***NOTE: This review was first posted on July 9, 2008, after Prince of Broadway world premiered and won the Target Award at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival.***

(Prince of Broadway was finally picked up for distribution by Elephant Eye Films and opens theatrically in New York City on Friday, September 3, 2010, at the Angelika Film Center, before expanding to more cities in the following weeks. Visit the film’s official website for details.)

It’s hard to make more astute observations about the work of writer/director Sean Baker than the ones that have been made in piece after piece about his last film, Take Out. But, with the coming of his next work, I’m going to try. His latest, Prince of Broadway, is the simple story of a self-proclaimed Ghanaian hustler whose life is turned upside down when his ex-girlfriend Linda stiffs him with their baby to raise. But in the hands of an intelligent and witty filmmaker like Baker, Prince of Broadway is anything but simple.

In many ways, Prince of Broadway belongs to a camp of movies that is rapidly writing its own history. Alongside films like Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, Jan Sverák’s Kolya and The Dardenne Brothers’ L’Enfant, it tells the story of an inept, misguided older man forced to take care of a baby. Together, both man and child mature through their relationship with each other, often resulting in both hilarity and tragedy. But what sets Baker’s film apart is the shockingly honest humanity he portrays along the way. There’s no glamour to his characters’ lives, no cutesy moments where they learn universal truths, no glitzy art direction that idealizes their world, no nail-biting chases where the child is used as a prop for monetary gain. No, Baker’s film exists in the real world, where undeveloped “children” are often forced to raise children of their own through the unglamorous day-to-day grind.

I still haven’t seen Take Out, but from everything I’ve read, Prince of Broadway seems like a logical next step. The aforementioned humanity allows Baker to discuss things like illegal immigration through the course of a pre-established cinematic construct, in this case the one of an immature man who must deal with a child that has been thrust upon him. It’s as if he is building off the shoulders of Hood, Sverák and The Dardennes to make something much more poignant and timely by using the themes he’s already prepared in his previous work. Much like Michael Haneke does in Cache, Baker matures as a filmmaker by employing greater subtlety to his work, letting what he wants to say come out of the subtext of the story as opposed to ever directly mentioning it.

Stylistically, the beautiful digital video look adds to the simplicity of the piece, allowing the drama of the characters’ lives to speak for itself and ride its own natural arch. Many of the scenes are played for a surprising and often comedic effect. Characters will take a dramatic shift in tone (in one standout scene, a couple’s argument quickly turns from seemingly playful to nasty). Even the way Lucky first receives Prince seems like a comedy of errors as Linda asks Lucky to hold him for a second and then takes off out the door. It’s as if Baker could find the drama of a wall being painted and make it kinetic, unexpected and cinematically original with a pixel-vision camera.

I would be remiss if I finished without mentioning the fantastic performance by Prince Adu. Never has a street hustler been more charismatically self-serving. Like Bruno Ganz’s Hitler or James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, Adu’s performance will go down in the books as one of those astonishing pieces of acting that makes a man out of a monster. This time around, Baker is not only showing off his first rate directing skills; he’s showcasing Adu alongside him.

— Michael Lerman

(My Dog Tulip opens theatrically at the Film Forum in NYC on Wednesday, September 1, 2010. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.)

If you aren’t a dog person— and if you aren’t a dog person how are you not a dog person?—Paul and Sandra Fierlinger’s My Dog Tulip might not send you running off to the animal shelter to snatch up a pooch of your very own, but it just might surprise you. An animated adaptation of J.R. Ackerley’s acclaimed memoir, My Dog Tulip tells the story of a middle-aged man who has felt his own lifelong aversion toward canines; yet later in life, when he inherits an Alsatian bitch named Tulip, he learns to love her as he’s never loved before. If that sounds overly schmaltzy, remember that Ackerley was an Englishman. Which is to say that even though there is cuteness on display in this sweet reminiscence, there is also mature wit and sentimental restraint. …click to read more

(The Builder is now available on DVD through Jagjagjuwar. Buy it here.)

R. Alverson’s debut feature The Builder was one of the centerpieces of last week’s New York Times article on record labels jumping into the independent film distribution game; it is being released by the indie imprimatur Jagjagjuwar (home to bands such as Okkervil River and Bon Iver), which has been organizing grass-roots screenings at bars and alternative screening venues. I saw the film last summer, shortly after Alverson completed it, but reading about these screenings compelled me to revisit it. Something about the description of the film playing for a small audience who “watched patiently at small candle-lit tables, beers in hand,” burnished my own recollection of a film whose running time was inversely related to the amount of overt incident contained in the plot. …click to read more

(The Edge of Dreaming will have its US television broadcast premiere on PBS’s P.O.V. Tuesday, August 24, 2010. ***Even better than that, the film is streaming for free online from August 25-November 24, 2010.*** Kino Lorber is distributing it on home video. Go here to learn more.)

At the beginning of The Edge of Dreaming, filmmaker Amy Hardie, a woman who admittedly never remembers her dreams, has an uncanny one. In this dream, her old horse, George, whom she is riding, wants to know if she’s filming; he tells her to “get ready to film.” Then he tells her that he’s going to die and starts to fall. …click to read more

(Modern Love is Automatic opens theatrically in New York City at the reRun Gastropub Theater on Friday, August 20, 2010. Visit the film’s official website for more information. ***Note: This review was first posted in March 2009 in conjunction with Modern Love Is Automatic’s world premiere at the 2009 South by Southwest Film Festival.)

Zach Clark’s Modern Love is Automatic is a genre-bending, color-coordinated dram-com with a flair for the absurd and a heart of gold. Clark cites John Waters as his primary influence and the Baltimore shock icon’s stamp is clear on this, Clark’s freshman feature. But it also establishes Clark as a young director with a vision that is informed equally by cult film, punk rock, ‘80s nostalgia, and taboo sexual behavior. In short, Modern Love is totally Clark’s own. …click to read more

(Calvin Marshall opens in New York City at the Quad Cinema on Friday, August 20, 2010. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. ***Note: This review was first posted in the spring of 2010 in conjunction with Calvin Marshall’s benefit theatrical run in Arizona.)

Gary Lundgren’s Calvin Marshall is not one of those movies that is going to rock your world. It’s a story that has been told many times before, and it doesn’t reinvent the wheel. But for those viewers who realize this was never Lundgren’s intention and who understand that it’s hard enough these days to discover a low-budget independent drama rooted in an earlier era that succeeds in the most important ways—writing, directing, acting—it will more than do the trick. …click to read more

(A Film Unfinished opens in New York City on Wednesday, August 18, 2010, at the Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinema. To find out when it’s opening in your town, visit the film’s page at Oscilloscope Pictures.)

Pardon my callousness, but I wasn’t that enthused about watching Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished, even though I’d heard nothing but positive things about it. Not because I’m too sensitive about the horrors inflicted upon the Jewish people by Hitler and Nazi Germany, and certainly not because I’m an anti-Semite. My problem is that as a film lover/watcher/reviewer, I’ve become pummeled into numbness by what I (don’t) like to refer to as the Holocaust Documentary Industry. It’s gotten so bad that whenever I hear about a new Holocaust doc, I cringe and head in the other direction. I was raised Catholic and thus have my own special guilt sauce streaming through my bloodstream, so while I genuinely don’t feel good about this newly cemented personal aversion, the constant barrage of Holocaust docs has left me no other option. Which is a long-winded, awkward way of saying that 1) I am glad that I saw A Film Unfinished, and 2) I am here to highly recommend it. It’s a thoughtful, at times sickeningly effective essay that manages to bring something new to the discussion. Hersonski shows us yet another, perhaps even more disturbing, side of Nazi evil in the form of a propaganda machine that planned to use the power of cinema to further deceive the world. …click to read more