AFI Fest: A to W

 
CRITIC’S PICK CHE (USA/Spain) Nothing if not the movie of the year — the best, the worst, the longest, the most controversial, pretty much whatever you want it to be — Steven Soderbergh’s counterintuitive, two-part collection of scenes from the life of the iconic Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Guevara is as notable for what it manages to include in its four-and-a-half-hour running time as for its structuring absences — namely, all but a few fleeting glimpses of Guevara’s personal life, plus the entire six-year stretch between the end of the Cuban revolution and the start of Che’s ill-fated campaign to direct a sequel in Bolivia. Simply put, it’s a movie — or two movies — after Guevara’s own heart, in which the rebel leader (brilliantly embodied by Benicio Del Toro) often recedes into the jungle scape, one more proletariat cog in the Marxist wheel, while the greater cause — represented by long scenes of ideological debate and battlefield strategy — comes to the fore. One part ends in conditional triumph, the other in tragedy; in both, Soderbergh, per Che’s prophetic words, suggests that a revolution succeeds or fails by the will of the people. (Grauman’s Chinese; Sat., Nov. 1, 6 p.m.) (Scott Foundas)

 
DEADGIRL (USA) Some provocative psychosexual ideas die from malnourishment in co-directors Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s sporadically affecting horror film about two outcast teenage buddies (Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan) who stumble upon a chained-up, zombielike naked woman (Jenny Spain) in an abandoned mental institution. The friends’ differing views on what to do lead to some half-formed satire about adolescent male hormones and the evil that is high school. But in trying to make a midnight-movie cult classic, the filmmakers seem to have gotten scared of their intriguing concept’s emotional underpinnings, settling into a contemptuous attitude toward their cast of dunderheaded characters. (ArcLight Hollywood, Fri., Oct. 31, 7:15 p.m.; Mon., Nov. 3, 12:15 p.m.) (Tim Grierson)

Teresa Isasi/IFC Films

Che

Related Content

• Cannes 2013: Five of Our Favorite Films
  May 30, 2013
• Why You Have to See The Master in 70mm
  September 14, 2012
• The Master's Master
  September 6, 2012
• Joaquin Phoenix Returns in Paul Thomas Anderson's Scientology-inspired The Master
  September 10, 2012
• The Master Review: Paul Thomas Anderson Reteams With Philip Seymour Hoffman
  September 13, 2012

More About

• Hollywood
• Kimberly Reed
• Andre Williams
• Takeshi Kitano
• Chris Taylor

 
CRITIC’S PICK  EVERLASTING MOMENTS (Sweden/Denmark) A likely contender for this year’s foreign-film Oscar, Everlasting Moments, despite the schmaltzy title, is a deeply involving family drama that marks a late-career triumph for 77-year-old Swedish director Jan Troell, whose two-part 1971-72 epic, The Emigrants and The New Land, was internationally beloved. As with those masterpieces, Troell once again delineates the complexities of marriage, in this case that of Maria (Maria Heiskanen) and Sigfrid Larsson (Mikael Persbrandt), who wed in 1907 and soon have a houseful of children. A dockworker, alcoholic and womanizer, Sigfrid leaves the worries of familial responsibility to Maria, who one day goes to hock an old camera that she won in a contest and never used. Encouraged by the obviously smitten camera-shop owner (Jesper Christensen), Maria begins taking and later developing her own photographs, a process that is forever miraculous to her. Despite an obvious “gift for seeing,” this mother and beleaguered wife often sets aside her camera, but gradually, over the course of 10 years, she finds a way to balance her art with her life — a feat, Troell suggests, that is as miraculous as the capturing of image to film. Despite some schematic plotting, Everlasting Moments is the work of a master, who draws marvelously subtle performances from Heiskanen, Persbrandt and Christensen in which the truth of a given character lies not in what is said aloud but in what is held within. As with one of Maria’s portraits, it’s all in the eyes. (ArcLight Hollywood, Sun., Nov. 2, noon; Thurs., Nov. 6, 6:45 p.m.) (CW)

 
FINALLY, LILLIAN AND DAN (USA) Two quarter-life Cambridge sad sacks converge in this nearly self-parodic signal that legions of the mumble-afflicted wait in the wings to rise up and falter as one. Lillian is an anemic-looking slumper living with grandma (who does funny-cute dances!); Dan’s selling points are an eagerness to shop at Lillian’s supermarket, apparently adorable social paralysis and an old car. Aphasic courtship ensues. While the precious filmmaking ekes out autumnal-gold Quiet City visuals, the feeble actors’ disfiguring attempts at earnestness suggest the residents of Frownland. If any of this sounds romantic, then the reproductive prospects of the human race look grim. (Mann Chinese 6, Wed., Nov. 5, 9:45 p.m.; Fri., Nov. 7, 1 p.m.) (Nicolas Rapold)

 
FOOD FIGHT (USA) No one gets a pie in the face in Chris Taylor’s cheeky documentary, Food Fight; instead, the director argues that the nation has been getting Twinkies and other processed food shoved down its gullets for decades. In the wake of books like Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (whose author, Michael Pollan, is one of many talking heads here), Food Fight pits organic farmers against the Industrial Agriculture Complex. While Taylor’s film serves up the history and politics of how America eats in a breezy, amusing way, its extended, hagiographic portraits of celebrity chefs (including Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck and Suzanne Goin) are a bit hard to swallow. (Mann Chinese 6, Sat., Nov. 8, 3:15 p.m.) (James C. Taylor)