L.A. Film Festival 2013: The Best Films to See

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The Act of Killing

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• Grace Lee Boggs
• Robert Reich
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• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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The Los Angeles Film Festival doesn't always share the same "event" status as its cinematic cousins such as AFI Fest or even the Spirit Awards (which are organized by the group that runs LAFF, Film Independent). This is in spite of the fact that it's the city's main traditional film fest — rather than showcasing the biggest hits from festivals like Cannes and Toronto, as AFI does, LAFF deals largely in world premieres of micro-budget indies. (If movie stars are your thing, though, you'll have a chance at LAFF to see Steve Carrell and Sam Rockwell in The Way, Way Back and Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives.)

Discovery is the greatest joy of any film festival, of course, and with more than 50 features on offer, there are sure to be a few diamonds in the rough at L.A. Live in the next 10 days.

The following is our take on your best bets in each of the festival's sections. For exact screening times see lafilmfest.com. —Michael Nordine

NARRATIVE

Of the films available for review in this section, only one stands out as a major work. I.D. (screening June 15 and 16) may be the first feature by Indian filmmaker Kamal K.M., but it's an utterly confident, absorbing drama told with visual precision and rhythmic momentum that plunges the viewer into the social fabric of contemporary Mumbai. A young, career-minded woman (Geetanjali Thapa) who recently moved to the city hires a painter to touch up the walls of her high-rise apartment. When he seriously injures himself, she's thrust into a search for his identity. As she journeys from bustling metropolis to littered shantytown, the film becomes a vivid expression of physical spaces and anonymous lives, a meditation on personal awareness and responsibility in an age of rote productivity.

Two other films are less assured but nevertheless mark talents to watch. In recent years, it would be hard to overstate the impact of the Dardenne brothers' modest but gripping dramas on the indie film scene. The handheld camerawork and themes of adolescence in Mother, I Love You (screening June 15 and 16) by Latvian filmmaker Janis Nords owes a lot to their work. A wayward 12-year-old challenges his single mother's ability to parent him when he makes a series of rash decisions and attempts to cover them up. The camera trails the boy throughout, climaxing in a moment of truth. The film may not cut new paths, but its performances (mostly nonprofessional) and shifting narrative prove to be effective and compelling.

Forty Years From Yesterday (screening June 16 and 22), by Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck and Robert Machoian, featuring many of Machoian's family members, offers a moving story about an aging man whose wife dies, and the funeral preparations that ensue. Ostensibly an examination of the man's religious crisis, the film is less successful at achieving spiritual depth than assembling — with an unusual, lingering gaze — intimate scenes of grieving and even the deceased's physical preparations at the local morgue.—Doug Cummings

INTERNATIONAL

An air of unreality hangs over Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn's The Act of Killing (June 14 and 16), which is not only the best film in LAFF's International Showcase but also the one that most epitomizes the section's tendency toward quietly gripping documentaries teeming with small but weighty moments. The premise — a group of Indonesian gangsters is asked to re-enact war crimes they committed in that country's anticommunist purge of 1965-66 — is darkly tantalizing; the results are even more bizarrely fascinating than that description lets on. The subjects' bumbling callousness, unchecked egos and affinity for movies starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino actually make them oddly reminiscent of Tony Soprano and his henchmen, another group of gangsters given to waxing poetic about The Godfather when not preoccupied with more unsavory affairs. "We wanted to be more cruel than the movies," one of them says early on; a moment of retroactive empathy brought about by viewing one of his re-enactments (with himself as the victim) attests to the power of cinema in a much different way.

Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To's cops-and-criminals action thriller Drug War (Du Zhan) (June 15 and 19) is marked by equally disagreeable characters, but here they're at least fictional. Though the subject matter and plotting are familiar, To is well-served by his yen for prolonged sequences of suspense and an utter lack of the bombast that so often accompanies this type of story. Shoot-outs are rare but methodically detailed, with each bullet feeling deliberate, forceful and indicative of the zero-sum conflict. No one wins To's drug war, but some survive it — at least for a while.

Elsewhere in the Showcase are two documentaries of limited means but admirable aims. Like last year's exceptional Whores' Glory, about Thai prostitutes, Valentina Mac-Pherson and Patricia Correa's The Women and the Passenger (June 15 and 17) documents the inner workings of a brothel, in this case from the collective perspective of the maids who clean it. There's no hand-wringing or put-upon outrage, just an effectively bare-bones aesthetic (fixed camera angles, long takes) and even-keeled ruminations — many of which have little or nothing to do with the Chilean sex hotel in which the women work.