in the film’s opening sequence, where Woody and Buzz square off with Mr. Potatohead and Hamm the Piggy Bank in an epic sci-fi/Western showdown) are indicative of his longing for a father-figure. I don’t believe any of the Toy Stories address Andy’s missing dad, a laudable absence given the kind of half-baked Freudianism that permeates so many children’s films (especially since Spielberg came along).

But to engage in some partial baking myself, I would like to suggest that Woody sees himself as Andy’s surrogate father. By the time of Toy Story 3, he is the wise elder of the toys, perpetually making plans to reignite Andy’s fading interest in them. While the other toys have begun to realize that Tony no longer cares about them, Woody is in denial. He suffers from empty-nest syndrome, refusing to believe that “his” Andy has grown up and moved on. He assumes responsibility for the other toys’ psychic well-being, offering B.S.-filled speeches about Andy’s imminent return to immaturity.

The only toy with whom Woody lets down his guard is Buzz Lightyear, his old rival. After 12 years together, Woody and Buzz act like something between Patton and Bradley and a married couple. While they do their best to keep the spirits of the other toys up, in private they discuss their anxieties about what’s really happening with Andy. Too much money is involved for Pixar to be subversive enough to suggest that the pair are life-partners (even though they clearly are); perhaps that’s why this film makes such a to-do about Buzz’s infatuation with Jessie, especially in his hyper-masculine Latin lover mode. Pixar’s avoidance of abnormal sexuality even extends to the most transparently closeted toy in history, Ken. While he is a clothes-adoring fop, he’s metrosexual rather than homosexual in Toy Story 3—he and Barbie fall for each other on first sight. “I love your leg warmers,” Ken says. “I love your ascot,” Barbie replies.

But as in his script for Little Miss Sunshine, screenwriter Michael Arndt knows what audience prejudices he’s toying with. A scene where Ken fabs out and displays his favorite costumes in a private fashion show for Barbie elicits probably the biggest laughs of the film. Its only competition, tellingly, is the aforementioned scene where Buzz’s language is accidentally reset to Spanish mode.

Part of what makes Pixar so brilliant is that it can flirt with Ken’s sexual ambiguity and depict Buzz’s hypersexuality without upsetting American parents’ ingrained sexual conservatism. Kids won’t get the allusions to homosexuality in Ken’s character; for them, he’s just a goofball who really likes to dress up in costumes, a desire not far from the heart of any kid who has even a passing interest in Halloween. And Buzz’s raging libido will be mostly lost on anyone who has difficulty reading subtitles. Without the translations from Spanish, Buzz is just dancing funny.

Much in the same way that South Park and The Simpsons can get away with satire they couldn’t attempt in other media, Pixar can get away with portraying psychologically abnormal characters because it makes animated “children’s” films. Animation’s sanctification as a “safe” entertainment for children gives it a greater degree of immunity from charges of subversiveness or poor taste than live-action film has. The irony is that the more domesticated the medium, the more potential there is for subversiveness. Which isn’t to say Toy Story 3 is subversive. Rather, it’s just kinda weird.

Jonah Hill (L) and Russell Brand (R) are chased by Sean Combs (C) in one of the more nonsensical sequences in Get Him to the Greek. 'This is the longest hallway!' shouts Hill. 'It's Kubrickian,' replies Brand.

I’m a sucker for a perfectly tuned pop culture parody. Tropic Thunder opened with a series of sublimely hilarious movie trailers, and I was hooked—despite the rest of the film being a somewhat erratic, and occasionally obnoxious (Tom Cruise as Les Grossman, anyone?), action-comedy. Which is why I fell for Nicholas Stoller’s new generically Apatow-ian comedy, Get Him to the Greek.

Get Him to the Greek opens with a video for “African Child” by Aldous Snow. Snow is played by Russell Brand, in a reprise of the narcissistic British rock star he played in Stoller’s and Jason Segal’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Snow is not far removed from the stage persona known as “Russell Brand,” who by all appearances, is not far removed from the real human being called “Russell Brand.” Not a stretch, but no matter. Breezily walking through the streets of a war-torn African city, Snow sings “All these blowjobs in limousines/What do they matter/What do they mean/To the little African child/Trapped inside of me,” as child soldiers murder each other in the background. In interviews on the set, Snow denies seeing himself as a “white Christ figure from outer space.” He leaves that judgment to other people, who are perfectly entitled to see him that way. Yup. I’m sold.

“African Child” turns out to be a turning point in Snow’s career. The song is a misguided bomb. Rolling Stone names it the third worst thing to happen to Africa after war and famine. His career (and ego) critically wounded, Snow falls into a funk, breaking up with his soulmate of seven years, pop savant Jennie Q (a spectacularly seductive Rose Byrne), and returning to the drinking, drugging and boinking of his youth. As a faux-musician, Brand sounds remarkably like Oasis, with enough fucking and fighting for both Gallagher brothers.

Fast forward a few years and a few thousand miles to L.A., where Aaron Green is a low-level music exec. Jonah Hill plays Green, and here he is as sweet and deferential as he was rude and pushy in Superbad. I’m still a bit shocked that Hill has range, but someone had to play the straight man. Even more shocking is Green’s girlfriend, a med student played by the lovely Elizabeth Moss (Peggy from Mad Men), who Green justifiably adores (despite her ignorance about the Mars Volta). At work, Sean Combs (good lines, bad comic acting) is Green’s impossible boss who demands some new ideas to save his struggling record label. Green convinces him that a comeback show by Snow, shown on pay-per-view, could revive the label’s sagging fortunes. There’s a catch of course, the kind that only makes sense in a Hollywood film script: Green must go to London and personally escort Snow for the show in L.A. in a week.

Their adventures detour them through New York and Las Vegas, with many missed flights and bacchanalian drug-assisted orgies along the way. The nastiest parts of the parties are mostly handled via montage, an efficient way of stuffing numerous shots of Hill pissing, puking and (I think but I hope I didn’t see) defecating into 20-second intervals. This may sound disgusting, but you’d be surprised how funny it is to see Hill talk to Meredith Viera unaware that he has vomit on his lapel. Like Chris Farley before him, Hill knows few things are more reliably amusing than a large man humiliating himself. Brand somehow manages to make an arrogant, intelligent Brit faintly charming, which probably has something to do with his aura of intense self-loathing. “I used to worry about so many things,” Snow tells Green. “Now I just worry about drugs.”

Like Apatow’s screenplays, Stoller’s script is smart and sophomoric in equal measure. The targets are easy and predictable—the music business, celebrity culture, rectums, Lars Ulrich—but the jokes mostly hit their marks. Even though you know where it’s all going (and quite often know the punchlines) Stoller’s fast-paced direction and his stars’ gameness keep the simple story moving. We’re as invested in getting Snow to the Greek Theater as Green is, even if we don’t give a whit what Snow does once he gets there.

The one atypical aspect of this very typical comedy is the surprisingly weak chemistry between Hill and Brand, and the surprisingly great chemistry between the leads and their girlfriends. In a few precise sweet and sour scenes, one gets the sense that the two couples have been together for a long time and probably are perfectly matched. This apparent weakness ends up a strength, as it provides a legitimately compelling competing narrative to the boys’ hedonistic, nihilistic adventures. When the film takes it regrettable and cloying turn into a comedy of remarriage in the final act, we at least have a rooting interest in the couples’ reuniting. At the minimum the ending offers Brand the opportunity to deliver one of the film’s best lines while proposing a ménage a trios with Green and his girl. “Don’t think of it as a threesome,” he says. “Think of it as you having sex with your girlfriend, while someone else is having sex with your girlfriend.”

That kind of absurdist logic also applies to the film, which is funny in spite of its canned casting, predictable plot and constant retreat into potty humor. Don’t think of Get Him to the Greek as just another gross-out movie. Think of it as a good gross-out movie… that is just like all the other gross-out movies.

L-R: Going in, I thought Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson, Sharlto Copley and Liam Neeson were perfectly cast in The A-Team. I hate it when a plan doesn't come together.

During the ‘80s, I watched The A-Team on a weekly (and later, daily) basis. Two decades later, I can’t remember the plot of a single episode. At 5 p.m. on June 20, 2010, I watched The A-Team the movie. Two hours later, I’m struggling to remember the plot.

Appropriate? I guess, if one’s expectations for a movie are defined by the limitations of its schlocky source material. I didn’t expect much more from director Joe Carnahan’s (Smokin’ Aces) reboot than a rehash of cartoon-deep character quirks, a throwaway plot and some over-the-top action scenes, but I was hoping it would be so stupid it would be fun. Unfortunately, it’s so stupid that it’s depressing.

On paper, the producers got the casting right: Bradley Cooper has the looks to play Face (Dirk Benedict in the original), Quinton “Rampage” Jackson seems mean and cuddly enough to fill Mr. T’s shoes as B.A. Baracus and Sharlto Copley was effortlessly funny in District 9, suggesting he could easily improve upon Dwight Schultz’s annoying Murdock. The most questionable call was Liam Neeson as Col. Hannibal Smith (George Peppard on the show), but the trailers seemed to lay that concern to rest. With cigar in mouth, hands on hips and smirk on face, Neeson appeared to capture Smith’s joyful sense of authority. Trailers can be deceiving.

Cooper specializes in playing cocksure charmers, but here he comes off as a full-blown douchebag, whooping in every action scene like a fratboy who shotgunned a beer. Jackson is an amateur and it shows (he’s neither mean nor cuddly), and Copley is every bit as obnoxious—and unfunny—as Schultz. Even Leeson is much too serious as Smith, with none of the grandfatherly charm Peppard brought to the role. The less said about their chemistry, the better.

As in the show, the team is a bunch of former Army Rangers “framed for a crime they didn’t commit” who operate outside the law righting wrongs and building tanks out of lawnmowers. But the movie takes a while to get to that point—it takes the whole movie, in fact—focusing instead on the team’s origins. I haven’t the foggiest idea why Carnahan and his fellow screenwriters Brian Bloom and Skip Woods chose this route. The team’s origin on the show was little more than a functional rationale to explain why such an eclectic group of military experts spent most of its time fighting rural bullies in small towns (noting that the budget limited the show to settings that can be staged in the Hollywood hills would not have been persuasive to preteen boys like myself).

The team meets in an amusingly preposterous, if overly long, opening sequence in Mexico, where Smith has been kidnapped by corrupt federales, B.A. is picking up his beloved black van from an auto shop (Why Mexico? Why not?), Murdock is a patient in a mental hospital and Face is about to be set on fire for stealing the wife of a drug kingpin. After carjacking B.A.’s van, Hannibal sees his Ranger tattoo, and the opening notes of an adagio version of the show’s theme song tinkle on the soundtrack. An unshakeable bond has been born. Enough to persuade B.A. to join Hannibal on a death-tempting journey to save Face and flee the country in a helicopter piloted by Murdock. Entertaining? Yes. Coherent? No.

And that’s pretty much the film’s high-water mark for storytelling. The action picks up again eight years later, after the group has returned to the Army and is on the verge of withdrawing from a successful run doing clandestine operations in Iraq. Here they bump into a whole cast of military types with uncertain agendas, including Patrick Wilson as a CIA spook, Jessica Biel as a Department of Defense something-something (and former lover of Face, of course), Bloom as a private military contractor and Gerald McRaney as Smith’s commanding general and best friend. A plan that seemed to come together somehow unravels, and the team soon finds themselves court-martialed and sent to various military prisons… “for a crime they didn’t commit.” As they escape from prison and attempt to restore their military honor, the team engages in—and suffers from—all manner of false alliances and -crosses of various multiples. Why this leads the team to fight for the little guy and build bazookas out of tea kettles is never explained, or even contemplated.

In the original show, when Hannibal uttered at the end of every episode, “I love it when a plan comes together,” we had a sense it was a goof, a nod to the audience’s knowledge that the team’s escapes were as improbable and implausible as they were inevitable. But the movie elevates Hannibal’s catchphrase to gospel, doting obsessively on his genius for planning. With the exception of the opening sequence and the flying tank scene made famous in the trailers, every action sequence is narrated and intercut with scenes of the team plotting their moves, sapping the action of whatever suspense it might have had. Worse, Carnahan has picked up Michael Bay’s dismal habit of filming fight sequences in excessive close-up, rendering them nearly unintelligible. Even the tank scene, which is fun and inventive, is not as good as it could be. Carnahan inexplicably doesn’t show the tank actually leave the plane—a blown opportunity to exploit our instinctive fear of falling from the sky in a heavy metal object.

After seeing The A-Team with two friends, one of them defended the movie by saying, “It doesn’t take itself seriously.”* It’s a common defense of movies drawn from stupid source material, as if a filmmaker’s attitude towards his material can somehow inoculate the film from any kind of critical response. It implies that not taking something seriously is equivalent to having fun (as well as its opposite), turning critics—or any discerning viewer—into a prissy puss incapable of having fun. But my problem with The A-Team isn’t that it doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s that it’s no fun. To my mind, The A-Team doesn’t take having fun seriously enough.

* He has since concurred that it’s dreadful.

This is about as glamorous as Jennifer Lawrence gets in Winter's Bone, where she plays a dirt-poor teenager in the Ozarks caring for her siblings and trying to find her fugitive father before the family home is taken away.

It’s tempting to search for universal themes in a film like Winter’s Bone, set among dirt-poor rednecks in the Ozarks, a mountainous, wooded region that spans from central Missouri to northern Arkansas. But everything that is great about Debra Granik’s film—and there is much—derives from the uniqueness of its setting, and the specificity of the characters’ motivations and codes. Stripped of its local color, Winter’s Bone becomes a drab and barely credible detective story.

As imagined by Granik, the Ozarks are a forbidding place. The trees are leafless, the ground crunches underneath each step, lawns—if you can call them that—are littered with vehicles and trash. Everyone owns a gun, if not several, and the only available occupations appear to be the military, the police or making crank. Somehow, every walk is uphill. This is surely not a full portrait of the Ozarks—the region is home to Wal-Mart and a healthy tourism industry—but it appears to be an accurate reflection of a particular kind of poor, marginalized community. Daniel Goodrell, a former Marine who has lived in the area for much of his 57 years, wrote the novel on which it is based.

The heroine is Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a 17-year-old woman forced to care for her younger siblings and her effectively catatonic mother after their father was jailed (again) for manufacturing meth. Ree is as self-sufficient as an unemployed high school dropout could possibly be, but still relies on occasional donations from friends and relatives. After her dad Jessup’s most recent arrest, though, he put up the family house for collateral on his bond—and disappeared. If she doesn’t find Jessup within two weeks, she and her family will be homeless.

After this admittedly schematic inciting incident, Ree transforms into a truth-seeking crusader who will stop at nothing to discover her dad’s whereabouts. Fearless, tough, uncorrupted by drugs or alcohol and possessed with an unwavering sense of moral authority, Ree is an easy heroine to root for. Her flawlessness makes her about as plausible as John McClane, but the 20-year-old Renee Zelwegger lookalike smartly underplays Ree’s righteousness. Her most powerful moments come during wordless reaction shots.

The search for Jessup gets a bit monotonous after a while, as there are only so many ways a hard-looking distant cousin can say, “You shouldn’t be sticking your nose where it don’t belong.” Granik gives us little direct access to Ree’s thought process, so the audience has no idea why she seeks out this cattle farmer or that meth dealer. More rewarding are the scenes of Ree’s and her family’s daily survival. In one memorable sequence, Ree takes her younger brother and sister squirrel-hunting. She has her 5-year-old sister pull the trigger and her brother yank out the guts after Ree skins it. Granik nicely balances a feel for the family’s deprivation with a sense of their closeness, creating a hard-nosed but affectionate portrait of life deep under the poverty line.

The story picks up after Jessup’s brother Teardrop (John Hawkes) joins Ree in the pursuit of her father, or at least his remains. Hawkes is brilliant, as intimidating and gruff here as he was craven and respectable in Deadwood. In bold contrast to Ree’s ascetic stoicism, Teardrop is a raging, coke-snorting loose cannon. His violent unpredictability injects some needed suspense into a story that threatened to become narratively inert.

Like the other less-than-perfect characters who inhabit Ree’s world, Teardrop serves as a vehicle for the expression of the codes and mores of Ozark redneck culture. Granik’s and Anne Rosselini’s script doesn’t spell out their arcane rules of honor, instead sprinkling them organically throughout the film, or asking us to infer them from characters’ seemingly irrational actions. One of the film’s great pleasures is figuring out the redneck code, so I won’t give the rules away—other than to say their mores have more in common with prison culture than with mainstream American morality.

Whether by design or by budget, Granik’s film stock is bleached of vivid color, offering a palate that ranges from gray to brown. While the story is told from the perspective of a confident Ozarks native, Granik shoots, edits and scores the movie to maximize the audience’s sense of dread. Like Deliverance, Winter’s Bone is littered with lingering close-ups on weathered, ugly faces, inviting that same sense of fascination and disgust that John Boorman’s film elicited so well. I’m not entirely comfortable with this backwoods exoticism but there’s no denying its effectiveness as a filmmaking technique.

Winter’s Bone’s suitably brutal climax links together the film’s thematic concerns of violence, honor and survivalism without compromising the tone of understated authenticity. If the film’s final scene veers a little too close to a kind of Spielberg-ian sentimentality, Granik can be forgiven. Spielberg’s middle-class heroes never had to eat squirrel.

L-R: Rebecca Hall, Ann Marie Gilbert, Amanda Peet and Catherine Keener are just four of the women who say horribly inappropriate but brutally honest things in Nicole Holofcener's Please Give.

I have little patience for movies about Upper Manhattan angst (see Solitary Man). But few are as funny, well-written and smart about female anxieties and—get this—the importance of money as Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give.

The latest Holofcener film to explore modern American women and their neuroses (Walking and Talking, Friends With Money), Please Give is less a story than a series of vignettes of very real, very flawed women who communicate as if their ids had been uncorked. When they cross paths, they say horribly inappropriate, brutally honest things but shrug them off with all the politeness expected of enlightened denizens of the East Coast middle/upper class. If it weren’t for the sympathetic piano score and the chorus-of-hugs ending, this could play as vicious satire.

Each female character in Please Give has her signature hang-up. Kate (Catherine Keener, AKA Holofcener’s filmic alter ego) owns a successful vintage furniture store with her husband Alex (Oliver Platt), supporting a privileged lifestyle in an apartment on the Upper East Side. Wracked by guilt over her good fortune, she obsessively gives money to the homeless and stays awake at night Googling “volunteer opportunities.” Her 15-year-old daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), is fixated on her unpredictable facial acne. Their next-door neighbor Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) takes care of her 91-year-old grandmother (Ann Morgan Gilbert) and sees herself as a martyr, refusing herself dates, make-up or anything resembling fun, while her over-tanned sister Mary (Amanda Peet) can’t stop stalking the shopgirl who’s seeing her ex-boyfriend. Linking the families together is the ghoulish knowledge that when grandma kicks it, Kate and Alex will buy her apartment, knock down the walls and put in a spectacular master bedroom and bath. Kate feels guilty about that too, of course.

But what makes Please Give so insightful and funny is Holofcener’s sense for humanity’s contradictions. Kate tells herself she feels terrible about capitalizing on her neighbor’s imminent death, but that doesn’t stop her from joking with her husband about ways to kill the old bag. Mary carries herself with the sexual confidence that only someone who looks like Amanda Peet can, but lives in quiet dread of the day that her looks “hit the wall.” Abby wants everyone to think she’s miserable but actually smiles more than anyone else in the film (with the possible exception of Oliver Platt, whose peace-making hubby is also a blissfully amoral philanderer). It doesn’t hurt that the women are played by a group of fine actresses, notably Hall, who is barely recognizable since her turn as an upwardly mobile American priss-ess in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And few actresses can communicate the mix of self-absorption, sympathy, guilt and anxiety that Keener projects in scene after scene.

As committed as Holofcener is to portraying the contradictions and nuances of real life, she is equally indifferent to the principles of satisfactory narrative construction, letting the film drift into a squishy series of embraces, apologies and cry-fests. It’s not clear whether Holofcener is making a statement—that a little bit of human connection absolves these women of their worst excesses—or simply being honest about the way people make themselves feel better about their sins (even if they keep on committing them). Judging by the extended close-ups and the soft lighting, my guess would be that Holofcener is an unapologetic humanist. Which makes the scene where Kate regains her daughter’s trust by buying her a pair of $235 Adriano Goldschmeid jeans particularly gross. Holofcener may be conscious of class distinctions, but that doesn’t mean she’s critical of them.

Best then to dwell on the film’s many beautifully drawn snapshots of flawed humanity in action. Kate, touring a nursing home with the intent of volunteering, walks away more disgusted and depressed than when she walked in. Abby, shopping for jeans, becomes transfixed by the horror of her zits and pops them in the store mirror. Mary, on a rare mission to buy grandma’s groceries, refuses to use coupons. “You’re too good for my coupons?” grandma asks. Mary replies: “They depress me.”

Holofcener is not an exceptional filmmaker nor a great storyteller, but she has something that few other writer-directors possess: a terrific wit that is enhanced, not compromised, by its encounter with credible human relationships. That puts her in the tradition of a particular breed of American comedy that includes Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and Albert Brooks. Like them, she’s a contradiction in terms. She’s a satirical humanist.

A classic example of Banksy's subversive, gimmicky street art that sorta kinda serves as the subject of Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a knowing exploration of the aesthetic, financial and ethical issues surrounding street art, hidden under the guise of a hilarious story about a talentless fool who hangs on the fringes of the scene. The fact that the fool may not exist hardly matters. If we take Exit at face value, it’s a twisting, amusing adventure that demonstrates how easily hype can manipulate art world taste. If we see it as a hoax, it becomes a twisting, amusing joke… that demonstrates how easily hype can manipulate art world taste.

Street art exists at the intersection between pop art, graffiti, performance art, vandalism, protest art and straight-up pranking. It’s usually not particularly complex—one of the most ubiquitous examples is a stencil of Andre the Giant’s face with the word “OBEY” in block letters—but it tries to make up for its simplicity through inventiveness, cleverness and how-the-hell-did-they-get-that-there logistical audacity. Its most famous practitioners are the mysterious, never-photographed Banksy, and Shepard Fairey, now best known for his red-and-blue Obama “HOPE” poster. Both figure prominently in Exit Through the Gift Shop, and Banksy directed it—a tip-off that in this documentary, not everything (perhaps even nothing) is what it seems.

According to narrator Rhys Ifans, Exit Through the Gift Shop is about Thierry Guetta, an exuberant roly-poly Frenchman who started making a film about street art and then became one of its most successful adherents, making a million dollars from a single exhibition while working under the handle of “Mr. Brainwash.” The film claims that Guetta, the owner of a vintage clothing store in L.A. and an obsessive videographer, became the unofficial chronicler of street art nearly 10 years ago after watching his cousin, “Invader,” plaster Paris with stickers of Space Invaders icons. When he finally got around to paring down the tens of thousands of hours of footage into an hour-and-a-half film, Banksy found the result so incompetent that he took over the project—and directed Guetta to put on his own art exhibition. Which Guetta dutifully did because, as this film argues, Banksy is never, ever wrong about anything. As Guetta unhelpfully describes him, “He’s really like what he represents.”

Exit Through the Gift Shop is composed of low-quality video footage of street artists in action (which is to say, doing mostly illegal stuff) and talking head interviews with Guetta, Fairey, Guetta’s wife and Banksy himself—who is filmed covered in shadows, his voice distorted into an English-accented bass growl. It’s narrated by Ifans, a fine British actor with a seductive Welsh accent. The soundtrack obliges with all the right notes, bringing a carnival-esque orchestral score to Fairey’s misadventures putting up his OBEY posters and appropriately minor chords to the story of Guetta’s troubled childhood. While much of the footage of street artists looks the same—fuzzy, poorly lit images of white guys pasting giant stickers on walls—Banksy keeps things bouncy by ending the sequences with a goofy pratfall or arrest (an effective trick stolen wholesale from skateboarding videos). Which is all a long way of saying that Banksy knows how to make a very effective traditional documentary—even when what he is documenting is probably largely fabricated.

See, Banksy is known for his gags, such as the time he put a live elephant in the room (get it?) at his debut art show in the U.S., or the time he planted a handcuffed, hooded blow-up doll in an orange jumpsuit in Disneyland at the height of the Guantanamo Bay mishegas. Perhaps his greatest gag is that he has been a darling of the art world for a number of years and has been widely written about and interviewed, yet has never revealed his identity or his face. Some speculate that Banksy is not an actual person but rather an avatar for an artists’ collective. Some also say there is no Thierry Guetta.

According to this interpretation (which I tend to buy), Banksy gathered footage from the street artists themselves and footage that Guetta (or whatever his real name is) had taken of his family over the years. Banksy then got Fairey and a few others on camera to talk about how Guetta followed them for years, and had Guetta make up an elaborate backstory involving his childhood, his obsession with videography and his grandiose, but intellectually bankrupt, art ambitions. Then, in 2008, Banksy put on a massive show of painfully derivative Fairey, Banksy and Warhol-inspired art in a shuttered studio in L.A. and made Guerra—AKA Mr. Brainwash—his frontman. The goal? To show that with the proper amount of hype (and endorsements from Banksy and Fairey), audiences and art collectors would gobble up anything that had the imprimatur of “authentic” street art. What makes Exit Through the Gift Shop so darn clever is that it doesn’t really matter whether Banksy made up Mr. Brainwash or not. The show was a hit, and people paid thousands for the work on display.

As a side benefit, Exit Through the Gift Shop works as a deliriously effective bit of self-promotion for Banksy, whose integrity as an artist WHO IS NOT IN IT FOR THE MONEY is continually contrasted with Guetta’s visions of fame and fortune. Fairey, Banksy and everyone who helped fabricate the works at Mr. Brainwash’s show disparage his dim-witted intentions and his hopeless disorganization, all the better to demonstrate that Fairey and Banksy are “real” artists. What I kept wondering was: what makes one street artist any more “real” than another? Mr. Brainwash’s Campbell Soup spray-paint cans may owe an enormous debt to Warhol, but doesn’t Banksy’s own “Question Time”—a painting of Parliament filled with chimpanzees—remind you just a bit of “Dogs Playing Poker”? L.A. audiences may not have been able to distinguish between good street art and bad street art, but in a genre that is fundamentally derivative, subversive and repetitive, can anyone? Banksy, who has now made millions off his work, may see himself (selves?) as nothing more than a master con artist whose primary talents are a flair for controversy and a feel for what people think is “cool.”

So I stand corrected: Exit Through the Gift Shop is the story of a fool. Whether that fool is Guetta, Banksy or us depends on your perspective.

Also, check out my story on Romero and the making of the film.

In Solitary Man, Michael Douglas uses sex to stave off mortality. Not a bad idea, in theory.

In a moment of post-coital clarity after a one-night stand, a lovely young blonde woman (Anastasia Griffithe) asks Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas), “How did I even end up with the grandfather of one of my son’s friends?” With typically cruel bluntness, Kalmen responds, “You’re in your late 30s. And if you were in your late 20s, you would be with the dissatisfied father of one of your son’s friends.” Pulling the bed sheets to her chin, she asks, “Who even talks like that?” Good question. The same could be asked about any character in Solitary Man, one of those contrived exercises in middle-brow profundity where every character articulately says what he’s thinking or feeling all the time, without the slightest bit of shame or misdirection. Its apparent cynicism is as fraudulent and predictable as its final reel turn to humanism.

Directed by Brian Koppelman and Daniel Levein (co-writers of Rounders) from an inexplicably celebrated script by Koppelman, Solitary Man focuses on Douglas’ Kalmen, one of those raging, aging lions familiar from overrated Saul Bellow novels. He’s 60, he has a bad heart, and he’s taken a dump on everything good in his life. Sometime in the past seven years, he divorced his faithful wife (Susan Sarandon) and sabotaged his successful car-dealership empire so as to dedicate his life to the pursuit of the youngest possible tail he can snare. Despite being a world-beating douchebag, he retains the unconditional love of his angelic daughter (Jenna Fischer, who has yet to prove she can do anything interesting beyond her role as Pam on The Office) and his eternally patient ex. He still lives in luxury in an impossibly expensive Manhattan apartment (which is to say, it has a view and there’s room to walk around his bed), and still catches the eye of winsome, exotic 20-somethings. In other words, he lives the kind of heterosexual fantasy of late middle age reserved in reality only for celebrated authors and, well, Michael Douglas.

If Koppelman were to cast a non-judgmental eye to his subject, then we might have had something interesting: a psychological case study of a man who uses sex to smother his fear of dying. But Koppelman is too “responsible” for that. As with any good (which is to say, bad) morality tale, the antihero needs to get his come-uppins. Koppelman provides them in spades, from dumping by his new girlfriend (Mary Louise Parker) to another business failure to sexual rejection to a beating at the hands of a mob-hired tough guy. The profound lesson? What goes around comes around, or perhaps, one shouldn’t be an asshole.

The opportunity for his predictable undoing comes in a trip to his alma mater, a generic Ivy-esque university outside of Boston that he gave heavily to during his salad days. He goes there at Parker’s urging, so as to help her spoiled, prematurely mature daughter (Imogeen Poots) with her chances of admission. But the dean, wary of Kalmen’s sketchy recent business record, sends the head of the student senate (Jesse Eisenberg) to take Kalmen on a tour of the library that bears his name. Kalmen, who ain’t got time for no book learning, instead shows the shy sophomore how to pick up girls, drinking beers with him at a college party more generic than the campus and offering old-man asshole lessons on women more generic than the party. Poots has about 50% of Scarlett Johansson’s blank-slate sex appeal—which is more than enough—and Eisenberg plays a typically Eisenberg-ian slouching nerd (a first cousin of Michael Cera’s stammering dork). We should be thankful, I guess, that Koppelman doesn’t pair these two off, but the first-act visit to the college is the last time Koppelman’s screenplay does anything remotely unpredictable.

I’m sure Douglas saw the script as one of those opportunities for an Oscar-baiting late-career reflection on mortality, but he’s been playing this kind of overconfident jerk who gets what he deserves for more than 20 years. As Scout Fountas wryly observes, Douglas’s movies resemble stations of the cross on the way to privileged white-male martyrdom. Still, it’s always a pleasure to hear him deliver unvarnished truths about life and sex in his commanding deep voice. But there’s nothing new here, other than a few touchingly vulnerable shots of Douglas’s sagging breasts and flabby belly. That’s appropriate, for Kalmen is the only fleshed-out character in Solitary Man.

The other characters have no lives of their own, existing solely to act as foils for Kalmen’s increasingly irresponsible behavior. They come in three shades: saintly (his daughter, his ex, Eisenberg’s character, his college friend played by Danny DeVito, his grandson played by Jake Richard Siciliano), sinister (Poots) and functional (Ben Shenkman as his contact at a major car-maker, Richard Schiff as his personal banker). The only exception is Parker, which may be less a function of her character than of Parker’s trademark affectless delivery. The one other exception is David Costabile (The Wire), whose job as Fischer’s husband is to berate Kalmen for his obnoxiousness. Costabile is annoying, albeit correct.

Koppelman surrounds his antihero with a chorus of critics, but Koppelman’s just as indulgent of Kalmen as Kalmen is of himself. Whether he’s on the prowl or in the dumps, Kalmen acts as if the world revolves around him. When he sees DeVito in his old college town, for the first time in 30 years, DeVito says, “You always said you’d never come back, and you always said I’d never leave.” As if that’s all DeVito’s character’s been thinking about for three decades. Just once, I would have liked to hear a character talk about something other than Kalmen, if only to suggest they have identities independent of his ego.

Apparently satisfied that Kalmen has suffered enough after various humiliations and failures, Koppelman uses the final scene as an opportunity to humanize his self-destructive protagonist. The explanation is so obvious as to be unnecessary. But that’s not the most obnoxious part of the film’s ending. In the final shot, Kalmen faces the unlikely choice of returning to a life of responsibility or continuing his death-denying, skirt-chasing ways. Just as he’s about to make his choice, Devein and Koppelman cut to black. They’re trying to create an aura of artful indeterminacy, but the cut is really an act of ideological and narrative cowardice. They want us to think they care about these characters when all they really care about is generating some kind of critical “buzz.” Judging by the reviews, the ploy worked.