Some of us have been following writer-director Noah Baumbach's career since his 1995 debut (the addictively quotable, post-collegiate pearl "Kicking and Screaming"), but his wry, semi-autobiographical dramedy "The Squid and the Whale" had even bigger acclaim and success spilling out its blowhole in 2005.
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Is a director's primary responsibility to her audience or her subject? Kasi Lemmons, the director of the new biopic "Talk to Me," gets caught between those two poles. People get up in arms when a fictionalized version of real events takes liberties with what actually happened. A film like this puts it in perspective. Had it been a little less accurate, it might have been a much better story. But, then, it wouldn't be truthful.

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If Dieter Dengler didn't exist, Werner Herzog would have had to invent him. As it is, he has reinvented him, in a way, in his new film "Rescue Dawn." Dengler was a German-American who dreamed of becoming a pilot ever since the day Allied aircraft buzzed his home and destroyed the little village in which he grew up. He emigrated to the US and joined the Navy just in time to serve in the Vietnam War. On his very first mission into Asia, he was shot down, captured and imprisoned in a Laotian P.O.W. camp.
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"Crazy Love" could only work as a documentary. If you tried to pass off this story, about a man and a woman who marry years after he blinded her by dousing her with acid, as an invention, no one would believe it. And yet here it is, complete with old photographs, newsreels and articles ("Acid Thrower Blinds Girl" screams a typical headline). They say it takes all kinds. Well, some of those kinds are severely deranged.

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The people in Adrienne Shelly's "Waitress" begin as caricatures and ends as characters. They introduce themselves on phony looking sets with Southern slang that's all "What can I get ya, hun?"s and "Have a good time, y'hear!"s. But their obviously constructed surroundings contain — and in some ways mask — the characters' humanity, humor and decency, at least until Shelly's screenplay slow-draws it out with wit and charm and a kind of patience that feels as old-fashioned as the story's setting.
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A good interview should be insightful and revealing. To be sure, the interview in "Interview" isn't a good one, but it would be nice if the film had a little of those qualities. It does not. The film places us in a room with two characters and their accumulated mishegas but it doesn't have enough intellectual curiosity about them to keep our attention.

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Julian Schnabel discusses "The Diving Bell and The Butterfly" at the 2007 New York Film Festival — click the image below to watch.
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It's not something one often praises in a film, but there's a mundaneness to "The Savages" that is incredibly appealing. The film is about a brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a sister (Laura Linney) dealing with their ailing father (Philip Bosco). That is all. There is no wacky road trip where they all reconnect, or a romanticized bank heist that solves all their unaddressed problems. That simplicity is refreshing, even if the movie's tone is a little uneven.

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Producer, writer, actor and now director Mike White made his memorable first dip into independent film as the writer and star of the 2000 Sundance Film Festival darling "Chuck & Buck." His career has spanned mediums and genres — in television, he worked as a writer on both "Dawson's Creek" and the critically adored "Freaks & Geeks," and in film he's collaborated several times with Jack Black, most notably on the Richard Linklater-directed "School of Rock."
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Perennial character actor Steve Buscemi is instantly recognizable for his roles in films like "Reservoir Dogs," "Ghost World" and "The Big Lebowski," and his indie cred has only been bolstered in the years since his filmmaking debut "Trees Lounge." Even being in the spotlight, however, Buscemi pretty much loathes being interviewed, which couldn't be more ironic, considering his fourth directorial feature is the 2007 Sundance drama "Interview."
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Ang Lee's films are fixated on the repression of desire, either by the self or by social constructs, so it's fitting that the acclaimed Taiwanese filmmaker's canon is defined by a cool, subdued style that stifles exhilaration. Unlike his more illustrious and rarefied Taiwanese contemporaries, boundary-pushing modern masters Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lee's sensibilities are about as mainstream as they come.
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Amidst all the new features from established auteurs, it would be easy to overlook the fact that 2007 was a banner year for debuts. In an effort to counteract any potential disregard, here are five films from six first-time helmers who, on the evidence of these maiden productions, will likely be heard from again very soon.
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Even before I'd seen "Once," the tiny Irish musical that could, it was apparent that those who had seen it and loved it — which was all of them — constituted a kind of epiphanic tribe, attempting unconfidently to communicate to the rest of us their magical experience. Once I saw it, I helplessly joined their frustrated company and word of mouth, handicapped by "just go" inexpressiveness, has kept the film in theaters for seven lovely months (so far, amounting to a roughly 100-to-one profit-to-budget ratio).
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When the first of Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" graphic novels debuted in 2003, it was perhaps the biggest and most acclaimed crossover success of the medium since Art Spiegelman's Holocaust allegory "Maus" in 1992. Yet it's the film adaptation of Satrapi's memoir of her formative years during the Islamic revolution in Iran that may be without precedent.
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In our sixth dispatch from the New York Film Festival, IFC News' Matt Singer and Alison Willmore are joined by Benten Film's Andrew Grant to discuss Todd Haynes' "I'm Not there."
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Julian Schnabel casts from the gut, and his third film, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," was no exception. The artist/director refused to let his comme çi comme ça French inhibit him from selecting an all-Francophone cast and shooting the film in the native language of its subject, 43-year-old Jean-Dominique ("Jean-Do") Bauby.
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A man stands on a stage and plays ferocious, grinding blues. At first glance, the man is Bob Dylan, defiantly pounding away on his electric guitar despite the protestations of an angry crowd at Manchester's Free Trade Hall. On second glance, the man isn't Bob Dylan at all; the man, in fact, isn't even a man. It's Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn" in an incredibly lifelike simulacrum of the Manchester show in Todd Haynes' Dylan deconstruction "I'm Not There."
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"A Mighty Heart"'s opening titles alternate black words on a white background with white words on a black background. Black and white obviously imply opposites; their juxtaposition with white on black suggests something further. From either side of the divide, each faction sees itself as wholly in the right and the other as wholly in the wrong, not unlike how the United States views Islamic terrorists and vice versa.
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Even a place as exciting and glamorous as the Cannes Film Festival can feel pretty lonely. You're 4,000 miles from home, you don't speak the language, and there's nothing to eat but dried sausage and gherkins. Which makes it the perfect place to see movies like Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" and Harmony Korine's "Mister Lonely," the first in competion and the second in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, and both absolutely steeped in the nature of isolation.
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French writer-actress-songbird Julie Delpy has probably been associated most with American film, and not only for her "Before Sunset" Oscar nomination in 2005 (for co-screenwriting!). Still, she is French, so it could be argued that having a bicultural identity has allowed her a more objective view of how both countries and their citizens can misbehave and act cruel.
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The personals are full of them; want ads promising easy fame and fortune for people with undiscovered talent. Music industry neophytes show up, audition, and receive every promise under the sun, if they put up a little of their own cash first "as a show of good faith."

The practice is called "song sharking," and though the scam's potency has faded in recent years, it still exists in smaller communities, on means to prey on people's dreams and finances.
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The movie I most anticipated and disliked from Sundance 2006, "The Hawk is Dying" — based on the novel by Harry Crews — comes with a fine creative pedigree and a murderers' row of a cast, including Michelle Williams, Michael Pitt and Paul Giamatti as George, a man obsessed with capturing and training birds. After the death of his nephew, George dedicates himself to training a wild hawk. Until his task is complete, he will not eat or sleep or, lamentably, make a good movie.
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"Rocket Science," like director Jeffrey Blitz's first non-fiction debut "Spellbound," creeps up on you, getting more and more effective as it goes along. In both films, Blitz has a knack for creating (or in the case of his documentary, finding and presenting) young characters we really care for, and then sending them, and us, into desperate, gripping situations. These are movies you feel, right down to your toes.
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