Another New York-only (for now) film retrospective that will, with any luck, eventually make its way West centers around the volatile, Texas-born character actor Rip Torn and, in particular, the rarely screened independent and underground cinematic experiments (including two films directed by Norman Mailer and one co-directed by Jean-Luc Godard) to which Torn devoted himself between 1967's Beach Red and 1973's Payday.

In previewing the series for this week's Village Voice, I wrote that Torn "has repeatedly gravitated, as if by some Pavlovian reflex, to the margins and uncertain frontiers of independent moviemaking and to filmmakers intent on setting the barn ablaze with the horses still inside. Notwithstanding the hard-working character actor's inability to turn down a job, 'normal' has rarely seemed to hold much interest for him." To read more, go here.

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Somewhere, Guy Debord is smiling -- or at least nodding in approval. Although it's been nearly 15 years since the French author, filmmaker and all-purpose radical put a gun to his heart and ended his life at the age of 62, his anarchistic spirit was alive and well this past weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, where a screening of Debord's 1952 film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls For Sade) came as close to inciting a riot as any movie I have ever seen play out before an audience. Admittedly, this may not have been such a surprise, given that Debord's 75-minute debut film -- which, to the best of my knowledge, has never before been commercially exhibited in the U.S. -- consists almost exclusively of a black screen and silent soundtrack.

Periodically, that silence is interrupted by flashes of a white screen accompanied by a cacophony of voices (belonging to Debord and fellow members of his "Letterist International" collective) spouting uncited literary quotations and snippets of dissociated conversations. "Love is only possible in a pre-revolutionary period," says one, while another reads a news item about the suicide of a child radio actress. Someone, presumably Debord himself, rattles off a "crib sheet for the history of cinema" that naturally includes his own birth (among such other milestones as Chaplin's City Lights and Méliès' A Trip to the Moon) and ends with Hurlements itself. Gradually, the dark, silent passages grow longer and the bright, sonic ones less frequent, until the film ends on something like 20 minutes of uninterrupted blankness.

Given those variables, it's little wonder that Hurlements has enjoyed something of a clandestine existence since its initial public screenings. Even Greil Marcus, who wrote at length about Debord and the Letterists in his essential Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, had to settle for "seeing Hurlements on the page," in the form of Debord's published screenplay and various other written accounts. Per Marcus, when the film was first screened, at the Musée de l'Homme in June of 1952, the projection was stopped after 20 minutes, with several LI members resigning in disgust over the film's very existence. Eight years later, when Hurlements was booked by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, it created more outrage, with viewers leaving one showing pleading with those lined up for a later one to go home and save themselves the agony -- which, of course, only made the second group even more eager to see the film.

Something not dissimilar transpired Sunday at the Walter Reade, where Hurlements capped a day-long marathon of Debord films organized by the editors of Film Comment magazine and presented, per the wishes of Debord's estate, in reverse chronological order. About 20 minutes into the screening, two people seated close to the screen started to audibly chatter (about what I'm not sure) during one of the film's silent passages. This prompted a patron seated near the back to loudly reprimand the talkers for disrespecting Debord's film. The talkers responded in kind by uttering a profane imperative and insisting that the blank screen wasn't really part of the movie. This was followed by another 30 minutes or so of relative quiet (during which several viewers filed into the lobby to report a projection problem), before more voices -- speaking in a fascinating babel of American, British, Indian and South African accents -- made themselves heard. "We could try holding our breath to see who lasts the longest," said one. "The whole point of this movie is to provoke discussion," reasoned another, in response to a second attempt to restore calm and order. Then, during the sustained final stretch of darkness, a voice from the middle of the theater endeavored to lead the audience in a group sing-a-long to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," followed by the 1915 union anthem "Solidarity Forever" (at which point the staunchly anti-union Debord may have gone from nodding in agreement to roiling in his grave).

Now, generally speaking, I am of the opinion that cinemas are holy sites far more deserving of our reverence than most churches, and that the films shown there should by approached with a worshipful silence. When a news item appeared late last year about an incident at a Philadelphia multiplex in which one man shot another in the arm for talking during a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, my sympathies were squarely with the alleged assailant -- no matter that Benjamin Button is a film for which I personally feel no great enthusiasm. But if ever there was a movie that invited a violent (and vocal) reaction, it's Hurlements, and the fact that it is still able to engender one more than a half-century after it was made, when we are now more than ever prisoners of what Debord termed "the spectacle" -- a post-capitalist society in which representations have entirely supplanted reality -- is no mean feat. Quite frankly, I can't recall the last time I felt so enlivened in a cinema.

In all fairness, it may be asking too much to expect an audience to give Hurlements due consideration without at least some grounding in Debord's theories, which is why the Film Society's counter-clockwise homage seemed to make perfect sense. The afternoon began with an encore screening of Debord's final film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), which received its own belated American premiere as a special screening during last fall's New York Film Festival, where it was followed by a panel discussion featuring Debord scholars and acolytes including Marcus and the French filmmakers Olivier Assayas and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Arguably Debord's most forcefully articulated, personal statement, In girum (whose palindromic Latin title translates as "We turn in the night, consumed by fire") begins with the static image of a cinema audience suspended in a state of artificial bliss, while Debord's spoken narration tells us, "I will make no concessions to the public in this film." What follows is a succession of of original and repurposed images -- Paris street scenes and cavalry raids from old Hollywood movies figure prominently -- as Debord mounts his own full-frontal attack on "a totally commodified society" and everything therein. "From the very beginning, I have devoted myself to overthrowing this society," Debord states, and so profoundly does In girum believe in the possibilities of revolution (even as it mourns a post-'68 Paris whose revolutionary embers had apparently burned out) that it seems to me impossible not to get caught up in its idealistic furor.

After two viewings, I can say that I find In girum among the most beautiful of all films, even if most audiences -- then and now -- may be ill-equipped to fathom its beauty. Put another way, Debord is not for those who blindly subscribe to what they have been taught in schools or by their parents; who happily swallow, like patients in an asylum, the mass-produced lies proffered by most Hollywood movies and the largely counterfeit art that gets classified as "art cinema"; or who measure their own self-worth by any yardstick of "acceptable society" (personal wealth, family, career advancement, etc.). For Debord, the only life truly worth living was one lived in a constant state of opposition -- opposition to the status quo and the anti-status quo alike (since rebellion itself was in constant danger of being commodified), to capitalism and to the perversion of Marxism that masqueraded as Communism, and to the various misreadings of Guy Debord's own work. Fittingly, in addition to Debord's 1973 film adaptation of his famous 1967 text, The Society of the Spectacle, the Film Society program also included his 1975 short Refutation of All the Judgments, Pro or Con, Thus Far Rendered on the Film "The Society of the Spectacle", in which Debord systematically debunks all the major reviews of his film in the French press, reserving his greatest contempt for the favorable ones.

Which brings me back to that blank screen -- Debord's earliest celluloid provocation and one of his most intriguing. Presented with it, most audiences will instinctively bolt for the exit, incensed at having wasted their "valuable" time when there are so many "better" and "more important" things they could be doing. But those who stay to ponder Debord's non-images may find themselves afflicted by the dawning revelation that this apparent emptiness is no more meaningless than most of the ephemera of our lives inside the spectacle (or, as some latter-day Debord disciples would term it, The Matrix) -- the null objects to which we ascribe significance, the choices we sheepishly believe are ours to make, and the conformity we do not question, or question only in the most conformist of ways. And that is the moment when Debord will have begun to have his desired effect. Now that these films have surfaced in New York, will anyone in Los Angeles (or any other American city) dare to show them, or to see them? Discuss -- as loudly as you desire -- amongst yourselves.

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Much as I am loathe to give any further wind to the orgy of self congratulations and poor taste that was this year's Academy Awards, given that it has been something of an ongoing discussion on this blog I do feel obliged to offer a few words to the outcome of the Best Foreign Language Film contest. That much-maligned category, which has undergone nearly as many cosmetic makeovers in recent years as the previous Best Actress winners seen on the Kodak Theatre stage last night, drew a fair amount of unwanted attention earlier this season when, despite all the reforms spearheaded by current Foreign Language nominating committee chair Mark Johnson, Matteo Garrone's widely acclaimed mafia drama Gomorrah failed to secure a nomination despite being Italy's official submission for the award.

Still, many (including Johnson) argued that the eventual five nominees were nothing to scoff at, since they managed to include French director Laurent Cantet's The Class (winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival), Austrian director Götz Spielmann's superb revenge drama Revanche (an audience favorite at least year's Telluride and Toronto festivals) and Israeli director Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, a film that rivaled Gomorrah in terms of its torrential acclaim from critics and audiences alike from Cannes up through its commercial release in U.S. cinemas last December. Given that Folman's film was also in the running for, but failed to secure, a nomination in the Academy's Best Animated Feature category, it had generally been considered the favorite to win in the Foreign Language category. But alas, when the envelope was opened, the Oscar instead went to Japanese director Yojiro Takita's relentlessly medicore tearjerker Departures, about an unemployed cellist who takes a job as an "encoffinment" specialist, preparing dead bodies for cremation. (As if that weren't enough, Waltz with Bashir was also omitted from the Oscar telecast's montage of animated features from 2008, having evidently been deemed a less significant achievement than Space Chimps and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.)

Admittedly, the win for Departures wasn't a total surprise. While it may be one of the lesser-known of the nomainetd films (by virtue of the fact that it played relatively minor film festivals and has yet to be commercially released in the U.S.), voters in the Foreign Language category are obliged to see all five nominated films, thereby placing the contenders on a somewhat level playing field. And when I found myself at a dinner last week with several knowledgable parties (including a longtime foreign-language film publicist and the head of a European country's national film commission), it was generally agreed that if there was a surprise winner, it was going to be the Japanese film. Beyond that, there is the simple fact that, along with Germany's The Baader Meinhof Complex, Departures was easily the most conventional, Hollywood-style movie of the five Foreign Language nominees -- the one with "universal" (read: one-dimensional) characters, a direly familiar fish-out-of-water scenario and an incessantly sentimental musical score applied like a thick shellac.

Meanwhile, I'm sure various conspiracy theories will emerge in the next few days as to exactly how and why Waltz with Bashir got screwed. Speaking to an audience at last year's New York Film Festival, Folman himself pointed out that his film, which examines the controversial role played by Israeli soldiers in the massacre of Palestinians during the 1982 occupation of Southern Lebanon, had been criticized by some extreme leftists in Israel for not being self-critical enough. But I doubt that Academy members objected to the movie on similarly political grounds.

Rather, it seems more likely that Folman's film was simply too innovative for the Academy's notoriously calcified tastes. Certainly, by Academy standards, it was one of the more radical works ever to be nominated in the Foreign Language category -- a fragmented memory film in which truth and illusion collide on a tide of uncertain recollection. There are multiple narrators, dreams masquerading as reality (and vice-versa), and so many genres exploded moment by moment that it becomes imossible to squeeze the film into an easily definable box. And while Waltz builds to a conclusion that many (including this critic) counted among the most emotionally devastating in movies last year, it is a moment that is earned by the film rather than cheaply calculated, and which raises more questions than it answers. That's something that many viewers of Folman's film have found thrilling to behold, but which may well have inspired paroxysms of rage in Academy voters who stand by the belief that a movie should have a clear beginning, middle and end and send people out of the theater feeling better about "humanity."

Even the somewhat more conventional The Class may have suffered for similar reasons, since despite the familiar trappings of its inspirational-schoolteacher scenario, it was that rare such film about a teacher who tries, but in many cases fails, to make a difference, and who is as complex and flawed a character as any of his troubled students. Like Waltz, Cantet's film also liberally mixed documentary and narrative techniques, using a real teacher and real students in a fictionalized scenario based on real events -- too much, perhaps, for Academy voters to wrap their heads around (much in the way that, for decades, documentary films featuring extensive use of dramatic re-enactments were considered anathema to the Academy's documentary nominating committee). Or it could simply be that the Academy felt the nomination was honor enough for films starring non-professional talent made well outside of their own countries' "studio systems." Such films do little to stroke the egos of actors (the Academy's largest voting branch) who seem to relish sitting in the Kodak auditorium while being reminded how fabulous they are. It's hard to imagine a Hollywood remake of Waltz with Bashir or The Class that would have roles in it for many of last night's nominees, but an American Departures starring Sean Penn as the cellist/undertaker and Kate Winslet as his clueless wife...well, that may already be in the works.

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As earlier noted, the 2009 Berlin Film Festival opened with a Hollywood movie (The International), directed by Germany's own Tom Tykwer and filmed in a half-dozen countries around the world, then continued with a French movie (In the Electric Mist) made in the U.S.A. with dialogue spoken in regional Louisiana dialects that begged the need for subtitles. In addition, this year's official Berlinale competition has included Storm, German director Hans-Christian Schmidt's docudrama about the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Netherlands, featuring a cast of Brits, Romanians and New Zealanders speaking a mix of English, Bosnian and Serbian; and Mammoth, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's stab at a Babel-style cross-cultural jigsaw, set between New York, Thailand and the Philippines. Still to come is The Dust of Time, the latest from master Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, here reportedly working in English, Russian, German and Greek, with Willem Dafoe in the lead.

Meanwhile, for the last two weeks, the North American box office has been dominated by Taken, a French movie made in France with an English-speaking, Irish-born star (Liam Neeson) that had already been released in most of the rest of the world before it ever crossed the Atlantic. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

Films made by actors and directors working outside of their national borders and mother tongues are, of course, as old as the cinema itself, with Hollywood having first been colonized by emigré filmmakers (Capra, Griffith, Wilder) who went on to make some of the most iconic American films. Likewise, there is the equally longstanding tradition of American and British movies set in foreign cultures, but starring predominately Yank and Anglo actors speaking anachronistically in English (for recent examples, see Valkyrie, with its cast of British-accented Germans, and The Reader, with its cast of faintly German-accented Brits). And whether now or then, American moviegoers have paid such nuances little mind -- in large measure because most Americans, whether at home or traveling abroad, assume that everything from restaurant menus to movie dialogue ought to be in English. I mean, if we're going to complain about the lack of German accents in Valkyrie, why not mention that, by rights, everyone in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner ought to be speaking Hungarian?

What's different about the crop of English-language international productions at this year's Berlinale is that they largely take matters of language and nationality as their very subjects. They could, one British colleague has joked, be rated "G" for globalization. Or, better yet, "P" for pedantic. That's certainly the case with Storm, which much like The International seems hellbent on finding a multinational bogeyman to finger for all of the world's injustices. In Tykwer's film, it's the global banking industry; in Schmidt's, it's the UN, which pays predictable lip service to the idea of bringing justice to bear on fugitive war criminals from the Bosnian conflict, provided it doesn't take too long or -- God forbid -- impede the breakaway Balkans' efforts towards EU membership. "Do you watch those kind of movies, where the good always wins in the end?" asks the potential star witness (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days star Anamaria Marinca) to the idealistic Hague prosecutor (Kerry Fox) who's urging her to testify against a former Yugoslav Army commander. From there, Storm becomes exactly one of those movies, complete with a grandstanding finale in which our two crusading heroines create massive disorder in the court and, by doing so, tip the scales of justice back into balance.

Still, far better Schmidt's Erin Brockovich of the Balkans than Moodysson's Mammoth, whose two-ton pretension is heralded by its own title, a reference to a $3000 pen whose clear barrel contains pieces of mammoth ivory -- this, in the movie's view, being the ultimate symbol of imperialist decadence. That pen is used by an arrested-adolescent video game designer (Gael Garcia Bernal) to sign the lucrative contract that will allow him to keep up the mortgage on the chic SoHo loft occupied by him, his ER doctor wife (Michelle Williams) and their young daughter. Williams, fresh from Wendy and Lucy -- one of the only recent films with something meaningful to say about America's haves and have-nots --  here has little wiggle room as a contemptible bourgeois who berates her live-in Filipina nanny for teaching the young'un Tagalog, unaware that, half a world away, the nanny's own son is about to stick his toe in the water of Manilla's underage sex trade. Let it be said that Moodysson, best known in the States for his 2002 human trafficking drama Lilya 4-Ever, has not yet run out of ways to humiliate his leading ladies.

Relievedly, given its own confluence of First World and Third, black skin and white, Islam and Christianity, London River (which could be rated "T" for terrorism) almost always places its characters ahead of its polemics, making for a small but heartfelt drama about an African man (the excellent Malian actor Sotigui Kouyate) and a British woman (Brenda Blethyn) who meet while searching for their missing children in the aftermath of the 2005 London subway and bus bombings. Directed by the French-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb, who previously made the Oscar-nominated Indigènes, London River sometimes plays things a bit too broadly in the culture-clash and racial-profiling departments, but still manages to render a nicely understated snapshot of multi-ethnic life in the global city, without a non-linear narrative or top-heavy title metaphor in sight.

Ironically, London River, which is mostly in French, seems a lot likelier to make its way to international art-house audiences than either Storm or Mammoth, which are mostly in English. The instructive difference is that, where Bouchareb's film feels personal and human-scale, the others seem anonymous and monolithic -- movies more concerned with saving the world than telling stories, hammered into existence by international sales companies and co-production boards rather than by artists with singular visions.

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Not many films in the 60 years since Robert Flaherty's immortal Louisiana Story have evoked the atmosphere of the Bayou State as strongly as Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist, a movie that doesn't seem to have been filmed so much as distilled, on a creaking porch beset by mosquitos and summer heat, with the rumble of a gathering storm in the distance. Adapted from the novel by James Lee Burke, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones as Burke's popular detective character, Dave Robichaux, here investigating the murder of one Cherry LeBlanc, a "fatally beautiful" 19-year-old prostitute whose mutilated corpse washes up on shore in the film's opening scene. Not long after that, another body -- this one belonging to a lynched black man dead and gone some 40 years -- surfaces deep in the swamp, loosed by Hurricane Katrina's churning tide.

Since it was first announced, In the Electric Mist has sounded like an ideal project for Tavernier, combining two of the veteran French filmmaker's great passions: the American South (previously explored in his 1985 documentary, Mississippi Blues) and American pulp fiction (the basis for 1981's Oscar-nominated Coup de torchon, which transposed Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French colonial Africa). But it's been a long road to Berlin for In the Electric Mist, which was shot on location in 2007 only to become entangled in post-production disagreements between Tavernier and the film's American producer, Michael Fitzgerald (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada).

When the dust finally settled, two different versions of the movie emerged -- an "international" cut prepared by Tavernier, which screened here in Berlin and will be released in most countries around the world, and an "American" cut supervised by Fitzgerald that runs 15 minutes shorter and will go directly to DVD in the U.S. next month. In comparing the two edits, Variety critic Leslie Felperin deemed the American version "brisker but less-coherent" with "tacky summing up and [an] oo!-spooky last shot mini twist that makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie."

Having seen only Tavernier's version, I can say that it's unfortunate American audiences may never get a chance to experience this superior detective yarn on the big screen, in the form its director intended. Unfortunate, but by no means surprising. Indeed, where the default Hollywood position would have been to strip-mine Burke's source material for its narrative chassis while junking all its atmospheric touches, tertiary supporting characters and curlicue digressions, Tavernier (working from a script credited to the husband-and-wife team of Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski) does exactly the opposite. Much like Burke himself on the page, he plays up the bass line at the expense of the melody, showing markedly less interest in the identity of the killer(s) than in a long and winding history of Southern injustice that stretches from Jim Crow to George W. Bush. Long ago, Robichaux says in the lyrical voice-over that opens the film, people placed heavy stones on the graves of the dead so as to weigh down the souls of the departed. But in Burke and Tavernier's world, every time a storm blows through, those stones become displaced, and restless spirits take to wandering the bayou.

This is the Burke adaptation fans of the author deserved, but were sorely denied by the 1996 film version of another Robichaux novel, Heaven's Prisoners, with an altogether unconvincing Alec Baldwin in the lead. Jones, by contrast, slips effortlessly into the character's skin -- a bit too effortlessly, some might argue, given the actor's history of playing no-nonsense lawmen. But pay close attention to the jittery impatience in Dave Robichaux's voice, his clumsiness of gesture, the faint uncertainty in his recovering alcoholic's eyes, and you will see a character many jurisdictions removed from The Fugitive's cocksure Marshal Samuel Gerard and No Country For Old Men's wizened and weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

If In the Electric Mist is finally less than completely satisfying as a murder mystery, as a piece of cultural anthropology it is never less than deeply absorbing. History and myth freely intermingle with the present, particularly in the case of what may be the movie's cleverest conceit -- a Civil War-era film within the film, starring a hell-raising Hollywood actor (a highly amusing Peter Sarsgaard) and a cast of hundreds, although the Confederate General (Levon Helm) Robichaux keeps encountering in the nighttime fog seems more than a mere costumed extra.

Elsewhere, Tavernier's movie runs thick with gut-bucket jazz and blues, regional accents so foreign that the film's Berlin press screenings carried English subtitles, and local fat cats with names like "Babyfeet" Balboni (wonderfully oily John Goodman) and "Twinky" Lemoyne (Ned Beatty) who add to the Chinatown-like air of pervasive corruption. One murder blends into another, and the only meaningful punishment is meted out not by the hands of the law, but by those of father time. Ultimately, "whodunit?" seems a question as unanswerable as a Zen koan -- except, perhaps, in the producer's cut.

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For the next 10 days, I'll be posting regularly from the Berlin International Film Festival (a.k.a. the Berlinale), generally considered to be the second largest festival in Europe (after Cannes) and, at 59, one of the oldest. This year, the Berlinale's international competition will feature the world premieres of new films by Stephen Frears (Cheri), Chen Kaige (Forever Enthralled), Sally Potter (Rage) whose 2004 film, Yes, sparked a memorable dialogue in these pages, and French director Bertrand Tavernier, whose 1995 teen crime drama, L'Appat, won Berlin's top prize, the Golden Bear, and who returns this year with an English-language adaptation of detective novelist James Lee Burke's In the Electric Mist, filmed on location in Louisiana with Tommy Lee Jones in the lead. Those films and 13 others will be judged by a jury headed by Tilda Swinton that also includes Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet, Swedish author Henning Mankell and American "slow food" doyen Alice Waters.

At 82, the Polish master Andrzej Wajda (Sweet Rush) may be the oldest director in competition, but he's young enough to be the son of Portugal's unstoppable Manoel De Oliveira, whose latest feature, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, screens in the non-competitive Berlinale Speical sidebar, which also includes Bellamy, the latest from French suspense maestro Claude Chabrol (a mere 78, and with nearly that many films under his belt). Meanwhile, in the Forum -- a home for more independent and experimental works roughly equivalent to Cannes' breakaway Directors Fortnight section -- one can find everything from Beeswax, the third feature by Funny Ha Ha director Andrew Bujalski, the latest architectural essay film by Heinz Emigholz and Love Exposure, a four-hour Japanese film about an adolescent sexual voyeur who falls in love with the man-hating step-daughter of his priest father's lover. (The Forum program intriguingly states that the film "composes the extremes of human behavior into an ecstatic passion choreographed to religious music, the Bolero, the funeral march and the Japanese band Yura Yura Teikoku's J-Pop music.") As a fan of long-form films, I welcome that challenge, but take due pause at the prospect of German director Ludwig Schönherr's New York. Ein visuelles Arbeitstagebuch, a Super 8 "visual diary" of New York City that reportedly takes more than four days to view in its entirety.

Like last month's Sundance Film Festival, which saw even its biggest buzz usurped by the U.S. Presidential Inauguration, the 2009 Berlinale coincides with its own bit of national history: the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, although it will not be officially marked until November, is the subject of various year-long commemorations throughout Germany, including a special Berlinale sidebar, "After Winter Comes Spring - Films Presaging the Fall of the Wall," comprised of 13 features and several shorts produced in the GDR and other countries of the former Communist East.

Meanwhile, the curtain rose on the Berlinale Thursday evening with an opening-night film inspired by more recent current events. Loosely based on the 1990s scandals surrounding the Pakistani-run Bank of Credit and Commerce International, The International is, true to its title, a globe-hopping conspiracy thriller directed by a German (Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer), produced with American studio money, and starring two foreign-born actors (Clive Owen and Naomi Watts) who are now as Hollywood as they come. So, for that matter, is the movie.

Since I'll be writing about The International at length for next week's editions of the Weekly and The Village Voice, when the film opens in worldwide commercial release, I won't belabor the matter now, except to say that this poor man's Parallax View, about a sinister Luxembourg bank that runs a brisk sideline in third-world revolutions and black-market arms sales, can't hold a candle to the geopolitical nail-biters presently unfolding in the pages of your morning newspaper. Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention the elaborate shootout that occurs in, of all places, Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, which should appease anyone who has ever wondered what a Michael Bay gallery installation might look like and provides The International with a working metaphor for its own shotgun wedding of grindhouse inclinations and art-house ambitions.

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Hollywood and John Updike, who died today at the age of 76, never made for the easiest of bedfellows. In 1970, the underrated director Jack Smight took an admirable stab at filming Rabbit, Run, the first in Updike's tetralogy of novels about the disaffected former high-school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. But the flm was taken away from Smight by writer-producer Howard B. Kreitsek, recut, shelved by the studio (Warner Bros.) after unsuccessful test screenings, and ultimately dismissed by Updike himself in a 1973 New York Times interview.

Seventeen years later, Mad Max director Grorge Miller's film version of Updike's The Witches of Eastwick, starring Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson, was a hit, spawning a stage musical and two unsold TV pilots in its wake. But it also took drastic liberties with Updike's 1984 novel and was described publicly by Miller as the worst creative experience of his career. "[It] "had a beautiful cast but intruded on the world of the witches. It became Nicholson's movie and dissolved into special effects," Updike told USA Today last fall, upon the publication of the book's sequel.

Indeed, the best and most faithful film adaptation of Updike came on the small screen, in the form of Fielder Cook's superb Too Far to Go (1979), which used Updike's series of short stories about Richard and Joan Maple (played by Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner) as the basis for a devastating portrait of modern marriage from "I do" to "I'm leaving you." So impressed was Francis Coppola with the film that he decided to give it a theatrical release via his Zoetrope Studios in 1982. After a long period of unavailability, Too Far to Go has recently been issued on DVD. I urge you to see it.

Meanwhile, our own Chuck Wilson, writing at his Flickers blog, recalls a lovely passage about moviegoing from Updike's century-spanning 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lillies, the first part of which concerns one Clarence Wilmot, a New Jersey Presbyterian minister who loses his faith and becomes an encyclopedia salesman -- as well as a fanatical movie buff.

Updike writes:

During the summer Clarence took his own defeat indoors, deserting the sunny harsh streets of door-to-door rejection for the shadowy interiors of those moving-picture houses that, like museums of tawdry curiosities, opened their doors during the day....When Clarence had paid his nickel -- one of the brand-new Indian-head nickels, with a buffalo hulking on the reverse side -- and settled into his hard chair in the dark, carefully placing his leather salesman's case upright between his ankles, it was as if his eyes drank a flickering liquor. The passionate, comical, swift-moving action on the screen, speckled with bright scratches, entered him like an essential food which he had been hitherto denied.

For more, click here.

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If the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance this year failed to yield one truly great film, it did offer up a lovely surprise in writer-director Cherien Dabis' Amreeka, which follows a Palestinian single mother and her son as they emigrate from the West Bank town of Ramallah to the flatlands of the American Midwest.

In its basic outline, the movie sounds like a collection of hoary coming-to-America clichés: Upon arriving in suburban Illinois, Muna (the excellent Nisreen Faour) and 16-year-old Fadi (Melka Muallem) move in with Muna's sister, Raghda (The Visitor co-star Hiam Abbas), who herself dreams of returning to her homeland. Raghda's husband, a doctor, has seen one white patient after another take their business elsewhere following 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. And as Muna searches for a job and Fadi enrolls in a public high school, they too encounter the face of anti-Muslim discrimination at every turn. That Muna and Fadi aren't Muslims hardly matters. All that matters is that they look the part.

Like The Visitor, to which it will surely be compared, Dabis' film aspires to show the plight of Arab people living in the U.S. in the Homeland Security era. Only, unlike that film, Amreeka tells its story from the inside-out, without want or need of a white protagonist to serve as the audience's surrogate, and with real three-dimensional characters instead of blunt ideological instruments masquerading as human beings. Although Dabis (who is Palestinian herself) isn't entirely immune from painting in broad strokes -- once again, a white character's first encounter with falafel is deployed as a symbol of East-West bonding -- the details in the film feel lived-in and sincere. Systematically, one form of humiliation is traded for another: no longer subjected to daily searches by West Bank checkpoint guards, Muna instead finds herself flipping burgers at White Castle, while Fadi's classmates accuse him of plotting to blow up the school.

At the heart of Amreeka beats an irresolvable conundrum: that a nation founded by immigrants can be so narrow-mindedly conformist. Yet, given every opportunity for self-pitying ACLU hand-wringing, Dabis keeps the film's tone buoyant and light, making a fine comedy of deception out of Muna's efforts to convince her family she actually works in a bank, and laying the groundwork for a gentle, not-quite romance between Muna and the Jewish principal of Fadi's school. When most filmmakers want to say something important about cultural conflicts, they labor to bring tears to our eyes. Dabis, by contrast, makes us laugh at ourselves and, in turn, each other.

Amreeka was the best of several films at Sundance this year concerned with living in (or getting to) the U.S. as seen through foreigners' eyes, a couple of which seem poised for prizes at the festival's closing-night awards ceremony, which begins in an hour from now. One of those contenders is Student Academy Award winner Cary Joji Fukunaga's Sin Nombre, which won over audiences (and a lot of critics) with its violent story of a teenage Honduran girl and a Mexican teen gangbanger on the run who end up on the same perilous train journey to the U.S.-Mexico border. When they say "From the producers of The Motorcycle Diaries," they're not kidding: another lushly produced, impersonally directed piece of Central/South American slum porn, Sin Nombre hitches stylized suffering on to a direly predictable street-thug scenario (two friends, torn between their loyalty to the gang and to each other) while awating the inevitable plaudits of festival juries, American art-house moviegoers and Oscar voters. (No surprise: this is one of the only competition entries to arrive at Sundance with a distributor already in place.) Fukunaga's film is slightly less exploitative, and therefore marginally preferable, to Fernando Meirelles' rancid City of God -- but not by very much.

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One of Anna Wintour's most significant (and profitable) contributions to Vogue, we learn in The September Issue, has been her decision to put movie stars -- rather than fashion models -- on the magazine's cover. That gives The September Issue an unintended but hardly insignificant point of connection with director Joe Berlinger's Crude, a remarkable documentary about the decade-and-a-half-long, multibillion-dollar class action lawsuit filed by indigenous Ecuadorian villagers against the Chevron oil company alleging toxic pollution of the local soil and water supply. At one point in Berlinger's film, longtime Amazon Rainforest advocate (and wife of Sting) Trudie Styler develops an interest in the case, and her involvement leads directly to a flurry of increased U.S. media attention (including a Vanity Fair profile of charismatic Ecuadorian prosecutor Pablo Fajardo). Whatever one thinks about the vacuity of celebrity culture, these two films convincingly argue that celebrities can and do make things happen, whether sustaining a magazine's viability or drawing attention to corporate America's latest atrocity. Certainly, in an age when shirtless pictures of Barack Obama are as much in demand by the tabloids as paparazzi snaps of Britney Spears, resistance is futile.

Styler's involvement in the Chevron case is one of the few bright spots in Crude, which otherwise unfolds as an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends. For nearly 30 years, beginning in the mid-1960s, the former Texaco oil company (acquired by Chevron in 2001) drilled for oil in the Euacdorian Amazon, in and around the ancestral homeland of the native Cofán Indian community. In 1992, Texaco's government-granted concession ended and the company ceded control of its drilling sites to the state-owned Petroecaudor, after allegedly embarking on a government-mandated $40 million "environmental remediation" project. And yet, today the soil and waters of the area still run black with oil, the Cofán are dying of cancer at an alarming rate, and the blame for this enviro-disaster is being passed between Chevron and Petroecuador faster than a Bobby Hull slapshot.

No stranger to gnarly courtroom thickets, Berlinger, together with his longtime filmmaking partner Bruce Sinofsky, previously directed the Sundance Audience Award winner Brother's Keeper (which centered around a fratricide trial in the small, dairy-farming community of Munnsville, New York) and the two Paradise Lost documentaries (about the ongoing travails of three Arkansas teenagers convicted, on questionable evidence, of murdering three eight-year-old boys). In the gripping, intrinsically cinematic Crude, he does an equally superb job of taking us through the twists and turns of a legal battle nearly as long as the Amazon itself, and with no discernible end in sight. As usual, Berlinger presents both sides of the case as fairly and non-judgmentally as possible, never inserting himself into the narrative and turning the audience, in effect, into the jury. Chevron even sends its in-house environmental scientist out to speak to the filmmaker in a defensive interview that plays like an extended Tilda Swinton outtake from Michael Clayton. Talk about your ice queens: next to this woman, Ana Wintour seems a positive ray of sunshine.

If Crude is the most urgent film I've seen at Sundance this year, Boy Interrupted is unquestionably the most harrowing. Directed by Dana Heinz Perry and photographed by her husband, Hart Perry, this documentary isn't torn from the headlines, but rather the bloodline. In 2005, the Perrys' 15-year-old son, Evan, committed suicide by jumping from the bedroom window of their New York City apartment -- something the bipolar teen had talked about doing since as early as age five. That event created an odd symmetry with the death, 30 years earlier, of Hart Perry's own younger brother, who asphyxiated himself with car exhaust at 21. Boy Interrupted tries to make sense of these two senseless acts by reconstructing them, through home movies and interviews with surviving friends and family, in frequently agonizing detail.

Nothing is private here, obsessive self-documentation the order of the day. "Filmmaking has been the family business for almost twenty years now," Dana Perry notes in a statement included in the movie's press kit, but it's actually even longer if you count the interview footage (included here) Hart Perry shot of his own parents in the immediate aftermath of his brother's death. Three decades later we see the Perry matriarch again, now suffering from dementia and a fair amount of willful amnesia, once more asked to replay painful memories before the camera's unforgiving gaze. The result is a deeply absorbing, undeniably creepy hybrid of catharsis and emotional exhibitionism -- a movie that twists your guts into a gordian knot, then sends you out of the theater wondering if there are limits to those things that should be filmed and publicly shown. Boy Interrupted is hard to reckon with, but even harder to shake off. If Capturing the Friedmans had been directed by the Friedmans themselves, it might have looked something like this.

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"The dirty little secret about Sundance is that the best films every year are the documentaries," says Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth director David Guggenheim in one of the trailers for this year's Sundance Film Festival. Actually, it's more of an openly acknowledged fact that Sundance's documentary selection is reliably stronger than its narrative one. And so, having made it through 14 of the 16 films in this year's U.S. Dramatic Competition (I'll see the remaining two -- Adam and Amreeka --  today), I shifted gears yesterday and hunkered down for a full schedule of docs at Sundance's newest screening venue: Temple Har Shalom or, as it's known until Sunday, the Temple Theatre.

First on my itinerary was The September Issue, which arrived in Park City hyped as a nonfiction riposte to The Devil Wears Prada, which it both is and isn't. Although director R.J. Cutler (A Perfect Candidate) was allowed unprecedented access behind the scenes at Vogue during the planning and production of its massive September 2007 issue (at the time, the largest single issue of a monthly magazine ever published), anyone who comes to The September Issue expecting a warts-and-all portrayal of Vogue editor-in chief Anna Wintour is likely to find the 90-minute film something of a let-down. That's not to say that Cutler lobs softballs at the fashion world's perpetually sunglass-ed high priestess, but rather that his primary interest is the nuts-and-bolts running of a magazine, from the concept stages to the moment the latest issue hits the newsstands. Of course, since this is a movie about Vogue and not, say, Field and Stream, the attendant glamour level is high, from the vertigo-inducing haute couture to the parade of strapping models and actresses who grace the magazine's coveted spreads.

In addition to following the Devil herself as she meets privately with top name designers (Oscar de la Renta, Jean-Paul Gaultier, et al.), scours the runways of the world's fashion weeks and passes final judgment on what does and doesn't end up in print, The September Issue devotes nearly equal attention  to Vogue's flamboyant editor-at-large, André Leon Talley, and its legendary creative director, Grace Coddington. And it's Coddington, a Welsh-born former model whose hugely ambitious narrative photo shoots have become a Vogue hallmark during her 30-plus years with the magazine, who threatens to steal the movie right out from under her more famous co-star. A force of calm at the center of Vogue's sometimes tempestuous storm, Coddington is, by Wintour's own admission, "a genius," and you don't have to know much about fashion (or even take it that seriously) to recognize the vivid, cinematic atmosphere and compositional elegance of Coddington's work with some of fashion's leading photographers.

Wintour, meanwhile, remains as coolly inscrutable to us as she does to many of the people she works with on a daily basis. And why not? It's to Cutler's credit that he neither plays into the stereotype of Wintour as an unfeeling ice queen nor goes out of his way to warm her up. (He also doesn't pry very deeply into her personal life.) Instead, he portrays the world's foremost fashion tastemaker as a serious businesswoman who has managed to not only keep Vogue at the center of the zeitgeist for the past two decades, but to enlarge the magazine's success at a time when most other printed media is going the way of the dodo. For this alone, she commands our respect.

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Pushed to the Brink Jan 20, 2009
Susan Sarandon Help Line Jan 20, 2009
Cold Souls and Paper Hearts Jan 19, 2009
Taking No Chances Jan 19, 2009
G'day Sundance Jan 17, 2009
Sundance, R.I.P.? Jan 14, 2009
How Do You Say "Oscar Scandal" in Italian? Jan 13, 2009
Papa Manoel Turns 100 Dec 12, 2008
Inside The Baader Meinhof Complex Oct 31, 2008
Left, Right and Center Oct 6, 2008
Toronto in the Round Sep 15, 2008
Citizen Lame Sep 13, 2008
The Porn of Pain Sep 12, 2008
Double Impact Sep 10, 2008
Iraq in (Shrapnel) Fragments Sep 9, 2008