The AFI Films You Need to See

HANAAN The generic, seemingly off-the-cuff bedtime story that a Korean father tells his daughter at the start of writer-director Ruslan Pak's Hanaan is really a crucial bit of historical information setting up the grim, engrossing story that follows. The fairy tale is actually a recap of Stalin's forced relocation of Koreans to the Soviet Union's Asian territories, and in many ways Pak's film — a Korean/Uzbek co-production — is about the dark, enduring legacies of that displacement and forced assimilation. Stas is an ambitious cop whose boyhood friends, and his own past, exist on the shadier side of the law. When a hard-earned drug bust dissolves, a disillusioned Stas falls apart and starts living on the flip side of legality. The world depicted in Hanaan is violent and gritty, illustrating the underbelly of the immigrant experience (criminality, underground economies) as well as the ties often forged between immigrant families and the disenfranchised poor of their new host nations. It also shows how even the possibility of redemption might not put as much distance between the past and the future as one might wish. —Ernest Hardy

INTO THE ABYSS With his latest documentary, Werner Herzog takes a look at a capital-punishment case in Texas. Rather than produce an issue-oriented doc looking to free the innocent or right a wrong, the filmmaker instead ruminates on loss, absence and the placid oblivion of nature. The crime is plain stupid: Two young men hatched a plan to steal a car and ended up killing three people. One is executed for the crime — Herzog interviews him during his last days — and the other is serving 40 years. Herzog isn't interested in retrying their case, especially since it seems undeniable that the pair did what they were accused of, regardless of their pleas to the contrary. Herzog instead looks at what isn't there, the hole that a series of senseless acts has created, the chain reaction of lives forced into change. Rather than a film about the death penalty, Herzog has created a film about death, staring at the cavernous unknown of mortality and still finding beauty, mystery, strangeness, wonder and, most of all, a reason to go on. In typically Herzog-ian fashion, his response to death is to appreciate life, as if to ask, what else is there to do? —Mark Olsen

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American Film Institute

2021 N. Western Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Category: Community Venues

Region: Los Feliz

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• Roman Polanski
• Alexander Sokurov
• Mike D'Angelo
• Chantal Akerman
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME Making the transition from the world of DIY indies to studio-distributed movies starring genuine famous people hasn't curbed the odd instincts of filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass, who with Jeff, Who Lives at Home have made their flat-out weirdest film yet. Jeff (Jason Segel) is a perennially baked layabout who feels particularly attuned to what he interprets as cosmic signs, Ed Helms is his hapless brother, convinced his wife is cheating on him, and — in a boldly distinct story line, at times like its own separate movie — Susan Sarandon plays their mother, whose late-in-life ennui opens up the possibility of an unlikely crush. What's best and most adventurous about Jeff is how purposefully flaky and digressive it is, using a stoner's intuition and wayward attention as guiding narrative principles. It's a shaggy-dude story with an emotional payoff, with the narrative strands dovetailing together for a singular climax. Sharp while knowingly a little stupid, heartfelt and sincere while also more than just a touch stylized  and slapsticky, Jeff is a resonant goof. —Mark Olsen

THE KID WITH A BIKE Like their 1999 Palme d'Or winner Rosetta, the Dardenne brothers' latest hits the ground running — a necessity if it hopes to keep pace with its manically driven title character. Initially — and tragically — bikeless, young Cyril (typically remarkable Dardennes discovery Thomas Doret ) refuses to accept that his deadbeat dad (Jérémie Renier) wants nothing more to do with him. During one of his frantic attempts to escape the state-run facility at which his dad has dumped him, Cyril quite literally runs into compassionate hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France), who unexpectedly offers the lad a stable and loving home ... but desperation born of abandonment doesn't just vanish overnight. Where Lorna's Silence (2008) saw the Dardennes courageously moving out of their comfort zone (to the consternation of many, who seemed to find their use of a bona fide plot somewhat vulgar), The Kid With a Bike takes comparatively few risks, doubling down on the unsentimental but deeply empathetic naturalism at which the brothers excel. But if this isn't their most adventurous or exciting film, it's nonetheless immensely satisfying — not least in its commitment to a child protagonist whose near-feral intensity and unthinking ingratitude make him the polar opposite of cute. —Mike D'Angelo

KILL LIST A soldier turned workaday mercenary assassin (Neil Maskell) is struggling to settle back into a normal domestic routine after a job goes awry when he lands a new mission from mysterious employers. As he sets to his grim work, each successive target seems closer and closer to him, as if this job was designed specifically for him. A relentless study in narrative disorientation, Ben Wheatley's second feature mercilessly upends viewer expectations at every turn, creating a world in which human cruelty becomes discomfortingly commonplace, grimly marching toward the truly unthinkable. Wheatley's debut, Down Terrace, a queasy comedy about low-stakes suburban gangsters who barely ever made it out of their modest house, had a gripping sense of unease and mounting anxiety. With his latest film, Wheatley creates a tense version of horror that includes both ritual murder and awkward dinner parties, moving between such poles with a cruel, exacting precision. Seemingly random circumstances suddenly reveal a darker true purpose as Maskell's character is pushed on his way to a final freak-out that is devastating, unimaginable and somehow inevitable. When it's all over, audiences are sent reeling out of the theater with heads spinning and guts churning. —Mark Olsen