Whenever I sit down to watch a Marko Zaror movie, I invariably find myself wondering why he doesn’t have more of a fan following in the US. He’s a top martial artist, has a strong screen presence and is a much better actor than the action film genre generally requires. And yet the Chilean star continues to find an American audience elusive.

Unfortunately, Zaror’s latest, Mandrill, is probably not going to do much to enhance his reputation here in the States. It is not the actor’s best collaboration with director Ernesto Diaz Espinoza. That would be 2006′s Kiltro. But Mandrill still manages to be an entertaining 90 minutes of martial arts action.

Mandrill (Zaror) is a stone cold killer, one of the best assassins for hire in the business. And as he plies his trade, he is always on the lookout for the one-eyed man known only as The Cyclops, who killed his parents years ago when he was a boy. When he is offered a contract on the Cyclops’s life, Mandrill manages to track down his daughter, the lovely Dominique, who is rumored to be the only one who knows where her father is hiding. But as he attempts to seduce Cyclops’s location out of Dominique, mandrill doesn’t count on falling in love with her.

Although the plot description sounds like the stuff of serious drama, the film never forgets that it is a martial arts movie first and foremost, serving up plenty of fight sequences. Acting as his own fight coordinator, as he has done for several of his previous films, Zaror manages to highlight his own abilities while never making it look as if his character is having too easy of a time dispatching his opponents.

Unfortunately for the film, Espinoza’s direction of the fight sequences is maddeningly inconsistent. There are several times when the camera circles Zaror and an opponent, searching for an interesting angle but seldom finding it. And then things will turn on a dime and Espinoza will show us exactly what we need in an action sequence, showing us the flow of the battle, the back and forth of the combatants and even momentarily slowing things down to showcase a particular instance of Zaror’s athleticism.

To say that Mandrill wears its James Bond influence on its sleeve would be a gross understatement. From his suave way with the ladies, one doesn’t have to sit through the film’s closing credits’ acknowledgement of thanks to the various actors who have played the British secret agent with a license to kill to see how their performances have informed Zaror’s approach to his role here. The film’s opening sequence, which shows off Mandrill’s skills, but which is inconsequential to the main plot, is similar to how the Bond films start off, while the casino location and some emotional beats are directly lifted from 2006′s Casino Royale. Even the soundtrack music owes a debt of gratitude, and perhaps a royalty payment, to composer John Barry’s classic scores for the series.

Originally we reviewed Secret Sunshine when it screened at the 2007 New York Film Festival. As it is screening today and Saturday at the Philadelphia Film Festival as part of their “From The Vaults” programming track, we’re re-presenting it.

Secret Sunshine is an emotional tour de force, taking its audience to the heart of a mother’s worst fear and then following her ensuing descent into a vortex of depression, denial and ultimately, madness.

Recently widowed Lee Sin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) moves with her young son to Miryang, the hometown of her deceased husband. There she hopes to establish a new life while maintaining a link to her past. As she settles in, she starts a business teaching piano and begins to make friends. In an effort to impress her newfound friends and neighbors, she talks about buying some land and building a home. This illusion of affluence, however, makes her son the target of kidnappers, who demand a ransom that Sin-ae can’t pay. When the kidnappers don’t believe her protests that she doesn’t have the ransom amount they think she has, her son is found dead and the kidnapper is revealed to be someone close to her.

Such is the plot to only the first third or so of the movie. Where that would be enough for a whole movie in another’s hands, but for Lee Chang-Dong it is just set up for the gut-wrenching journey Sin-ae is on the road to. The success of this movie rests entirely on the shoulders of Jeon, who gives an incredible performance. As Sin-ae’s fortunes continue to sour, Jeon takes us step-by-step through her breakdown and descent into despair. It is this measured, naturalistic performance that keeps the film from becoming mawkish melodrama, overridden with histrionics that seem more about acting a character than being the character. Her work also helps ground the proceedings when Sin-ae becomes involved with Korea’s growing Christian church community.

Beautifully shot, the film paints a portrait of the sleepy Korean town it is set in. People laugh and cry, go about their business and gossip. It’s this universal, mundane reality of life that sets the stage for this tale, as well as propels the story along, helping to anchor the drama of the film and give it more punch-in-the-guts power.

No matter how you may or may not have voted, there is no denying that Election Day 2008 was of more historical import than most. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, many felt a growing excitement and energy as the country grew closer to casting their votes. Wanting to capture the peaking of this crescendo, Jeff Deutchman asked friends and associates around the world to pick up cameras and document November 4, 2008 on video and send him the footage. The edited result is 11/4/08, tone poem that captures in a way like no other could the overwhelming spirit and emotion that griped many that day.

The film covers nearly 20 hours of the historic day, starting with get out the vote volunteers psyching themselves up for one last marathon day of work. In Chicago we meet two voters who are excited to be casting their ballots in candidate Barack OBama’s home district even though his appearance at the polls will now surely mean that they will be late for work. Nervous excitement grows through the day. A young girl in Alaska knows that the day will be important, even if she is not sure as to why. Around the world eyes are turning towards the United States as it grows closer to the time that election results are to start being announced. In Paris, Dubai and Berlin, Americans abroad and foreigners alike gather to await the news.

Although the film follows mainly Obama supporters, it does maintain a certain objectivity. There is no connecting narration and title cards only give us the scantest information of time and place. Strictly observational footage captures the action as the day builds towards the announcement that Obama has won the election. But not everyone is caught up in the day’s excitement. A Chicago woman wonders if Obama supporters are voting for him based on his stated policies or for other reasons. In Manhattan, a subway-riding young Republican thinks that there will be a change in the country no matter who is elected, while a convicted felon in St. Louis, unable to vote, sits by and voices doubt that anything will change personally for him.

Deutchman’s unique crowd sourcing approach to this film is probably the one only way it could have been made with the scope that it encompasses. And it brings numerous interesting collaborators into the process including such indie directors Henry Joost (Catfish) and Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes The Stairs) and Independent Spirit Award winning documentary director Margaret Brown (The Order Of Myths). And the film is just the first part of a cross-platform approach that he is taking to documenting that day, launching a website that will serve as an exchange of footage shot on that date from the contributing filmmakers as well as video shot by ordinary citizens.

With funding courtesy of a small inheritance from a recently deceased aunt, Jeff (Neil Patrick Harris) and Samantha (Bonnie Somerville) decide to transplant their home from Delaware to Manhattan. But the transition isn’t a smooth one as they discover when they go to enroll their five-year-old daughter into a private kindergarten. It turns out that there is cutthroat competition to get in and many schools start the enrollment process while the couples are still pregnant. Turning to a professional enrollment coach (Amy Sedaris), Jeff and Samantha soon find themselves trapped in a series of increasingly ridiculous lies and deception in order to get their daughter enrolled.

The Best And The Brightest doesn’t quite measure up as a big screen comedy. There are laughs to be had here, but the screenplay’s constant need to place its characters in improbable situation and then compounding things through a string of easily avoidable misunderstandings and contrived bad luck. This happens on more than one occasion and each time it does the rhythm of the scene feels as if there should be a pre-recorded laugh track accompaniment.

Of course, this formula also insists on characters doing incredibly stupid things and here is no exception. At the insistence of their enrollment adviser, Jeff pretends that he is a poet who is preparing to have his first volume of work published. A racy transcript of a friend’s online chat activity is accidentally substituted for his supposed verse when a school’s admissions officer asks to see a sample of his writing. Rather than being appalled at the content, she finds it groundbreaking and soon the couple find themselves hosting a book party to premier the non-existent volume with all the school’s high-powered administration in attendance. While this could be played as screwball or farce, it plays it too broadly to be anything but a plot from a half-hour television laughter.

Harris, Somerville, Sedaris and Peter Serafinowicz as the aforementioned online chatting friend, try to work with the script gives them, but it is a desperate battle. The characters are fairly underdeveloped and that leaves much of the action unmotivated except for the need of the screenplay to have them do something that will further complicate the situation. Only Christopher McDonald, as the school’s main financial benefactor, seems to realize what he’s stuck with and plays his character’s collection of cliches to the hammy hilt.

A note: Although set in New York City, the film was shot in both Manhattan and Philadelphia-posing-as-Manhattan. Familiarity with both cities may induce an occasional jolt of disconnection when the production jumps from one locale to the other.

All wars are filled with stories that can only be told years or even decades after the conflict has ended. The incredible story of Juan Pujol, one of World War ll’s most masterful double agents, is just such a story.

As unassuming Spaniard, Pujol offered his services to the British government as a spy in the early days of the war. Rebuffed due to his lack of any qualifications, Pujol turned around and offered his services to the Nazis. Much more receptive to his offer, the Germans stationed him in Lisbon, where Pujol quickly assembled a network of informants and began sending information back to his impressed controllers in Berlin.

But what his Nazi spy masters don’t realize is that the entire network that Pujol has constructed is a fiction. Pjujol has no agents working for him and the information he has sent them has been gleaned from newspapers and almanacs from the local public library. When Pujol shows the British what he has accomplished, they realize that they not only grossly underestimated the modest man but are being offered an incredible weapon to use against the Axis. Granting him the code name Garbo, for being “the greatest actor in the world,” British Intelligence has Pujol feed misinformation to the Germans to draw their attention away from their desired targets for the D-Day Invasion.

It’s a remarkable story and director Edmon Roch has done an admirable job in telling it, weaving the various fictions that Pujol created with the facts of his operation. The result is an interesting and compelling portrait of one of the war’s unsung heroes, a man whose initiative ultimately made the invasion of Normandy possible. While Garbo’s exploits are no longer classified, very little is known about the man. Although there is plenty of vintage war footage to supplement the talking head interviews, Roch ran into a roadblock in the form of there being, understandably, no film footage of Pujol from that time. Roch gets around this limitation by using clips from Hollywood war and espionage films to illustrate certain points his interview subjects are making.

If the documentary stumbles, it’s right towards the end, with the section that looked at Pujol’s post-War life. After faking his death, Pujol headed to South America where he lived anonymously and even starting a second family. (He left his first family in Spain at the outbreak of the War.) He finally revealed that he was still alive in the mid-1980s, just a few years before his death. While an interesting post-script, Roch doesn’t give an explanation for what drove Pujol to decline offers from British intelligence for a quiet retirement, especially after showing that he seemed to have enjoyed the work so much when he was doing it.

Blue Valentine is a devastating portrait of the disintegration of a marriage, a slow-motion car crash where you see things inevitably spinning out of control but are unable to stop the tragic tableau unfolding before you.

Whatever love Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) had between them is gone. Although they’ve made a home together and are raising a precious little girl, the stresses of their life have taken their toll. Cindy’s dream of being a doctor has been reduced down to a job as a nurse, while the ambitionless Dean seems content with his job as a housepainter. They both know that their marriage is in trouble, but neither know what to do to fix things. In desperation, Dean books them a room in what could be politely described as a “honeymoon motel” with the hopes that they can reconnect on any level.

But as we watch them make a last, fumbling grasp at saving their marriage, the film flashes us back to five years earlier, showing us their chance meeting, courtship and then hasty marriage. Oddly enough, many of these beats can be found in typical Hollywood romantic comedies, but here they are played for a sweet realism, not the cloyingly cute tone endemic to that genre. And given what happens to Dean and Cindy, it is hard not to think that maybe writer/director Derek Cianfrance is critiquing if not outright rejecting the notion of the Hollywood happy ending.

The contrast between the couple then and now is stark and at times jolting, leaving the audience to wonder what happened between the two. While Cianfrance doesn’t show us the intervening years directly, we can make some good guesses as to why things fell apart the way that they did from what we do learn about the pair and their upbringings.

But for all the strength of Blue Valentine‘s script, it is the performances of Gosling and Williams that deliver the emotional heft of the story. The pair manages to simultaneously create a marvelous chemistry in the flashback scenes and an agonizing estrangement in the present day portion of the film. Williams continues to show that she was one of the most underrated actresses working today as she injects into Cindy’s inability to fully articulate the anger and frustration she feels at how her life has overwhelmed her a raw energy. Gosling’s Dean comes across as deeply conflicted, his male ego under attack whenever Cindy tries to voice her complaints to him. The two create a self-sustaining loop of pain from which they can not escape and which is heartbreaking to watch.

Note: Screening at the Philadelphia Film festival this week, Gerrymandering is also opening in limited release around the country this weekendand will be having a number of other one-off presentations in various cities until after the current mid-term elections next month.

Gerrymandering has been called the “bloodsports of politics.” The act of redrawing voting district line in response to new census data, in theory it supposed to allow for better demographic representation of a population on the city, state and national level. But it is a double-edged sword, often being used by politicians to insure their own incumbency and to negate as much as possible the voices of those registered to the opposition party.

First-time director Jeff Reichert’s documentary takes a look at the practice and its implementation in modern American politics and it is hard not to come away from it amazed at how it has been used and perhaps more than a little angry and disgusted. Granted the topic certainly sounds like it could appeal only to hard core political wonks, and the movie does skate close to that edge at times, does manage to keep it fairly accessible to the average Joe. Reichert gives us some historical context though a bulk of the material centers on the past twenty years or so.

We learn that the practice of gerrymandering knows no political bias. Both sides have used it to try and gain an advantage. District lines were redrawn to his benefit when a young Barack Obama was just beginning to dip his toe into the water of local politics. In Texas in 2003 there is the famous case of Republicans leading a charge to redistrict under Tom Delay causing Democrats to flee to just over the Texas/Oklahoma boarder in an effort to bring attention to the fact that they felt the move to redistrict was illegal as it did not proceed from a judge’s order or from new census data.

And there are certainly anomalous situations that could only come about due to gerrymandering. Take for example the case of Danny Young , who was elected to city council in Anamosa, Iowa on the strength of just two write-in votes, his wife’s and his neighbor’s. As it turns out, Young lives in a district that is mostly made up of a prison, its inmates counting towards the population of an area and thus the determination of representation, but are ineligible to vote. Although not popular with voters, having a prison in one’s district can be very desirable to a politician.

At just under an hour and a half in length, Gerrymandering never overstays its welcome, though there are a few things that could have gotten some more in-depth examination. The film could have stood to spend more time following the movement in California to turn the process of district realignment over to a non-partisan committee, a move which finally passed in 2008 after six failed attempts, especially as it appears that this is supposed to be the backbone of the film. Also, Reichert could have extrapolated a bit more on his pronouncement that Iowa has the best redistricting policies in the country.

Through the film, Reichert builds a case that an overhaul of the gerrymandering process is desperately needed. Other governments who used to allow politicians to draw their own district lines such as England (on whose Parliamentary system much of our representational democracy is modeled), France and Germany have all reformed their systems to avoid the abuses chronicled here. H e makes a compelling argument, without ever letting the film become a polemic. Unfortunately, it may be too late to reform the process before it starts up again next spring, following the delivery of finalized census data to the executive branch which in turns hands over apportionment numbers to the legislative branch for the next round of district realignment.

A psychologist friend of mine once said to me, “How do I know why people do the crazy things they do?”  I try to remember that whenever something like Columbine goes down, because there is an immediate need in the media to find out what caused this to happen.

But remember, the list of causatives can’t be a long or complex one.  If you can list two or three things like say, Goth culture, Marilyn Manson’s music or computer games, the chances are, especially if the killers are kids themselves that they have a familiarity with at least one of these things, so ergo, ipso facto, that must be what made the killers do it.

It is amazing, but I still find myself reminding people of the simple principle that correlation is not causation.  Consider this, I bet the Columbine killers had coffee in the twenty-four hour period preceding the shootings.  Did coffee make them do it?  If they ate Pop Tarts, shouldn’t we just ban Pop Tarts; you know, to be on the safe side? I found myself thinking about this and many other things after watching the new documentary Playing Columbine which looks at the controversy surrounding a free Internet computer game called Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (henceforth Massacre) which was designed by a Colorado computer game enthusiast named Danny Ledonne.

Massacre was designed anonymously and put out for free on the web (which indicates to me that Mr. Ledonne was not looking for fame or money) and the only reason Danny Ledonne has come out into the spotlight to defend himself is because he was pushed there by many unsavory people trying to use the fake outrage surrounding his computer game to advance their own agendas. It is possible that Danny Ledonne was naïve and did not realize how much anger his game would cause and he didn’t do himself any favors by saying his only intention to raise awareness about issues surrounding the 1999 Columbine shootings because while that may have been true, it sounds like a hack justification. But once he was called to account, he patiently and painstakingly made every attempt to follow up on his intent to get people to talk about issues surrounding Columbine and other tragedies of a similar nature.

The film Playing Columbine was directed by Danny Ledonne and while he doesn’t show any especial talent as a filmmaker, he does present a more balanced view of this controversy than any of his critics would have if they had made a similar film.

I can tell that Danny Ledonne comes from the world of computer games and not from cinema because his sense of filmic pacing is non-existent.  Playing Columbine moves with all the subtlety of a computer game. It is a relentless assault of talking head clips, rarely held for more than a few seconds intermixed with shots from newsreels, feature films, comedy shows and other pieces of found media and you are barely able to process what you have heard before you are off on another tangent. Take it from me Danny; a film made entirely from quickly paced sections does not yield a quickly paced film.

We hear a lot from people who design, play or study computer games and naturally, they don’t think that a mass murder on the level of Columbine is reducible to a single cause and we hear their various theories and thoughts and they are an impressive array of commentators.

On the negative side of the question, we have the usual suspects whose only concern is “saving the children” like Tim Winter, a spokesman from the Parents Television Council and from Jack Thompson, a Florida lawyer (recently disbarred) who has been fighting a pitched battle against the computer game industry for a very long time. I have no doubt that Jack Thompson feels slighted by the film Playing Columbine, but take it from me Jack, if your arguments come across as stupid and untenable, it’s because they are. Thompson’s arguments consist of loaded questions like (I’m paraphrasing) “Would you rather have your kids play violent video games for hours, or spend that time studying the Bible?”  This is like the question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”  No matter how you answer it, you are wrong.

Typical of a bone-head like Thompson that he doesn’t even consider that there are more things a parent can do with their children than either reading the Bible or playing computer games.  I don’t want to say Jack Thompson has delusions of grandeur, but at one point he does say that he is only trying to save Western Civilization. At another point, Jack Thompson says the computer game companies have posted death threats against him on various websites, yet he can’t show us a single example of one.  Then, Mr. Thompson fervently denies ever saying that several post-Columbine school shooters “were trained on Super Columbine Massacre RPG!”, but director Danny Ledonne then shows us actual clips from Fox News among other sources where Thompson says those exact words, yet he still denies it. Jack Thompson says he just wants to hold the computer game industry accountable for the psychological damage they cause and he compares his efforts to early activists who pressed the cigarette manufacturers to own up to their responsibilities.

OK Jack Thompson, how about this, you claim to be a born again Christian and that you are doing all this because it is your Biblical duty.  The weekend before the Columbine shooting, one of the killers, Dylan Klebold, went to the prom with one Robyn Anderson who has been described as a sweet and pretty girl who was like you, a solid, Jesus saved me Christian.  She also helped the Columbine killers acquire three of the four guns they used.  This is all on public record, if you don’t believe me, look it up yourself.

Are you willing to share responsibility for that?

At first glance, it would be easy to draw parallels between director Jennifer Lynch’s film Surveillance and her father David Lynch’s magnum opus television series and film spinoff Twin Peaks. In both you have FBI agents, in this case Bill Pullman and Julia Ormand, arriving in a small town protected by quirky police officers to investigate the latest in a series of serial killings, a case which they may know more about than they initially let on. But as Lynch’s two agents interrogate the three survivors of the killer’s most recent attacks, it is slowly revealed that these are definitely not her father’s FBI agents.

Arriving at an unnamed, sleepy Santa Fe desert town’s police station, Agents Hallaway (Pullman) and Anderson (Ormand) almost immediately set the local constabulary, led by always reliable character actor Michael Ironside, on edge. They aren’t happy that their investigation is being taken over by outsiders, especially when one of their own happens to be one of the killers’ victims. Placed into three separate rooms, the three survivors of a roadside attack by the killers each give their version of what happened. But the various pieces of the puzzle they supply start to reveal a far more disturbing picture than first presumed.

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This is a curious film ostensibly about bullying, but may well have deeper themes that go into youthful fear and how we sometimes cover our fears with bluster. I don’t want to get all amateur psychiatrist on you, but this film raises many more questions than it answers and I don’t say that as a criticism.

Gaby is a young boy with red hair who is teased with the seemingly innocuous nickname of “Carrot”. Believe me, nicknames like that are designed to insult and this one definitely does. Guille is the leader of a small gang that is doing most of the picking on Gaby and there is never any indication why this is so, or how long it has been going on. Is that important information, I’m not sure, but not knowing the reasons behind this do not distract from the film.

Being a contemporary film, the whole schoolyard bullying and teasing has moved into the world of cell phones and the Internet. This should not be surprising, but some of the standard problems still remain. The bullied kid feels totally alone and there aren’t any adults around who seem to know what is actually going on. This is not their fault per se, especially since the kids won’t say one word about it.

In an ironic twist, one time when Gaby in a stall in the bathroom (I can’t speak for schools in Spain, but no one in any urban high school in the USA goes into the boys bathroom to do anything but cause trouble), and while there, someone, unseen by us, sets a trash can on fire and then breaks the lock on the stall trapping Gaby who manages to escape.

In a rage, he runs right up to Guille and cold cocks him and then continues punching him until several teachers have to pull him off. I said this was ironic because it is from this quite visible act of anger that Gaby becomes tagged as the bully and Guille as the victim, characterizations that neither boy likes. But it does send their various parents off on the wrong tangents.

There are several scenes involving the two boys very busy parents, who are always planning to talk to their kids later about their problems but they never quite get around to it. On another level, we see the parents getting pushed around at their jobs and in their social lives and you do come to realize exactly how much crap we adults have to put up with on a daily basis from other people.

I was afraid at one point that this film might degenerate into a Columbine like bid for revenge or vindication or perhaps end with a round of big hugs and friendly understanding, but fortunately, director/writers Jose Curacao and Juan Cruz manage to provide a solution to Gaby’s problem that is original, without being particularly helpful.

Otherwise, the film rises or falls on the performances of the kids and they are all around excellent.  A very thought provoking drama that didn’t take the easy way out.