20 Movies You Need to See at AFI Fest 2012

Room 237: How Kubrick faked the moon landing, or didn't

No film has inspired as many, shall we say, creative interpretations as The Shining. Various amateur sleuths and scholars claim it's about everything from the extermination of the American Indian (somewhat plausible) to the Apollo 11 moon landing, which Kubrick allegedly helped to fake (get real). This fascinating doc assembles five such theories, with disembodied voices making their case over relevant clips, but director Rodney Ascher is ultimately less interested in who may be right or wrong than in the ways that viewers take possession of their favorite movies and transform them into an endless feedback loop. (M.D.)

Related Content

• Cannes Film Festival 2012: Highlights and Lowlights
  May 31, 2012
• Amour and More: How to See the Golden Globes' Five Foreign Film Nominees in Five Days
  January 3, 2013
• AFI Fest 2012: Who Will Win the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film?
  November 1, 2012
• AFI Fest 2012: Four Trends to Watch For
  November 1, 2012
• Cannes Film Festival: The Korean Woody Allen, and an Iranian Game-Changer
  May 21, 2012

More About

• Sundance Film Festival
• Cannes Film Festival
• Karina Longworth
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Film Festivals

Rust and Bone: Marion Cotillard meets special effects magic

The beautifully acted latest film from director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) stars Marion Cotillard as a bombshell aquarium worker who loses both legs in an accident, and Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead) as the pretty but apparently vacant thug she turns to for sex/comfort. A triumph of meaningfully deployed artifice (Katy Perry's "Fireworks" plays twice, the second time jerking tears), it's either one of the year's most manipulative slices of Oscar bait or a brilliant, knowing critique of the way such films muddle the difference between realism and fantasy, synthetic sentimentality and authentic emotion. (K.L.)

Simon Killer: Casanova was a neuroscientist

A fascinating, visually hypnotic study of a seductive creep. Antonio Campos' follow-up to Afterschool (he also produced Martha Marcy May Marlene) follows the post-collegiate wanderings of Simon (Brady Corbet, phenomenal), a would-be brain scientist (or is he?) attempting to escape a painful break-up. He uses his baby-faced good looks and mastery of the mechanics of perception to manipulate his way through Paris, and into the beds and lives of young women. A brutal indictment of willfully misspent youth, it's also a startling treatise on the difference between looking and seeing, commenting on cinema as a manipulation of the eye and the brain, while embodying the medium's sensual pleasures. (K.L.)

Tchoupitoulas: One crazy night in the Big Easy

They may look like Echo Park bartenders, but make no mistake: Brothers Bill and Turner Ross are the future of cinéma vérité. Tchoupitoulas, their free-form, nonfiction portrait of three young brothers on an all-night walkabout around New Orleans, is a cleverly constructed ode to formative experience. Call it the documentary Beasts of the Southern Wild if you must (the films share more than geography and young narrators — they actually share several financiers/producers). But Tchoupitoulas is rougher and rowdier, its depiction of life through a child's eyes not quite as fantastic but no less thrilling. (K.L.)

Tey: Last day on Earth

African-American spoken-word artist Saul Williams powerfully anchors Tey while, ironically, barely uttering a word. His character, Satché, awakens to his last day to live and sets out on a farewell tour where he encounters old flames, friends and locals who come to see him off. Information is sparsely doled out, so we're never clearly told why seemingly healthy Satché must die, and conversation with those he encounters is elliptical, filled as much with recrimination as love. The gorgeous visuals (lots of close-ups on faces) jell into a hypnotic poem as Senegalese writer-director Alain Gomis suggests that our lives are not wholly knowable even to us, and life itself carries brashly on without us. (E.H.)