What do you get if you throw Travis Bickle, Frownland, a 40 oz. bottle of rampant celebrity obsession, and a tablespoon of Pinochet-era dictatorial critique into a blender? Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero, that’s what. Tony Manero is its own demented creation, which has one of the more dizzyingly original tones of recent memory. So much so that the time I alloted myself to finish a review this morning simply was not enough. But since we know how important opening weekends are in this slicethroat market place, I wanted to reiterate how giddily demented this movie is and recommend that you carve out a few hours to experience it for yourself. As I said, more to come on this one next week, but for now, see Tony Manero this weekend! (And if one must connect it to the current holiday, it should make you more fully appreciate your democratic existence in the good ol’ US-of-A.) …click to read more

(Unfortunately, DVD distribution of A Moment of Innocence has been discontinued, as a result of New Yorker Films’s recent closing. But copies of it can still be found for sale online.)

For admirers of the great Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the news that he has been operating from his temporary base in Paris as the official foreign spokesman of Mir Hussein Mousavi’s presidential campaign—urging Western governments as well as Iranian expatriates not to recognize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim to victory—was a surprising and inspiring development, even during a momentous couple of weeks that have brought no shortage of surprising, inspiring developments. Although Makhmalbaf’s reputation in the U.S. and Europe has been somewhat overshadowed by that of his near-contemporary Abbas Kiarostami, a handful of his films, including The Peddler (1987), Salaam Cinema (1994), and Gabbeh (1995), were crucial in raising international audiences’ awareness of modern Iranian cinema. My own favorite of Makhmalbaf’s works is 1996’s A Moment of Innocence. The film may seem especially relevant right now, since its explicit subject is the disillusionment and diminishment of populist hopes during the years following the 1979 revolution, and its implicit message is that the young of Iran must lead their society in a new direction. But its power and profundity transcend the merely topical. …click to read more

(The Beaches of Agnes is being distributed by The Cinema Guild. It opens Wednesday, July 1st, at the Film Forum. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.)

In 1956, François Truffaut wrote a short essay in Cahiers du cinema about La Pointe Courte, the first film by the then young photographer and art historian Agnès Varda. In his piece, Truffaut describes the film as “a cinematic essay, an ambitious experimental work” and claims: “If, by the nature of its ambitions, La Pointe Courte joins the family of films that are outside cinema… it is nonetheless superior to these because the result matches the director’s intentions.” Truffaut’s exacting summation of La Pointe Courte applies in a general sense to the extraordinary career of Varda, whose nonfiction work willfully and triumphantly reaches beyond cinema’s conventional borders. …click to read more

This week has some definite keepers, so let’s get to it: …click to read more

I’m one of the remaining few losers who has yet to see The Hangover, but even taking that into account, I feel strongly that Lynn Shelton’s Humpday will prove to be the smartest and most rousing Hollywood comedy of 2009. That it was made as far outside the Hollywood system as a movie can be only makes it more impressive of an achievement. Humpday is both a crowd-pleasing romp that plays by Hollywood’s formulaic rules as well as a deceptively intelligent subversion of that very same stifling formula. The thought of experiencing it with a virgin crowd at Rooftop Films has me quite excited. It happens tonight on the Lower East Side. Go here for details.

(The Hurt Locker is being distributed by Summit Entertainment. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, June 26th, before opening in select cities July 10th. Visit the official website for more information.)

The notion that war changes men for the worse is not a new one and it has been explored in cinema more times than any reasonable person should be able to recall. That said, I’ve yet to see a film dramatize that premise with such intelligence, veracity, paranoia and sheer aesthetic pleasure (and pain) than Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. This is the type of product that the American movie industry—a series of interlocking private ideological enterprises in a country that is fighting two wars and was, until recently, hankering for a third—has a moral responsibility to make. No wonder it was financed with European money. …click to read more

Lordy, lordy, lordy. Tomorrow evening (Friday, June 26th, 7pm) at the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo, the one-and-only Werner Herzog will be reading from his new book Conquest of the Useless, which completes the triptych that began with Fitzcarraldo and was followed by Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams. Conquest of the Useless collects Herzog’s personal, diary-like musings scribed during that intense production. Reading Herzog’s words on the page and merely imagining him speaking them is a yummy enough concept, but actually watching him read them aloud, funky fresh in the flesh? Yes, please!