It’s fitting that the Asia Society should whittle down Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s filmography down to what they deem to be his bare essentials, leading up to Face, his latest and certainly one of his best films. Tsai’s films are about mundane phantoms, invisible people that exist in the same places as one other but rarely at the same time. A complete weeklong retrospective of Tsai’s work shouldn’t be done since none of his characters in any given film can fit into the same spot, let alone the same frame-of-mind. To respect the films’ spare vision of sexual mystery and longing, you have to be a little selective in choosing which ones best fit together. Read more

In a fitting dramatic flourish, the Two Boots Pioneer theater closed one year ago this upcoming Halloween. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was the last movie screened at the much-missed hub for both vintage and contemporary cult flicks. The saddest part about the space closing was how quickly its unusual programming disappeared with nothing to fill the space. Programmer/manager Lee Paterson’s eclectic and exciting month-long “Schlocktober” festival, featuring everything from Italian zombies to Mexican wrestlers, made it seem as if the Pioneer was going strong right up until its last night. This is the first Halloween in a decade that New Yorkers will have to get their horror fix without the theater and, while it’s tempting to say that it’s not going to be an easy one, there is hope yet. Read more

“Pulp Fiction with soul,” was what Boston-born, indie-hack-that-could Troy Duffy’s first screenplay, The Boondock Saints, was crassly dubbed by Hollywood insiders. Duffy, more memorable for the story of his rise and meteoric fall from prominence, is not really interested in the kind of misappropriated nostalgia from which Quentin Tarantino has made a career. Like its predecessor, which found a huge cult following on DVD, Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Days is much more proud of its pseudo-religious self-righteousness and strained pub humor. This time, however, Duffy offers his small but devoted fanbase an equally meaningless sheen of progressivism. Read more

Pandorum, the latest Hollywood-funded science fiction missed opportunity, makes no sense. It doesn’t really try to by the end but nevertheless, it should be said up front so that nobody has any illusions about the film since its creators certainly didn’t. Flattering themselves that they could get by on the film’s atmosphere alone, screenwriter Travis Molloy and director Christian Alvart—whose indie horror flick Antibodies kick started his career—don’t aspire to much more. Read more

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, the film adaptation of Tucker Max’s notoriously infantile and incredibly popular tell-all memoir about his fratboy sexcapades is not immediately repugnant. It may make you lose feeling in your upper extremities, thanks to its never-ending stream of proudly misogynistic repartee, but at this point, it’s not yet worthy of your ire. The film only becomes truly insipid when it makes a cloying, half-hearted attempt to show that Max and his buddies, who go on a debauch at a fabled strip club, have learned the error of their ways and now have greater respect for women and themselves. Read more

Writer/director Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me is like the mumblecore version of a Terry Southern comedy. Full of anarchic energy and a revolving door set of cameos from Austin’s film scene, it takes Southern’s love of absurd, disorientingly staccato confrontations and gives it a lo-fi tweak. That’s because, unlike Southern’s comedies, where any given protagonist is never as important as the trip they’re on, the plot of Harmony and Me is grounded in the perspective of its snarky young protagonist. Which means it’s intermittently more smarmy and quirky than charming and surreal but never enough to make it lose its indomitable momentum. Read more

With Big Fan, screenwriter Robert Siegel’s directorial debut, the schmaltz-meister that wrote The Wrestler shows us that he’s grown leaps and bounds as an artist in the span of just one year. Big Fan tempers the tragic sap of Mickey Rourke’s deadly serious comeback with a healthy dose of acidic, self-loathing humor. Read more

It’s not surprising that it has taken three years for Hungarian writer/director Gyorgy Pálfi’s simultaneously gorgeous and repulsive Taxidermia to be released in America. A blisteringly unhinged post-Soviet fantasia, it defies contextualization, as it doesn’t take place within any normative sense of time or place. Starting with the death of the eldest of three generations of men and revolving around the carnivalesque celebration of the body in various states of abuse, the film resembles something of a Vonnegut allegory put through a cinematic chamber of horrors. Read more

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has the kind of somber presence that demands to be taken seriously. His English-speaking role as the calculating villain “Le Chiffre” in 2006’s Casino Royale confirmed two things: First, that the Euro-baddies in Bond films are still the best and, second, that Mikkelsen deserves the reputation his impenetrable, measured stare has earned him. Rugged, steely eyed and chalk-white, he exudes the aura of a man who broods for a living, concentrating on some sublimated dilemma so intently that he may be able to summon a comic book thought bubble for a halo by sheer force of will. Too bad his latest vehicle Flame & Citron, a Danish WWII thriller, forces him to be more serious than he should be. Read more

Co-writer/director Duncan Jones’ debut feature Moon is a modest but nonetheless exciting bit of (derivative) speculative fiction. As the film’s vision of the future is obviously cobbled together from a myriad of sources—most importantly 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris—it only really becomes involving after the first half hour has given us sufficient set-up. Although Jones and co-writer Nathan Parker add nothing novel to the mythic canon they’re working in, they do provide a very satisfying bit of genre falderal, albeit one that’s a little too literal-minded. Read more