Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
This lyrical film from Chinese director Dai Sijie, who based the drama on his own semiautobiographical novel, is set in the early Seventies, during the Cultural Revolution. Balzac concerns two university students who are sent to a re-education camp in a remote mountain village. There both young men fall in love with the tailor's vivacious granddaughter. Discovering a cache of forbidden Western literature — Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky — they introduce her to a world of art, music, and literature. With an oddly nostalgic feel that belies the tumultuous period during which it's set, this poetic, bittersweet film extols the importance of ideas and the power of the imagination.
The Beautiful Country
The questing hero of this drama of discovery is a slender, big-eyed Vietnamese farmboy (Damien Nguyen) who's an outcast in his own land because his father was an American soldier. He dreams of freedom, and his harsh journey from home to Ho Chi Minh City to a dirty refugee camp in Malaysia to an overheated kitchen in New York takes on the power of myth. Made by Norwegian Hans Petter Moland, this fearlessly observant film deserves a place of honor among the great movies about emigrant tenacity. By the time its young seeker comes to ground on a windswept Texas prairie, he has liberated us too.
CSA: Confederate States of America
Writer-director Kevin Willmott's picture was bought by IFC Films at the 2004 Sundance festival — and then buried. It saw only limited release this year and spent most of its time cooling its heels on the film-fest circuit — a shame, given its absolute genius. It's a mockumentary dolled up as a made-for-Brit-TV documentary about the U.S. as though the South had won the Civil War, complete with antique photos and film footage subverted in order to tell an alternate history, in which slavery is still legal and abolitionist Canada is our enemy. This is easily the nerviest film about race, religion, and American imperialism ever made.
Darwin's Nightmare
Hubert Sauper's outraged but carefully measured documentary begins with the introduction of a predatory food fish, the Nile perch, into Lake Victoria and telescopes into a harrowing meditation on globalization and the new look of colonial cruelty in black Africa. In their filthy work camps, the fishermen subsist without medical care, while the boundless greed of European profiteers extends even to abetting African violence by their importation of the deadly weapons used in bloody conflicts nearby. This is a vivid feat of reporting that stirs the conscience and enrages the soul. It is stunning as a punch in the face.
Heights
A contemporary ensemble drama about a group of New York artistic types whose lives intersect over one 24-hour period, this film from director Chris Terrio inexplicably came and went in less than a week. Glenn Close gives one of her finest performances to date as a grande dame of the theater, whose personal life demands as much pretense as her stage roles. Before the night is over, most of the characters (including lovely performances by Elizabeth Banks and James Marsden) will be forced to face bitter truths about themselves and those they think they know.
Keane
The protagonist of this deeply moving, uncomfortably intimate film is the captive of demons only he can hear, wandering around New York City in search of his missing daughter — a girl who may not be missing at all, who may not even exist. Played with frightening intensity by Damian Lewis (Major Winters in Band of Brothers), obsessed William Keane is the kind of pariah urban dwellers do anything to avoid: He shuffles foot to foot, he screams in strangers' faces, he slams his vodka warm. But by the time writer-director Lodge Kerrigan gets done with us, this portrait of mad despair lets us inside the claustrophobic prison of its victim's heart.
Kingdom of Heaven
Yes, it arrived in theaters with much fanfare, but few people actually saw it. And it's a shame, because everything Ridley Scott got wrong in Gladiator he got right in this, a medieval epic with well-drawn characters and comprehensible battle sequences. Orlando Bloom may not be the ideal action hero for a guy movie like this, and the finale is more of a whimper than a bang, but Kingdom of Heaven still feels more like a true heir to the likes of Spartacus than those other pale imitations we've seen from Wolfgang Peterson and Oliver Stone.
