AFI Fest, A to W

GO  PETITION (France/China) Zhao Liang’s documentary about ordinary Chinese citizens seeking redress for assorted wrongs (unlawful firings; police brutality) at the Petition Office in Beijing was more than a decade in the making. During that time, Liang skirted the law by filming inside the office while following a handful of petitioners on their quest for justice, and then took his cameras to Petition Village (just outside Petition Office) to capture the squalid living conditions of petitioners. The result is a riveting, depressing look at systemic injustice and people fearlessly battling both the perpetrators of their original injuries and a bureaucratic agency that merely compounds the wound. (Mann Chinese 6, Thurs., Nov. 5, 7 p.m.) (EH)

*CRITIC’S PICK*  POLICE, ADJECTIVE A spirit of literal-mindedness guides Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, easily the best film in Cannes not screening in the main competition. (Instead, it was inexplicably relegated to a single 11 a.m. screening in the festival’s Un Certain Regard sidebar.) Set, like Porumboiu’s previous 12:08 East of Bucharest, in the filmmaker’s hometown of Vaslui, Police, Adjective depicts an absurdly protracted sting operation designed to catch a lone high school student in the act of selling marijuana. Cristi, the cop assigned to the case, realizes the futility of his mission, though his attempts to convince his bureaucratic superiors of the same are met with contempt, derision and the reminder that it is not his place to question the letter of the law. But it is nothing less than letters and laws — of both the legal and grammatical variety — that are the keys to Porumboiu’s wonderfully pliable, allegorical theme. For much of the running time, Porumboiu gives us a series of long, nearly wordless scenes of the cop pursuing his suspect, which turn out to be the carefully laid groundwork for a showstopping final act of Stoppardian verbosity, as the cop and his superior engage in a verbal tennis match about conscience, personal morality and the true meanings of words. (Mann Chinese 6, Sun., Nov. 1, 4:15 p.m.) (SF)

Red Riding

Trash Humpers

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• Albert Barnes
• Michael Haneke
• Neil Young
• Benito Mussolini
• Corneliu Porumboiu

RED RIDING The four novels that comprise British author David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet — with chronological titles 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 — earned literary notoriety for their Ellroy-influenced fact/fiction mash-ups, which dove headlong into the climate of fear, despair and sinful power that pervaded mining-hub Yorkshire during the reign (1975-80) of a serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper. The narratively compressed film trilogy adapted from the books (1977 was left out), which first aired in March on the U.K.’s Channel 4, is a mixed bag of noir-inflected style and awkwardly slick character studies. Directed by Julian Jarrold and set before the Ripper murders, 1974 introduces a cocky young journalist (Andrew Garfield) who is exploring the connection between a schoolgirl’s rape/murder and several missing girls of years prior — a pursuit that entangles him with one girl’s mother (Rebecca Hall); the viciously brutal West Yorkshire police (who say things like “To the North, where we do what we want!”); and a powerful construction magnate (Sean Bean). Man on Wire director James Marsh’s 1980 chronicles the efforts of a Home Office investigator (Paddy Considine) to unearth possible law enforcement cock-ups in the now-full-blown Ripper case, which leads him down treacherous and ultimately violent personal and professional paths. Lastly, the Anand Tucker–directed 1983 follows a haunted lawyer (Mark Addy) and a conscience-stricken detective (David Morrissey, who along with a few other actors, appears in all three films) as each turns over rocks in the thought-to-have-been-solved murders from the first film. At five hours’ total, the Red Riding movies valiantly attempt to turn Peace’s scorching (if self-conscious) mix of it’s-grim-up-north plotting and tortured interior monologues into an intertwined movie epic about the limits of humanity in a place teeming with visible and hidden devils. Yet, the urgency of the novels has been mostly stripped and replaced by an arty, burnished bleakness that, although often eye-catching in 16mm (1974), 35mm (1980) and Red One HD video (1983), prevents the many characters from ever truly getting under our skin — despite a great cast that includes Peter Mullan, Eddie Marsan and Jim Carter. Marsh’s 1980 is the most satisfying of the lot — the best-acted, surest in tone and crispest in execution as a story — but while it makes for a tantalizingly dark heart at the core of Red Riding’s venal anatomy, it rarely pumps. (All films in the Red Riding trilogy screen at the Mann Chinese 6 on Sat., Oct. 31: 1974 at 4:30 p.m.; 1980 at 6:30 p.m.; and 1983 at 8:15 p.m.) (RA)

GO  REPORTER (USA) A convincing, but not hectoring, argument for the importance of old-school investigative reporting in the blog age, director Eric Daniel Metzgar’s documentary uses two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof as the catalyst for a larger discussion about the difficulty of keeping Westerners interested and emotionally involved in ongoing, seemingly endless humanitarian crises like the Rwandan genocide. Metzgar follows Kristof as he travels to Congo in June 2007 in the hopes of interviewing a dangerous local warlord reportedly responsible for the deaths of thousands, and the resulting footage is a gripping, Heart of Darkness–style confrontation between journalistic rigor and commonplace evil. (Mann Chinese 6, Thurs., Nov. 5, 10 p.m.) (TG)