Los Angeles Film Festival: Reviews, A to Z

GO  HIGH-RISE (Brazil) Zeroing in on one essential facet of urban experience, documentarian Gabriel Mascaro whisks us to the islands in the sky known as penthouses and hears out their well-heeled inhabitants. A colorful variety of upper-class Brazilian city dwellers chat away, happily espousing isolation and control as ideals, while Mascaro injects clean, angled views from one sheer skyscraper to the next. The desultory doc has room to grow, but its milieu effortlessly provokes thoughts on inequality, satisfaction and oblivion. (Landmark, Sat., June 20, 9:45 p.m.; Italian Culture Institute, Sun., June 21, 2:30 p.m.) (NR)

HOLLYWOOD JE T’AIME (USA) Sad-sack adult naif Jérôme (Eric Debets) impetuously books a flight from Paris to Hollywood to escape his philandering ex-boyfriend and cramped new apartment. Once writer-director Jason Bushman gets Jérôme stateside, the character befriends clichés (including a semitragic Negro tranny and a jaded, weeping-on-the-inside white queen) as he navigates Silver Lake, West Hollywood and the cutthroat world of show biz. Chad Allen (looking skeezy) turns up as a weed-dealing, potentially ideal holiday romance until he unleashes some bigotry. With fantasy sequences that impart obvious life lessons, a superficial look at the politics of immigration, and welcome dollops of eye candy, the film is never more than mildly entertaining. (Majestic Crest, Sun., June 21, 7 p.m.) (Ernest Hardy)

Still Walking

Wah Do Dem

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CRITIC’S PICK  IN THE LOOP (U.K.) Taking the Dr. Strangelove view that nothing is funnier in the halls of power than a war of cockamamie spin, this scabrously hilarious warmongering farce co-written and directed by British comedy impresario Armando Iannucci reimagines the U.K./U.S. buildup to an inevitable Middle Eastern conflict as an absurdist school-yard bully-off between a ferociously insulting Downing Street adviser (the magnificently scary Scotsman Peter Capaldi, in one of the year’s great comic turns) and an American general (James Gandolfini) who’s seen enough bloodshed in his lifetime. Their pawn — and the movie’s jittery moral hero — is a well-meaning British secretary of international development (Pirates of the Caribbean’s Tom Hollander), whose ill-spoken answers on a talk show spark the movie’s pond-crossing crisis. Like Iannucci’s TV series The Thick of It — the fantastic BBC government satire that is this movie’s genetic cousin, from its use of the same actors (Capaldi among them) to the fly-on-the-wall camera style — In the Loop presents modern politics as little more than a constant state of leak-plugging, backtracking, shrewd stupidity and inelegant redirection. (Majestic Crest, Sat., June 20, 7 p.m.) (RA)

I SELL THE DEAD (USA) The always enterprising indie-horror auteur Larry Fessenden produced and stars in this goofy Dickensian monster movie as half of a grave-robbing duo (the other is played by The Lord of the Rings’ Dominic Monaghan) unearthing corpses of the human, vampire and zombie varieties in period-on-a-shoestring, 18th-century England. The cast — a who’s who of the genre faithful, including Guillermo del Toro regular Ron Perlman and Phantasm’s tall man, Angus Scrimm — keeps things fitfully amusing, but debuting writer-director Glenn McQuaid (previously a visual-effects supervisor on other Fessenden productions) fails to bring any distinctive personality or flair to material that ultimately feels all ghouled up with nowhere to go. (Landmark, Wed., June 24, 7:15 p.m.; Majestic Crest, Fri., June 26, 10 p.m.) (SF)

GO  THE LAST BEEKEEPER (USA) The precipitous decline of the American honeybee population, which has a creepy X-Files resonance, is shown from the point of view of three humans who have an immediate stake in the outcome, stubborn practitioners of an endangered profession. Jeremy Simmons’ crisp, tight, understated documentary doesn’t belabor the point that Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a microcosm of man’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the ecosystem. The very thought of a world without bees to pollinate the almond crop is bone-chilling enough. (Regent, Sat., June 20, 2:30 p.m.; Landmark, Thurs., June 25, 4:45 p.m.) (David Chute)

GO  LOS BASTARDOS (Mexico/France/USA)The second feature by the auspiciously talented 30-year-old director Amat Escalante (Sangre) is a blunt but undeniably effective social critique — imagine a Marxist riposte to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games — in which two Mexican immigrants working as day laborers in and around Long Beach spend one long night as unwelcome intruders in the suburban home of a disaffected white woman. In long, static wide-screen compositions, they take a gander at how the other half lives: eating the woman’s microwave dinners, swimming in her azure pool, and smoking her crack cocaine, before a predictable (albeit startling) blast of violence brings down the curtain on their doomed masquerade. (Regent, Tues., June 23, 9:45 p.m.; Landmark, Wed., June 24, 2 p.m.) (SF)

GO  MY DEAR ENEMY (South Korea) Ad-Lib Night director Lee Yoon-ki’s charmingly deadpan, socially awkward stroll through Seoul (once again adapted from a novel by Azuko Taira) is a thematic inversion of the Hollywood romcom, so stay tuned for the misguided remake. Broke as a joke, prickly 30-something Hee-su (Secret Sunshine’s Jeon Do-youn) hunts down her glib but feckless ex-boyfriend (The Chaser’s Ha Jung-woo) to demand repayment of a $3,500 loan. Setting off on a day trip to visit his friends and other exes for potential shakedowns, the two share a wary chemistry as nuanced as the film’s magnificent sense of wide-screen space. (Landmark, Sat., June 20, 7 p.m.; Regent, Mon., June 22, 1:30 p.m.) (AH)