Philadelphia Weekly

After a nasty breakup with TLA, the rebranded Philadelphia Film Festival reappears in abridged form with newly autonomous owners the Philadelphia Film Society. While the CineFest goes down in the spring, the PFF gets the award-season fall from here on out (and will return bigger and better in 2010).

Here’s a brief selection of the 34 titles crammed into five days, at least one of which will surely be on the Oscar’s new list of Best Picture overachievers.

The various horrors of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist are, by now, common knowledge: crushed penises, bloody ejaculate, talking foxes, a close-up of genital mutilation. What’s less reported is how sincerely affecting his gorefest really is, even as it happily tumbles into ridiculousness. Even after she gets her hands on a rusty toolbox, Charlotte Gainsbourg keeps things grounded as a woman guilt-ridden by the death of her child. That she’s driven to madness because significant other Willem Dafoe forces her off her meds plays as a kind of vengeance against its own maker, who’s made a career of torturing petulant women. Here, the woman fights back. And how.
>> B+ Fri., Oct. 16, 7:45pm, RB.

Like this summer’s Il Divo, Bronson—about “England’s most dangerous prisoner,” Charles Bronson (née Michael Peterson)—has only one insight into its subject. In this case, his life is a work of art, ultraviolence his brush. Unlike Il Divo, Bronson skips info almost entirely. (The middle half-hour is mostly fictional.) A darkly comic abstraction, the film spans decades, but its ripped, mustachioed antihero (fully embodied by Tom Hardy) never ages or changes. The idea is to capture how Bronson sees himself, and in doing so, director Nicolas Winding Refn (the Pusher series) challenges both the biopic and the very idea of what defines an artist. >> B+ Sat., Oct. 17, 5pm and Mon., Oct. 19, 9:15pm, RB.

Those fearing the teen theater drama Dare exists in the same galaxy as High School Musical can relax early on in the flick when nerdy aspiring actress Emmy Rossum preps for A Streetcar Named Desire by slutting up and getting laid. Sexual frankness is director Adam Salky’s chief weapon—that, and co-star Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights), who mumbles his way through the role of a bi-probable bad boy who channels his inner drama dork. Too bad it’s so wildly inconsistent—astutely oberved one moment and stone cold stupid the next. >> C+ Sat., Oct. 17, 5pm, PMT. Mon., Oct. 19, 9:45pm, RB.

The splashy, high-concept, name cast, Philly-shot fest opener, Law Abiding Citizen—featuring Gerard Butler as a vengeful super-mega-mastermind and Jamie Foxx as a lawyer learning to no longer give a shit about civil rights and be a better parent—is both risible and asinine. So there’s that. >> D+ Thurs., Oct. 15, 6pm and 8:30pm, PMT.

The Messenger finds a haunted soldier (Ben Foster) on Casualty Notification shit detail falling for one of his informed widows (Samantha Morton). Or it would be if cowriter/director Oren Moverman didn’t wise up and smell the silliness of that plot, and instead send him palling around with his older, super-bitter partner Woody Harrelson. Moverman aims for the loose, brooding style of ’70s staples like The Last Detail. But there’s such a thing as too loose, and The Messenger often feels like it’s trying to hide how little it has to say. >> B- Sat., Oct. 17, 7:30pm, PMT. Mon., Oct. 19, 9:30pm, RB.

If Bill Maher represents the snide side of religious inquiry, Peter Rodger is his antithesis: a guy not wise enough to ask the right questions. In Oh My God, Rodger trots the globe to chat too politely with every flavor of religious belief, from Buddhist to Bible Belter, from rambling deist to annoyed atheist. Our host feigns neutrality, all the while downplaying the fundies and overemphasizing the progressively spiritual who define god as “everything” or “love.” Not above breaking out the cute cancer kids for emotional appeal, Oh My God strains to make the case for some kind of hyper-fuzzy, optimistic-bordering-on-delusional global unity when what the film really reveals is a total shamble. >> C Fri., Oct. 16, 5:30pm and Mon., Oct. 19, 2:15pm, RB.

Closing film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire is already on a calculated track to be this year’s Slumdog: poorsploitation told with a reckless style that gives the illusion of being “fresh.” There’s little unique about the tale of an obese, abused teen (Gabourey Sidibe) empowered by a kindly teacher, but director Lee Daniels delves deep into her mindset, only fumbling when he shows her fantasies. Mo’Nique and an unrecognizable Mariah Carey are as strong as you’ve heard, and yet I’ll have little problem pretending I hate it when it starts raking in the cash and Oscars. >> C+ Sun., Oct. 18, 5pm and 7:30pm, PMT.

Even fans of Peter Greenaway would rarely describe his dense, experimental puzzle-films as “fun.” And yet fun is exactly what his doc Rembrandt’s J’accuse is. As with his recent Nightwatching, to which this acts as a documentary remake, the topic is the Dutch master’s most beloved work, The Night Watch, which, as Greenaway exhaustibly shows, subtly accuses its subjects of murder (and much else). Greenaway has faded into obscurity, and his two Rembrandt films smack of a comeback attempt: not as willfully abstruse, but still employing his unique bag of tricks. >> B+ Fri., Oct. 16, 2:30pm, PMT. Sat., Oct. 17, 7pm, RB.

We Live in Public exhumes forgotten ’Net pioneer Josh Harris, who took his winnings from founding the webcasting channel Pseudo.com and poured them into two pricey millennial social experiments. Both involved people under constant broadcast: first a Manhattan tenement of horny extroverts, the second Harris and his then-girlfriend. It’s a subject that demands a skeptic’s exacting razor, but the eternally problematic Ondi Timoner (DiG!) buys into her subject with all the caution of a pyramid scheme rube, asserting Harris’ self-diagnosed genius when he’s really just a savvy and oft-cretinous egomaniac. Claims he’s the true father of our social network-drenched era cry for a blood test, while his two pièces de resistance proved that even shameless exhibitionists will go crazy through 24/7 oversharing. >> C Fri., Oct. 16, 10:15pm and Mon., Oct. 19, 7:30pm, RB.

The exceedingly terrific Emily Blunt puts in her period piece hours on the perfectly ho-hum The Young Victoria, which portrays the queen as a not-so-stuffy proto-feminist with a suspiciously modern way of delivering dialogue. No cost is spared: the literate screenplay is courtesy Gosford Park’s Julian Fellowes, Jean-Marc Vallée’s direction is sprightly for the genre and the cast is packed silly with greats like Jim Broadbent and Mark Strong. It’s just that nothing much happened to the young Victoria. Ah well. At least there’s Emily Blunt. >> C+ Fri., Oct. 16, 7:30pm, RB. Sun., Oct. 18, 12pm, PMT.