Li Yuchun and Ethan Juan in THE GUILLOTINES (Well Go USA)

The latest film from director Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs) kicks off with a promising and strong opening sequence, with the titular elite fighting group in action. This secret squad is small but deadly, serving at the behest of the Qing Dynasty emperor, and their preferred weapon gives them their name. Featured prominently in the initial battle scene, this killing device is a circular set of spinning blades launched from a curved and scythe-like sword that hones in on its intended target, like an ancient form of GPS positioning, descending upon and decapitating a victim. The wildly kinetic curtain-raiser makes for an exciting opening, but unfortunately the rest of the film soon devolves into a muddled hodgepodge of rote betrayals, male bonding, and bloodless drama that completely squanders the potential for compelling action that The Guillotines initially promises.

The film’s very convoluted and often baffling plot is set into motion when the Guillotines capture the Wolf (Huang Xiaoming), the leader of the Herders, an ethnically Han Chinese, quasi-religious group and the main opposition to China’s Manchu rulers. The Guillotines are tasked with executing Wolf, but their leader, Leng (Ethan Juan), decides instead to keep him alive to use as a bargaining chip in a power play to gain higher status in the court. However, on the day he’s to be executed, Wolf escapes with help of the Herders, and he kidnaps Musen (Li Yuchun), the sole female Guillotine.

Meanwhile, a new emperor ascends the throne, who seeks to bring modern Western weapons, such as guns and cannons, to China. He regards the Guillotines as an inconvenient anachronism with no place in his new order. The Guillotines, never publicly acknowledged, find themselves betrayed and set adrift by their rulers, and since they have been kept deliberately illiterate and treated as simply human weapons, their very identity and sense of purpose is completely shattered. With nowhere else to turn, they join forces with the Herders, since much like them they have become enemies of the state. Adding to these complications is the arrival of Haidu (Shawn Yue), an imperial envoy ostensibly sent to advise the Guillotines, but who unbeknownst to them is working for the new emperor to eradicate them.

A loose reimagining of the 1975 Shaw Brothers classic The Flying Guillotine, The Guillotines is an unfortunate victim of its troubled production history—its original director, Teddy Chan (Bodyguards and Assassins), was replaced by Andrew Lau after the production was completely shut down, reportedly due to script issues. The final product is credited to no less than six screenwriters, which most likely accounts for its ramshackle dramatic construction and frequent lapses of logic. For example, Wolf brutally tortures Musen after he captures her, but later becomes a Gandhi-like figure of peace.

Die-hard action fans will doubtless be disappointed by the fact that, beyond the opening sequence, the titular weapon almost completely disappears from the movie in favor of familiar martial-arts action that breaks no new ground whatsoever. Also, other than Leng and Musen, the Guillotines never emerge as compelling characters, so the tragedies that befall them have very little emotional impact. Shawn Yue is quite good as the steely, efficient enforcer Haidu, and Huang Xiaoming manages to exude considerable charisma despite his ill-conceived character. Unfortunately, Taiwanese heartthrob Ethan Juan is a blankly bland presence in what should have been a riveting central performance.

The best that can be said for The Guillotines is that the considerable talent involved, including cinematographer Edmond Fung, prevents this from becoming a total disaster, given the tortured path it traveled to the screen. However, it falls far short from being a memorable or accomplished film.

Toby Jones in BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (Film Society of Lincoln Center)

Peter Strickland’s second feature is an inventive homage to the art of analogue sound and the power of the medium. Sometime in the 1970s, sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a meek, middle-aged English bachelor, and a specialist in nature documentaries, accepts a job to engineer the soundtrack for an Italian film. The job transplants him from the sedate rural life he shares with his mother to a cheap sound studio in Rome. He has no idea what elusive director Santini (Antonio Mancino) has in the can beyond the title, “The Equestrian Vortex,” and he’s confronted by twin Foley goons in lab coats smashing watermelons to bits.

Trapped in the studio with a manipulative producer, Francesco (Cosimo Fusco), and a monosyllabic, aged, studio manager, Gilderoy recoils at the violent, exploitative horror movie that Francesco is making. Ignorant of the language and culture, Gilderoy is overwhelmed by the explosive dynamics between charismatic, unscrupulous Santini, Francesco, and their embittered cast.

There’s much comedy in the Anglo-Italian cultural clash, the stylized screen artifice, and the sordid studio reality. A black, leather-gloved hand projects the film that we never actually see, and the droll projectist’s voice-over introduces each gruesome scene with classic descriptions: “A dangerously aroused goblin stalks the dormitory.” In the sound booth, actresses complain between repeated takes of sickening screams, and Foley artists discard smashed vegetables, left to fester and decompose in a vat.

Cashless and unable to recover any of his costs from the beautiful and contemptuous secretary, the ensnared Gilderoy is unable to leave the job, and he retreats into his work. His only outside communication are the letters from his mother recounting the changing pastoral life he longs to record. Immersed in the sonic simulation of sadism, the resonance of repeated takes exacts its toll, twisting his grasp of reality.

Berberian Sound Studio is a blackly comic film, pregnant with menace, the action contained entirely in the claustrophobic studio, with a sound design that is to die for. This is a master class in the language of horror and the alchemy of sound artists. Production designer Jennifer Kernke lovingly re-creates the period details captured by the lingering camera of cinematographer Nic Knowland.

The film uses the syntax of giallo, the exploitative genre that has had far-reaching impact on modern horror cinema. Although rewarding, familiarity with the genre and the works of such directors as Dario Argento and Mario Bava is not necessary to appreciate this movie. Strickland has a different artistic goal. Underlying the dark comedy, he exploits the power of our imaginations and the viewer’s complicity in the violence.

Writer/director Strickland is a rare talent whose ambitions are refreshingly original. His follow up to Katalin Varga is a clever low-budget conceit and a fascinating tour de force with a daring, shifting tone. It’s only weakness, as in a giallo, is that as Gilderoy’s sanity deteriorates, plot seems secondary to sound and vision.

More Than Honey, a delectable nature documentary of the secret life of bees, is also a philosophical rumination on the past, present, and future of those who raise them, and the threat to the 80 percent of plant species that need these insects for pollination—which means about a third of what we eat.

Swiss director Markus Imhoof narrates and illustrates with a montage of photographs of his family’s long connections to beekeeping, from his grandfather’s orchards to his biologist daughter and son-in-law studying bees in Australia, and follows bees and apiarists on four continents. Elderly Fred Jaggi operates an alpine heritage like the Imhoof family, and is proud of his traditional techniques and pure-bred black bees, but even up in these mountains promiscuous yellow queens from the next valley threaten his stock. Austrian mother/daughter team Heidrun and Liane Singer manipulate the insects’ life cycle and instincts to specialize in breeding queens (the busiest workers in agriculture) that they mail out to clients in more than 50 countries.

Footage is filmed so up close that it looks like Imhoof has practically placed high-speed cameras with endoscopic lenses right on the bees. The cameras could click 70 frames per second as the bees travel to sweet sources (whether flower nectar or sugar water) and return to the colony to communicate, feed each other, lay eggs, and build the honeycombs. Up close, they look like hairy, bulbous monsters from a science fiction movie. Using mini-helicopters, Imhoof also catches on screen a queen bee’s wedding flight, with a mid-air mating at 300 frames per second. To explain what the bees do (though I can’t say I completely followed the details while bug-eyed at the visuals), the production team was guided by a renowned “bee whisperer,” German neurobiologist Randolf Menzel.

How little bees are essential to Big Agriculture is usefully demonstrated by following affable John Miller’s big trucks of bee boxes. He hits the road for his annual circular route from California’s Central Valley fruit basket, to the Washington apple orchards, to the summer fields of North Dakota, and back for the winter to process his honey harvest. Acres of almond groves are the case study for what Miller ruefully calls “our Faustian deal” with growers—extensive acres of uniformly planted monoculture is easy prey for parasites and bacteria, which farmers then attack with fungicides. Watching bees slowly die after spraying visually supports the recent two-year ban by the European Commission of a class of pesticides.

That sequence introduces the mysterious crisis of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which, since 2006, has decimated bees around the world—the many possible causes and its repercussions have been better covered in Doug Shultz’s Silence of the Bees (2007) and Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell’s Colony (2009). While a U.S. government study released earlier this month found no conclusive evidence of one villain, Imhoof uniquely looks to other solutions for the future business of beekeeping. In China, manual labor is being applied to agriculture—swarms of people try to replace bees by brushing branch-by-branch fruit trees with pollen (giving yet another meaning to the birds and the bees). On a smaller scale, individual entrepreneurs dry and sell pollen in small packets to retailers.

Learning from killer bees is also presented as a creative solution. I had thought virulent escapees from a research lab in Brazil were an urban legend, but they really are spreading north and seem to be as immune to CCD as much as they are resistant to domesticity. In Arizona, burly, long-haired Fred Terry tracks killer bees and tries to figure out how to get their honey, sort of like a hippie Winnie the Pooh with a bandanna. Meanwhile, Imhoof’s relatives attempt to more scientifically figure out if there are secrets in the feral bees’ immune systems that can benefit these insects, beekeepers, and all us eaters. They also introduce Imhoof’s grandchildren to the family’s heritage, giving new cinematic meaning to the spirit of the beehive.

Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough in SHADOW DANCER (Magnolia Pictures)

Terrorism, sectarian loyalties, die-hard fanatics, civilian casualties, aggressive security measures, and revenge killings—all complicate chances for peace. These themes could be ripped from today’s headlines. Shadow Dancer lends “The Troubles” of Northern Ireland very tense, sobering, contemporary immediacy.

Opening in Belfast 1973, the McVeigh family is thrust into violence right in their home, as a small son is caught in the bloody clashes between the British forces and the IRA. His red-headed brothers and sister are then seared into radicalism. Twenty years later, the TV news is full of the ceasefire negotiations even as London is still on high alert over past and possible bombings. Now grown-up, the sister, Collette (Andrea Riseborough, mesmerizing at first sight), nervously switches trains amidst the commuter crowds and carries a bulging bag. Deep in the bowels of the railroad station, she panics and drops it. She follows a daring escape plan through emergency exits, tunnels, and ladders up to the street.

Until agents from the MI5 internal security agency seize her. The interrogating agent, Mac (Clive Owen), doesn’t need a confession to hold years of imprisonment over the tough as nails single mother. He demands she turn traitor against her brothers, leaders of the most rigidly extreme IRA faction, and betray the cause her family members have died for over the years. Police movies are full of scenes of turning criminals into confidential informants who usually end up as collateral damage, and Mac insists on cracking a closed circle of intimate trust, where suspected snitches are brutally executed. Privately, even he thinks his promises of protection are wishful thinking, particularly as he has to operate within a bureaucracy of competing interests, ambitions, and procedures in Northern Ireland and Britain—not least his coolly focused boss Kate (Gillian Anderson).

Mac sets up a complicated system of meetings and an emergency beeper whose discovery could risk Collette’s life at any moment. He insists he just wants to know her brothers’ political views on the negotiations. As she hesitates to inform, Mac calls in the troops to storm her house for a shake down. Her coiled older brother Gerry (Aiden Gillen, warning to his Game of Thrones fans, it’s a small role) is still planning assassinations to be carried out by their brother Connor (the more and more intriguing chameleon Domhnall Gleeson), and a scary IRA enforcer (David Wilmot) is ever watching (and ready to torture). Though Collette begins to question the toll of the violence when peace could be at hand, what Mac asks of her tears her loyalties in half, and she can’t even confide in her worried mother (Bríd Brennan), who is trying at least to protect her grandchild’s future. Each plan Collette overhears, each call she surreptitiously makes, each clandestine meeting with Mac escalates her risks, and the suspense is excruciating.

Director James Marsh and cinematographer Rob Hardy bring the same feel of urban noir they brought to Red Riding Trilogy, making a film about entrenched politics feel more like undercover cops and murderers, but with a whole lot more at stake. (While earlier films like Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) and Terry George’s Some Mother’s Son (1996) established the background on the intransigent conflict, the details of the negotiations are a bit unclear for American audiences.) Tom Bradby’s script considerably tightens up his novel, particularly in the fraught relationship between Collette and Mac, so that the sexual tension is more oblique, and their mutual dependence considerably more damaging,  and shockingly so.

As London and other cities are again nervous about random attacks and governments’ counter-terrorism efforts have further ramped up, it’s impossible to watch this and not think about the depressing cycle of those caught up in terrorist groups or cartels organized around families. More than a well-acted and great-looking thriller, Shadow Dancer makes a strong, emotional case for the bravery of those in the exhausted middle who sacrificed for peace to prevail, as it eventually did in Northern Ireland.

Kristy Sword Gusmão in ALIAS RUBY BLADE (Alex Meillier)

Some of Tribeca Film Festival’s lesser-known documentaries and fiction films were the strongest I’d seen in the program. There were certainly standouts, films that had what seemed like impossible footage of an event—Alias Ruby Blade shares secrets firsthand from within the heart of a country’s rebellion—or feature films that explore familiar territory with nuance and care. Many of these films will be worth tracking down if they find distribution.

Alias Ruby Blade is the international handle for Kristy Sword. The Australian had an interest in East Timor in the early 1990s, a time when the nation was boiling under Indonesian governance. (Indonesia had invaded East Timor in 1975, and annexed the country the following year.) Director Alex Meillier reconstructs Sword’s youthful Super-8mm footage into a story of romance and revolution, from when she first moves to East Timor and begins to work for the resistance, assumes her codename, and gets so close to the revolution’s inner world that eventually she becomes the only contact that charismatic leader Xanana Gusmão has outside prison. Before being arrested for treason, Gusmão had become a beloved national figure, leading the revolutionary forces for independence while in hiding.

Sword becomes Gusmão’s connection to the outside world, delivering messages to rebel groups and pleas to world leaders. At one point, Sword sneaks a movie camera and a cell phone into his tiny detention center for political prisoners. This is a documentary with the rare advantage of having caught the unfathomable on film, and uses it well. The footage of the two of them talking to each other, exchanging cassette tapes, phone calls, and small gifts, comes into focus as an impossible romance between a young freedom fighter from Melbourne and a warrior-poet, who inspired a nation to revolt. Then the revolution begins, which we see also from home movies: the struggle for East Timor from a first-person perspective with access to the heart of the revolution.

Does Sword survive? Does Gusmão? Can they stay together? Can their country? Don’t let Wikipedia spoil the plot for you. Candid interviews with Sword and major players in the politics of the country known today as Timor-Leste round out an unbelievable story of two people coming together and fighting for their beliefs.

Where Alias Ruby Blade was made from raw material that was innately compelling, Bending Steel was less fortunate. The topic has promise: Chris Schoeck, an awkward and shy subject, has nevertheless spent years training to become an old-timey carnival strongman. He challenges himself daily to bend ever-thicker pieces of steel, performing tricks of superhuman strength—pulling apart phone books and decks of playing cards. He sets a goal for himself: to perform on stage and bend a two-inch bar of steel. Both goals seem large to him, but they aren’t very cinematic. Schoeck is someone with complicated emotional boundaries that would need to be explored in order for his very internal goals to work as a climactic structure. But director Dave Carroll doesn’t go far enough in interviews with his subject or the few people who surround him. There is rarely enough insight to make Schoeck’s trajectory resonant.

Powerless is another documentary that took a shot in the dark, somewhat literally, by tracking a year in the life of its subjects and hoped for the best. A former British factory town in ruins, Kampur is still known in memory as India’s Manchester, though the city’s factories are now shuttered and the homes are dark at night. The state-run electricity company cannot support the amount of power needed by Kampur’s population. In a city of three million, an estimated 400,000 people live without power. Most have resorted to stealing electricity, resulting in a capitalist catch-22: how to improve an electricity company with no money, and how to make an impoverished population pay for something that they’re now accustomed to getting for free?

Directors Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar track two controversial figures in this north Indian city’s quest for electricity. An expert electrical thief, Loha Singh, helps poor families steal power each night, and Ritu Maheshwari, the power company’s first female managing director, hopes to affect dramatic change. They are two sides of the same idealistic battle, and neither wins. Powerless seems to point to bureaucratic failure to understand how the electricity company’s failure began, which is needed to understand how to fix the problem. It can be fascinating to watch Maheshwari fail in interactions with her customers and employees, or Singh get into disputes with other Kampur residents who criticize his chosen profession. But this is a film that needs talking heads. The film presents the size of the energy problem in India but never quite articulates the background behind the situation, or points to a pathway towards improvement.

AATSINKI: THE STORY OF ARCTIC COWBOYS (Jessica Oreck)

Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys is a documentary in the truest sense of the word. Filmmaker Jessica Oreck documents a year in the life of two reindeer herders in Finnish Lapland within the Arctic Circle. Without narration or even narrative, we watch two brothers, Aarne and Lasse Aatsinki, at work and at home. There are no interviews or voice-overs to shed more light on these men than what we are shown. That helps create a beautiful portrait, if lulling. The landscape is gorgeous—ice-covered trees, snow deeper than most people have ever experienced, and a look into an ancient and rugged lifestyle that is modernized but still inextricably connected to the land and the elements.

It’s at times an entrancing portrait, a way of life preserved on film, but that sense of magic wears off without a narrative. There are only so many shots of men silently creating a campfire (and there are more than five of those here) or once again flaying a deer that remain interesting without more direct engagement with the men.

Roisin Murphy and Jack Reynor in WHAT RICHARD DID (Tribeca Film)

Among the feature films, Irish filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson’s excellent What Richard Did is a nuanced portrayal of teenagers that persists in digging below the surface. We are first introduced to a high school rugby team, all boisterous and ready to party, all equally dangerous in their own way. Richard (Jack Reynor) emerges as the group’s alpha male, outgoing though clearly holding back an inner life that he shies away from sharing.

Richard is comfortable with his family and friends as a leader, showing good-natured adult humor and a diplomatic morality. He’s even happy in his role as the group’s aloof sexual fantasy for the girls of the group until Lara (Roisin Murphy) enters his life. She leaves her boyfriend for Richard, creating tension between the three that pulls him into an act of uncharacteristic violence, which the film’s ominous energy has promised from the start. But the pleasure in watching this film comes not from the plot arc but from being introduced to a solidly drawn character, and watching him respond with subtlety to a situation forcing mature growth, and it works because Reynor carries his role well.

Director Tomasz Wasilewski has made what has been called Poland’s first gay film, Floating Skyscrapers, a  sophomore film tense with anticipation. A 20-something swimmer-in-training, Kuba (Mateusz Banasiuk), becomes restless in his comfortable relationship with his girlfriend once he allows himself to feel a romantic interest in Mikal (Bartosz Gelner). Their attraction and connection is powerful enough for both of them to completely come out of the closet.

However, they live in a society that threatens homosexuals, bruising the bold, leaving only muffled thumps in a locker room as a safe expression of desire. In Poland, LGBT rights and views on homosexuality are stuck behind much of Europe. The film’s beautifully shot, and Warsaw becomes both romantic and alienating in Wasilewski’s framing. In his lens, the city is full of promise for people in love and those lucky enough to be able to take advantage of it, and claustrophobic for those who can’t.

Mi-sun (Cho Min-soo) in PIETA (Drafthouse Films)

Over the course of a 17-year career, in which he has made 18 films, Korean auteur Kim Ki-duk has often shocked and divided audiences with his singularly uncompromising visions of violent, often uncommunicative people, who are both the perpetrators and victims of torture, psychological torment, and physical and psychic distress. However, these extremely grim situations is married to a visual style that is quite strikingly beautiful, befitting his pre-filmmaking life as a painter. Kim has had, despite his international acclaim, a very antagonistic relationship to the Korean film industry, and a series of personally devastating events and perceived betrayal by others led him to take a self-imposed exile from filmmaking in 2008 following his film Dream. Kim emerged from this hiatus in 2011 with the raw and nakedly confessional self-portrait Arirang, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year.

Kim’s latest feature Pieta continues his re-emergence as a vital and celebrated world filmmaker, reinforced with his winning the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. Pieta marks a return to the violent and harrowing themes of his previous work, but with a much rawer and more unadorned aesthetic that matches the desperate and tortured characters that populate the film.

Pieta follows Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), a collector and enforcer for a local loan shark in a run-down, industrial area of Seoul. He is merciless and implacable as he goes about collecting debts from those who have been loaned money at outrageous and truly criminal rates of interest. Kang-do is almost an automaton, gaining no pleasure from his work. Pleas and entreaties from the debtors fall on resolutely deaf ears and a quarry stone heart. Kang-do’s preferred punishment for those who fail to pay up is to cripple them after they have signed injury insurance claims, the payouts for which will settle the amounts they owe the loan shark. Kang-do, a loner, and a rather savage figure, prefers to slaughter live chickens for dinner rather than buy them from the supermarket, and gains his sexual release by humping the pillows in his sleep.

One day while he is on his rounds, he encounters Mi-sun (Cho Min-soo), a woman who begins following him and later forces her way into his apartment, where she begins cleaning up the place and preparing meals for him. Mi-sun claims to be Kang-do’s long lost mother, who abandoned him soon after giving birth to him. Kang-do doesn’t believe her at first, and he takes out his extremely violent nature on her, making her do humiliating things, and eventually rapes her. Still, Mi-sun doggedly remains with Kang-do, apologizing profusely for leaving him, and expressing her wish to make things up with him.

Kang-do comes around to fully accepting her as his mother, which causes him to begin to reform himself and give up his work. However, this makes Kang-do worried and paranoid that he will now become the victim of those he has hurt, who will now want to take revenge against him, and that his newly found mother will be a prime target for this revenge. Sure enough, the chickens eventually come home to roost in the most devastating way for Kang-do.

Pieta is crowned by an exceptionally fine performance by Cho Min-soo as the mother. Her emotional trajectory, even when her motives are not entirely clear, is given viscerally palpable form by this powerhouse portrayal. Lee Jung-jin impresses as well, making quite believable both Kang-do’s brutality and his transformation by what he perceives as unconditional love.

Pieta is very clearly and consciously a post-financial crisis film, with poverty and desperation for money the force which drives everything here, with people willing to go to any lengths to borrow money or pay back debts. Kang-so is called a “devil” several times by his victims, as someone who tempts with money and who exacts a terrible cost for this need.  Pieta’s setting is a character in itself, with the metalwork shops and hulking machinery an appropriate environment for the cold, brutal violence that occurs here.

The raw camerawork, with its shaky handheld shots and awkward zooms, by Kim and cinematographer Jo Yeong-jik, provide an unsettling, documentary-like feel that matches the ugliness of the human behavior on display. While Pieta is not the best film Kim has ever made (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, 3-Iron, and Samaritan Girl are superior examples of Kim’s prodigious artistry), it’s a solid reminder of his singular worldview—quite fascinating if often not easy to watch.

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Despina Spyrou/Sony Pictures Classics)

In Before Midnight, time has moved on once again since the last time we saw Jesse and Celine from Before Sunset nine years ago, and much more than 18 years earlier in Before Sunrise. This much is obvious—since Sunset, when they met again by chance in Paris and finally committed to their relationship as opposed to the first film, when they enjoyed a night out on Vienna—they now have twins and live in Paris. They’re vacationing with Jesse’s writer colleague, and have suffused their summer in Greece. It’s one of their last days/nights in the country, and it’s been a nice summer—according to Jesse’s son from his previous marriage, the best the 13-year-old ever had—but what now? What comes next?

Before Midnight is a mature film, more so than the previous two, which themselves carried a high air of maturation for stories featuring young people in their 20s and then 30s. Some of this comes with early middle age. But it’s not only a movie where two characters walk around and talk about life as before. Like in the past, the dialogue’s has tangents that are extremely difficult and profound to pull off (on aging, living a meaningful life, politics, gender roles, death) without sounding too vapid or too pretentious. In other words, these two can go on about intelligent topics and know what they are talking about while being engaged with their semantics.

It’s only for a stretch of about 20 to maybe 30 minutes in the mid-section when Jesse and Celine, for the first time in the series, have meaningful conversations with other people around them. (Previously, if memory serves, their walks around the cities were punctuated with only the slightest, most tertiary interactions with others.) Jesse engages with a much older writer, an admirer a little older than him, and a younger guy; Celine with a much older woman, a slightly older woman, and then a much younger woman. Around a dinner table, this dynamic of the age range is represented, and a conversation unrolls that is like, say, My Dinner with Andre times three (though shorter) as this trio of couples and two older widowed folk talk about falling in love, what it means to be a man or woman in lust, and then coming back to getting older and the changing nature of love. Are you each your own person and find a place to meet in the middle, or are you one unit?

Linklater acts as a great guide for these philosophical musings, and it’s always engrossing, but what makes this film so much more special than the previous two is that we see what happens when conflict comes up. The antagonist is not some big entity that can be easily defeated. Jesse and Celine are given a sort of gift by their Greek friends, a night to themselves at a local hotel, and at first they like the room and try to make love. A phone call interrupts them—Jesse’s son has made it to his connection flight just fine. Yet this sparks off the argument: do they maintain life as it’s been in Paris, or go to America so Jesse can live near his son?

The obstacle here is so painful and yet so real and recognizable. When the argument flares up, there’s a theatrical nature to the proceedings, even though one may try to keep things grounded more so than the other, and Celine is probably more the instigator than Jesse. But where all this leads is just completely engrossing. The actors have taken these characters into darker contours, and Jesse and Celine know how to press one another’s buttons. This isn’t even the key to what makes all of this drama and tension work though, which on its own could make for fascinating Bergman-esque patter. It’s funny. Their arguments, more often than not, carry blistering humor.

In fact, much of this film, from a long conversation between the couple in a car driving from the airport (and in Linklater’s trademark long takes) to a stroll through a town, has a lot of sly, knowing humor. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, both giving wonderful, soulful, and yet always naturalistic performances, perhaps know that the essential element to a relationship is that a spark has to be maintained, and, as I can attest, a sense of humor as well. Indeed, in a pivotal moment, Jesse says to an upset Celine, “Look, I am trying to make you LAUGH,” in one of the most genuinely romantic gestures in any film.

In a season dominated by the same blockbuster characters with their blockbuster talk and blockbuster action, Before Midnight gives us a grown-up film that has adult, funny-tragic motions, and characters that are endearing, heartfelt, and true, especially if one has seen the previous films. From the start, it approaches them as fully formed people, and could work as a stand-alone film for the uninitiated.

Adèle Exarchopoulos, right, and Léa Seydoux in BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR (All photos: Cannes Film Festival)

The main difference that sets the Cannes Film Festival apart from other fests is the anticipation: you will want to see the films debuting in the competition, especially if they are directed by the likes of the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne, Roman Polanski, and Asghar Farhadi, to name four. Few shots in the dark here.

There was a real race this year for the awards bestowed by a jury headed by Steven Spielberg. The half-hour televised ceremony was as glitzy and cheesy as its American counterparts, but since only about a half-dozen awards were handed out, it moved at a fast pace. But oh, the banter. Before revealing the top price, the Palme d’Or, the poor mistress of ceremonies, Audrey Tautou, intoned “Ooo” (beat) “La” (beat) “La,” and repeated it even more slowly and to lesser effect before announcing Uma Thurman, a Cannes red carpet fixture, who, in turn, introduced Spielberg to reveal the winner.

Going into the ceremony, Blue Is the Warmest Color, the victor, was ahead in the running in the French critics’ poll.  Its director, Abdellatif Kechiche (The Secret of the Grain), has previously won major awards within the French film industry but not at Cannes. His new film was based on a popular graphic novel, where a 17-year-old working-class girl falls in love with a woman, an older (21ish) middle-class arts student. It’s lust at first sight when she notices Emma crossing the street in the arms of a woman. With a mop of blue hair and delicate blond eyebrows, the striking Emma looks like a contemporary Ariel.

Without precedent, the jury handed out the award to not only the film’s director but to its two lead actresses as well, which was an unusual but a completely appropriate acknowledgement of their contributions, especially considering how they were filmed in Kechiche’s well established style: long hand-held tracking shots filmed very, very close to the face. (But really, it’s not the greatest idea when people are filmed eating, which they do here a lot.) Although the scenes naturally build to a conflict, an internal editorial voice creeps in, voicing what scenes to cut here and there. In Kechiche’s previous films, which are also three hours long, the momentum of the story gathers steam, but this time around it ambles.

The way that the camera follows 19-year-old actress Adèle Exarchopoulos (completely uninhibited in her first film)—like it was her shadow—draws you into her thoughts and emotions, but the camera also reveals too much. Both of the film’s actresses give 100 percent so there’s really no mystery to their motivations. Forget the on-screen sex, it’s the emotions that are too explicit.

But speaking of the former, the first bedroom scene between Exarchopoulos (as Adèle) and her co-star Léa Seydoux brings a new level of depicting sex on screen. It’s not pornographic, yet neither does it leave anything to your imagination—but at almost 10 minutes long, it’s gratuitous. It didn’t hurt the film to achieve immediate notoriety, though. It’s noteworthy that an earlier sex scene with Adèle and a man is chaste in comparison.

Another French production featuring sex, some would call hardcore, premiered in the concurrent section Un Certain Regard, which generally programs more unconventional films (though not based on what I saw). From what I’ve heard, Stranger by the Lake, set around a lakeside gay cruising ground for hookups and homicide, flashes penises for two hours. A French colleague said that he thought the reaction to the nudity and the male-on-male oral sex by the woman sitting nearby was just as entertaining as the movie. The often nude male actors reportedly had body doubles for the money shots. The actresses in Blue just had themselves.

Thankfully, Blue is not a coming-out retread. Kechiche depicts the story of a couple; the gender and sexual preference is almost incidental. Indeed, Adèle introduces her girlfriend to her parents as her philosophy tutor, and the more politically aware Emma plays along. The couple is out and proud at a Lille gay rights march, but Adèle’s real coming-out epiphany occurs in the bedroom with Emma.

Kechiche has stated that the major obstacle in their relationship is their social background, which informs their personal aspirations. I saw less of a class contrast than a power play between two opposites. Even though there are only a few years between them, the gap between 17 and 21 is huge in terms of life experience and maturity. And Emma molds her younger lover, introducing her to art and the joys of eating oysters (really), though Adèle is no rube and is very confident in what she likes (Marivaux, please) and is already politically minded (say no to austerity measures). Though she’s young, Adèle has a certain strength that has nothing to do with intellect—she’s constantly being hit on by both men and women. When she ventures into a lesbian bar for the very first time, Emma has to fight off other women waiting to buy the high schooler a drink. So it’s that attraction that adds some insecurity and a possible threat for Emma, and not whether Adèle can live up to some sort of standard.

Sophie Desmarais in SARAH PREFERS TO RUN

From Canada and in the Un Certain Regard section, Sarah Prefers to Run shares a lot in common with Blue. A track-and-field athlete, 20-year-old Sarah (Sophie Desmarais) moves to the big city of Montreal to attend McGill University, and marries a hometown boy so that both can receive a government stipend to support themselves while in school. He’s a congenial, happy-go-lucky, hearts-on-sleeve jock. She’s withdrawn and timid, except when she watches a female teammate sing karaoke, and her heart skips many beats—landing her in the hospital. The audience knows where this is going, and this quiet, unpretentious film leads to a climax when Sarah makes a simple, though life-changing, gesture. After a refreshingly brief 87 minutes, Sarah has finally made a decision for herself. Except for one awkward sex scene, the film is strictly PG. Even in a gym shower, the women wear bathing suits. However, the film reveals the limits of how compelling a passive lead character can be, especially compared to her husband-of-convenience and her extroverted teammates. Adèle in Blue doesn’t have this problem.

Though the Palme d’Or is arguably the most important European film award, Blue’s win doesn’t guarantee that it will represent France for the best foreign language film Oscar this year. France’s selection committee often picks both popular and commercial fare, though sometimes a Cannes winner is thrown into the mix. Although it lost the top prize, Asghar Farhadi’s new film, The Past won the best actress prize for Bérénce Bejo (far from the frivolity of The Artist), and it’s as strong as A Separation, which won the Oscar just two years ago, making it a more likely pick, besides being the film that resonated the most for me.

Though it begins on a lower charged note than A Separation, it builds, taking off in the second half. A great novelist-as-filmmaker, Farhadi has written another mystery where every plot detail counts, beginning simply and innocuously enough. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) has returned from Iran to Paris for the first time in four years to sign his divorce from Marie-Anne (Bejo) and end their relationship on good terms, but given the film’s title, that may not be likely.

On the drive from the airport, he asks her if she has booked him a hotel room. She hasn’t. Why bother when he might cancel his plans—like he has before (about which she will remind him repeatedly). Instead, she’ll put him up in her suburban home—except she hasn’t warned him of her new living arraignments. And oh, can he please have a heart-to-heart with her teenage daughter from another marriage and find out what’s bothering her? Thus an enormous can of worms opens.

Like in Farhadi’s previous films, the moral waters become murky. Marie-Anne has a certain skill of dropping information bombs at the right moment, but Ahmad has an equally adept way of delivering a withering putdown. And in another similarity to A Separation, there’s an impromptu court scene of sorts that takes place in a café. You won’t see the next development coming.

Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric in VENUS IN FUR

Emmanuelle Seigner gave Bejo strong competition in husband Roman Polanski’s breezy and confident adaptation of David Ives’ 2010 two-hander play Venus in Fur. Although there was only one female director in the competition section (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s wobbly Chekhovian and autobiographical A Castle in Italy), it was a very good year for actresses. On first appearance, Seigner’s character’s a mess, coming out of the rain dripping wet, wearing a black leather mini-dress and a dog collar. She’s dressed for an audition of a director/playwright’s version of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs, named for the only article of clothing adorning the goddess in Titian’s Venus at a Mirror. Vanda (Seigner), perhaps not so coincidentally sharing the same name as novel’s dominating woman, calls the work “S & M porn” and asks if it was written in Austrian. She has no appointment, but somehow has managed to get hold of the unpublished script.

Both Polanski and Seigner clearly set out to undermine the audience’s expectations of Vanda as she bulldozes her way onto the stage and transforms into an Austrian aristocrat, taking over the audition as well as the film, with Mathieu Amalric along for the humiliation as her befuddled, acquiescent, and awed foil.

As though mirroring the power shift between the play’s director and Vanda, Polanski has delivered the film to Seigner on a silver platter. The role of Vanda was originally created on stage by a younger actress, Nina Arianda, yet the casting of the older Seigner works to the film’s advantage. Vanda has been around the block more than a few times, and her anger and need for a job feel more justified. (Not to mention, she’s hilarious doing a thick Dietrich accent.) And this time, Polanski knows the jig is up: this is a beautifully framed mounting of a play, filmed elegantly with simply composed shots. He doesn’t try to overcompensate for the material’s visual limitations (it all occurs on one set—a darkened theater) by moving the camera about or looking for any way to open up the story, as he did in his previous play adaptation, Carnage.

The winner of the best screenplay award, Jia Zhangke took a giant step away from his more meditative films like Still Life or 24 City.  (He’s a great purveyor of “slow cinema.” Stay with his films and they will resonate). The brutal A Touch of Sin is made up of four chapters, all based on real-life incidents of violence. The storytelling lucidly draws you into each of the blood-soaked storylines, and, remarkably, the film offers a scalding look at contemporary China by one its most acclaimed directors—and with government support (the Shanghai Film Group). I suppose that the title is ambiguous enough to finger point any moral lapse at the characters and not at the country’s communist/capitalist system.  These are engrossing homilies against different types of private transgressions.

Setting an unhinged tone, the film begins with a motorcyclist blocked at a road stop by men with guns. He needs to pay to pass through. The driver reaches for the rifle strapped over his shoulder and shoots them all dead. The vigilante, Dahai (Jiang Wu), arrives back at his hometown, where he’s convinced everyone in power is on the take: his village privatized its coal mine, but the promised yearly dividends to the workers have never been distributed. He’s proven right.

The film gives new meaning to the term “blood money.” It also features a scene from a pragmatic marriage, where a wife advises her traveling husband, “If you use a call girl, use a condom” and the truism: “There’s no true love in sex work.” Only one of the chapters feels too rushed and a little under-developed. Overall, this was one film that I gladly wished was longer. It’s the best omnibus in quite some time. One question lingers, though: how many theaters will actually show this in China?

Ryan Gosling in ONLY GOD FORGIVES

Yet no other film was bloodier than Only God Forgives, my prize for the best title of the year (A Touch of Sin comes second). Ryan Gosling reunites with Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn for a garishly beautiful and modern Jacobean tale of revenge. Julian, (Gosling) runs a Bangkok boxing club, and based on the sweat on Gosling’s forehead, the humidity is well over 100 percent. Like in their last effort, Drive, Gosling plays it cool, maybe too much so. He’s on no-emote control, revealing nothing when he learns his older brother is dead—his brains bashed out by a bat after he had raped and killed a teenage prostitute.

Kristin Scott Thomas as Julian’s mother from hell raises the energy of this art-house-pulp from its trippy lethargy. She’s a nightmarish caricature of American womanhood: mid-forties, bleached white blond hair, pink lip gloss, and stuffed in a way too tight dress. Blunt and coarse, she conspicuously compares the endowments of her sons, and uses language that would make a harden ex-con blush. She’s out for blood: to kill whomever ordered her son to die. That would be the police chief, the all-powerful judge of good and evil. Though morally and emotionally superficial, the film mesmerizes visually, with one of Julian’s hallucinations following another. It was booed at its debut press screening, but was politely, though tepidly, received at the screening I attended.

Overall, it was generally agreed that it was a very good year for American directors, even though James Gray’s The Immigrant received a mixed reception. First and maybe foremost, there is Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, a straightforward road trip with an embracing sense of melancholia, centered on a family that has forgotten or ignored its past. A placid but dutiful son takes his rarely-lucid, alcoholic, obstinate father from Montana back to the man’s Nebraska hometown on a dubious quest: dad’s convinced he has won a million dollar sweepstakes.

The black-and-white cinematography brings out the beauty of the flat Midwestern countryside and the starkness of small towns with closed up Main Streets. You might say it’s sentimental, but just a touch. These blunt, terse characters would never show too much emotion. (Dad explains to his son why he married: he liked to screw and mom’s Catholic, “So you do the math.”) This plain spoken film, along with the new Coen brothers offering, was a one-two punch for the U.S. Bruce Dern as Nebraska’s father deserved his best actor recognition, and his only competitor, based on what I saw, was the smooth Oscar Isaac in the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis.

Oscar Isaac in INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

Winner of the Grand Prix (second place), it has been compared to A Serious Man, but with a major difference. Folk artist Llewyn Davis is being tested, like a mid-century Job, but he’s the architecture of his own calumnies. He’s arrogant, self-centered, and a charming liar, but so single-minded and determined that this man/child disarms. Ironically, he can only express his vulnerabilities while singing with his guitar. He rigidly separates the emo vibe from his private life.

Formerly in a duo, he struggles for money and a place to crash, roaming from gig to gig, painfully carving out a solo career right before the Greenwich Village folk scene really hits it big on the charts. The beauty of the film is that the tone fluidly shifts from farcical, dark, and slightly screwball, with great acoustic renditions of “A Hundred Miles” and the traditional “The Death of Queen Anne.” No matter where you would rank these latter two films among their respective directors’ best, both feature steadfastly self-assured storytelling. And for all of the detours it takes, Inside Llewyn Davis may be the Coens’ saddest yet. Both films are awards season ready.

Hadas Yaron, center, in FILL THE VOID (Venice Film Festival)

Fill the Void feels like a folk tale set in a rural village. These folk dress and live bound by tradition as if they were in 19th century Eastern Europe, but their community is the middle of modern Tel Aviv, they take airplanes to visit family overseas, and text on cell phones. They can make individual choices, so that despite their modest and uniform dress, strong personalities prevail.

Writer/director Rama Burshtein, who became religiously observant after attending film school, creates a fictional, close-knit sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews whose lives, she notes, are as obsessed with marriage and parental social expectations as the characters in a Jane Austen novel. The family matriarch, Rivka (Irit Sheleg), has every reason to be happy with her two daughters. Twenty-eight-year-old Esther (Renana Raz) is lovingly married to Yochay (Yiftach Klein) and is about to have their first child. Eighteen-year-old Shira (Hadas Yaron) is excited to be approaching the final arrangements for her engagement to a young man from New York.

Then tragedy strikes and the family reels in grief at Esther’s death in childbirth. The distraught Rivka clings to her infant grandchild, and aggressively maneuvers reluctant family and rabbinical support to ensure that the baby will grow up near her. Talk about a guilt trip—her solution is to convince Shira and the older Yochay to marry each other. (Shades of Tudor England, where King Henry VIII claimed he acceded to his dying father’s wish to marry his brother’s widow.)

The slim plot is pretty much will they or won’t they? Shira is as independently determined as an Austen heroine to be more than an accessory in her mother’s plans or a convenient babysitter for Yochay. She insists on a real courtship to help her make up her mind. She also seeks advice from many people around her, from her elderly rabbi to her handicapped Aunt Hanna (Razia Israeli), who has reconciled herself to a life without marriage and children.

The charm is how, despite these pressures, a chemical attraction slowly and sweetly develops between Shira and Yochay. Klein, amazingly, manages to be as magnetic here as he was considerably more undressed in Nadav Lapid’s Policeman, while Yaron matches him with subtle expressiveness.

There have been recent films that sympathetically portray romantic relationships in the Hasidic community in Jerusalem, such as a married couple in Shuli Rand’s Ushpizin (2004), portrayed by Orthodox actors, and a surreptitious gay relationship in Haim Tabakman’s Eyes Wide Open (2009), portrayed by secular actors. Burshtein, in her first film for a general audience (she first specialized in making films restricted to women audiences), draws out the emotional communication by her secular actors, while setting them amidst extras from the Orthodox community for the convincing mise en scène.

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt (Veronique Kolber/Zeitgeist Films)

Hannah Arendt humanizes an intellectual whose persona is usually remembered as grim as her philosophical observations of 20th century totalitarianism. Writer/director Margarethe von Trotta reveals the woman behind the work at a point when her public writings became entangled with her personal life. In 1960, Arendt (forcefully portrayed by Barbara Sukowa) is a middle-aged matron wearing ever-present pearls, living comfortably in a book- and modern art-filled New York apartment with her loving husband of 20 years, Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg), hosting soirees of fellow German émigré academics, and sharing girlish confidences with her earthy best friend, writer Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer).

When the news breaks that Israel has abducted from Argentina Adolf Eichmann, the administrator of the Nazis’ Jewish Affairs Department, and will try him in their court, Arendt convinces The New Yorker editor William Shawn (Nicolas Woodeson) to send her to cover the trial. He’ll ruefully realize he’s not dealing with the usual deadline-bound journalist, and her observations and insights will be quite unlike the other 600 reporters from around the world she joins chain-smoking in the huge press center. She intently watches in the court room and on the closed-circuit TV feed (actual black-and-white clips), and observes Eichmann’s smirking reactions and self-serving testimony. (More footage can be seen in Michael Prazan’s recent documentary The Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Ironically, Israelis did not yet have TV, so the country was glued to the radio.)

Reuniting with an old Zionist friend, Kurt Blumenfeld (Michael Degen), and walking the streets of the modern Jewish state, past armed soldiers and Hassids, she hones in on how Eichmann answered questions about his conscience: “I support the state.” Back in New York, she pours over the thousands of pages of transcripts from the year-long trial, and over the next year thinks through her reactions with her surprised coterie: “He’s not scary. He’s a nobody. He’s terrifyingly normal. It was just the law.” As she wrestles with the concept of evil, she dismisses characterizations of him as a monster within their German literary touchstones: “Eichmann is no Mephisto.”

The film usefully spotlights the personal fallout when her five-part magazine series was published in 1963, and then compiled in book form, with some revisions, as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a striking contrast to the first-person admissions of journalism today. The closest she even revealed about being German herself was in her frequent criticism of the official translations of testimony in German, particularly saying it led to misinterpretations of what was said. She doesn’t identify herself as Jewish, nor as directly affected by the Nazis, and her husband chastises her that Eichmann controlled the trains that took Jews to Auschwitz from Gurs, the southern French internment camp where she was briefly detained before getting a visa to the U.S. in 1941.

While she claims not to have seen a Nazi close up, brief (and somewhat confusing) flashbacks depict her passionate student affair with her married philosophy professor Martin Heidegger (Klaus Pohl)—he woos her in Latin—and her shock at learning he joined the Nazi Party. (Their postwar reunion  seems comparable to the camaraderie of German cultural solidarity uncovered in Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat.)

The articles unleash a furor that practically drives her out of her home and job. (“The Perversity of Brilliance” is one review headline. A Hebrew translation wasn’t published in Israel until 2000). Accusations that she’s a self-hating Jew just seem nasty without presenting her key controversial claim that Jewish ghetto leaders could have saved at least 20 percent of their population if they had refused to cooperate with the Nazis. (Some of her analysis of Eichmann’s career and the implementation of the Final Solution seem superseded by material in archives that have opened since.) The anger of her New School colleagues is portrayed as narrow-minded without the context that the graduate school was instituted in 1933 as the University in Exile as a refuge for scholars fleeing Europe.

Her insights about the banality of the bureaucracy of genocide have outlasted her critics, but left out is her argument on the limits of a court set up by one nation or by a victors’ consortium (such as in Nuremberg), which can veer into show trials, and her prescient call for an international criminal court, which was created 40 years later. But she is given the opportunity here to present her case in a rousing closing lecture on how understanding isn’t the same as forgiveness.